Viriconium

Ashlyme the portrait painter, of whom it had once been said that he “first put his sitter’s soul in the killing bottle, then pinned it out on the canvas for everyone to look at like a broken moth,” kept a diary. One night he wrote in it.

The plague zone has undergone one of its periodic internal upheavals and extendedits boundaries another mile. I would care as little as anyone else up here in the High City if it were not for Audsley King. Her rooms above the Rue Serpolet now fall within its influence. She is already ill. I am not sure what to do.

He was a strange little man to have got the sort of reputation he had. At first sight his clients, who often described themselves later as victims, thought little of him. His wedge-shaped head was topped by a coxcomb of red hair which gave him a permanently shocked expression. His face accentuated this, being pale and bland of feature, except the eyes, which were very large and wide. He wore the ordinary clothes of the time, and one steel ring he had been told was valuable. He had few close friends in the city. He came from a family of rural landlords somewhere in the midlands; no one knew them. (This accident of birth had left him a small income, and entitled him to wear a sword, although he never bothered. He had one somewhere in a cupboard.)

She must be got out of there, he continued, writing a little more quickly. I have thought of nothing else since this evening’s meeting with Paulinus Rack. Rack, with his fat lips and intimate asides! How did he ever come to be her agent? In his oily hands he had some proof sketches of her designs for his productionof Die Traumunden Knaben-The Dreaming Boys. I stared at them and knew that she must be preserved. They are inexplicable, these figures in their trance-like yet painful attitudes. They suggest a line and form quite foreign to us warmer, more human beings. Could she have understood somethingabout the nature of the crisis that we have not?

He bit his pen.

But how to persuade her to leave? And how to persuade anyone to help me?

This was rhetoric. He had already persuaded Emmet Buffo the astronomer to help him. But what is a diary for, if not effect? The world has already seen too much history dutifully recorded: that was the unconsciously held belief of Ashlyme’s age.

When the ink was dry he locked the book, then picked up the light easel he used for preliminary studies and went downstairs. “Come sometimes at night,” she had said when he accepted the commission, and laughed. “A lamp can be as unflattering as daylight.” (Touching his sleeve with one mannish hand.) At the bottom of the stairs he stood still for a second or two, then let himself out into the empty street and echoing night. From here he had a view of the Low City, some odd quality of the moonlight giving its back and foreground planes equal value, so that it had no perspective but was just a clutter of blue and gamboge roofs filling the space between his eyes and the hills outside the city.

He made his way down the thousand steps which in those days gave access to the heights of Mynned, hidden behind the facade of the Margarethestrasse and its triumphal arches, winding among the fish markets and pie shops where the Artists’ Quarter rubs up against the High City like someone’s old unwanted animal. There were people who did not want to be seen coming and going between High City and Low. They could be heard ascending and descending this stairway all night, among them those curious twin princes of the city, the Barley brothers. (How are we to explain them? They weren’t human, that’s a fact. Had Ashlyme known his fate was mixed up with theirs, would he have been more careful in the plague zone?) At the bottom they would let themselves through a small iron gate. It was constructed so as to permit only one person through at a time, and its name commemorated in the Low City some atrocity long since forgotten in the High. Ashlyme had his own reasons for keeping off the Margarethestrasse. Perhaps his nightly visits to the plague zone embarrassed him.

He was inclined to hurry through the Artists’ Quarter. Blue light leaked from the chromium doors of the brasseries and estaminets as he passed. In the Bistro Californium, beneath Kristodulos’s notorious frescoes, some desperate celebration was in progress. Out came the high-pitched voice of a poet, auctioning the dull things he had found in the back of his brain. There was a peculiar laugh; a scatter of applause; silence. Further on, in the Plaza of Unrealised Time, beggars were lounging outside the rooms of the women, curious bandages accentuating rather than covering their deformities as they relaxed after the efforts of the day. One or two of them winked and smiled at him. Ashlyme clutched his easel and quickened his pace until they had fallen behind. In this way, quite soon, he entered the infected zone.

The plague is difficult to describe. It had begun some months before. It was not a plague in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a kind of thinness, a transparency. Within it people aged quickly, or succumbed to debilitating illnesses-phthisis, influenza, galloping consumption. The very buildings fell apart and began to look unkempt, ill-kept. Businesses failed. All projects dragged out indefinitely and in the end came to nothing.

If you went up into the foothills outside, claimed Emmet Buffo, and looked down into the city through a telescope, you could see the affected zone spreading like a thin fog. “The instrument reveals something quite new!” The Low City streets, and the people you could see in them (and he had an instrument which enabled them to be seen quite clearly) were a little faded or blurred, as if the light was bad or the lenses grimy. But if you turned the identical telescope on the pastel towers and great plazas of the High City, they stood out as bright and sharp as a bank of flowers in the sun. “It is not the light at fault after all, or the instrument!” Whether you believed him or not, few areas south of the Boulevard Aussman remained safe; and to the east the periphery of the infection now threatened the High City itself along the line of the Margarethestrasse, bulging a little to accommodate the warren of defeated avenues, small rentier apartments, and vegetable markets which lay beneath the hill at Alves. Buffo’s observations might or might not be reliable. In any case they only told part of the story. The rest lay in the Low City, and to appreciate it you had to go there.

