Viriconium

THE LUCK IN THE HEAD

Uroconium, Ardwick Crome said, was for all its beauty an indifferent city. Its people loved the arena; they were burning or quartering somebody every night for political or religious crimes. They hadn’t much time for anything else. From where he lived, at the top of a tenement on the outskirts of Montrouge, you could often see the fireworks in the dark, or hear the shouts on the wind.

He had two rooms. In one of them was an iron-framed bed with a few blankets on it, pushed up against a washstand he rarely used. Generally he ate his meals cold, though he had once tried to cook an egg by lighting a newspaper under it. He had a chair, and a tall white ewer with a picture of the courtyard of an inn on it. The other room, a small north-light studio once occupied-so tradition in the Artists’ Quarter had it-by Kristodulos Fleece the painter, he kept shut. It had some of his books in it, also the clothes in which he had first come to Uroconium and which he had thought then were fashionable.

He was not a well-known poet, although he had his following.

Every morning he would write for perhaps two hours, first restricting himself to the bed by means of three broad leather straps which his father had given him and to which he fastened himself, at the ankles, the hips, and finally across his chest. The sense of unfair confinement or punishment induced by this, he found, helped him to think.

Sometimes he called out or struggled; often he lay quite inert and looked dumbly up at the ceiling. He had been born in those vast dull ploughlands which roll east from Soubridge into the Midland Levels like a chocolate-coloured sea, and his most consistent work came from the attempt to retrieve and order the customs and events of his childhood there: the burial of the “Holly Man” on Plough Monday, the sound of the hard black lupin seeds popping and tapping against the window in August while his mother sang quietly in the kitchen the ancient carols of the Oei’l Voirrey. He remembered the meadows and reeds beside the Yser Canal, the fishes that moved within it. When his straps chafed, the old bridges were in front of him, made of warm red brick and curved protectively over their own image in the water!

Thus Crome lived in Uroconium, remembering, working, publishing. He sometimes spent an evening in the Bistro Californium or the Luitpold Cafe. Several of the Luitpold critics (notably Barzelletta Angst, who in L’Espace Cromien ignored entirely the conventional chronology-expressed in the idea of “recherche”-of Crome’s long poem Bream Into Man) tried to represent his work as a series of narrativeless images, glued together only by his artistic persona. Crome refuted them in a pamphlet. He was content.

Despite his sedentary habit he was a sound sleeper. But before it blows at night over the pointed roofs of Montrouge, the southwest wind must first pass between the abandoned towers of the Old City, as silent as burnt logs, full of birds, scraps of machinery, and broken-up philosophies: and Crome had hardly been there three years when he began to have a dream in which he was watching the ceremony called “the Luck in the Head.”

For its proper performance this ceremony requires the construction on a seashore, between the low and high tide marks at the Eve of Assumption, of two fences or “hedges.” These are made by weaving osiers-usually cut at first light on the same day-through split hawthorn uprights upon which the foliage has been left. The men of the town stand at one end of the corridor thus formed; the women, their thumbs tied together behind their backs, at the other. At a signal the men release between the hedges a lamb decorated with medallions, paper ribbons, and strips of rag. The women race after, catch it, and scramble to keep it from one another, the winner being the one who can seize the back of the animal’s neck with her teeth. In Dunham Massey, Lymm, and Iron Chine, the lamb is paraded for three days on a pole before being made into pies; and it is good luck to obtain the pie made from the head.

In his dream Crome found himself standing on some sand dunes, looking out over the wastes of marram grass at the osier fences and the tide. The women, with their small heads and long grey garments, stood breathing heavily like horses, or walked nervously in circles avoiding one another’s eyes as they tested with surreptitious tugs the red cord which bound their thumbs. Crome could see no one there he knew. Somebody said, “A hundred eggs and a calf’s tail,” and laughed. Ribbons fluttered in the cold air: they had introduced the lamb. It stood quite still until the women, who had been lined up and settled down after a certain amount of jostling, rushed at it. Their shrieks rose up like those of herring gulls, and a fine rain came in from the sea.

“They’re killing one another!” Crome heard himself say.

Without any warning one of them burst out of the melee with the lamb in her teeth. She ran up the dunes with a floundering, splay-footed gait and dropped it at his feet. He stared down at it.

“It’s not mine,” he said. But everyone else had walked away.

He woke up listening to the wind and staring at the washstand, got out of bed and walked round the room to quieten himself down. Fireworks, greenish and queasy with the hour of the night, lit up the air intermittently above the distant arena. Some of this illumination, entering through the skylight, fell as a pale wash on his thin arms and legs, fixing them in attitudes of despair.

If he went to sleep again he often found, in a second lobe or episode of the dream, that he had already accepted the dead lamb and was himself running with it, at a steady premeditated trot, down the landward side of the dunes towards the town. (This he recognised by its slate roofs as Lowick, a place he had once visited in childhood. In its streets some men made tiny by distance were banging on the doors with sticks, as they had done then. He remembered very clearly the piece of singed sheepskin they had been making people smell.) Empty ground stretched away on either side of him under a motionless sky; everything-the clumps of thistles, the frieze of small thorn trees deformed by the wind, the sky itself-had a brownish cast, as if seen through an atmosphere of tars. He could hear the woman behind him to begin with, but soon he was left alone. In the end Lowick vanished too, though he began to run as quickly as he could, and left him in a mist or smoke through which a bright light struck, only to be diffused immediately.

