Viriconium

Ashlyme seldom took his own meals at home. Before the plague he had eaten with his friends at the Luitpold Cafe in the Artists’ Quarter. Now, more often than not, he could be found at the Vivien, or one of the other charcuteries on the Margarethestrasse, eating a chop.

One night he had supper there with Mme. Chevigne, who wanted him to design the programme for a production called The Little Humpbacked Horse. This had been devised as a vehicle for Vera Ghillera, the city’s newest principal dancer, illegitimate daughter of a laundress, with a lyrical port de bras, and would run as a rival to Die Traumunden Knaben if that play was ever produced. Ashlyme was not enthusiastic but allowed himself to be persuaded. (Later he was to make two or three sketches for this commission; but they were of young dancers caught unawares during exercises often far from graceful, and they were never used.) The sharp-nosed little Chevigne, who in her time had danced as well if not better than Ghillera, amused him with her scandals until late. When he got home a bluish moon was shining through the roof lights of the studio, giving an odd look of frozen motion to his easel and lay figure, as if they had been moving about just before he came in.

A note had been pushed in through his front door and lay on the mat.

Come at once, it said, in a self-assertive script. It was unsigned, but with it the Grand Cairo had sent a massive silver signet ring which he treated nightly in powdered sulphur to maintain its tarnish. Ashlyme sighed, but he set out immediately for Montrouge.

The night was quiet and dry. A wind had got up and was scattering dust over the surface of the puddles. In Montrouge the Barley brothers had fallen out over a white geranium in a pot, which they had stolen in some midnight adventure along the Via Gellia. They were rolling about in the moonlight among the half-finished brick courses of the dwarf’s municipal estate, kicking over stacks of earthenware pipes and biting one another when they got the chance. Ashlyme found himself watching them silently from the shadows on the other side of the road. He could not have said why. Presently Gog Barley got on top of his brother and gave him a punch in the chest.

“You bit of snot,” he said. “Give us me rose back.”

He twisted Matey’s arm until he got the geranium. It was more foliage than flower. He jumped up and made off with it, but Matey gave him the “dead leg” and he fell into a trench. They scuffled stealthily in there for a minute or two, then bolted out of it with enraged howls. Suddenly they spotted Ashlyme.

“Oh, gor,” said Matey. “It’s the vicar.”

He dropped the flower and stood there breathing heavily, wincing and squinting and shading his eyes as if Ashlyme had unexpectedly held up a bright light. He nudged his brother in the ribs and they both ran off shouting in the direction of the Haadenbosk. After a moment the night was quiet and empty again. The geranium pot rolled slowly across the road until it came to rest at Ashlyme’s feet. He bent down to pick it up and then thought better of it. One ghostly white floret remained among the leaves of the geranium, luminous in the moonlight; a musty smell came up from it and surrounded him.

He got into the tower by showing the dwarf’s ring.

Pride of place in the salle had been given over to a delicate little drawing by Audsley King. It was of boats, done in charcoal and white chalk on grey paper, and Ashlyme had not seen it on his last visit there.

He found the dwarf pacing impatiently to and fro, dressed with a kind of ignominious majesty in a studded black jerkin. A pair of spectacles gave him a judiciary air. His hair gleamed with Altaean Balm. Despite his new acquisition he was in a dangerous temper, and he greeted Ashlyme brusquely. “Begin drawing,” he said, taking up immediately a stiff seated pose which threw into prominence the tendons of his ageing neck. Confused by the lateness of the hour and the vertiginous spaces of the old building, Ashlyme made some attempt to set up his easel. The dwarf watched disapprovingly, fidgeting about in his chair as if the pose had already become intolerable to hold, and said as soon as Ashlyme had settled down,

“What fresh secrets have you found it necessary to hide from me today, Master Backstabber?”

He gave Ashlyme no time to answer this accusation. “Say nothing for the moment,” he warned, with an irritable gesture. “Don’t bother to try and justify yourself to me.” Suddenly he gave a sly laugh. He jumped out of his chair and took off his spectacles. “I got these when I lived in the North,” he said. “But I can see very well without them. What do you think of this new drawing of mine?”

Ashlyme, unconvinced by this change of mood, swallowed. “I should not like you to think that I had deceived you deliberately-” he began. He saw the dwarf watching him with the patient, ironic eyes of the secret policeman, waiting for an answer. He could not organise his thoughts. “It is very good,” he said at last.

“And you recognise the artist, of course?”

Ashlyme nodded.

“Audsley King,” he whispered.

The Grand Cairo nodded. “Just so.” He sat down again. “Go on with your work,” he advised. “I think that would be best for you now.” But he was soon back on his feet, rearranging a display of sol d’or. He picked up one of his cats and stroked its greyish fur. Every time he said its name the animal purred loudly and poked its head into his armpit. “You are not a man for secrets, Ashlyme,” he said contemplatively as he opened the door and watched the cat run out into the corridor with its tail in the air. “Never imagine you are.” He listened for a moment at the door. “I am your man for secrets,” he mused. “They’re safe with me.” He went up to the Audsley King sketch, regarded it with his hands behind his back, then tapped its frame. “Why didn’t you tell me about your little scheme to smuggle this woman out of the quarantine zone?”

“I-” said Ashlyme. He was confused and frightened. “She is the great painter of our age. We-”

The dwarf studied him silently for a moment, head on one side. “ ‘She is the great painter of our age’!” he mimicked suddenly. “Do you know, Ashlyme, I can’t quite make you out. That’s not a very responsible attitude in the face of our present plight, is it?” He took out a leather notebook. “What about this other man, this ‘Emmley Buffold’, who is so fond of fish? He gave my man quite a fright, chasing him like that! What does he hope to gain from it?” He laughed at Ashlyme’s expression. “Oh, make no mistake. It’s all written here. I know who’s in it with you.” He shut the book decisively.

