Viriconium

EPILOGUE

One day a long time afterwards, when Ashlyme was looking through a drawer for some pencils he thought he’d put there, he came across the fish’s-head mask Emmet Buffo had made him wear during their doomed visit to the Rue Serpolet. He was no longer quite so afraid of it as he had been. “Absurd thing!” he thought, while for its part it eyed him lugubriously enough-fat-lipped, stupid, shedding scales. It filled him with a kind of ashamed affection for Buffo, and for himself as he had been then. It reminded him suddenly of cod and saffron, of a bright morning in the cisPontine Quarter, and the old man who lived behind “Our Lady of the Zincsmiths.” He decided he would take it back where it belonged.

The old paved square was exactly as he remembered it. If it was not so warm, then it was just as sunny: the pale clear light of a late-December afternoon slanted across the cobbles and lapped the blackened hulk of the old church. The children, as before, were playing noisily at “blind Michael,” and Ashlyme could hear the women laughing and squabbling in the houses. He felt suddenly elated, though he couldn’t have explained why.

SELLER, announced the partly obliterated sign above the old man’s shop. Ashlyme stood for a moment smiling into its small dusty window, where a ray of sun had warmed the fur of the stuffed animals until it was the colour of newly fallen oak leaves, then went inside.

Birds, stiff and silent, watched him from every shelf, their heads cocked forever intelligently on one side, their eyes made of glass. The workroom at the back had the sweet, woody smell of old books and chamomile tea. Ashlyme picked his way between bales of rag to the bottom of the stairs.

“Hello?” he called.

There was no answer, but he sensed the old man was up there: alert, shy, breathing shallowly and waiting for him to go away. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I came here once with your friend Emmet Buffo.”

Silence.

Ashlyme shrugged. If he waited quietly the old man’s curiosity would bring him down. Perhaps he would have another metal feather. Meanwhile he took out the fish’s-head mask and unfolded it carefully. He put it down on a workbench next to the soft wire armature which would one day support the outstretched wings of a little hawk with furious eyes.

“Old man? I cannot stay for long…”

Wrinkling his nose, he turned over some of the rags on the floor. Among them he found a bit of heavily worked tapestry which he thought might do as a curtain. He unfolded it nervously, having learned his lesson from the last one he had picked up. It was stained yet luminous; it had been splendid once. It showed a man in the extreme yellow of age, as bald as an egg, walking between two huge buildings. The road under his feet was carpeted with the crushed husks of insects, and a shadowy figure accompanied him on his left side, a child or a dwarf mounted on a donkey. This figure, its face partly obscured by dirt, fascinated Ashlyme. He lifted the tapestry to the light so that he could see it better.

As he did so there came a loud clatter of wings from the room upstairs. Suddenly the shop seemed to be full of shadows.

A large bird had flown in through an open window, he wrote later in his journal. I thought I heard a reedy voice speak indistinctly in the gloom. I put the tapestry down and walked quickly out into the sunshine.