By then the lamb had become something that produced a thick buzzing noise, a vibration which, percolating up the bones of his arm and into his shoulder, then into the right side of his neck and face where it reduced the muscles to water, made him feel nauseated, weak, and deeply afraid. Whatever it was he couldn’t shake it off his hand.

Clearly-in that city and at that age of the world-it would have been safer for Crome to look inside himself for the source of this dream. Instead, after he had woken one day with the early light coming through the shutters like sour milk and a vague rheumatic ache in his neck, he went out into Uroconium to pursue it. He was sure he would recognise the woman if he saw her, or the lamb.

She was not in the Bistro Californium when he went there by way of the Via Varese, or in Mecklenburgh Square. He looked for her in Proton Alley, where the beggars gaze back at you emptily and the pavement artists offer to draw for you, in that curious mixture of powdered chalk and condensed milk they favour, pictures of the Lamia, without clothes or without skin, with fewer limbs or organs than normal, or more. They couldn’t draw the woman he wanted. On the Unter-Main-Kai (it was eight in the morning and the naphtha flares had grown smoky and dim) a boy spun and tottered among the crowds from the arena, declaiming in a language no one knew. He bared his shaven skull, turned his bony face upwards, mouth open. Suddenly he drove a long thorn into his own neck: at this the women rushed up to him and thrust upon him cakes, cosmetic emeralds, coins. Crome studied their faces: nothing. In the Luitpold Cafe he found Ansel Verdigris and some others eating gooseberries steeped in gin.

“I’m sick,” said Verdigris, clutching Crome’s hand.

He spooned up a few more gooseberries and then, letting the spoon fall back into the dish with a clatter, rested his head on the tablecloth beside it. From this position he was forced to stare up sideways at Crome and talk with one side of his mouth. The skin beneath his eyes had the shine of wet pipe clay; his coxcomb of reddish-yellow hair hung damp and awry; the electric light, falling oblique and bluish across his white triangular face, lent it an expression of astonishment.

“My brain’s poisoned, Crome,” he said. “Let’s go up into the hills and run about in the snow.”

He looked round with contempt at his friends, Gunter Verlac and the Baron de V-, who grinned sheepishly back.

“Look at them!” he said. “Crome, we’re the only human beings here. Let’s renew our purity! We’ll dance on the lips of the icy gorges!”

“It’s the wrong season for snow,” said Crome.

“Well, then,” Verdigris whispered, “let’s go where the old machines leak and flicker, and you can hear the calls of the madmen from the asylum up at Wergs. Listen-”

“No!” said Crome. He wrenched his hand away.

“Listen, proctors are out after me from Cheminor to Mynned! Lend me some money, Crome, I’m sick of my crimes. Last night they shadowed me along the cinder paths among the poplar trees by the isolation hospital.”

He laughed, and began to eat gooseberries as fast as he could.

“The dead remember only the streets, never the numbers of the houses!”

Verdigris lived with his mother, a woman of some means and education who called herself Madam “L,” in Delpine Square. She was always as concerned about the state of his health as he was about hers. They lay ill with shallow fevers and deep cafards, in rooms that joined, so that they could buoy one another up through the afternoons of insomnia. As soon as they felt recovered enough they would let themselves be taken from salon to salon by wheelchair, telling one another amusing little stories as they went. Once a month Verdigris would leave her and spend all night at the arena with some prostitute; fall unconscious in the Luitpold or the Californium; and wake up distraught a few hours later in his own bed. His greatest fear was that he would catch syphilis. Crome looked down at him.

“You’ve never been to Cheminor, Verdigris,” he said. “Neither of us has.”

Verdigris stared at the tablecloth. Suddenly he stuffed it into his mouth-his empty dish fell onto the floor where it rolled about for a moment, faster and faster, and was smashed-only to throw back his head and pull it out again, inch by inch, like a medium pulling out ectoplasm in Margery Fry Court.

“You won’t be so pleased with yourself,” he said, “when you’ve read this.”

And he gave Crome a sheet of thick green paper, folded three times, on which someone had written:

A man may have many kinds of dreams. There are dreams he wishes to continueand others he does not. At one hour of the night men may have dreams in which everything is veiled in violet; at others, unpalatable truths may be conveyed. If a certain man wants certain dreams he may be having to cease, he will wait by the Aqualate Pond at night, and speak to whoever he finds there.

“This means nothing to me,” lied Crome. “Where did you get it?”

“A woman thrust it into my hand two days ago as I came down the Ghibbeline Stair. She spoke your name, or one like it. I saw nothing.”

Crome stared at the sheet of paper in his hand. Leaving the Luitpold Cafe a few minutes later, he heard someone say: “In Aachen, by the Haunted Gate-do you remember?-a woman on the pavement stuffing cakes into her mouth? Sugar cakes into her mouth?”

That night, as Crome made his way reluctantly towards the Aqualate Pond, the moonlight rose in a lemon-yellow tide over the empty cat-infested towers of the city; in the Artists’ Quarter the violin and cor anglais pronounced their fitful whine; while from the distant arena-from twentyfive-thousand faces underlit by the flames of the auto-da-fe-issued an interminable whisper of laughter.

It was the anniversary of the liberation of Uroconium from the Analeptic Kings.