“I am the man for secrets,” he said. “You must always bring them to me. It is the only safe course.”

Ashlyme looked at him in dismay. “What will you do with us?” he said.

The Grand Cairo put his notebook away.

“Why, I’ll join you!” he answered, and winked.

Nothing would persuade him otherwise. He would listen to none of Ashlyme’s arguments. He had the romantic temper, he said. He needed action! Besides: Audsley King was the greatest painter of their age. Only a criminal oversight could have placed her in such jeopardy. She was a resource. He made Ashlyme sit down, poured out two glasses of bessen genever, and insisted they drink to their adventure. “Confidentially,” he admitted, “I am bored with all this.” His gesture took in the whole of Montrouge. “This morning I woke up wishing I was back in the North again.” He emptied his glass. “You can’t imagine how appalling it is up there,” he said. “Constant intrigue and backstabbing, and black mud in everything you eat. The wind never drops. Ruined cities full of cripples, and insects as big as a horse!”

He shuddered. “Even the rain was black. But I’ll tell you something, Ashlyme: at least we were alive then! Our intrigues had bowels. A kingdom was at stake, even if it was a kingdom of mud!”

“But what about your own police?” appealed Ashlyme, who had understood little of this reminiscence, with its implications of habitual conspiracy in a country which could barely support life. “What if they catch you with us?” This was his last argument. The wine had made him feel sick but slightly less frightened. He was sure that the dwarf would never forgive him his deception; he suspected that his position was only slightly less insecure than it had been when he first entered the room. “Won’t that put you in wrong with your employers?”

The Grand Cairo laughed scornfully.

“Never mention those brothers to me!” he exclaimed. He shook his head, staring into space. “I argued all along against us coming down here, even in defeat-” He rubbed his hands over his eyes. “Look at them now!”

He refilled Ashlyme’s glass, emptied his own.

“Oh, it was hand-to-mouth in those days, it was catch-as-catch-can. You should have seen some of the lads I had with me then; they’d kill a cow with their bare hands! It’s all very well for you to be frightened of those imbeciles downstairs: after all, they’re here to frighten civilians. But not one of them would have lasted a week up there. Not one of them.” He examined this idea with morose satisfaction. “Don’t you worry about them. This is a scheme that can’t go wrong!” He leaned forward enthusiastically and took Ashlyme’s hands. “Imagine the scene “Three muffled figures, heavily armed and disguised, support a fourth. (She is unable to walk unaided. Her face is pitiable, pinched, almond white, framed in a great collar of wolf’s fur. Under her skin are fine mauve veins like those the clematis sometimes displays beneath its flower. Her eyes are as blue as phosphorus in the gloom.) Like ghosts they cross the end of an alley, passing in silence in the deep night, and make their way stealthily from gravestone to gravestone across Allman’s Heath, down to the waters of the Pleasure Canal. Will the boatman be waiting, as he promised? Or has he been enlisted by their enemies? They are almost home now. But wait! Out of the mist at the water’s edge comes the pursuit! Now they must fight!”

A dreamy, excited expression had settled on the dwarf’s face. He got up and mimicked the weariness of the conspirators, taking the part of each in turn, then the curious lurching gait of the sick woman. He let his eyelids fall half-closed and said in a kind of shrieking falsetto, “I can go no further.” He collapsed, and caught himself before he fell to the ground. He pulled forth an imaginary knife and looked warily about. This pantomime took him all round the room and up to a huge wardrobe of black pear wood, its mouldings disfigured where he had struck matches on them. As he reached this he turned towards Ashlyme the sexless, ageless glance of the obsessed, full of incomprehensible irony; and at the word fight, he opened it with a quick, powerful tug.

It was full of weapons of all kinds: clubs, truncheons, and loaded wooden coshes; misericordes and stilettos, with and without sheaths; knuckle-dusters studded and spiked, trick knives whose blades shot out on springs, and strangling cords made of silk or cheese wire, all hanging in rows from pegs. Most of this stuff seemed rusty and ill-kept, although at one time it had been in almost daily use. In a wooden rack were three bottles made of deep blue glass, which had once contained acids. Some rotten-smelling objects in the bottom of the cupboard turned out to be potatoes and cakes of scented soap into which had been embedded bits of broken glass; among them were other homemade devices of less obvious purpose. The dwarf took them out one by one and laid them on the floor, knives in one place, garrotes in another. He beckoned Ashlyme closer.

“Come on,” he said. “Have anything you want. We must go prepared.”

Ashlyme stared at him dry-mouthed. The dwarf made encouraging sounds. Eventually Ashlyme picked up the smallest knife he could find. It had a curious flaw halfway up the blade. The dwarf started a little when he saw Ashlyme had picked that particular one; but he soon recovered himself and told several stories about it. “I got that knife on Fenlen Island in the North,” he said. “There was blood on that knife from the moment I had it.” But this was said with such unconvincing bravado that Ashlyme was sure he had simply stolen it from the Barley brothers years ago, and was glad to get rid of it now in case they found out.

Ashlyme was to grow used to this weapon, sharpening his pencils with it, and sometimes fingering the flaw in its blade, which was quite unlike rust and had a satisfying texture to the ball of the thumb: but that night he took it home in horror, wondering what would become of him.