Ashlyme, who was there and didn’t appreciate it, put down his easel and massaged his elbow. With the onset of the plague all the streets in this corner of the city had begun to seem the same, lined with identical dusty chestnut trees and broken metal railings. He had walked down the Rue Serpolet ten minutes ago, he discovered, without recognising it. The houses on either side of Audsley King’s were empty. Piles of plaster and lath and hardened mortar lay everywhere, evidence of grandiose and complicated repairs which, like the schemes of the rentiers who had instituted them, would never be completed. Speculation of this kind was feverish in the plague zone: a story was told in the High City in which a whole street changed hands three times in one week, its occupants remaining lethargic and uninterested.

Audsley King had a confusing suite of rooms on an upper floor. The stairs smelt faintly of geraniums and dried orange flowers. Ashlyme stood uncertainly on the landing with a cat sniffing round his feet. “Hello?” he called. He never knew what to expect from her. Once she had sprung out on him from a closet, laughing helplessly. He could hear low voices coming from one of the rooms but he couldn’t tell which. He set his easel down loudly on the bare boards. The cat ran off. “It’s Ashlyme,” he said. He went from room to room looking for her. They were full of paintings propped up against the neutral cream walls. He found himself staring down into a square garden like a cistern, full of darkness and trailing plants. “I’m here,” he called-but was he? She made him feel like a ghost, swimming idly around waiting to be noticed. He opened what he thought was a cupboard but it turned out to be a short hall with a green velvet curtain at the end of it, which gave on to her studio.

She was sitting there on the floor with Fat Mam Etteilla, the fortune-teller and cardsharp. One lamp gave out a yellow light which was reflected from the upturned cards: threw the women themselves into prominence but failed to light the rest of the room, which was quite large. Consequently they seemed to be posed, in their strained and graceless attitudes, against a yellow emptiness in which hung only the faintest suggestions of objects- a pot of anemones, the corner of an easel, or a window frame. This lent a bewildering ambiguity to the scene he was later to paint from memory as “Visiting the women in their upper room.” In the picture we see the Fat Mam sitting with her skirts pulled up to her thighs and her legs spread out, facing the cards (these are without symbols and, though arranged for divination, predict nothing). Crouched between her thighs and also facing the cards is a much thinner woman with hair cropped like an adolescent boy’s and a body all elbows and knees. Ashlyme’s treatment of these figures is extraordinary. Their arms are locked together and they seem to be rocking to and fro-in grief, perhaps, or in the excesses of some strange and joyless sexual spasm. A few brutal lines contain them; all else is void. There is some humanity in the way he has coloured the skirts of the Fat Mam. But Audsley King is looking defiantly out of the canvas, her eyes sly.

They remained in this position for thirty seconds or so after he had pulled back the curtain. The studio was quiet but for the hoarse breathing of the fortune-teller. Audsley King smiled sleepily at Ashlyme; then, when he said nothing, reached out deliberately and disarranged the cards. Suddenly she began coughing. She put her hand hurriedly over her mouth and turned her head away, writhing her thin shoulders in the attempt to expel something. “Oh, go away you old fool,” she said indistinctly to the fortune-teller. “You can see it hasn’t worked.” When Ashlyme took her hand it was full of blood. He helped her to a chair and made her comfortable while the Fat Mam put away the cards, brought water, lit the other lamps.

“How tired I am,” said Audsley King, smiling up at him, “of hearing my lungs creak all day like new boots.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “It makes me so impatient.”

The haemorrhage had left her disoriented but demanding, like a child waking up in the middle of a long journey. She forgot his name, or pretended to. But she would not let him leave: she would not hear of it. He would set up his easel like a proper painter and work on the portrait. Meanwhile she would entertain him with anecdotes, and the Fat Mam would read his fortune in the cards. They would make him tea or chocolate, whichever he preferred.

Ashlyme, though, had never seen her so pale. Should she not go to bed? She would not go to bed. She would have her portrait painted. In the face of such determination, what could he do but admire her harsh, mannish profile and white cheeks, and comply? After he had been drawing for about an hour he put down the black chalk and said carefully,

“If you would just come to the High City. Rack is a charlatan, but he would have you well cared for, if only to safeguard his investment.”

“Ashlyme, you promised me.”

“It will soon be too late. The quarantine police-”

“It’s already too late, you stupid man.” She moved her shoulders fretfully. “The plague is here”-indicating herself and then the room at large, with its morosely draped furniture and empty picture frames-“and in here. It hangs in the street down there like a fog. They will make no exceptions, we have already learned that.” For a moment a terrible hunger lit up her eyes. But it turned slowly into indifference. “Besides,” she said, “I would not go if they did. Why should I go? The High City is an elaborate catafalque. Art is dead up there, and Paulinus Rack is burying it. Nothing is safe from him-or from those old women who finance him-painting, theatre, poetry, music. I no longer wish to go there.” Her voice rose. “I no longer wish them to buy my work. I belong here.”