Householders lined the steep hill up at Alves. Great velvet banners, featuring black crosses on a red and white ground, hung down the balconies above their naked heads. Their eyes were patiently fixed on the cracked copper dome of the observatory at its summit. (There, as the text sometimes called The Earl of Rone remembers, the Kings handed over to Mammy Vooley and her fighters their weapons of appalling power; there they were made to bend the knee.) A single bell rang out, then stopped- a hundred children carrying candles swept silently down towards them and were gone! Others came on behind, shuffling to the rhythms of the “Ou lou lou,” that ancient song. In the middle of it all, the night and the banners and the lights, swaying precariously to and fro fifteen feet above the procession like a doll nailed on a gilded chair, came Mammy Vooley herself.

Sometimes as it blows across the Great Brown Waste in summer, the wind will uncover a bit of petrified wood. What oak or mountain ash this wood has come from, alive immeasurably long ago, what secret treaties were made beneath it during the Afternoon of the world only to be broken by the Evening, we do not know. We will never know. It is a kind of wood full of contradictory grains and lines: studded with functionless knots: hard.

Mammy Vooley’s head had the shape and the shiny grey look of wood like that. It was provided with one good eye, as if at some time it had grown round a glass marble streaked with milky blue. She bobbed it stiffly right and left to the crowds, who stood to watch her approach, knelt as she passed, and stood up again behind her. Her bearers grunted patiently under the weight of the pole that bore her up. As they brought her slowly closer it could be seen that her dress-so curved between her bony, strangely articulated knees that dead leaves, lumps of plaster, and crusts of whole-meal bread had gathered in her lap-was russet-orange, and that she wore askew on the top of her head a hank of faded purple hair, wispy and fine like a very old woman’s. Mammy Vooley, celebrating with black banners and young women chanting; Mammy Vooley, Queen of Uroconium, Moderator of the city, as silent as a log of wood.

Crome got up on tiptoe to watch; he had never seen her before. As she drew level with him she seemed to float in the air, her shadow projected on a cloud of candle smoke by the lemon-yellow moon. That afternoon, for the ceremony, in her salle or retiring room (where at night she might be heard singing to herself in different voices), they had painted on her face another one-approximate, like a doll’s, with pink cheeks. All round Crome’s feet the householders of Alves knelt in the gutter. He stared at them. Mammy Vooley caught him standing.

She waved down at her bearers.

“Stop!” she whispered.

“I bless all my subjects,” she told the kneeling crowd. “Even this one.”

And she allowed her head to fall exhaustedly on one side.

In a moment she had passed by. The remains of the procession followed her, trailing its smell of candle fat and sweating feet, and vanished round a corner towards Montrouge. (Young men and women fought for the privilege of carrying the Queen. As the new bearers tried to take it from the old ones, Mammy Vooley’s pole swung backwards and forwards in uncontrollable arcs so that she flopped about in her chair at the top of it like the head of a mop. Wrestling silently, the small figures carried her away.) In the streets below Alves there was a sense of relief: smiling and chattering and remarking how well the Mammy had looked that day, the householders took down the banners and folded them in tissue paper.

“… so regal in her new dress.”

“So clean…”

“… and such a healthy colour!”

But Crome continued to look down the street for a long time after it was empty. Marguerite petals had fallen among the splashes of candle grease on the cobbled setts. He couldn’t think how they came to be there. He picked some up in his hand and raised them to his face. A vivid recollection came to him of the smell of flowering privet in the suburbs of Soubridge when he was a boy, the late snapdragons and nasturtiums in the gardens. Suddenly he shrugged. He got directions to the narrow lane which would take him west of Alves to the Aqualate Pond, and having found it walked off up it rapidly. Fireworks burst from the arena, fizzing and flashing directly overhead; the walls of the houses danced and warped in the warm red light; his own shadow followed him along them, huge, misshapen, intermittent.

Crome shivered.

“Whatever is in the Aqualate Pond,” Ingo Lympany the dramatist had once told him, “it’s not water.”

On the shore in front of a terrace of small shabby houses he had already found a kind of gibbet made of two great arched, bleached bones. From it swung a corpse whose sex he couldn’t determine, upright in a tight wicker basket which creaked in the wind. The pond lay as still as Lympany had predicted, and it smelled of lead.

“Again, you see, everyone agrees it’s a small pool, a very small one. But when you are standing by it, on the Henrietta Street side, you would swear that it stretched right off to the horizon. The winds there seem to have come such a distance. Because of this the people in Henrietta Street believe they are living by an ocean, and make all the observances fishermen make. For instance, they say that a man can only die when the pool is ebbing. His bed must be oriented the same way as the floorboards, and at the moment of death doors and windows should be opened, mirrors covered with a clean white cloth, and all fires extinguished. And so on.”

They believed, too, at least the older ones did, that huge fish had once lived there.

“There are no tides of course, and fish of any kind are rarely found there now. All the same, in Henrietta Street once a year they bring out a large stuffed pike, freshly varnished and with a bouquet of thistles in its mouth, and walk up and down the causeway with it, singing and shouting.

“And then-it’s so hard to explain!- echoes go out over that stuff in the pool whenever you move, especially in the evening when the city is quiet: echoes and echoes of echoes, as though it were contained in some huge vacant metal building. But when you look up there is only the sky.”

“Well, Lympany,” said Crome aloud to himself. “You were right.”