Emmet Buffo lived at the top of an old house at Alves, halfway up the famous hill (the summit of which had interfered with many of his most radical and innovatory observations). Alves was a curious place. It was a windy salient or polyp of the High City flung out into the Low, partaking of the character of both. While its streets were wider than those of the Artists’ Quarter, they were no less shabby. Strange old towers rose from a wooded slope clasped in a curved arm of the derelict Pleasure Canal. About their feet clustered the peeling villas of a vanished middle class, all plaster mouldings, split steps, tottering porticos, and drains smelling of cats. Ashlyme trudged up the hill. A bell clanged high up in a house; a face moved at a window. The wind whirled dust and dead leaves round him.

While he waited for the astronomer to open his door, he thought of Audsley King’s most popular watercolour, “On the bridge at New Man’s Staithe.”

In this view of Alves a honey-coloured light seems to rise from the glassy waters of the abandoned canal and enfold the hill behind, giving its eccentric architecture a mysterious familiarity, like buildings seen in a dream. The towers, their pastel colours thickened romantically, glow like stained glass.

Ashlyme smiled. A print of this picture hung in every salon in the High City. The question most frequently asked about it was: “This unmoving figure at the parapet of the bridge, is it male or female?” Audsley King would answer: “I did not intend you to know.” She had painted it during a love affair sixteen years before. She now disowned its dreamy lights and sentimentality. “It is untruthful,” she complained. “Yet they love it so!”

Emmet Buffo put his head round the door and blinked.

“Come in, come in!” he said.

He took Ashlyme’s hand as if he had never seen him before, and, under the impression that he had been sent from some committee to explore the funding of a new telescope, led him up the stairs. He had, he explained, almost given up hope of ever getting money for his experiments. He did not blame the High City for this. “Every six months I go to the patents office and sit for an hour, perhaps two, on the benches with all the others. I understand the needs of the bureaucracy. I understand its inertia. What can I do but maintain a philosophical attitude?”

Up the stairs went Ashlyme behind him, listening to this monologue float down, unable to find any opportunity to speak and in any case hardly knowing what to say. There were pockets of dust in the corners of the landings.

“Still,” said Buffo. “They’ve sent you. That’s something!”

He laughed.

He lived in a kind of penthouse, much of which he had built himself. It was cold there even in summer. In one room he cooked his food and slept; it was tidy, but a stale smell hung in the air about the low iron bed and the homemade washstand. He ground his lenses in another smaller room. Little pieces of coloured glass like the petals of anemones littered a table, some set in complex frames made of whitish metal. The astronomical charts had peeled that morning from the wall and lay in folds at its foot. (Mouldy patterns in the plaster suggested that another universe had been hidden behind them.) “It’s the damp,” apologised Buffo. He showed Ashlyme around like a tourist in the Margarethestrasse. “This is my ‘exterior brain,’ ” he said. “I call it that. I can refer to it at any time. It’s more than just a library.” He indicated an ordinary set of shelves on which were arranged reference books and instruments, models of telescopes and bits of paper with technical drawings on them.

The adjoining room, where he spent most of his time, was a flimsy structure like a greenhouse, with a complicated system of ratchets and rods that enabled him to lift its roof and poke out his telescopes. It was composed of odd panes of glass, some coloured, some milky; they were cracked, and of different sizes.

“This is the observatory itself. From here I can see twenty miles in any direction.”

Ashlyme looked out. A quarter of the sky was obscured by the bulk of Alves, with the cracked, threatening copper dome of the old palace askew on it like a crown. From the other side he could look down across the Pleasure Canal at the famous graves on Allman’s Heath. “It was built to my own design, ten years ago,” said Buffo. It was full of contraptions. As Ashlyme moved from one to the other, pretending not to have seen them before, Buffo sat on a stool. But he couldn’t sit still. He hopped to his feet to explain, “These are the plans for the new device,” and sat down again. He was like an exhibit himself in the odd light.

One of the contraptions was a maze of copper tubing into which Buffo had let two or three eyepieces, apparently at random. Ashlyme bent to look through one of them. All he saw was a sad reticulated greyness, and, suspended indistinctly against it in the distance, something like a chrysalis or cocoon, spinning at the end of its thread. Buffo smiled shyly. “Success is slow to come with that one,” he admitted. “You’ll agree it has vast potential, though?” He went on to explain his experimental method, but soon saw that Ashlyme didn’t understand. He left the observatory for a moment and came back with a tray. “Would you like some wine? Some of these pilchards?” Thankfully, Ashlyme sat down and took some. They ate in silence. When he had finished, Ashlyme rubbed his hand over his face.

“Buffo,” he said. “You know it’s me, not some clerk from the patents office. It’s Ashlyme. I’ve seen all this a hundred times before.”

“Pardon?” Buffo stared at him, his expression changing slowly. “I suppose you have,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose you have.” He sighed. “I expect I knew all along really. I’m sorry, old chap.”

Ashlyme explained how he had become entangled with the Grand Cairo.

“Now this dwarf wants to come with us to the Rue Serpolet,” he told Buffo. “He won’t take no for an answer. What are we going to do?”

Buffo looked bleakly round the observatory.

“You wake from one nightmare into the next,” he said in a quiet voice. He inspected the palm of his hand as if it was his whole life. “I’m sorry, this fish is awful. Leave it if you like.” Suddenly he laughed and pushed his plate on the floor with a clatter. “We must lay new plans then!” he exclaimed. He touched Ashlyme’s arm. “Come on, Ashlyme, it cheers me up just to see you!”

He had an idea already, he continued. “Let him push the handcart if he is so keen to come! We need someone to do that, after all; and it’s our plan, not his.”