Ashlyme would have argued further. She said she would cough herself to death if he did. He went miserably back to his work.

A curious listlessness now came over the studio-the dull, companionable silence of the plague zone, which stretched time out like a thread of mucus. Mam Etteilla shuffled the cards. (What was she doing here, this fat patient woman, away from her grubby satin booth in the Plaza of Unrealised Time? What arrangement had been made between them?) She set the cards out; read them; gathered them up without a word. She did this sitting on the floor, while Audsley King looked on expressionlessly, for the present indifferent to her condition, as if she were dreaming it. The feverish energy of the haemorrhage seemed to have left her; she had sunk into her chair, eyes half closed. Only once did the symbols on the cards attract her attention. She leaned forward and said,

“As a young girl I lived on a farm. It was somewhere in the damp, endless ploughland near Soubridge. Every week my father killed and plucked three chickens. They hung on the back of a door until they were eaten. I hated to pass them, with their small mad heads hanging down, but it was the only way to get to the dairy.” One day, opening the door, she had seen an eyelid fall suddenly closed over an eye like a glass bead. “Now I dream that it is dead women who hang behind the door: and I imagine one of them winks at me.” Catching Ashlyme’s astonished glance she laughed and ran her hand along the arm of her chair. “Perhaps it never happened. Or not to me. Was I born in Soubridge, or have I been here all the time, in the plague zone? Here we are prone to a fevered imagination.” She watched her hand a moment longer, moving on the arm of the chair, then seemed to fall asleep.

Ashlyme, relieved, immediately packed his chalks and folded his easel.

“I must go while it is still dark,” he told the Fat Mam. She put her finger to her lips. She held up one of the cards (he could not see what was on it, only the yellow reflection of the lamp), but did not answer otherwise. I will return, he pantomimed, tomorrow evening. As he passed her chair the dying woman whispered disconcertingly, “Yearning has its ghosts, Ashlyme. I painted such ghosts, as you well know. Not for pleasure! It was an obligation. But all they want in the High City is trivia.” She clutched his hand, her eyes still closed. “I don’t want to go back there, Ashlyme, and they wouldn’t want me if I did: they would want some pale, neutered shadow of me. I belong to the plague zone now.”

The fortune-teller let him out into the street. The cat rubbed his legs. As he made off in the direction of the High City he heard something heavy falling in an upper room, and a confused, ravaged voice called out, “Help me! Help me!”

He continued to visit the Rue Serpolet once or twice a week. He would have gone more frequently but he had other commissions. An inexplicable lethargy gripped him: while he still had access to the dying woman he found it hard to finalise his plans for her rescue. Still, the portrait was progressing. In exchange for his preliminary sketches and caricatures, which had delighted her with their cruelty, she gave him some small canvases of her own. He was embarrassed. He could not accept them; compared to her he was, he protested, only a talented journeyman. She coughed warningly. “I would be honoured to take them,” he said. He came no closer to understanding her relationship with the fortune-teller, who was now seen only rarely at her yellow booth in the Artists’ Quarter, and spent her time instead laundering bloody handkerchiefs, preparing meals which Audsley King allowed to cool uneaten, and endlessly turning over the cards.

The cards!

The pictures on them glowed like crude stained glass, like a window on some other world, some escape. That the fortune-teller saw them so was plain. But Audsley King looked on expressionlessly, as before. She was using them, he thought, for something else: some more complex self-deception.

All his visits were made via the Gabelline Stairs. There was a considerable volume of traffic there during the plague months. Ashlyme made an oddly proper little figure among the poets and poseurs, the princelings, politicians and popularists who might be found ascending or descending them at dawn and dusk. But his peculiar red coxcomb gave him away as one of them. One morning just before dawn he encountered two drunken youths on the stairs where they went round behind Agden Fincher’s famous pie shop. They were a rough-looking pair, with scabby hands and hair of a dirty yellow colour chopped to stubble on their big round heads. They wore outlandish clothes, which were covered with food stains and worse.

When he first saw them they were sitting on each side of the stair, throwing a bruised melon back and forth between them. They were singing tunelessly,

“We are the Barley brothers.

Ousted out of Birmingham and Wolverhampton,

Lords of the Left Hand Brain,

The shadows of odd doings follows us through the night,” but they soon stopped that.

“Give us yer blessing, vicar!” they called. They staggered up to Ashlyme and fell at his feet, bowing their heads. He had no idea who they had mistaken him for. Perhaps they would have done it to anybody. One of them gripped his ankles with both hands, stared up at him, and vomited copiously on his shoes.

“Oops!”

