M Harrison: Viriconium

He tethered his horse, which had begun to shiver, fed it, and threw a light blanket over its hindquarters against the chill. He kindled a small fire and prepared a meal, then sat down to wait out the mist, taking up the Eastern gourd and composing to its eery metallic tones a chanted lament. The mist coiled around him, sent cold, probing fingers into his meagre shelter. His words fell into the silence like stones into the absolute abyss:

“Strong visions: I have strong visions of this place in the empty times… Far below there are wavering pines… I left the rowan elphin woods to fulminate on ancient headlands, dipping slowly into the glasen seas of evening… On the devastated peaks of hills we ease the barrenness into our thin bones like a foot into a tight shoe… The narrative of this place: other than the smashed arris of the ridge there are only sad winds and silences… I lay on the cairn one more rock… I am possessed by Time…”

He put the instrument away from him, disturbed by the echoes of his own voice. His horse shifted its feet uneasily. The mist wove subtle shapes, caught by a sudden faint breath of wind.

“tegeus-Cromis, tegeus-Cromis,” said a reedy voice close at hand.

He leapt to his feet, the baan spitting and flickering in his left hand, the nameless sword greasing out of its dull sheath, his stance canny and murderous.

“There is a message for you.”

He could see nothing. There was nothing but the mist. The horse skittered and plunged, snorting. The forceblade fizzed in the damp atmosphere.

“Come out!” he shouted, and the Cruachan echoed, out! out! out!

“There is a message,” repeated the voice.

He put his back against a worn wall and moved his head in a careful semicircle, on the hunt. His breath came harsh. The fire blazed up red in the grey, unquiet vapours.

Perched on the rubble before him, its wicked head and bent neck underlit by the flames, was a bearded vulture-one of the huge, predatory lammergeyers of the lower slopes. In that gloom, it resembled a hunch-backed and spiteful old man. It spread and cupped a broad wing, fanning the fire, to preen its underfeathers. There was a strange sheen to its plumage; it caught the light in a way feathers do not.

It turned a small crimson eye on him. “The message is as follows,” it said. Unlimbering both wings, it flapped noisily across the ruined room in its own wind, to perch on the wall by his head. His horse sidestepped nervously, tried to pull free from its tether, eyes white and rolling at the dark, powerful wings.

Cromis stood back warily, raised his sword. The lammergeyers were strong, and said by the herders of Monar to prefer children to lambs.

“If you will allow me:

“ tegeus-Cromis of Viriconium, which I take to be yourself, since you tally broadly with the description given, should go at once to the tower of Cellur. ” Here, it flexed its cruel claws on the cold grey stone, cocked its head, ruffled its feathers. “Which he will find on the Girvan Bay in the South, a little east of Lendalfoot. Further-”

Cromis felt unreal: the mist curled, the lammergeyer spoke, and he was fascinated. On Cruachan Ridge he might have been out of Time, lost, but was much concerned with the essential nature of things, and he kept his sword raised. He would have queried the bird, but it went on:

“-Further, he is advised to let nothing hinder that journey, however pressingit may seem: for things hang in a fine balance, and more is at stake than the fate of a minor empire.

“ This comes from Cellur of Girvan. That is the message.”

Who Cellur of Girvan might be, or what intelligence he might have that overshadowed the fall of Viriconium (or, indeed, how he had taught a vulture to recognise a man he never could have met), Cromis did not know. He waited his time, and touched the neck of his horse to calm it.

“Should you feel you must follow another course, I am instructed to emphasise the urgency of the matter, and to stay with you until such time as you decide to make the journey to Lendalfoot and Girvan. At intervals, I shall repeat the message, in case it should become obscured by circumstance.

“Meanwhile, there may be questions you wish to ask. I have been provided with an excellent vocabulary.”

With a taloned foot, it scratched the feathers behind its head, and seemed to pay no more attention to him. He sheathed his sword, seeing no threat. His beast had quietened, so he walked back to the fire. The lammergeyer followed. He looked into its glittering eyes.

“What are you?” he asked.

“I am a Messenger of Cellur.”

“Who is he?”

“I have not been instructed in the description of him.”

“What is his purpose?”

“I have not been instructed in the description of that.”

“What is the exact nature of the threat perceived by him?”

“He fears the geteit chemosit.”

The mist did not lift that day or that night. Though Cromis spent much of this time questioning the bird, he learned little; its answers were evasive and he could get nothing more from it than that unpleasant name.

The morning came grey and overcast, windy and sodden and damp. The sister ridges of the Cruachan stretched away east and west like the ribs of a gigantic animal. They left the third cairn together, the bird wheeling and gyring high above him on the termagant air currents of the mountains, or coming to perch on the arch of his saddle. He was forced to warn it against the latter, for it upset the horse.

When the sun broke through, he saw that it was a bird of metal: every feather, from the long, tapering pinions of the great wide wings to the down on its hunched shoulders, had been stamped or beaten from wafer-thin iridium. It gleamed, and a very faint humming came from it. He grew used to it, and found that it could talk on many diverse subjects.

On his fifth day out of the Pastel City, he came in sight of Duirinish and the Rust Desert.

He came down the steep Lagach Fell to the source of the River Minfolin in High Leedale, a loamy valley two thousand feet up in the hills. He drank from the small, stone-ringed spring, listening to the whisper of the wind in the tall reed grasses, then sought the crooked track from the valley down the slopes of Mam Sodhail to the city. The Minfolin chattered beside him as he went, growing stronger as it rushed over falls and rapids.

Low Leedale spread before him as he descended the last few hundred feet of Sodhail: a sweep of purple and brown and green quartered by grey stone walls and dotted with herders’ crofts in which yellow lights were beginning to show. Through it ran the matured Minfolin, dark and slow; like a river of lead it flowed past the city at the north end of the valley, to lose and diffuse itself among the Metal-Salt Marshes on the verge of the Rust Desert: from there, it drained westward into the sea.

Sombre Duirinish, set between the stark hills and the Great Brown Waste, had something of the nature of both: a bleakness.

A walled city of flint and black granite, built twenty generations before against the threat of the Northern clans, it stood in a meander of the river, its cobbled roads inclining steeply among squat buildings to the central fastness, the castle within the city, Alves. Those walls that faced the Rust Desert rose vertically for two hundred feet, then sloped outwards. No welcome in Duirinish for Northern men. As Cromis reached the Low Leedale, the great Evening Bell was tolling the seventh change of guard on the north wall. A pale mist clung to the surface of the river fingering the walls as it flowed past.

Camped about a mile south of the city, by the stone bridge over the Minfolin, were Birkin Grif’s smugglers.

Their fires flared in the twilight, winking as the men moved between them. There was laughter and the unmusical clank of cooking utensils. They had set a watch at the centre of the bridge. Before attempting to cross, Cromis called the lammergeyer to him. Flapping out of the evening, it was a black cruciform silhouette on grey.