Ashlyme wiped the condensation off a pane of glass and looked out. The Artists’ Quarter was barely three hundred yards away across the Pleasure Canal and Allman’s Heath. He stared at the dark loop of water, the jumble of roofs to the west, the leaning gravestones that filled the heath between. (Had Audsley King set her easel up among them to paint “On the bridge at New Man’s Staithe,” anemones and sol d’or burning at her feet? Now the graveyard was full of briars and plaster dust blown in from the senseless renovations on Endingall Street and de Monfreid Square.) The canal was quite shallow. You could see the bottom on a sunny day. They had intended to wade it after the rescue, and bring Audsley King directly to Alves. His long experience of conspiracies had enabled the dwarf to guess this immediately.

“I don’t think he would be content with that, Buffo. Even if we could persuade him, he is untrustworthy. He is subject to moods, fits of enthusiasm, distempers, sudden hatreds. He is in love with plots. Even his masters, the Barley brothers, he believes, are plotting against him.”

“Never mind,” said Buffo. “We’ll think of something.”

He went out for a minute and came back with what looked like a bundle of rags, wrapped around something more solid.

“Don’t look for a moment,” he said.

Ashlyme was forced to smile. He closed his eyes; ran his tongue round the inside of his mouth to dislodge a piece of pilchard. When he opened his eyes again he saw Buffo standing there wearing a kind of varnished rubber mask. It covered his head completely, and resembled the stripped and polished skull of a horse, two pomegranates set in the empty sockets to simulate eyes. It was ludicrous. Buffo had taken off his clothes and wound strips of green swaddling round his body. His arms were like sticks, his rib cage huge. Two great branched feathery horns came up out of the forehead of the mask. He did not look human.

“They’re rather well done, aren’t they?” he said, his voice muffled by the rubber which was forced down over his nose. “Don’t you want to look at yours?” He had another mask in his outstretched hand.

Ashlyme backed away. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to see it. Why must we dress like that?”

“I thought the old man had done rather well. We will look just like beggars. No one will recognise us!” He pounced on Ashlyme and took him by the shoulders. He whirled him round and round in a clumsy dance. “What an idea!” he crowed. “What a success!”

Ashlyme was helpless. The skull of the horse was thrust into his face. It was hard to believe that Buffo’s familiar features were somewhere beneath it. He was as frightened by the strength of the astronomer’s thin arms as he was by the sound of breath sobbing in and out of the mask. Then he began to laugh despite himself.

“Well done, Buffo!”

Buffo, encouraged, sang a lively but mawkish popular song. They finished the bottle of wine and even the pilchards. The sun set. Crowing and singing, they pranced about the observatory, bumping into things and falling down, until they were exhausted.

Later, with the proper fall of night, the observatory became cold and uninhabitable; but the two men sat on, talking at first, then contemplating their plan in a companionable silence. They discussed the future. Buffo would move out of Alves and into the High City, where he believed his work would be better appreciated; Ashlyme would share his studio with Audsley King and they would do great work together. The flimsy structure of the greenhouse creaked around them as the wind rose. Damp air blew through the cracked panes, giving Ashlyme the impression of motion, of racing travel through some ramshackle but benign dimension. Where would they end up? He smiled over at Buffo. The astronomer’s head had sunk on to his chest; he had fallen asleep with his mouth open and begun to snore. Turned down, the lamps emitted a queer crepuscular light. Ashlyme got his cloak and folded it about him. It was too late to go home. Besides, he felt somehow responsible for the astronomer, who looked even more honest asleep than he did awake. He wandered about for a while, squinting into the eyepieces of the telescopes. Then he sat down and dozed. Once or twice he woke up suddenly, thinking about the pile of clothes and masks on the floor.

For a week he felt debauched and bilious, uninclined to commit himself. Was the dwarf still having him watched? Was Emmet Buffo a broken reed? The plague, he wrote in his diary, permeates all our decisions, like a fog. He put the rescue attempt off again and again, and for the most part stayed in his studio, watching morosely as the unseasonable rain swept across the Low City and lashed the fronts of the houses at Mynned. This summer is a travesty, he wrote, as if the trivial might allow him to forget his situation. And, on finding water among his belongings in the attic, I am appalled, but it is my own fault. I have not repaired the roof. Neither had he repaired his opinion of the High City art cliques. Is anything worthwhile being done? In short, no: up here it is all dinner arrangements and affaires. Rack has had the set designs for The Dreaming Boys for two months now, yet there have been no auditions, no readings. He wishes (he says) “to consult the artist”; but he never goes to the Low City.

He could not work on the portrait of Audsley King. Instead he began framing the pictures she had given him. He discovered with delight the early landscape “A fire this Wednesday at Lowth,” and what appeared to be an incomplete gouache of the notorious “Self-portrait half clothed,” in which the artist is seen peering slyly into a mirror, her long hands touching her own private parts. He hung the paintings in different places to find the best light and stood in front of them for long periods, thrilled by the stacked planes of the landscapes, the disquieting eros of her inner world.

At last an oblique sunshine broke through the clouds above the city and filled it with a shifting, fitful brightness. There was a rush to the banks of the Pleasure Canal. The High City emptied itself onto Lime Walk and the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves, and there, in audacious proximity to the plague zone, took the sun.

Little iron tables were set up and the women drank tea out of porcelain “lucid as a baby’s ear”; while those poets who had escaped exile in the Californium and the Luitpold Cafe recited in musical voices. Everyone had a theory about the plague. Everyone had it from a reliable source. Most agreed it would never reach the High City. Imagine the scene! The women had on their muslin dresses. The men wore swords and meal-coloured cloaks copied carefully from those fashionable among the Low City mohocks two or three centuries before. A wet silvery light fell delicately on the white bridges, limning the afternoon curve of the canal and perfectly disguising its shabbiness. Everyone enjoyed themselves thoroughly; while down below, among the ragwort on the towpath, writhed the thousand-and-one black and yellow caterpillars of the cinnabar moth, some fat and industrious, rearing up their blunt, ugly heads, others thin and scruffy and torpid. The Barley brothers ate them and were sick.