Ashlyme was disgusted. He ignored them and walked on, but they followed him, trying out of curiosity to prise his easel from under his arm.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he told them fiercely, avoiding their great sheepish blue eyes; they groaned and nodded. They accompanied him in his fashion about a hundred steps toward Mynned, winking conspiratorially when they thought he wasn’t looking. Then they seemed to remember something else.

“Fincher’s!” they shouted.

They began to pelt each other furiously with fruit and meat.

“Fincher, make us a pie!”

They tottered off, falling down and knocking on doors at random.

Ashlyme quickened his pace. The reek of squashed fruit followed him all the way up to the High City, where his shoes attracted some comment.

Who were these drunken brothers? It is not certain. They owned the city, or so they claimed. They had come upon it, they said, during the course of a mysterious journey. (Sometimes they claimed to have created it, in one day, from nothing but the dust which blows through the low hills of Monar. Millennia had passed since then, they explained.) At first they appeared in a quite different form: two figures materialising once or twice a decade in the sky above the Atteline Plaza of the city, huge and unrealistic like lobsters in their scarlet armour, staring down in an interested fashion. Mounted on vast white horses, they had moved through the air like a constellation, fading away over a period of hours.

Now they lived somewhere in the High City with a Mingulay dwarf. They were trying to become human.

This is a game to them, or seems to be, wrote Ashlyme in his diary: a curiousand violent one. Not a night passes without some drunken imbroglio. They hang about all day in the pissoir of some wineshop, carving their initials in the plaster on the walls, and after dark race along the Margarethestrasse stuffing themselves with noodles and pies which they vomit up all over the steps of the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metalla at midnight.

Were they responsible for the city’s present affliction? Ashlyme had always blamed them. If they really are the lords of the city, he wrote, they are unreliable ones, with their “Chinese take-away” and their atrocious argot.

While the Barley brothers wrestled with their new humanity, the plague was lapping at the foot of the High City like a lake. An air of inexplicable dereliction spread across the entire Artists’ Quarter. The churchyards were full of rank marguerites, the streets plastered with torn political posters. Dull ironic laughter issued from the Bistro Californium and the Luitpold Cafe. In the mornings old women stared with expressions of intense intelligence into the windows of pie shops along the Via Gellia in the rain. While, up in the High City and all down the hill below Alves, dismayed servants were pulled across the roads by dogs like wolves on jewelled leashes. These were the secret agents of the Barley brothers. Everyone knows them, Ashlyme told his journal. They pretend to be harassed and have receding hair, pretend to be exercising these gigantic dogs. On whom are they spying? To whom do they report? Some say the brothers, some their dwarf, who has recently granted himself the title of “The Grand Cairo.” Now that the Barleys are among us nothing is reliable.

Other police enforced the quarantine of the affected area. They were strangely apathetic and unpredictable. For a month nobody would see them; suddenly they would put on smart black uniforms and arrest anyone trying to leave the zone, taking them away to undergo “tests.” People detained this way were released erratically and under no obvious system.

I cannot take them seriously, Ashlyme wrote. Are they police at all?

They were. The next time he went to see Audsley King they stopped him at the foot of the Gabelline Stairs before he could even enter the zone. It was a new policy.

They were polite, since he had obviously come down from the High City, but firm. They took his easel from him so that he would not have to be bothered carrying it. They led him back up the steps and into a part of the city which lay behind the fashionable town houses and squares of Mynned, where the woody parks and little lakes, the summery walks and shrubberies of the Haadenbosk merged imperceptibly with that old and slightly sinister quarter which had once been known as Montrouge. Here, they said, he would have a chance to explain himself.

He looked anxiously about. In Montrouge the great characteristic towers of the city, with their geometrical inscriptions and convoluted summits, had been allowed to fall into disrepair after some long-forgotten civil war. Their delicate pastels were faded or fire-blackened, their upper storeys inhabited by birds; and though the bustle and commerce of the Margarethestrasse was only a stone’s throw away, no one lived here anymore. When Ashlyme reminded them of this, his custodians only smiled and inquired after the satchel in which he kept his colours and brushes: was it too heavy for him? Soon he began to notice signs of recent construction work, trenches dug across the avenues, walls half-finished among the ragwort and willow herb, low courses of brick lying abandoned amid the excavations. Here and there a raw new building, looking like a town hall or civic centre, had been completed. But no one seemed to be working now, and the majority of the sites lay unfinished, dwarfed and depressed by the ancient structures tottering above them.

Ashlyme had to go into one of the towers to be questioned. From the outside it looked like a charred log, but it was habitable enough. New wooden partitions, still smelling of carpenter’s glue, had reduced its internal spaces. In the narrow corridors there was a good deal of coming and going. A gloomy, ill-dressed man took charge of Ashlyme and ushered him through a succession of small bare rooms, in each of which he had to explain to different officials why he had been trying to get into the plague zone. They watched him indifferently as he spoke, and his story began to sound feeble and rehearsed.