He yawned. Whistling thinly and flapping his arms against his sides to keep warm, he paced to and fro underneath the gibbet. When he stood on the meagre strip of pebbles at its edge, a chill seemed to seep out of the pool and into his bones. Behind him Henrietta Street stretched away, lugubrious and potholed. He promised himself, as he had done several times that night, that if he turned round, and looked down it, and still saw no one, he would go home. Afterwards he could never quite describe to himself what he had seen.

Fireworks flickered a moment in the dark, like the tremulous reflections made by a bath of water on the walls and ceilings of an empty room, and were gone. While they lasted, Henrietta Street was all boarded-up windows and bluish shadows. He had the impression that as he turned it had just been vacated by a number of energetic figures-quiet, agile men who dodged into dark corners or flung themselves over the rotting fences and iron railings, or simply ran off very fast down the middle of the road preciselyso that he shouldn’t see them. At the same time he saw, or thought he saw, one real figure do all these things, as if it had been left behind by the rest, staring white-faced over its shoulder at him in total silence as it sprinted erratically from one feeble refuge to another, and then vanishing abruptly between some houses.

Overlaid, as it were, on both this action and the potential or completed action it suggested, was a woman in a brown cloak. At first she was tiny and distant, trudging up Henrietta Street towards him; then, without any transitional state at all, she had appeared in the middle ground, posed like a piece of statuary between the puddles, white and naked with one arm held up (behind her it was possible to glimpse for an instant three other women, but not to see what they were doing-except that they seemed to be plaiting flowers); finally, with appalling suddenness, she filled his whole field of vision, as if on the Unter-Main-Kai a passerby had leapt in front of him without warning and screamed in his face. He gave a violent start and jumped backwards so quickly that he fell over. By the time he was able to get up the sky was dark again, Henrietta Street empty, everything as it had been.

The woman, though, awaited him silently in the shadows beneath the gibbet, wrapped in her cloak like a sculpture wrapped in brown paper, and wearing over her head a complicated mask made of wafery metal to represent the head of one or another wasteland insect. Crome found that he had bitten his tongue. He approached her cautiously, holding out in front of him at arm’s length the paper Verdigris had given him.

“Did you send me this?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Do I know you?”

“No.”

“What must I do to stop these dreams?”

She laughed. Echoes fled away over the Aqualate Pond.

“Kill the Mammy,” she said.

Crome looked at her.

“You must be mad,” he said. “Whoever you are.”

“Wait,” she recommended him, “and we’ll see who’s mad.”

She lowered the corpse in its wicker cage-the chains and pulleys of the gibbet gave a rusty creak-and pulled it towards her by its feet. Momentarily it escaped her and danced in a circle, coy and sad. She recaptured it with a murmur. “Hush now. Hush.” Crome backed away. “Look,” he whispered, “I-” Before he could say anything else, she had slipped her hand deftly between the osiers and, like a woman gutting fish on a cold Wednesday morning at Lowth, opened the corpse from diaphragm to groin. “Man or woman?” she asked him, up to her elbows in it. “Which would you say?” A filthy smell filled the air and then dissipated. “I don’t want-” said Crome. But she had already turned back to him and was offering him her hands, cupped, in a way that gave him no option but to see what she had found-or made-for him.

“Look!”

A dumb, doughy shape writhed and fought against itself on her palms, swelling quickly from the size of a dried pea to that of a newly born dog. It was, he saw, contained by vague and curious lights which came and went; then by a cream-coloured fog which was perhaps only a blurring of its own spatial limits; and at last by a damp membrane, pink and grey, which it burst suddenly by butting and lunging. It was the lamb he had seen in his dreams, shivering and bleating and tottering in its struggle to stand, the eyes fixed on him forever in its complaisant, bone-white face. It seemed already to be sickening in the cold leaden breath of the pond.

“Kill the Mammy,” said the woman with the insect’s head, “and in a few days’ time you will be free. I will bring you a weapon soon.”

“All right,” said Crome.

He turned and ran.

He heard the lamb bleating after him the length of Henrietta Street, and behind that the sound of the sea, rolling and grinding the great stones in the tide.

For some days this image preoccupied him. The lamb made its way without fuss into his waking life. Wherever he looked he thought he saw it looking back at him: from an upper window in the Artists’ Quarter, or framed by the dusty iron railings which line the streets there, or from between the chestnut trees in an empty park.

Isolated in a way he had not been since he first arrived in Uroconium wearing his green plush country waistcoat and yellow pointed shoes, he decided to tell no one what had happened by the Aqualate Pond. Then he thought he would tell Ansel Verdigris and Ingo Lympany. But Lympany had gone to Cladich to escape his creditors-and Verdigris, who after eating the tablecloth was no longer welcomed at the Luitpold Cafe, had left the Quarter too: at the large old house in Delpine Square there was only his mother-a bit lonely in her bath chair, though still a striking woman with a great curved nose and a faint, heady smell of elder blossom-who said vaguely, “I’m sure I can remember what he said,” but in the end could not.

“I wonder if you know, Ardwick Crome, how I worry about his bowels, ” she went on. “As his friend you must worry, too, for they are very lazy, and he will not encourage them if we do not!”

It was, she said, a family failing.

She offered Crome chamomile tea, which he refused, and then got him to run an errand for her to a fashionable chemist’s in Mynned. After that he could do nothing but go home and wait.