Ashlyme, who had been out buying mastic, wandered onto the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves and could not find his way off again. The crowds confused him. He ran into Paulinus Rack, who was sitting at a table with Livio Fognet, the lithographer, and their patron the Marchioness “L.” A shy young novelist stood behind the Marchioness’s chair, admiring the famous curve of her upper arm. They were all delighted to see Ashlyme. What a stranger he was!

“Has the plague lifted, then?” he said, staring puzzledly about him. It was the only reason he could think of for a celebration.

They were amused. Had he never heard of sunshine? He accepted a cup of tea the Marchioness had poured especially for him, but declined to watch the antics of the Barley brothers down on the canal bank. He could not think of them, he explained, as a sideshow.

“Aren’t you being a little naive, old chap?” said Livio Fognet. He winked at the Marchioness’s novelist.

“After all,” chided the Marchioness, “we must think of them as something!” She laughed shrilly and then seemed to lose her confidence. “Mustn’t we?”

A bemused silence followed. After a minute her novelist said, “I don’t think Rack himself could have put it better.” He blushed. He was saved by a general movement toward the railings. A murmur of laughter went up and down the terrace. “Oh, do look, Paulinus!” cried the Marchioness. “One of them has fallen in, right up to the knees!”

Rack gave her a mechanical glance and a twist of his fat lips. He shrugged. “My dear Marchioness,” he said, and moved his chair closer to Ashlyme’s. He could create a small eddy of intimacy in any crowd. We, he was able to suggest, with a touch of one plump hand, have nothing in common with these people. Why are we here at all? Only because they need us. It was a flattering device, and he owed to it much of his social and financial success. “Fognet’s a buffoon, I’m afraid,” he murmured, leaning forward a little. “And the Marchioness a parasite. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”

“But I love the Marchioness,” said Ashlyme loudly. “Don’t you?”

Rack looked at him uncertainly. “You surprise me.” He laughed. He raised his voice. “By the way,” he said, “how is Audsley King?”

“Oh, yes,” said the Marchioness plaintively. “We are all appalled by her situation.”

The Barley brothers, egged on by the laughter from above, linked arms and jumped into the canal together, showering the tables along the terrace with bright drops of spray. They had found a spot where the water was deeper. It surged and bubbled; then their great red faces appeared, puffing and blowing, above its greenish surface. “Gor!” they said. “It i’n’ ’alf cold!” They coughed and spat, they shook their heads about and stuck their fingers in their ears to get the water out. The little screams of the women encouraged them to thrash about (it could hardly be called swimming); to blow bubbles; and to push one another under. Presently they dragged themselves out, water gushing out of their trouser legs and running down the towpath. They grinned stupidly upward, too exhausted now to go back in for their shoes.

Ashlyme was enraged by this display.

“Audsley King is coughing her left lung up, Marchioness,” he said bitterly. “She is dying, if you want to know. What will you do about that?” He laughed. “I do not see you abroad much in the plague zone!”

The Marchioness blinked into her teacup. It seemed for a moment she would not answer. Finally she said: “You judge people by unrealistic standards, Master Ashlyme. That is why your portraits are so cruel.” She looked thoughtfully at the tea leaves, then got to her feet and took the arm of her novelist. “Though I daresay we are as stupid as you make us appear.” She adjusted her dove-grey gloves. “I hope you’ll tell Audsley King that we are still her friends,” she said. And she went away between the surrounding tables, exchanging a word here and there with people that she knew. Once or twice the young novelist looked angrily back at Ashlyme, but she touched his shoulder in a placatory way and soon they were lost to view.

Paulinus Rack bit his lip. “Damn!” he said. “I shall have to pay for that later.” He stared across the canal. “You’ll find you’ve carried this attitude too far one day, Ashlyme.”

“What are you going to do when the plague reaches the High City, Rack?” asked Ashlyme with some contempt.

Rack ignored him. “Your work may be less fashionable in future. If I were you I would be prepared for that. Never insult the paying customers.” He made a dismissive gesture. “You cannot save Audsley King anyway,” he said.

Ashlyme was furious. He grabbed at Rack’s arm. Rack looked frightened and pulled it away. Ashlyme caught him by the fingers instead. He twisted them. “What do you know?” he jeered. “I’ll have her out of there within the week.” Rack only curled his lip. He made no attempt to free his fingers, so Ashlyme, horrified to have committed himself to the rescue attempt in public, twisted them harder. “What do you say to that?” He wanted to see Rack wince, or hear him apologise, but nothing like that happened. They sat there for some time, looking at one another defiantly. Rack must have been in considerable pain. Livio Fognet, who did not seem to understand the situation, winked and grinned impartially at them. It came on to rain. The High City opened its umbrella and took itself off to Mynned, while the Barley brothers put their arms over their heads to protect themselves from the rain and, groaning, watched their shoes float away towards Alves. Ashlyme let Rack’s fingers go. “Within the week,” he repeated.

“I’ll just go and have a word with Angina Desformes,” said Livio Fognet.

“There is a certain time of the afternoon,” said Audsley King, “when everything seems repellent to me.”