Did he not know, they asked him, that the zone was closed? “I’m afraid not. I had a commission there.” Posters had been stuck up on every wall for weeks, they said: had he not noticed them? “Sorry, I’m a portrait painter, you see, and I had a commission in the Low City.” He did not mention Audsley King by name. “I always go in the evening. Shall I have to pay a fine?” They received this bit of naivete emptily. All at once he saw that, having got him there, they didn’t really know what to do with him. Oddly enough this made him even more anxious. They searched his bag perfunctorily, and examined his easel. Suddenly they began asking him questions about the Barley brothers; had he seen them lately in the Low City? Were they with anyone? What was his opinion of them?

“Everyone sees the Barley brothers,” he said puzzledly. He shrugged. “I have no opinion of them at all,” he said.

Were they practising these obliquities to frighten him? Ashlyme couldn’t tell. When he coughed and asked if he could go home, no one answered him. Each time they transferred him to another room it seemed to him that he was taken deeper into the building. Its inner architecture had a curious hollow quality which the dreary new passages and staircases could not quite fill up. If he closed his eyes he could easily imagine himself afloat on a ringing emptiness, in which strange old languages were being spoken. And he could get no idea of who lived here: empty bottles and rotting apple cores rolled about underfoot, yet every so often he glimpsed through some half-open door a richly furnished suite of rooms, or observed fleetingly a servant hurrying along the landing with a dog on a jewelled lead. Finally he found himself in an office equipped with a brass voice pipe, into which his answers were conveyed. When he mentioned his profession, this apparatus set up a tinny, excited squawking. He could not catch its drift, but his custodians listened carefully and then conferred among themselves.

“Ask him his name,” they advised one another, and after it had been given for the hundredth time, and repeated twice into the voice pipe, told Ashlyme: “His nibs would like to see you.”

The Grand Cairo was a very small man of indeterminate age, thick-necked, grown fattish in the middle. “I like to think of myself as a fighter,” he was always saying, “and a veteran of strange wars.” He did move with a light, aggressive tread, much like that of a professional brawler from the Plaza of Unrealised Time, and sometimes quite disconcerting: but he had too sly a glance even for a common soldier; and drinking bessen genever, a thick black-currant gin very popular in the Low City, had ruined his teeth, lent his eyes a watery, spiteful caste, and made his forearms flabby. Nevertheless he had a high opinion of himself. He was proud of his hands, in particular their big square fingers; showed off at every opportunity the knotted thigh muscles of his little legs; and kept his remaining hair well oiled down with a substance called “Altaean Balm,” which one of his servants bought for him at a stall in the Tinmarket.

Ashlyme found him waiting impatiently by a window. He had on a jerkin with heavily padded shoulders, done in gorgeous dull red leathers, and he had arranged himself in the curious hollow-backed pose-hands clasped behind his back-he believed would accentuate the dignity of his chest.

“Come here, Master Ashlyme,” he said, “and tell me what you see.”

By now it was dark outside. The windowpanes reflected the lamplight and furnishings like a pond. If he strained his eyes, Ashlyme could make out rooftops, some of them quite close, which he took to be those of the less fashionable side of Mynned, near Cheniaguine and the Hospital Coictier. Off to the left, hardly visible at all and looking like the preparations for some long-drawn-out nocturnal war, there were the strange trenches and abandoned foundations which had been visited on the district of Montrouge.

“If it were not for their interference,” said the Grand Cairo, giving the word a particularly virulent emphasis and at the same time glancing over his shoulder as if he suspected someone might be listening, “this part of the city would have been transformed by now. Transformed!”

“I know very little about town planning,” said Ashlyme, careful not to enlist himself in some quarrel between the Barley brothers and their dwarf.

The Grand Cairo tilted his head alertly on one side. “Just so,” he said in a flat voice.

Suddenly he threw open the window, letting in the warmish air from a small balcony, where some early roses, planted in curious old baptismal fonts and trained to the wrought-iron railing, gave off a heavy vulgar scent.

“Come out here and see if you can guess how I do this,” he invited. He gave a low, plaintive whistle, oulouloulou, which echoed away across the housetops like the call of a summer owl. Nothing happened. He laughed and tried to catch Ashlyme’s eye.

Ashlyme, embarrassed, avoided this by looking out over the balcony. “We’re not at all high up here,” he said, and found himself slightly disappointed.

“Look! Look!” said the dwarf gleefully. “See?”

The balcony was full of cats, purring and mewing, lifting themselves up momentarily on their hind legs to rub their heads against his knees. The dwarf picked them up one by one, chuckling and saying their names: “This is Nounoune… Sexer… here’s Zero with his bent tail… and here’s my fierce Planchette… Namenloss… Eamo… Elbow,” and so on, an eerie list spoken thoughtfully into the scented night. More than a dozen lean little animals had come to him out of the darkness. It was in its way quite impressive.

“Not one of these cats is mine,” he said. “They come from all over the city, because I speak their language.” He looked intently at Ashlyme. “What do you think of that? Of that possibility?”

“What lovely animals!” exclaimed Ashlyme evasively. He tried to stroke one of them but it turned on him such a cold, knowing glance that he moved his hand away at once. “Very impressive,” he said.