Kristodulos Fleece-half dead with opium and syphilis, and notoriously self-critical-had left behind him when he vacated the north-light studio a small picture. Traditionally it remained there. Succeeding occupants had taken heart from its technical brio and uncustomary good humour (although Audsley King was reputed to have turned it to the wall during her brief period in Montrouge because she detected in it some unforgivable sentimentality or other) and no dealer in the Quarter would buy it for fear of bad luck. Crome now removed it to the corner above the cheap tin washstand so that he could see it from his bed.

Oil on canvas, about a foot square, it depicted in some detail a scene the artist had called “Children beloved of the gods have the power to weep roses.” The children, mainly girls, were seen dancing under an elder tree, the leafless branches of which had been decorated with strips of rag. Behind them stretched away rough common land, with clumps of gorse and a few bare, graceful birch saplings, to where the upper windows and thatch of a low cottage could be made out. The lighthearted vigour of the dancers, who were winding themselves round the tallest girl in a spiral like a clock spring, was contrasted with the stillness of the late-winter afternoon, its sharp clear airs and horizontal light. Crome had often watched this dance as a boy, though he had never been allowed to take part in it. He remembered the tranquil shadows on the grass, the chant, the rose and green colours of the sky. As soon as the dancers had wound the spiral tight, they would begin to tread on one another’s toes, laughing and shriekingor, changing to a different tune, jump up and down beneath the tree while one of them shouted, “A bundle of rags!”

It was perhaps as sentimental a picture as Audsley King had claimed. But Crome, who saw a lamb in every corner, had never seen one there; and when she came as she had promised, the woman with the insect’s head found him gazing so quietly up at it from the trapezium of moonlight falling across his bed that he looked like the effigy on a tomb. She stood in the doorway, perhaps thinking he had died and escaped her.

“I can’t undo myself,” he said.

The mask glittered faintly. Did he hear her breathing beneath it? Before he could make up his mind there was a scuffling on the stairs behind her and she turned to say something he couldn’t quite catch-though it might have been: “Don’t come in yourself.”

“These straps are so old,” he explained. “My father-”

“All right, give it to me, then,” she said impatiently to whoever was outside. “Now go away.” And she shut the door. Footsteps went down the stairs; it was so quiet in Montrouge that you could hear them clearly going away down flight after flight, scraping in the dust on a landing, catching in the cracked linoleum. The street door opened and closed. She waited, leaning against the door, until they had gone off down the empty pavements towards Mynned and the Ghibbeline Passage, then said, “I had better untie you.” But instead she walked over to the end of Crome’s bed, and sitting on it with her back to him stared thoughtfully at the picture of the elder-tree dance.

“You were clever to find this,” she told him. She stood up again, and, peering at it, ignored him when he said,

“It was in the other room when I came.”

“I suppose someone helped you,” she said. “Well, it won’t matter.” Suddenly she demanded, “Do you like it here among the rats? Why must you live here?”

He was puzzled.

“I don’t know.”

A shout went up in the distance, long and whispering like a deeply drawn breath. Roman candles sailed up into the night one after the other, exploding in the east below the zenith so that the collapsing pantile roofs of Montrouge stood out sharp and black. Light poured in, ran off the back of the chair and along the belly of the enamel jug, and, discovering a book or a box here, a broken pencil there, threw them into merciless relief. Yellow or gold, ruby, greenish-white: with each new pulse the angles of the room grew more equivocal.

“Oh, it is the stadium!” cried the woman with the insect’s head. “They have begun early tonight!”

She laughed and clapped her hands. Crome stared at her.

“Clowns will be capering in the great light!” she said.

Quickly she undid his straps.

“Look!”

Propped up against the whitewashed wall by the door she had left a long brown paper parcel hastily tied with string. Fat or grease had escaped from it, and it looked as if it might contain a fish. While she fetched it for him, Crome sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, rubbing his face. She carried it hieratically, across her outstretched arms, her image advancing and receding in the intermittent light.

“I want you to see clearly what we are going to lend you.”

When the fireworks had stopped at last, an ancient white ceramic sheath came out of the paper. It was about two feet long, and it had been in the ground for a long time, yellowing to the colour of ivory and collecting a craquelure of fine lines like an old sink. Chemicals seeping through the soils of the Great Waste had left here and there on it faint blue stains. The weapon it contained had a matching hilt-although by now it was a much darker colour from years of handling-and from the juncture of the two had leaked some greenish, jelly-like substance which the woman with the insect’s head was careful not to touch. She knelt on the bare floorboards at Crome’s feet, her back and shoulders curved round the weapon, and slowly pulled hilt and sheath apart.

At once a smell filled the room, thick and stale like wet ashes in a dustbin. Pallid oval motes of light, some the size of a birch leaf, others hardly visible, drifted up towards the ceiling. They congregated in corners and did not disperse, while the weapon, buzzing torpidly, drew a dull violet line after it in the gloom as the woman with the insect’s head moved it slowly to and fro in front of her. She seemed to be fascinated by it. Like all those things it had been dug up out of some pit. It had come to the city through the Analeptic Kings, how long ago no one knew. Crome pulled his legs up onto the bed out of its way.

“I don’t want that,” he said.

“Take it!”

“No.”

“You don’t understand. She is trying to change the name of the city!”

“I don’t want it. I don’t care.”

“Take it. Touch it. It’s yours now.”