The city was unseasonably dank again, the air chilly and lifeless. Tarot cards were scattered across the floor of the studio as if someone had flung them there in a fit of rage. Audsley King lay in a nest of brocade pillows on the faded sofa, her thin body propped up on one elbow. On the easel in front of her she had a grotesque little charcoal sketch, in which a conductor, beating time with extravagant sweeps of his baton, cut off the heads of the poppies which made up his orchestra. It was full of overt violence, quite unlike her usual work. It was unfinished, and she regarded it with flushed features and angry, frustrated gestures. In her preoccupation she had let the studio fire burn down, but she did not seem to feel the cold. This wasn’t a good sign.

Ashlyme stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. He felt shy, guilty, inadequate: not so much in the knowledge of the betrayal he had come to effect, as in his inability thereby to make any real change in her circumstances. He had never before been so aware of the bareness of the grey floorboards, the impermanent air of the canvases piled in the corners, the age and condition of the furniture. He opened his mouth to say, “In the High City they would take more care of you,” but thought better of it. Instead he studied the two new paintings that hung unframed on the wall. Both were of Fat Mam Etteilla, and showed her crouching on the floor shuffling the cards. Under one of them the artist had written in a slanting hand, the door into the open! They were hurried and careless, like the cartoon on the easel, as if she had lost faith in her technique-or her patience with the very medium.

“You shouldn’t work so hard,” he said.

She was amused.

“Work? This is nothing.” She dabbed at the sketch, looked disgustedly at the resulting line, and smeared it with her long thumb. “When I lived in the farmlands,” she said, “I would paint from six in the morning until it grew dark.”

She laughed.

“ ‘Six in the morning, and chrome yellow is back in nature!’ Do you know that quotation? My eyes never grew tired. The ploughed fields stretched away like a dark dream, covered in mist. Rooks creaked above it, circling the elms. My husband-”

She stopped. Her mouth curved in regret, and then in self-contempt.

“What a masterpiece this is!”

She struck the canvas so hard that her charcoal broke. The casel tottered, folded itself up, and fell over with a clatter.

“That field of poppies is the field we have sown!” she cried, looking vaguely into the air in front of her. “It is like an orchestra in which the players take no notice of their conductor. Am I raving?”

Suddenly she collapsed among the pillows and blood poured out of her mouth. It ran along her arm and began to soak into the brocade. She stared helplessly down at herself.

“My husband was an artist too. He was far better than I am. Shall I show you?” She tried to get up, slumped back, dabbed at herself with a handkerchief. “Nothing of his is left, of course.” Her eyes focused on Ashlyme. Tears ran out of them. “No, I am quite all right, thank you.”

Ashlyme was dismayed. She had never been married. (Before moving to the city she had lived, as far as he knew, with her parents. This had been several years ago, and no paintings survived from the period.) The haemorrhage had brought to the surface in this inexplicable delusion some deeply buried internal drama. She clutched his wrist and pulled him closer to her. Embarrassed, he stared into the thin face, white as a gardenia, with its harshly cut features and strange voracious lines about the mouth. She whispered something more, but in the middle of the sentence fell asleep. After a moment he detached himself gently from her grip, and, walking like a man in a dream, went out into the passage.

“Come on, Buffo,” he said.

It had been their intention to dose Audsley King with laudanum, although neither of them, frankly, had been clear how this might be done. She ate so little. They had discussed putting it in a glass of wine. “But how to make sure she drinks it?” The drug now seemed unnecessary, but Buffo was an inflexible conspirator and insisted she have it anyway. In the event he did not give her enough: as the stuff touched her tongue she moaned and moved her head with the practised obstinacy of the invalid (who fears that every surrender to sleep might be the last), so that most of the dose trickled down her cheek. The little she swallowed, though, had an eerie effect. After a moment she sat bolt upright, and with her eyes firmly closed said clearly:

“ Les morts, les pauvre mortes, ont de grand doleurs. Michael?”

Buffo gave a tremendous guilty leap and spilled the remainder of the draught on the floor.

“What?” he shouted. “Are we discovered already?”

Ashlyme, who could see that the woman was only talking in her sleep, tried to pull him away from her. He resisted stubbornly, plucking at Ashlyme’s clothes and hair.

“The noise!” appealed Ashlyme in an urgent whisper. “Do you want to wake her, you madman?”

They tottered about on the bare boards in the failing light, panting, hissing, pushing at one another, while the thick smell of the drug rose up all around them.

“She has not taken it!”

“Nevertheless!”

Audsley King groaned suddenly, as if seeking their attention, and subsided into the pillows. They stopped struggling and watched her warily. Her mouth fell open. She began to snore.

To Ashlyme’s surprise the Grand Cairo had agreed to wait below in the Rue Serpolet with the handcart. Their plan was to carry her down to him in an old linen sheet of Buffo’s. Meanwhile he would make sure that no one got into the house. Ashlyme was worried nevertheless. Audsley King’s limbs were lax and uncooperative, and she was heavier than her wasted appearance had led him to expect. “Hurry! If he gets impatient he will come up here and interfere!” A fierce heat seemed to radiate from her skin. Upside down, her face, with its bluish hollows and trickle of dried blood, looked accusatory, ironical, amused. They muddled it and could not get her off the sofa and onto the sheet. Ashlyme would not continue. “We’ve killed her!” he said. The whole idea was mad. He would have nothing more to do with it. “At any moment that creature will be up here with his knives and knuckle-dusters!”

In the end Buffo had to lift her onto the sheet on his own, while Ashlyme stood by with a blunted upholstery needle, ready to sew her in with long, loose stitches.

“Now the disguises. Be quick!”