At this, the dwarf seemed to lose interest. He required Ashlyme to come and sit down next door in what he called his “side chamber,” a monstrously tall room, original to the tower, in which he looked like a spoiled child wandering about a palace at night. Even the furniture was too large, huge wing chairs and armoires with pewter fitments. There were intricately carved circular tables, old, heavy brocade curtains, and cushions embroidered with metallic thread. The walls had been done out in black and dull gold, with panels of red in which were mounted paintings by Audsley King, Kristodulos, and Ashlyme himself. “I am a collector, you see!” said the dwarf proudly. There was even a sentimental watercolour signed by Paulinus Rack, almost invisible against its overblown setting. The room smelled of incense and stale cakes, the smell of great age. The cats loved it: they filed in one by one and filled up the air with a drugged purring, but Ashlyme felt dizzy, and-when he saw his own work hung in those ancient spaces-a little uneasy.

The Grand Cairo sighed. He stared thoughtfully at an Audsley King landscape, done in oil and pencil, which showed an old swing bridge being mended at Line Mass Quay.

“What do you see when you look at me?” he said at last. “I’ll tell you. You see a man who has rubbed hard against the corners of the world; a man who has had to endure privations and attacks, and constantly fulfil the role of outcast.” He laughed scornfully. “Outcast!” he repeated, and went on: “Perhaps you look admiringly round this room and tell yourself, ‘A streak of the sinister is mixed in this man’s composition with many good qualities.’ You are right!” And he gave a satisfied nod, as if this dramatic assessment had indeed been Ashlyme’s. “Nevertheless: I am a man of strong sensibilities-do not forget that-who might once himself have been artist, athlete, mathematician!”

He gave the Audsley King a last admiring glance.

“If only we could be as she is! Still, we can only do our best. I’ll order some refreshments, then stand-or sit-wherever you want me to. Will you have the right profile or the left?”

And, when he saw Ashlyme staring at him helplessly:

“I want you to do my portrait, Master Ashlyme. You are the one to catch me as I am!”

He was an exasperating subject, full of nervous energy and forever dissatisfied with his pose. He began by standing up, one hand stretched out like a populist orator. Then he sat down and put his chin on his hand. But soon that was not good enough for him either and he had to stand up again to display the muscles of his upper back. At first he thought too much light was falling on him to emphasise the essential duality of his character, then too little to bring out the line of his jaw. He smiled until he remembered that this would reveal his teeth, then frowned. “I cannot decide how to present myself,” he admitted, with a sigh. He was talking constantly.

“Do you know why I am so handsome?” he would ask. “It is because of the straightness of my legs.”

It was clear that he hated and feared his masters. One of his favourite topics was the steel ring he wore on the thumb of his right hand. It was a wicked object, with a sharpened spur mounted on it instead of a stone. His employers, he hinted darkly, had attacked him before; the day would come when he would have to fear them again. Suddenly he leapt to his feet and cried, “Imagine the scene! I am attacked! I slash at the forehead of my opponent! Immediately his own blood fills his eyes, and I have him where I want him!”

He accompanied this explanation with a violent sweep of his arm, which knocked over a little pewter vase of anemones.

This was how they passed the rest of the night. Extra lamps were brought in at Ashlyme’s request, and at the dwarf’s a tray of aniseed cakes and a preparation he called “housemaid’s coffee,” made of heavily sugared milk heated slowly while buttered toast was crumbled into it and then browned until it formed a thick crust. This he drank with great gusto, rolling his eyes and rubbing his diaphragm, while Ashlyme watched him covertly from behind the easel, yawning and pretending to draw. As the room cooled, the cats crowded round him, or ran about picking up the pieces of food he threw them.

Towards dawn there was a dull crash outside the building. The dwarf got up and went hurriedly into the adjoining room. Ashlyme found him standing on tiptoe on the little balcony, looking down at the Barley brothers. “Give us a tune, dwarf!” they shouted. “Give us a story!” Drunken singing came up, mixed with laughter and dry retching sounds. They tried to scale the rotten wall below the balcony. They redoubled their efforts to get the door open, and a hollow booming echoed away across the deserted building sites of Montrouge. The dwarf greeted this without a word, staring out over the rooftops, his jaw muscles twitching spasmodically. Ashlyme, intimidated, kept quiet.

Doors opened and closed elsewhere in the tower. Servants ran about. Eventually it was quiet again, but the dwarf stood on at the railing. When he turned away at last it was apparent that he had expected to find himself alone. He regarded Ashlyme with blank hatred for a moment, then said effortfully, “Do you see how they plague me? I won’t have them in my portrait. Hurry. It will spoil everything if they find you here!”

Ashlyme nodded and went to fetch his easel.

The dwarf stood in the doorway watching him pack chalks and paper. “What’s your game in the plague zone, Ashlyme?” he asked quietly. His expression was detached. When he saw Ashlyme’s confusion he laughed. “Go anywhere you like! My men will leave you alone unless I order it. But don’t forget your new commission.”