“No!”

“Very well,” she said quietly. “But don’t imagine the painting will help you again.” She threw it on the bed near him. “Look at it,” she said. She laughed disgustedly. “ ‘Children beloved of the gods’!” she said. “Is that why he waited for them outside the washhouses twice a week?”

The dance was much as it had been, but now with the fading light the dancers had removed themselves to the garden of the cottage, where they seemed frozen and awkward, as if they could only imitate the gaiety they had previously felt. They were dancing in the shadow of the bredogue, which someone had thrust out of an open window beneath the earth-coloured eaves. In Soubridge, and in the midlands generally, they make this pitiful thing-with its bottle-glass eyes and crepe-paper harness-out of the stripped and varnished skull of a horse, put up on a pole covered with an ordinary sheet. This one, though, had the skull of a well-grown lamb, which seemed to move as Crome looked.

“What have you done?” he whispered. “Where is the picture as it used to be?”

The lamb gaped its lower jaw slackly over the unsuspecting children to vomit on them its bad luck. Then, clothed with flesh again, it turned its white and pleading face on Crome, who groaned and threw the painting across the room and held out his hand.

“Give me the sword from under the ground, then,” he said.

When the hilt of it touched his hand he felt a faint sickly shock. The bones of his arm turned to jelly and the rank smell of ashpits enfolded him. It was the smell of a continent of wet cinders, buzzing with huge papery-winged flies under a poisonous brown sky; the smell of Cheminor, and Mammy Vooley, and the Aqualate Pond; it was the smell of the endless wastes which surround Uroconium and everything else that is left of the world. The woman with the insect’s head looked at him with satisfaction. A knock came at the door.

“Go away!” she shouted. “You will ruin everything!”

“I’m to see that he’s touched it,” said a muffled voice. “I’m to make sure of that before I go back.”

She shrugged impatiently and opened the door.

“Be quick then,” she said.

In came Ansel Verdigris, stinking of lemon genever and wearing an extraordinary yellow satin shirt which made his face look like a corpse’s. His coxcomb, freshly dyed that afternoon at some barber’s in the Tinmarket, stuck up from his scalp in exotic scarlet spikes and feathers. Ignoring Crome, and giving the woman with the insect’s head only the briefest of placatory nods, he made a great show of looking for the weapon. He sniffed the air. He picked up the discarded sheath and sniffed that. (He licked his finger and went to touch the stuff that had leaked from it, but at the last moment he changed his mind.) He stared up at the vagrant motes of light in the corners of the room, as if he could divine something from the way they wobbled and bobbed against the ceiling.

When he came to the bed he looked intently but with no sign of recognition into Crome’s face.

“Oh yes,” he said. “He’s touched it all right.”

He laughed. He tapped the side of his nose, and winked. Then he ran round and round the room crowing like a cock, his mouth gaping open and his tongue extended, until he fell over Kristodulos Fleece’s painting, which lay against the skirtingboard where Crome had flung it. “Oh, he’s touched it all right,” he said, leaning exhaustedly against the door frame. He held the picture away from him at arm’s length and looked at it with his head on one side. “Anyone could see that.” His expression became pensive. “Anyone.”

“The sword is in his hand,” said the woman with the insect’s head. “If you can tell us only what we see already, get out.”

“It isn’t you that wants to know,” Verdigris answered flatly, as if he was thinking of something else. He propped the painting up against his thigh and passed the fingers of both hands several times rapidly through his hair. All at once he went and stood in the middle of the room on one leg, from which position he grinned at her insolently and began to sing in a thin musical treble like a boy at a feast:

“I choose you one, I choose you all,

I pray I might go to the ball.”

“Get out!” she shouted.

“The ball is mine,” sang Verdigris,

“and none of yours,

Go to the woods and gather flowers.

Cats and kittens abide within

But we court ladies walk out and in!”

Some innuendo in the last line seemed to enrage her. She clenched her fists and brought them up to the sides of the mask, the feathery antennae of which quivered and trembled like a wasp’s.

“Sting me!” taunted Verdigris. “Go on!”

She shuddered.

He tucked the painting under his arm and prepared to leave.

“Wait!” begged Crome, who had watched them with growing puzzlement and horror. “Verdigris, you must know that it is me! Why aren’t you saying anything? What’s happening?”

Verdigris, already in the doorway, turned round and gazed at Crome for a moment with an expression almost benign, then, curling his upper lip, he mimicked contemptuously, “ ‘Verdigris, you’ve never been to Cheminor. Neither of us has.’ ” He spat on the floor and touched the phlegm he had produced with his toe, eyeing it with qualified disapproval. “Well, I have now, Crome. I have now.” Crome saw that under their film of triumph his eyes were full of fear; his footsteps echoed down into the street and off into the ringing spaces of Montrouge and the Old City.

“Give the weapon to me,” said the woman with the insect’s head. As she put it back in its sheath it gave out briefly the smells of rust, decaying horse hair, vegetable water. She seemed indecisive. “He won’t come back,” she said once. “I promise.” But Crome would not look away from the wall. She went here and there in the room, blowing dust off a pile of books and reading a line or two in one of them, opening the door into the north-light studio and closing it again immediately, tapping her fingers on the edge of the washstand. “I’m sorry about the painting,” she said. Crome could think of nothing to say to that. The floorboards creaked; the bed moved. When he opened his eyes she was lying next to him.

