M. Harrison: The Pastel City

The great white sloth watched him out with almost human eyes, rearing up to its full height, its ambered claws glinting.

He stayed in the city for that night and another day. It was quiet, the streets empty and stunned. He had snippets of rumour that the Moidart's remaining supporters skulked the narrower alleys after dark and skirmished with groups of the city guard. He did not discount them, and kept a hand on the nameless sword. He expected to find Trinor somewhere in the old Artist's Quarter.

He enquired at several taverns there, but had no information. He grew progressively more impatient, and would have given up had not a derelict poet he met in the Bistre Californium advised him to take his queries to an address on Bread Street in the poorer part of the Quarter. It was said that blind Kristodulous had once rented a garret studio athere.

He came to Bread Street at twilight. It was far removed from the palace and the Pastel Towers, a mean alley of aging, ugly houses, down which the wind funneled bitterly. Over the crazed rooftops, the sky bled. He shivered and thought of the Moidart, and the note of the wind became more urgent. He drew his cloak about him and rapped with the hilt of his sword on a weathered door.

He did not recognise the woman who opened it: perhaps the light was at fault.

She was tall, statuesque and graceful; her narrow face had an air of calm and the self-knowledge that may or may a not come with suffering: but her blue robe was faded, patched here and there with material of quite another colour, and her eyes were ringed with tired, lined flesh. He bowed out of courtesy.

'I seek Norvin Trinor,'he said, 'or news of him.'

She peered into his face as if her eyes were weak, and said nothing. She stepped aside and motioned him to enter. He thought that a quiet, sad smile played about her firm mouth.

Inside, the house was dusty and dim, the furniture of rough, scrubbed deal. She offered him cheap, artificially-coloured a wine. They sat on opposite sides of a table and a silence. lie looked from her discoloured fingernails to the cobwebs in the windows, and said:

'I do not know you madam. If you would be -'

Her weary eyes met his and still he did not know her. She got slowly to her feet and lit a squat hanging lamp.

'I am sorry tegeus-Cromis. I should not have embarrassed you in this fashion. Norvin is not here. I -'

In the lamplight stood Carron Ban, the wife of Norvin Trinor, whom he had married after the fight against. Carle-maker's brigands, twelve years before. Time had gone against her, and she had aged beyond her years.

Cromis upset his chair as he got to his feet, sent it clattering across the floor. It was not the change in her that horrified him, but the poverty that had caused it.

'Carron! Carmon! I did not know. What has happened here?'

She smiled, bitter as the wind.

'Norvin Trinor has been gone for nearly a year,'she said. 'You must not wormy on my behalf. Sit down and drink the wine.

She moved away, avoiding his gaze, and stood looking into the darkness of Bread Street. Under the faded robe, her shoulders shook. Cromis came to her and put his hand on her arm.

'You should tell me,'he said gently. 'Come and tell me.'

But she shrugged off the hand.

'Nothing to tell, my lord. He left no word. He seemed to have grown weary of the city, of me -'

'But Trinor would not merely have abandoned you! It is cruel of you to suggest such -'

She turned to face him and there was anger in her eyes.

'It was cruel of him to do it, Lord Cromis. I have heard nothing from him for a year. And now -now I wish to hear nothing of him. That is all finished, like many things that have not outlasted King Methven.'

She walked to the door.

'If you would leave me, I would be pleased. Understand that I have nothing against you, Cromis; I should not have done this to you; but you bring memories I would rather not acknowledge.'

'Lady, I -'

'Please go. '

There was a terrible patience in her voice, in the set of her shoulders. She was brought down, and saw only that she would remain so. Cromis could not deny her. Her condition was painful to them both. That a Methven should cause such misery was hard to credit -that it should be Norvin Trinor was unbelievable. He halted at the door.

'If there is help you require -I have money -And the queen -'

She shook her head brusquely.

'I shall travel to my family in the south. I want nothing from this city or its empire.'Her eyes softened. 'I am sorry, tegeusCromis. You have meant nothing but good. I suggest you look for him in the north. That is the way he went.

'But I would have you remember this: he is not the friend you know. Something changed him after the death of Methven. He is not the man you knew.'

'Should I find him -'

'I would have you carry no message. Goodbye.'

She closed the door, and he was alone on that mean street with the wind. The night had closed in.

That night, haunted by three women and a grim future, a Cromis of the nameless sword, who thought himself a better poet than fighter, left the Pastel City by one of its Northern gates, his horse's hooves quiet on the ancient paving. No-one hindered him.

Though he went prepared, he wore no armour save a mail shirt, lacquered black as his short cloak and leather breeches. It was the way of many of the Methven, who had found armour an encumbrance and no protection against energy blades. He had no helmet, and his black hair streamed in the wind. The baan was at his belt and his curious eastern instrument across his back.

In a day, he came to the bleak hills of Monar that lay between Viriconium and Duirinish, where the wind lamented considerably some gigantic sorrow it was unable to put into words. He trembled the high paths that wound over slopes of shale and between cold still lochans in empty conies. No birds lived there. Once he saw a crystal launch drift overhead, a dark smoke seeping from its hull. He thought a good deal of the strange actions of Norvin Trinor, but achieved no conclusions.

He went in this fashion for three days, and one thing happened to him while he traversed the summit of the Cruachan Ridge.

He had reached the third cairn on the ridge when a mist descended. Aware of the insecurity of the path in various places ahead, and noting that his beast was already prone to stumble on the loose, lichen-stained rock, he halted. The wind had dropped, and the silence made a peculiar ringing noise in his ears. It was comfortless and alien up there, impassable when the snow came, as were the lower valleys. He understood the Moidart's haste.

He found the cairn to be the tumbled ruins of an old fourfaced tower constructed of a grey rock quite different from that beneath his feet. Three walls remained, and part of a ceiling. It had no windows. He could not guess its intended purpose, or why it was not built of native stone. It stood enigmatically among its own rubble, an eroded stub, and he wondered at the effort needed to transport its stones to such a height.

Inside, there were signs that other travellers of the Cruachan had been overtaken by the mist: several long-dead fires: the bare bones of small animals.

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 mowan 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…'