M Harrison: Viriconium

“You take single setbacks too hard,” said the old man, sucking bits of food from his whiskers. He was holding a strip of meat to the flames with the tip of his knife. “You’ll learn-” He sniggered, nodding his head over the defeats of the aged. “Still, it is strange.

“It was always said south of the Pastel City that if tegeus-Cromis and the nameless sword could not kill it, then it must already be dead. Strange. Have some cooked pig?”

Cromis laughed dully. “You are small comfort. An old man mumbling over meat and homilies. What shall we do without the Queen’s authorisation? What can we do?”

Birkin Grif came up to warm his hands over the fire. He sniffed at the cooking meat like a fat bloodhound, squeezed his great bulk carefully into the space between Cromis and the old man.

“Only what we would have done had we kept the thing,” he said. “Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontrovertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.”

“But to command an army-” began Cromis helplessly.

Grif scraped halfheartedly at the filth on his boots. “I have seen you command before, poet. It appeared to me then that you did so from the strengths of your own self, not from those of some bauble.”

“That’s true,” old Glyn said judiciously, spitting out some gristle. “That’s how we did it in the old days. Damned expensive boots, those, Grif. You ought to saddle-soap them to keep the damp out. Not that I ever commandeered anything but the arse of a wench.”

Grif clasped Cromis’s shoulder, shook it gently. “Brooder, it was not your fault.”

Cromis shrugged. It made him feel no better. “You buried the guard?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

Grif’s smile vanished. He nodded. “Aye, and found one more piece for the puzzle. I was fascinated by the precise edge of his wound. Examining it more closely, I found-” He paused, prodded the fire with his boot, and watched the ascending sparks. “We buried only a part of that man, Cromis: the rest has gone with the creature you put to flight.

“His brain has been stolen.”

There was a silence. The colourful trees dripped. Theomeris Glyn began to chew noisily. Cromis reached out to toy with the shards of his sword, unpleasant visions of the corpse crawling through his head: the huddled limbs in the mud, the congealing broth at the edge of the wound.

He said: “She has woken something from the Old Science. I am sorry for that man, and I see each of us in him-” He slid the shards of the nameless sword one by one into his scabbard. “We are all dead men, Grif.” He stood up, his muscles aching from the long night. “I’ll make ready my horse. We had best to move on.”

Perched on an overhanging bough with pale turquoise bark, the metal lammergeyer eyed him silently.

“Sure you won’t have some pig?” offered Theomeris Glyn.

They reached the northerly bounds of the marsh without further loss of men. By afternoon on the fourth day the gaudy foliage had thinned sufficiently to reveal a sky overcast but of more acceptable colour. Their speed increased as the going firmed steadily. The bog broke up into irregular patches separated by wide, flat causeways, tending to the colour of rust as they moved north. A cold wind billowed their cloaks, plucked at Cromis’s torn mail, and fine rain dulled the hides of the horses.

Stretching east and west in a great lazy curve, the terminal barrens of the Great Brown Waste barred their way: chains of dun-coloured dunes interconnecting to form a low scarp, the face of which was cut and seamed by massive gully erosion.

“We are lucky to come here in winter,” said Birkin Grif, twisting in his saddle as he led the company in single file up the gently sloping cleft worn by a black and gelid stream. Walls of damp russet loess reared lifelessly on either side. “Although the winds are stronger, they carry more moisture to lay the soil. The waste is not a true desert.”

Cromis nodded dully. In the Low Leedale it had been autumn yet, but that was hard to believe here. He fixed his eyes on the narrow strip of sky beyond the lips of the ravine, wishing for Balmacara, where the year died more happily.

“There is slightly less danger of earth-falls, you understand, and clouds of dust. In summer, one might choke to death, even here on the edge.”

From the uncomfortable sky, Cromis shifted his gaze to the file of men behind him. They were lost in a mist of rain, dim shapes huddled and silent on tired mounts.

At the top of the gully, the entire company halted, and by common, unspoken consent, fanned out along the crest of a dune: each man held solitary and introspective by the bleak panorama before him.

The Waste rolled north-umber and ochre, dead, endless. Intersecting streams with high, vertical banks scored deep, meaningless ideographs in the earth. In the distance, distorted into deceptive, organic forms, metal girders poked accusing fingers at the empty air, as if there the Rust Desert might fix the source of its millennial pain. Grif’s smugglers muttered, and found that a narrowed eye might discern certain slow but definite movements among the baffling curves of the landscape.

But tegeus-Cromis turned his horse to face away from the spoiled land, and stared back at the mauve haze that marked the marshes. He was much preoccupied by giants.

“We should not strive too hard to imitate the Afternoon Cultures,” said Grif. “They killed this place with industry and left it for the big monitors. In part, if not in whole, they fell because they exhausted the land. We mine the metal they once used, for instance, because there is no ore left in the earth.

“And in using it all up, they dictated that our achievements should be of a different quality to theirs-”

“There will be no more Name Stars,” murmured Cromis, looking up from the fragments of his sword. Dusk had drawn a brown veil across the wastes, amplifying the peculiar vagueness of the dune landscape. It was cold. As yet, they had seen no lizards: merely the slow, indistinct movements among the dunes that indicated their presence.

“Or any more of this, ” said Grif, bleakly.

They had made camp amid the ruins of a single vast, roofless building of vanished purpose and complicated ground plan. Although nine tenths of it had sunk long ago beneath the bitter earth, the remains that reared around them rose fifty or sixty feet into the twilight. A feeble wind mumbled in off the waste and mourned over their indistinct summits. Among the dunes meandered a vile, sour watercourse, choked with stones worn and scoured by Time.

Two or three fires burned in the lee of a broken load wall. Grif’s men tended them silently. Infected by the bleakness of the waste, they had picketed the horses close, and the perimeter guards kept well within sight of the main body.

“There will be no more of anything soon,” said Theomeris Glyn. “The Moidart, the Afternoon Cultures-both are Time by another name. You are sentimentalists, lacking a proper sense of perspective. When you get to my age-”

“We will grow bored and boring, and make fools of ourselves with dirty girls in Duirinish. It will be a fine time, that.”

“You may not make it that far, Birkin Grif,” said the old man darkly.

Since Cromis’s fight in the Metal-Salt Marsh, Cellur’s mechanical vulture had spent most of its time in the air, wheeling in great slow circles over the waste. It would report nothing it had seen from that vantage. Now it perched just beyond the circle of firelight and said:

“Post-industrial shock effected by the so-called ‘Afternoon Cultures’ was limited in these latitudes. There is evidence, however, that to the west there exists an entire continent despoiled to the degree of the Great Brown Waste.