All the rest of the night her strange long body moved over him in the unsteady illumination from the skylight. The insect mask hung above him like a question, with its huge faceted eyes and its jaws of filigree steel plate. He heard her breath in it, distinctly, and once thought he saw through it parts of her real face, pale lips, a cheekbone, an ordinary human eye: but he would not speak to her. The outer passages of the observatory at Alves are full of an ancient grief. The light falls as if it has been strained through muslin. The air is cold and moves unpredictably. It is the grief of the old machines, which, unfulfilled, whisper suddenly to themselves and are silent again for a century. No one knows what to do with them. No one knows how to assuage them. A faint sour panic seems to cling to them: they laugh as you go past, or extend a curious yellow film of light like a wing.

“Ou lou lou” sounds from these passages almost daily-more or less distant with each current of air-for Mammy Vooley is often here. No one knows why. It is clear that she herself is uncertain. If it is pride in her victory over the Analeptic Kings, why does she sit alone in an alcove, staring out of the windows? The Mammy who comes here to brood is not the doll-like figure which processes the city on Fridays and holidays. She will not wear her wig, or let them make up her face. She is a constant trial to them. She sings quietly and tunelessly to herself, and the plaster falls from the damp ceilings into her lap. A dead mouse has now come to rest there and she will allow no one to remove it.

At the back of the observatory, the hill of Alves continues to rise a little. This knoll of ancient compacted rubbish, excavated into caves, mean dwellings, and cemeteries, is called Antedaraus because it drops away sheer into the Daraus Gorge. Behind it, on the western side of the gorge (which from above can be seen to divide Uroconium like a fissure in a wart), rise the ruinous towers of the Old City. Perhaps a dozen of them still stand, mysterious with spires and fluted mouldings and glazed blue tiles, among the blackened hulks of those that fell during the City Wars. Every few minutes one or another of them sounds a bell, the feathery appeal of which fills the night from the streets below Alves to the shore of the Aqualate Pond, from Montrouge to the arena: in consequence the whole of Uroconium seems silent and tenantless-empty, littered, obscure, a city of worn-out enthusiasms.

Mammy Vooley hasn’t time for those old towers, or for the mountains which rise beyond them to throw a shadow ten miles long across the bleak watersheds and shallow boggy valleys outside the city. It is the decayed terraces of the Antedaraus that preoccupy her. They are overgrown with mutant ivy and stifled whins; along them groups of mourners go, laden with anemones for the graves. Sour earth spills from the burst revetments between the beggars’ houses, full of the rubbish of generations and strewn with dark red petals which give forth a sad odour in the rain. All day long the lines of women pass up and down the hill. They have with them the corpse of a baby in a box covered with flowers; behind them comes a boy dragging a coffin lid; Mammy Vooley nods and smiles.

Everything her subjects do here is of interest to her: on the same evening that Crome found himself outside the observatory-fearfully clutching under his coat the weapon from the waste-she sat in the pervasive gloom somewhere in the corridors, listening with tilted head and lively eyes to a hoarse muted voice calling out from under the Antedaraus. After a few minutes a man came out of a hole in the ground and with a great effort began pulling himself about in the sodden vegetation, dragging behind him a wicker basket of earth and excrement. He had, she saw, no legs. When he was forced to rest, he looked vacantly into the air; the rain fell into his face but he didn’t seem to notice it. He called out again. There was no answer. Eventually he emptied the basket and crawled back into the ground.

“Ah!” whispered Mammy Vooley, and sat forward expectantly.

She was already late; but she waved her attendants away when for the third time they brought her the wig and the wooden crown.

“Was it necessary to come here so publicly?” muttered Crome.

The woman with the insect’s head was silent. When that morning he had asked her, “Where would you go if you could leave this city?” she had answered, “On a ship.” And, when he stared at her, added, “In the night. I would find my father.”

But now she only said,

“Hush. Hush now. You will not be here long.”

A crowd had been gathering all afternoon by the wide steps of the observatory. Ever since Mammy Vooley’s arrival in the city it had been customary for “sides” of young boys to dance on these steps on a certain day in November, in front of the gaunt wooden images of the Analeptic Kings. Everything was ready. Candles thickened the air with the smell of fat. The kings had been brought out, and now loomed inert in the gathering darkness, their immense defaced heads lumpish and threatening. The choir could be heard from inside the observatory, practising and coughing, practising and coughing, under that dull cracked dome which absorbs every echo like felt. The little boys-they were seven or eight years old-huddled together on the seeping stones, pale and grave in their outlandish costumes. They were coughing, too, in the dampness that creeps down every winter from the Antedaraus.

“This weapon is making me ill,” said Crome. “What must I do? Where is she?”

“Hush.”

At last the dancers were allowed to take their places about halfway up the steps, where they stood in a line looking nervously at one another until the music signalled them to begin. The choir was marshalled, and sang its famous “Renunciative” cantos, above which rose the whine of the cor anglais and the thudding of a large flat drum. The little boys revolved slowly in simple, strict figures, with expressions inturned and languid. For every two paces forward, it had been decreed, they must take two back.

