M Harrison - Viriconium

“It’s already midnight.”

She let his arm go.

“He was so sure he would be here. We lose nothing if we wait.”

There things rested. Fifteen minutes passed, perhaps half an hour; de M-, certain now that Verdigris was only pretending to be asleep to taunt him, crumpled a sheet of paper suddenly and dropped it on the floor. At this Rhys, whose affairs had made him nervous, jumped to his feet. The Marquis’s mouth dropped open weakly. When nothing else happened Rhys sat down again. He thought, After all, I’m as safe here as anyone else in the city. He was still wary, though, of the poet, whom he thought he recognised. Vera glanced once or twice at the frescoes (they were old; no one could agree on what was represented), then quickly down at her cup. All this time Kiss-O-Suck the dwarf had been sitting slumped on a corner of the mantelpiece behind them like a great doll someone had put there for effect years before.

His legs dangled. He wore red tights, and yellow shoes with a bell on each toe; his doublet was made of some thick black stuff quilted like a leather shin guard and sewn all over with tiny glass mirrors. Immobility was as acceptable to him as motion: in repose his body would remember the gloottokoma and the hours he had spent there, while his face took on the look of varnished papier-mache, shiny but as if dust had settled in the lines down the side of his hooked nose down to his mouth, which was set in a strange but extraordinarily sweet smile.

He had been watching Vera since she came in. When she repeated eventually, “He was so sure he could be here,” he whispered to himself: “I was! Oh, I was!” A moment later he jumped down off the mantelpiece and blew lightly in Egon Rhys’s ear.

Rhys threw himself across the room, smashing into the tables as he tried to get at his razor which he kept tucked up the sleeve of his coat. He fetched up against the Marquis de M- and screamed, “Get out of the fucking way!” But the Marquis could only stare and tremble, so they rocked together for a moment, breathing into one another’s faces, until another table went over. Rhys, who was beginning to have no idea where he was, knocked de M- down and stood over him. “Don’t kill me,” said de M-. The razor, Rhys found, was tangled up with the silk lining of his sleeve: in the end he got two fingers into the seam and ripped the whole lot down from the elbow so that the weapon tumbled out already open, flickering in the light. Up went Rhys’s arm, with the razor swinging at the end of it, high in the air.

“Stop!” shouted Vera. “Stop that!”

Rhys stared about him in confusion; blinked. By now he was trembling, too. When he saw the dwarf laughing at him he realised what had happened. He let the Marquis go. “I’m sorry,” he said absentmindedly. He went over to where Kiss-O-Suck had planted himself rock steady on his bent legs in the middle of the floor, and caught hold of his wrist.

“What if I cut your face for that?” he asked, stroking the dwarf’s cheek as if to calm him down. “Here. Or say here. What if I did that?”

The dwarf seemed to consider it. Suddenly his little wrist slipped and wriggled in Rhys’s grip like a fish; however hard Rhys held on, it only twisted and wriggled harder, until he had let go of it almost without knowing. (All night after that his fingers tingled as if they had been rubbed with sand.)

“I don’t think she would like that,” said Kiss-O-Suck. “She wouldn’t like you to cut someone as small as me.”

He shrieked; slapped Rhys’s face; jumped backwards from where he stood, without so much as a twitch of intent, right over the table and into the hearth. Out of his doublet he brought a small jam jar which he put down in the centre of the table. It contained half a dozen grasshoppers, a grey colour, with yellowish legs. At first they were immobile, but the firelight dancing on the glass around them seemed to invigorate them, and after a moment or two they started to hop about in the jar at random.

“Look!” said the dwarf.

“Aren’t they lively?” cried Vera.

She smiled with delight. The dwarf chuckled. They were so pleased with themselves that eventually Egon Rhys was forced to laugh too. He tucked his razor back up his sleeve and stuffed the lining in after it as best he could. Thereafter strips of red silk hung down round his wrist, and he sometimes held the seam together with his fingers. “You must be careful with that,” said Vera. When she tapped the side of their jar, one or two of the grasshoppers seemed to stare at her seriously for a moment, their enigmatic, horsey little heads quite still, before they renewed their efforts to get out, popping and ticking against the lid.

“I love them!” she said, which made Egon Rhys look sidelong at the dwarf and laugh even louder. “I love them! Don’t you?”

The Marquis watched incredulously. He got himself to his feet and with a look at Ansel Verdigris as if to say “This is all your fault” ran out onto the Unter-Main-Kai. A little later Rhys, Vera, and the dwarf followed. They were still laughing; Vera and Rhys were arm in arm. As they went out into the night, Verdigris, who really had been asleep, woke up.

“Fuck off, then,” he sneered. His dreams had been confused.

The day they crossed the canal they were followed all the way up to Allman’s Reach from the Plain Moon Cafe. The mutual associations were out: it was another truce. Rhys could distinguish the whistles of the Fish-Head Men, January the Twelfth, the Yellow Paper College (now openly calling itself a “schism” of the Anemone and publishing its own broad-sheet from the back room of a pie shop behind Red Hart Lane). This time, he was afraid, the Anemone was out too. He had no credit anywhere. At Orves he made the dwarf watch one side of the road while he watched the other. “Pay most attention to doorways.” Faces appeared briefly in the cobbled mouths of alleys. Vera Ghillera shivered and pulled the hood of her cloak round her face.

“Don’t speak,” warned Egon Rhys.

He had a second razor with him, one which he no longer used much. That morning he had thought, It’s old but it will do, and taken it down off the dusty windowsill where it lay-its handle as yellow as bone-between a ring of his mother’s and a glass of cloudy water through which the light seemed to come suddenly when he picked it up.

Though he was careful to walk with his hands turned in to the sides of his body in such a way as to provoke no one, he had all the way up the hill a curious repeating image of himself as somebody who had already run mad with the two razors-hurtling after his enemies across the icy treacherous setts while they stumbled into dark corners or flung themselves over rotting fences, sprinting from one feeble refuge to another. “I’ll pen them up,” he planned, “in the observatory. They won’t stop me now. Those bastards from Austonley.. .” It was almost as if he had done it. He seemed to be watching himself from somewhere behind his own back; he could hear himself yelling as he went for them, a winter gleam at the end of each wildly swinging arm.

“We’ll see what happens then,” he said aloud, and the dwarf glanced up at him in surprise. “We’ll see what happens then.” But the observatory came and went and nothing happened at all.

By then some of the Austonley men were no longer bothering to hide, swaggering along instead with broad grins. Other factions soon fell in with them, until they formed a loose, companionable half circle ten or fifteen yards back along the steep street. Their breath mingled in the cold air, and after a few minutes there was even some laughter and conversation between the different parties. As soon as they saw he was listening to them they came right up to Rhys’s heels, watching his hands warily and nudging each other. The Yellow Paper kept itself apart from this: there was no sign of the Anemone at all. Otherwise it was like a holiday.