“I meant a real insect,” he said. “You knew that before we started.”
“We haven’t been lucky,” Kiss-O-Suck agreed.
When Rhys took hold of his wrist he stood as still and compliant as a small animal and added, “Perhaps we came at the wrong time of year.”
Something had gone out of him: Rhys gazed down into his lined face as if he was trying to recognise what. Then he pushed the dwarf tenderly onto the cinders and knelt over him. He touched each polished cheek, then ran his fingertips in bemusement down the sides of the jaw. He seemed to be about to say something: instead he flicked the razor into his hand with a quick snaky motion so that light shot off the hollow curve of the blade. The dwarf watched it; he nodded. “I’ve never been in a desert in my life,” he admitted. “I made that up for Vera. It sounded more exotic.”
He considered this. “Yet how could I refuse her anything? She’s the greatest dancer in the world.”
“You were the greatest clown,” Rhys said.
He laid the flat of the razor delicately against the dwarf’s cheekbone, just under the eye, where there were faint veins in a net beneath the skin.
“I believed all that.”
Kiss-O-Suck’s eyes were china-blue. “Wait,” he said. “Look!”
Vera, who had given up trying to imitate locust or danseuse or indeed anything, was en pointe and running chains of steps out across the ash, complicating and recomplicating them in a daze of technique until she felt exactly like one of the ribbons flying from Rhys’s sleeve. It was a release for her, they were always saying at the Prospekt Theatre, to do the most difficult things, all kinds of allegro and batterie bewilderingly entangled, then suddenly the great turning jump forbidden to female dancers for more than a hundred years. As she danced she reduced the distinction between heath and sky. The horizon, never convinced of itself, melted. Vera was left crossing and recrossing a space steadily less definable. A smile came to Kiss-O-Suck’s lips; he pushed the razor away with one fat little hand and cried:
“She’s floating!”
“That won’t help you, you bastard,” Egon Rhys warned him.
He made the great sweeping cut which a week before had driven the razor through the bone and gristle at the base of Toni Ingarden’s throat.
It was a good cut. He liked it so much he let it pass over the dwarf’s head; stopped the weapon dead; and, tossing it from one hand to the other, laughed. The dwarf looked surprised. “Ha!” shouted Rhys. Suddenly he spun round on one bent leg as if he had heard another enemy behind him. He threw himself sideways, cutting out right and left faster than you could see. “And this is how I do it,” he panted, “when it comes down to the really funny business.” The second razor appeared magically in his other hand and between them they parcelled up the emptiness, slashing wildly about with a life of their own while Rhys wobbled and ducked across the surface of the desert with a curious, shuffling, buckle-kneed, bent-elbowed gait. “Now I’ll show you how I can kick!” he called.
But Kiss-O-Suck, who had watched this performance with an interested air, murmuring judicially at some difficult stroke, only smiled and moved away. He had the idea-it had never been done before-to link in sequence a medley of cartwheels, “flying Dementos,” and handsprings, which would bounce him so far into the smoky air of the arena, spinning over and over himself with his knees tucked into his stomach, that eventually he would be able to look down on the crowd, like a firework before it burst. “Tah!” he whispered, as he nerved himself up. “Codpoorlie, tah!”
Soon he and Rhys were floating too, leaping and twirling and wriggling higher and higher, attaining by their efforts a space which had no sense of limit or closure. But Vera Ghillera was always ahead of them, and seemed to generate their rhythm as she went.
Deserts spread to the northeast of the city, and in a wide swathe to its south.
They are of all kinds, from peneplains of disintegrating metallic dust- out of which rise at intervals lines of bony incandescent hills-to localised chemical sumps, deep, tarry, and corrosive, over whose surfaces glitter small flies with papery wings and perhaps a pair of legs too many. These regions are full of old cities which differ from Vriko only in the completeness of their deterioration. The traveller in them may be baked to death, or, discovered with his eyelids frozen together, leave behind only a journal which ends in the middle of a sentence.
The Metal-Salt Marshes, Fenlen Island, the Great Brown Waste: the borders of regions as exotic as this are drawn differently on the maps of competing authorities, but they are at least bounded in the conventional sense. Allman’s Heath, whose borders can be agreed by everyone, does not seem to be. Neither does it seem satisfactory now to say that while those deserts lie outside the city, Allman’s Heath lies within it.
The night was quiet.
Five to eleven, and except where the weir agitated its surface, the canal at Allman’s Reach was covered with the lightest and most fragile web of ice. A strong moon cast its blue and gamboge light across the boarded-up fronts of the houses by the towpath. They don’t look as if much life ever goes on in them, thought the watchman, an unimaginative man at the beginning of his night’s work, which was to walk from there up to the back of the Atteline Quarter (where he could get a cup of tea if he wanted one) and down again. He banged his hands together in the cold. As he stood there he saw three figures wade into the water on the other side of the canal.
They were only ten yards upstream, between him and the weir, and the moonlight fell on them clearly. They were wrapped up in cloaks and hoods, “like brown-paper parcels, or statues tied up in sacks,” he insisted later, and under these garments their bodies seemed to be jerking and writhing in a continual rhythmic motion, though for him it was too disconnected to be called a dance. The new ice parted for them like damp sugar floating on the water. They paid no attention to the watchman, but forded the canal, tallest first, shortest last, and disappeared down the cinder lane which goes via Orves and the observatory to the courtyard near the Plain Moon Cafe.
The watchman rubbed his hands and looked round for a minute or two, as if he expected something else to happen. “Eleven o’clock,” he called at last, and though he couldn’t commit himself to a description which seemed so subject to qualification as to be in bad faith, added: “And all’s all.”
A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY TO VIRICONIUM
On the day of the enthronement of the new archbishop, the “badly decomposed” body of a man was found on the roof of York Minster by a TV technician. He had been missing for eight months from a local hospital. He had fallen, it was said, from the tower; but no one had any idea how he had come to be there. I heard this on the local radio station in the day; what excited me about it was that they never repeated the item, and no mention of it was made either on the national broadcasts later in the day, or in the coverage of the ceremony itself. Mr. Ambrayses was less impressed.
“A chance in a thousand it will be of any use to us,” he estimated. “One in a thousand.”
I went to York anyway, and he came with me for some reason of his own-he paid visits to a secondhand bookshop and a taxidermist’s. The streets were daubed with political slogans; even while the ceremony was going on, council employees were working hard along the route of the procession to paint them out. The man on the roof, I discovered, had been missing from an ordinary surgical unit, so I had had the journey for nothing, as Mr. Ambrayses predicted. What interested us at that time was any event connected with a mental or-especially-a geriatric home.
“We all want Viriconium,” Mr. Ambrayses was fond of saying. “But it is the old who want it most!” That night on the way home he added,
“No one here needs it. Do you see?”