Soon Mammy Vooley was pushed into view at the top of the steps, in a chair with four iron wheels. Her head lolled against its curved back. Attendants surrounded her immediately, young men and women in stiff embroidered robes who after a perfunctory bow set about ordering her wisp of hair or arranging her feet on a padded stool. They held a huge book up in front of her single milky eye and then placed in her lap the crown or wreath of woven yew twigs which she would later throw to the dancing boys. Throughout the dance she stared uninterestedly up into the sky, but as soon as it was finished and they had helped her to sit up she proclaimed in a distant yet eager voice:

“Even these were humbled.”

She made them open the book in front of her again, at a different page. She had brought it with her from the North.

“Even these kings were made to bend the knee,” she read.

The crowd cheered.

She was unable after all to throw the wreath, although her hands picked disconnectedly at it for some seconds. In the end it was enough for her to let it slip out of her lap and fall among the boys, who scrambled with solemn faces down the observatory steps after it while her attendants showered them with crystallised geranium petals and other coloured sweets, and in the crowd their parents urged them, “Quick now!”

The rain came on in earnest, putting out some of the candles; the wreath rolled about on the bottom step like a coin set spinning on a table in the Luitpold Cafe, then toppled over and was still. The quickest boy had claimed it, Mammy Vooley’s head had fallen to one side again, and they were preparing to close the great doors behind her, when shouting and commotion broke out in the observatory itself and a preposterous figure in a yellow satin shirt burst onto the steps near her chair. It was Ansel Verdigris. He had spewed black-currant gin down his chest, and his coxcomb, now dishevelled and lax, was plastered across his sweating forehead like a smear of blood. He still clutched under one arm the painting he had taken from Crome’s room: this he began to wave about in the air above his head with both hands, so strenuously that the frame broke and the canvas flapped loose from it.

“Wait!” he shouted.

The woman with the insect’s head gave a great sideways jump of surprise, like a horse. She stared at Verdigris for a second as if she didn’t know what to do, then pushed Crome in the back with the flat of her hand.

“Now!” she hissed urgently. “Go and kill her now or it will be too late!”

“What?” said Crome.

As he fumbled at the hilt of the weapon, poison seemed to flow up his arm and into his neck. Whitish motes leaked out of the front of his coat and, stinking of the ashpit, wobbled heavily past his face up into the damp air. The people nearest him moved away sharply, their expressions puzzled and nervous.

“Plotters are abroad,” Ansel Verdigris was shouting, “in this very crowd!”

He looked for some confirmation from the inert figure of Mammy Vooley, but she ignored him and only gazed exhaustedly into space while the rain turned the bread crumbs in her lap to paste. He squealed with terror and threw the painting on the floor.

“People stared at this picture,” he said. He kicked it. “They knelt in front of it. They have dug up an old weapon and wait now to kill the Mammy!”

He sobbed. He caught sight of Crome.

“Him!” he shouted. “There! There!”

“What has he done?” whispered Crome.

He dragged the sword out from under his coat and threw away its sheath. The crowd fell back immediately, some of them gasping and retching at its smell. Crome ran up the steps holding it out awkwardly in front of him, and hit Ansel Verdigris on the head with it. Buzzing dully, it cut down through the front of Verdigris’s skull, then, deflected by the bridge of his nose, skidded off the bony orbit of the eye and hacked into his shoulder. His knees buckled and his arm on that side fell off. He went to pick it up and then changed his mind, glaring angrily at Crome instead and working the glistening white bones of his jaw. “Bugger,” he said. “Ur.” He marched unsteadily about at the top of the steps, laughing and pointing at his own head.

“I wanted this,” he said thickly to the crowd. “It’s just what I wanted!” Eventually he stumbled over the painting, fell down the steps with his remaining arm swinging out loosely, and was still.

Crome turned round and tried to hit Mammy Vooley with the weapon, but he found that it had gone out like a wet firework. Only the ceramic hilt was left-blackened, stinking of fish, giving out a few grey motes which moved around feebly and soon died. When he saw this he was so relieved that he sat down. An enormous tiredness seemed to have settled in the back of his neck. Realising that they were safe, Mammy Vooley’s attendants rushed out of the observatory and dragged him to his feet again. One of the first to reach him was the woman with the insect’s head.

“I suppose I’ll be sent to the arena now,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged.

“The thing seems to be stuck to my hand,” he told her. “Do you know anything about it? How to get it off?”

But it was his hand, he found, that was at fault. It had swollen into a thick clubbed mass the colour of overcooked mutton, in which the hilt of the weapon was now embedded. He could just see part of it protruding. If he shook his arm, waves of numbness came up it; it did no good anyway, he couldn’t let go.

“I hated my rooms,” he said. “But I wish I was back in them now.”

“I was betrayed, too, you know,” she said.

Later, while two women supported her head, Mammy Vooley peered into Crome’s face as if trying to remember where she had seen him before. She was trembling, he noticed, with fear or rage. Her eye was filmed and watery, and a smell of stale food came up out of her lap. He expected her to say something to him but she only looked, and after a short time signed to the women to push her away. “I forgive all my subjects,” she announced to the crowd. “Even this one.” As an afterthought she added, “Good news! Henceforth this city will be called Vira Co, ‘the City in the Waste.’ ” Then she had the choir brought forward. As he was led away Crome heard it strike up “Ou lou lou,” that ancient song:

Ou lou lou lou

Ou lou lou

Ou lou lou lou

Ou lou lou

Ou lou lou lou

Lou Lou lou lou

Ou lou lou lou

Lou

Lou

Lou

Soon the crowd was singing too.