Outside, the night was totally silent; and as Ashlyme picked his way between the derelict towers and rubbish-filled trenches, it seemed to him that the whole city had shrunk to a black dot on the vast featureless map of the end of the world.

This week, he wrote in his journal, the High City can think of nothing but the Barley brothers. What they wear, where they go, what they do when they get there, all this is suddenly of paramount interest. The most vexing question is: where do they live? Yesterday at Angina Desformes’s I was told in confidence that the Barleys live in a workman’s hut in the cisPontine Quarter; this morning I learned to the contrary that they stay on a houseboat down at Line Mass and spend their time throwing things in the canal. Tomorrow I expect to hear that they have bought all the houses on Uranium Street, where, in a grave beneath the pavement, they have secretly arranged a sepulchre for themselvesand their dwarf…

It was a silly preoccupation, he felt, and one which could only confirm the Barley brothers in their bad behaviour. Now that I have visited the tower in Montrouge, and seen the curious roadworks beyond the Haadenbosk, he added, I do not encourage such speculation. To the extent that he could, he pushed his encounter with the Grand Cairo out of his mind. He was not anxious to admit, perhaps, that the pattern of his life could be so easily disturbed. As an antidote he worked hard at his round of commissions in Mynned.

Most of these, he recorded, are middle-aged women, bored, educated, “artistic.” I am quite the fashion with them. At present, of course, they are besottedby the Barley brothers, and filled with delighted fear by the proximity of the plague zone: but they remain eager to talk about Paulinus Rack, who is still their darling despite the growing row over Die Traumunden Knaben, which many of them consider too risque a production to be put on the High City. Like all of us, Rack relies for his funding on these women, and his feet are getting colder by the minute. If the play fails, Audsley King will fail with it. The Dreaming Boys are her last link with the High City, her last investmentin life rather than death. The women of Mynned, who have not thought about this, are scandalised by what they imagine her plight to be. May they send her money? they enquire of me. “I’m afraid it is against quarantine regulations,” I tell them. They find this quite unsatisfactory.

He always lost two or three of these clients when the finished portrait turned out a little less “sympathetic” than they had expected.

“La Petroleuse” complains that I have made her look provincial. I have not. I have given her the face of a grocer, which is another matter entirely, and in no way a judgement. There are so many other things to think about that I cannot regret it. Audsley King seems lower in spirit every time I see her. Emmet Buffo is anxious about his part in our plan, and lately has sent me several letters on the subject of disguises. He does not want to enter the zone without one. He thinks we should both have one. He knows where there is an old man who can get them for us.

After some thought Ashlyme decided, I don’t care for this idea. Nevertheless, to Buffo he wrote, I will meet you to see this man as soon as I can get away.

It was a cool, bright morning in the High City.

“How lucky you are to live up here!” exclaimed Buffo. “The plague hardly seems to have changed anything.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Ashlyme.

“Well, I love to come here,” Buffo insisted, “especially if I’ve been working all night. Look: there’s Livio Fognet on his way to lunch at the Charcuterie Vivien.” He waved cheerfully. “Not a care in the world!”

Buffo was tall and thin, with a loose, uncoordinated gait which made him look as if the wrong legs had been attached to him at birth. His face was clumsy and long-jawed, he had limp fair hair and a pale complexion. Years of staring through homemade lenses had given his eyes a sore and vulnerable look. His researches, which had something to do with the moon, were regarded with derision in the High City. He did not suspect this. Lately, though, he had been short of funds. It had made him absentminded; when he thought no one was watching him his face became slack and empty of expression.

“You even have better weather in Mynned,” he went on, stretching, expanding his chest, and blinking round in the weak sunlight. “It’s always so windy where I live.” He had bought himself a pound of plums and was eating them as he went along. “I don’t know why I like plums so much,” he said. “Did you see the sky just after dawn today? Extraordinary!”

They were on their way to the cisPontine Quarter, a Low City district as yet untouched by the plague. To get there they had to cross Mynned and go down to the canal. It had rained quite heavily an hour or so before. As they made their way between the deserted quays and warehouses, the eggshell colours of the sky were reflected in the puddles on the towpath. A coolish breeze blew across the lock basin at Line Mass, giving it something of the windy spaciousness of a much larger body of water and reminding Ashlyme without warning of the Midland Levels, where he had been born. He thought suddenly of bitter winter floods, eels coiled fat and unmoving in the mud, and herons standing motionless along the silvery margins of the willow carrs. He shivered.

Buffo was describing the man they were going to meet.

“He is a great collector of stuffed birds. He makes them, too. He sells, among other things, the clothes the beggars wear. He lives behind ‘Our Lady of the Zincsmiths,’ and thinks as I do that the future of the world lies with science.” (Ashlyme, hearing only the word future, looked guiltily in the direction Buffo happened to be pointing. He saw only an old lock gate, behind which had collected a creamy brown curd full of floating rubbish.) “His researches take him into the old towers of the city, and their derelict upper floors. You will not believe this, Ashlyme, but there among the jackdaw colonies and sparrows’ nests he claims to have found living birds whose every feather is made of metal!”