Buffo took his clothes off in a corner. As he hopped from one foot to the other on the cold floor, trying to conceal himself, a strong smell of camphor wafted from him. Ashlyme, embarrassed by his friend’s modesty, turned over the scattered tarot cards or glanced through the window at the yellowish underbelly of the clouds above the Rue Serpolet. He began to believe that the scheme might succeed after all. He would offer Audsley King space in his own studio while she reorganised her life. He would get her away from Rack and the Marchioness “L.” There would be other patrons, other dealers, only too willing to take her on. He tapped his fingers on the windowsill. “Hurry,” he urged Buffo. “Even now the Fat Mam may be returning.”

Buffo, swaddled at last in his disagreeable bandages, pulled the rubber mask over his head and turned to face into the room.

He asked, “Is it on straight?” which Ashlyme heard as a sepulchral and threatening “Iv id om fdrade?” Yellow light, reflected from the clouds outside, splashed down one side of the mask. It looked like a horse’s head, newly scraped to the bone in a knacker’s yard and decked with green paper ribbons for some festival. But its horns and eyes belonged to nothing on earth. The astronomer patted it with one cupped hand like a woman adjusting a hat and came towards Ashlyme, who shuddered and backed away, saying,

“Must I wear such an awful thing?”

Buffo laughed. “Yours isn’t half so striking. Here!”

Ashlyme accepted it with distaste. It was damp and sweaty. He forced it quickly down over his face, so as not to give himself time to think, and was at once unable to breathe. Nauseated by its smell, his nose squashed over to one side, his left eye covered, he struggled to tear it off, found the astronomer’s hands forcing it back on. “I need no help! Leave me alone!” He was disgusted with himself as much as with Buffo. This foetid confinement, more than anything else, made the plan unbearable. His eyes were streaming. When he could see again he glared resentfully at Buffo’s swathed, stick-like limbs.

“I won’t be bandaged up like that, whatever you say!”

Buffo shrugged.

“Suit yourself, then.”

The lower stairs of the house were bathed in a dim yellow light and strewn with the lath and plaster dislodged daily by the landlord’s workmen. Abandoned building materials lay about on each landing. Ashlyme and the astronomer picked their way down through this litter, Audsley King slung between them like a stolen carpet. (While behind their doors the other occupants of the house ignored the furtive thudding on the stairs and spoke in the desultory, argumentative tones of the plague zone, asking one another if it meant to rain, and what they would get from the butcher tomorrow.)

Audsley King shook her head restively and groaned. “I cannot have those great lilies in here,” she said in a low, reasonable voice. “You know how hard it is to get my breath.” She trembled once or twice and was still.

Ashlyme and Buffo redoubled their efforts. She seemed to have grown heavier with every step, numbing their arms and slipping out of their aching fingers. They weren’t used to the work and bickered over it like two old men: if Buffo was not pulling forward too hard, then Ashlyme was hanging back. Neither dared raise his voice to the other, but, trammeled in his rancid helmet, could only curse the thick hiss of his own breath in his ears and wish himself back in the High City. Their feet scraped and slithered on the stairs.

“Don’t pull!”

“If only you would stop pushing like that!”

Without warning, Audsley King-dreaming perhaps-drew her knees up to her chin, and the sheet contracted like a ghostly chrysalis in the gloom. Ashlyme lost his grip on her shoulders. She slipped forward, knocked Buffo off his feet, and tumbled down the stairs after him, bumping and groaning on every step, to fetch up with a hollow thud among the bags of sand and lime on a landing not far below.

“Buffo!” begged Ashlyme. “Be more careful!”

Buffo stared at him with hatred, his absurd barrel chest heaving beneath its rags. The sheet writhed briefly; snores came from it. They approached it cautiously.

“Where am I?” said Audsley King.

She had regained consciousness, and obviously believed herself to be alone.

“Am I in Hell? Oh, nothing will ever console me for the ghastliness of this condition!”

It was the voice of someone who wakes in a bare room in an unknown city; stares dully at the washstand and the disordered bed; and having pulled open every empty drawer turns at last to the window and the empty streets below, only to discover she has lived here all her life.

“Another haemorrhage. If only I could die.”

She considered this, then forgot it.

“My father said, ‘Why draw this filth?’ ” she went on. “ ‘If you abuse your talents you will lose them. They will be taken from you if you draw filth.’ It’s so dark in here. I didn’t want to go to bed so soon.”

There was a small sob. She struggled a little, as if to test the limits of her confinement.

She stiffened.

A piercing shriek issued from the sheet.

Ashlyme tried to get hold of her feet but she tore herself out of his grasp and began to roll back and forth across the landing, knocking into the walls and shouting, “I am not dead! I am not dead!”

At this, doors flew open up and down the stairs and out came her neighbours to complain about the noise. A few ducked back when they saw what was happening, but several of them, mainly women, exchanged ironical if puzzled nods and settled down to watch. Emmet Buffo, who had rehearsed such an eventuality, explained to anyone who would listen: “Official business. Quarantine police. Keep back!” This was so manifestly ridiculous that he was ignored (although in the melee that was to develop later it did him more harm than good).

Audsley King, meanwhile, had ripped the sheet open along Ashlyme’s rough seam and thrust one of her long powerful hands through the gap to clutch desperately at the air. By now she was so frightened that she had started to cough again, in a series of deep, destructive spasms between which she could only retch and gasp. A red bloom appeared at the upper end of the sheet and spread rapidly. Ashlyme lifted her into a sitting position. “Please be calm,” he begged. The convulsion decreased a little. He was ready to confess the whole sordid business to her, but he did not know where to begin. Gently he freed her head and arms from the sheet. The women crowded forward, silent, uncertain, no longer amused; they groaned angrily at the sight of her white cheeks and bloody lips. She blinked up at them. Her hands were hot; she took one of Ashlyme’s between them.

