M. Harrison: The Pastel City

'Are you bidding me remember, madam? I fear I cannot.'

'They were stupid,'said Birkin Grif, his fat, honest face puzzled and hurt. It was his way to feel things personally. 'They were fools.'

'They were insane towards the end,'said Cellur. 'That I know.'

Lord tegeus-Cromis wandered the Birdmaker's tower alone, filled his time by staring out of upper windows at the rain and the estuary, making sad and shabby verses out of the continual wild crying of the fish-eagles and the creaking of the dead white pines. His hand never left the hilt of the nameless sword, but it brought him no comfort.

Tomb the dwarf was exclusively occupied by machinery -he and Cellur rarely left the workshop on the fifth floor. They took their meals there, if at all. Birkin Grif became sullen and silent, and experienced a resurgence of pain from his damaged leg. Methvet Nian stayed in the room set aside for her, mourning her people and attempting to forgive the monstrousness to which she was heiress.

Inaction bored the soldier; moroseness overcame the poet; a wholly misplaced sense of responsibility possessed the Queen:

in their separate ways they tried to meet and overcome the feeling of impotence instilled in them by what they had learned from the Lord of the Birds, and by the enigma he represented.

To a certain extent, each one succeeded: but Cellur ended all that when he called them to the topmost room of the tower on the afternoon of the fifth day since their coming.

They arrived separately, Cromis last.

'I wanted you to see 'this,'Cellur was saying as he entered the room.

The old man was tired; the skin was stretched tight across the bones of his face like oiled paper over a lamp; his eyes were hooded. Abruptly, he seemed less human, and Cromis came to accept the fact that, at some time in the remote past, he might have crossed immense voids to reach the Earth.

How much sympathy could he feel for purely human problems, if that were so? He might involve himself, but he would never understand. Cromis thought of the monitor-lizard he had seen in the Waste, and its fascination with the fire.

'We are all here then,'murmured the Birdmaker.

Birkin Grif scowled and grunted.

'Where is Tomb? I don't see him.'

'The dwarf must work. In five days, he has absorbed the governing principles of an entire technology. He is amazing. But I would prefer him to continue working. He knows of this already.'

'Show us your moving pictures,'said Grif.

Ancient hands moved in a column of light. Cellur bent his head, and the windows flickered behind him.

'A vulture flew over Viriconium this morning,'he said. 'Watch.'

A street scene in the Artists'Quarter: Thing Alley, or Soft Lane perhaps. The tottering houses closed tight against a noiseless wind. A length of cloth looping down the gutter; a cat with an eye like a crooked pin flattens itself on the paving, slips out its tongue and devours a morsel of rancid butter. Otherwise, nothing moves.

Coming on with an unsteady rolling gait from the West End of the Quarter: three Northmen. Their leather leggings are stiff and encrusted with sweat and blood and good red wine. They lean heavily against one another, passing a flask. Their mouths open and shut regularly, like the mouths of fish in a bowl. They are oblivious.

They have missed a movement in a doorway, which will kill them.

As crooked and silent as the cat, a great black shadow slips into the road behind them. The immense energy-blade swings up and down. The silly, bemused faces collapse. Hands raised helplessly before eyes. Their screams are full of teeth. And the triangle of yellow eyes regards their corpses with clinical detachment…

'It has begun, you see,'said the Birdmaker. 'This is happening all over the city. The automata fight guerilla engagements with Canna Moidart's people. They do not fully understand what is happening as yet. But she is losing control.'

Birkin Grif got to his feet, stared at the false windows with loathing, and limped out.

'I would give an arm never to have come here, Birdmaster,'he said as he left the room. 'Never to have seen that. Your windows make it impossible for me to hate the enemy I have known all my life; they present me with another that turns my legs to water.'

CelIur shrugged.

'How soon can we move?'Cromis asked.

'In a day, perhaps two. The dwarf is nearly ready. I am calling in all my birds. Whatever your Lord Grif thinks, I am not some voyeur of violence. I no longer need to watch the Moidart's fall. The birds will be more useful if I redeploy them over the route you must shortly take.

'Make sure you are watching when they return, Lord Cromis. It will be a sight not often seen.'

Cromis and Methvet Nian left the room together. Outside, she stopped and looked up into his eyes. She had aged. The girl had fallen before the woman, and hated it. Her face was set, the lips tight. She was beautiful.

'My lord,'she said, 'I do not wish to live with such respon-sibilities for the rest of my life. Indirectly, all this is my fault. I have hardly been a strong Queen.

'I will abdicate when this is over.'

He had not expected such a positive reaction.

'Madam,'he said, 'your father had similar thoughts on most days of his life. He knew that course was not open to him. You know it, too.'

She put her head on his chest and wept.

For twenty-four hours, the sky about the tower was black with birds. They came hurling down the wind from the North:

Bearded vultures and kites from the lower slopes of the Monar Mountains;

Eagle owls like ghosts from the forests;

A squadron of grim long-crested hawk-eagles from the farmlands of the Low Leedale;

A flight of lizard buzzards from the reaches of the Great Brown Waste;

A hundred merlins, two hundred fish-hawks – a thousand wicked predatory beaks on a long blizzard of wings.

Cromis stood with the Young Queen by a window and watched them come out of night and morning: circling the tower in precise formation; belling their wings to land with a crack of trapped air; studding the rocks and dark beaches of the tiny island. They filled the pines, and he saw now why every tree was dead – Cellur had had need of his birds come long time before, and their talons had stripped every inch of bark, their steel bodies had shaken every branch.

'They are beautiful,'whispered the Queen.

But it was the birds, despite their beauty, that destroyed their maker.

For in the stripped lands South of Soubridge, where the villagers had burned their barns before the enemy arrived, a hungry Northman fired his crossbow into a flock of speeding owls. A certain curiosity impelled him: he had never seen such a thing before. More by luck than judgement, he brought one down.

And when he found he could not eat it, he screwed his face up in puzzlement, and took it to his captain…

Dawn came dim and grimy over the basalt cliffs of the estuary. It touched the window from which Cromis had watched all night, softening his bleak features; it stroked the feathers of the birds in the pines; it silvered the beaks of the last returning flight: seventy cumbersome cinereous vultures, beating slowly over the water on their nine-foot wings.

And it touched and limned the immense shape which drifted silently after them as they flew – the long black hull that bore the mark of the Wolf's Head and Three Towers.

Cromis was alone; the Queen had retired some hours earlier. He watched the ship for a moment as it trawled back and forth over the estuary. Its shell was scarred and pitted. After two or three minutes it vanished over the cliffs to the West, and he thought it had gone away. But it returned; hovered; spun hesitantly, hunting like a compass needle.

Thoughtfully, he made his way 'to the workshop on the fifth floor. He drew his sword and rapped with its pommel on the door.