“He should avoid those old towers,” said Ashlyme. “They can be dangerous.”

“It’s interesting work, though. Do you want the last plum or can I have it?”

Presently they came to the cisPontine Quarter and found the old man at home in his shop. The small dusty window of this place was full of birds and animals preserved in unrealistic poses, and above it hung a partly obliterated sign. It stood on one side of an old paved square, entry to which was gained through a narrow brick arch. Fish was being sold from a cart at one end of the square; at the other rose the dark bulk of “Our Lady of the Zincsmiths”; children ran excitedly about between the two, squabbling over a bit of pavement marked out for the hopping game “blind Michael.” As Ashlyme stepped through the arch he heard a woman’s voice, shrill, nasal, singing to a mandolin; and the air was full of the smells of cod and saffron.

The old man was watery-eyed and frail. He stood amid the clutter at the back of the shop, clutching one stiff hand with the other and smiling uncertainly. The skin was stretched over his long skull like yellow paper. He had on a faded dressing gown which had once been embroidered with fine silver wire. A few twists of this still poked out of its lapels and threadbare elbows. He took Emmet Buffo by the arm and drew him away from the door.

“Come and look!” he whispered excitedly.

In a garret near Alves he had found a metal feather. It was the first proof of his theories. Smiling and nodding, he held it out for Buffo to examine. He cast quick, anxious little glances over his shoulder at Ashlyme. Ashlyme looked away and pretended to be interested in the stuffed birds which stood on the shelves as if they were waiting to be revived. The gaze of their small bright eyes made him shift impatiently. The old man looked like a bird himself, with his thin bones and nodding skull. He is frightened I will steal his discovery, thought Ashlyme. Buffo should have come on his own.

“Hurry up, Buffo.” But Buffo was engrossed.

Ashlyme picked his way between the bales of rags and secondhand clothes which made up the shop’s stock-in-trade. He found what he thought was a nice piece of brocade, folded into a thick square and heavy with damp. When he shook it out and held it up to the light from the doorway, it turned out to be a decomposing tapestry, in which was depicted a city at night. Huge buildings and monuments stood under the moon. Along the wide avenues between them, men dressed in animal masks were stalking one another from shadow to shadow with mattocks and sharpened spades. He dropped it quickly and wiped his hands. He heard the old man say, “The clue I have been looking for.”

“What do you think, Ashlyme?” asked Buffo.

“It looks like an ordinary feather to me,” said Ashlyme, more bluntly than he had meant to. “Apart from the colour,” he amended.

“These birds are real!” said the old man defensively. He came closer to Ashlyme, holding the feather tightly. “Would you like a cup of chamomile tea?”

“I think we’d better just look at what we came to see,” said Ashlyme. Buffo and the old man bent down and began to root through a pile of disintegrating bandages. Ashlyme watched uneasily. “What are you looking in there for?” he said. “Who would wear things like that?” He walked off irritably.

“Don’t you want to choose your own disguise?” Buffo called after him in a puzzled voice.

“No,” said Ashlyme.

He stood outside in the square, watching the children run about in the chilly sunshine. Above him the partly obliterated sign creaked. If he studied it carefully he could make out the word SELLER. The fishmonger was pulling his barrow out under the archway; the woman was still singing. Ashlyme closed his eyes and tried to imagine how he would paint if he lived here rather than up in Mynned. He decided that one day he would find out. The smell of the food being cooked was making him hungry. Suddenly he realised how rude he had been to Buffo and the old man. He went back inside and found them drinking chamomile tea. “Can I have a look at that feather?” he asked.

The old man held it out. “You see?” he said. “Look at the craftsmanship. These birds were built long ago, by whom and for what purpose is as yet unclear.” He leant forward. “I believe,” he said, in a whisper so quiet that it forced Ashlyme to lean forward, too, “that one day they will speak to me.”

“It’s interesting work,” said Ashlyme.

Later, as they were preparing to leave, the old man touched his sleeve. “This will surprise you,” he said. “I don’t know how old I am.” Suddenly his eyes filled up with tears. He rubbed them unembarrassedly with the back of his hand. “Can you understand what I mean?” He gazed at Ashlyme for a moment or two, with a look in which could be read only a vague anxiety, then turned away.

“Goodbye,” said Ashlyme. And outside, to Buffo: “Do you know what he was talking about?”

“It means nothing to me,” admitted Buffo, hefting the brown paper parcel which contained their disguises. “I can’t wait to get these home and try them on.” But on the way back to Mynned through Line Mass he stopped suddenly. “Look,” he said. “That’s the fishmonger following us. I saw him in the High City this morning, and he had some nice hake. I think I’ll cook a bit of that for tea.” He was unlucky. For some reason, as soon as he saw Buffo approaching, the fishmonger went into a side alley and made off, his barrow clattering on the cobbles.