“I beg of you, whoever you are, to get me out of this shroud,” she said.

Suddenly she caught sight of the thing over his head. She began to scream again, flailing her arms and begging him not to hurt her.

This was too much for the women, who advanced on Ashlyme, jeering and rolling up their sleeves. Emmet Buffo stepped in front of them, making gestures he imagined to be placatory. He took several nasty knocks about the head and chest, and was pushed into a pile of sand, where he lay jerking his long legs ineffectually and repeating, “Official police, official police.”

Audsley King thrust Ashlyme away. “Fish into man: man into fish!” she cried, in a thick Soubridge accent-remembering perhaps some solstitial bonfire, some girlhood ritual in the heavy ploughland. “Murderer!”

Ashlyme fell back, astonished.

A fish?

He touched the mask with his fingers. It was the head of a trout, to which someone had added thick rubbery lips and a ludicrous crest of spines. He clapped his hands to his head and, reeling about in disgust, tried vainly to pull the mask off. Its smell grew horrifying. Why had he conspired to make himself so absurd? He could think only of escaping. Audsley King would have to be abandoned. In the High City he would be a laughingstock. He threw himself at the women, who were punching and kicking Buffo with a kind of dazed, preoccupied savagery, and tried to drag the astronomer away from them.

“Bitten off more than you can chew, eh?” they sneered. “Let’s have them headpieces off and see who you really are!”

Having won the day, though, they made no attempt to carry out this threat. One of them attended to Audsley King, while the rest stood arms akimbo, sniffing defiantly, or tugged nervous fingers through their ruffled hair.

So it would have remained but for the arrival of the Grand Cairo, who had grown bored with his post at the handcart. He ran lightly up the stairs from the street and approached the women with a brisk tread, as if he was used to taking command of any situation. He was wearing a suit of military-looking brown leather, into the belt of which he had stuck a curious weapon-a knife about a foot long, with a round, varnished wooden handle like an awl’s, and a blade nowhere thicker than a knitting needle. From a strap on his wrist dangled a workman-like rubber cosh. His feet were shod in laced boots with steel toecaps. He was well aware of the effect his appearance made. With his hands clasped behind his back and his chest thrown out, he gave the women a long intent look.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Are we having some trouble with these people?”

“No,” said Ashlyme. “It’s all right.”

Hearing this, the women laughed sarcastically. They returned the dwarf’s scrutiny with bold, interested glances.

Meanwhile Emmet Buffo sat helplessly in a corner, breathing in exhausted gasps, while one of the women bent over him trying to pull off his mask. “Stop that,” ordered the dwarf. He swaggered over to her and prodded her buttocks with his truncheon. Her face reddened. “Why, you dirty little bugger,” she said, half-amused. She ruffled his hair, wrinkling her nose at the smell of Altaean Balm; then, quick as lightning, knocked him over with a jerk of her elbow. She watched him rolling about on the floor clutching his eye and said, “You’ll not do that again in a hurry, will you, my dear?”

“Obscene bitch!” shouted the Grand Cairo.

He sprang to his feet with the unpredictable violence of the acrobat (who moves from rest to motion without any apparent intervening state), dragging the long knife from his belt. Before anyone could stop him he had grabbed her by the hair, pulled her down into a kneeling position, and rammed the knife twice into her open mouth as hard as he could. Her eyes bulged briefly. “That’s that, then,” he said. Ashlyme fell down and vomited into the fish’s-head mask; around him he could hear the rest of the women screaming in panic. Emmet Buffo sat where he was, whispering, “Official police.” The dwarf danced about the landing, stabbing at any women who came within reach, until he drove the knife three inches into a doorpost and broke it off. He swung his cosh on its leather thong.

“No more!” shouted Ashlyme. “Why are you doing this?”

Weeping with fear and revulsion, he ran down the stairs and into the street, where rain had begun to pour from the undersides of the clouds, spattering the dusty chestnut trees and making a greasy cement out of the plaster dust and fallen leaves on the pavements. Buffo staggered out after him, confused and bleeding, his rags coming unwrapped and his dreadful headdress knocked askew. Seeing that they were not pursued, they leaned against the handcart. “Those wretched women,” panted the astronomer. “They will always ruin your plans.”

Ashlyme stared at him speechlessly for a moment, then walked off.

The rain fell.

Buffo called, “What about the handcart? Ashlyme?”

The screams and shouts which continued to come from the house soon drew the attention of the plague police. Buffo saw them in the distance. He gave a start of surprise, grabbed the handles of the cart, and ran erratically down the Rue Serpolet with it until one of its wheels came off. It mounted the kerb and fell onto its side. Buffo looked round in panic, as if he had lost his bearings, then made off with long strides into the gathering darkness between two buildings, calling, “Ashlyme? Ashlyme?”

The plague police went up into the house, two at a time. Shortly afterwards there was silence. Fat Mam Etteilla the fortune-teller then trudged into sight from the direction of the market. The rain had plastered her yellow cotton dress to her billowing breasts and hams. Her eyes were phlegmatic, her arms full of greengrocery. She entered the house. A great wail went up as she discovered Audsley King on the stairs. Doors were banged, the lights came on in Audsley King’s studio, there was a great deal of coming and going between floors.

Ashlyme, who had been hiding from Buffo in a wet doorway, waited until the commotion had died down and then went home, soaked.

Later, he stared into the mirror above his washstand, hardly seeing the lugubrious, blubbery-lipped totem that stared back out at him, its eyes popping solemnly and its loose scales dropping into the sink. All the way back he had dreaded trying to remove it, but it came off quite easily in the end.