M. Harrison: A Storm of Wings

He fed the ponies. Then he went to look at the cliff.

At first, a little out of breath after the ascent of the vegetated scree beneath, he was content merely to stand at the bottom of it and crane his neck to watch the jackdaws. The rock was warm: he placed the palm of his hand against it, flat. The earth beneath his boots was filled with the smell of autumn: he breathed deeply, cocking an eye at a hanging rib, a soaring corner, an ivy-filled crack.

He stood there at the beginning of it where every line led upward, then he began to climb.

He had remembered what was haunting him.

He climbed slowly and amiably, placing his feet with care; here jamming a fist into a crack, there balancing his way across some steep slab while empty space burnt away beneath him like a fuse: and with him as he climbed went the long barren limestone scars of his youth, burning and distant under a foreign sun – the baking hinterlands of the Mingulay Peninsula in summer – the stones so bright at midday they hurt the eyes – the tinkers'caravans string 'themselves out like gems across the Mogadon Littoral – the sea-cliffs blaze in a fifty mile arc from Radiopolis to Thing 10, while, high above the stoneheaps and the thorny rubbish in the dry gullies, patrols a single lammergeyer, a speck on the burning bowl of the air! Each place or event he now saw miniaturised and arid, as if sealed in clear glass. He regretted none of them – but he was glad on the whole to have. exchanged them for the softer airs of the north; and the memory identified, the haunting laid, he let it slip away… Soon he was able to rest on a shaggy platform some three 'hundred feet from his starting point and perhaps two hundred more above the caravan on the valley floor. Here there was a cool breeze, and he could watch the jackdaws pursue their millenial evening squabble beneath him; 'harrying one another from roost to roost then exploding away into the clear air in a clatter of wings and sneers – to soar and drift and drop like stones into the treetops below before returning to the bramble-ledges to begin the whole tedious argument over again… He took off his belt and with it anchored himself among the roots of the yew with which he shared his perch. The air around him cooled; the light. began imperceptibly to fade; the long shoulders of the plateau receded north before him, horizon after horizon like grey pigeon feathers set against the enamelled blues and yellows of the sky. Across the valley he could no longer distinguish individual ash trees – crowned with a continuous lacy fretwork of branches, the sun red and unmoving above it, the far slope rose dark and sullen like a vast earthwork.

. And as he watched, a head began to raise itself above that earthwork.

It was such a brief glimpse that later he was unable to describe it coherently – by then, of course, it no longer mattered. The thing revealed itself in total silence, and by parts. First the drooping, jointed antennae, in constant nervous motion, were lifted above the trees; then the great globular eyes followed them, dull and faceted, set in a wedge-shaped carapace like the stained and polished skull of a dead horse; finally came the mouthparts, working like a machine. Two trembling, oddly-curved forelimbs appeared, and, braced against the earth's dark edge (although they left not the slightest mark), levered this shocking mask high above the dwarf's stance. He never saw the rest of the creature. The valley winked out below him; the cliff lurched and spun; he shuddered, and heard a thin piping noise coming out of his own mouth -Then it was gone.

He retained the impression of something fading, of a noise he had never actually heard gradually diminishing from some unimaginable crescendo – as if an invisible energy dissipating itself like water dribbling away under a stone: then he felt the rough powdery bark of the yew against his sweating hand; the cry of the jackdaws came back to him (faint at first, as though from a vast distance); the valley of the Cressbrook was once more as it had been -Such a brief glimpse.

The sun sank, the dark welled in: but the small hunched figure on the cliff remained – chin on knees, singed grey hair moving in the night wind, expression quizzical. When he eventually got up to leave his ledge and begin the careful retreat, he saw suddenly that it was scattered with hundreds of little luminous insects. Leaping and glittering in an excess of life and energy, they scuttled over his feet, flickered between the roots of the yew, and tumbled in a constant rain over the edge, spilling into the depths like sparks. He could not see where they came from; and when he tried to pick some of them up they evaded him.

During his descent he had expected to see them falling past him into space: but when a few minutes later the difficulties eased and he was able to look up, they had gone, and he couldn't even see the ledge.

In a languor of puzzlement and dried blood, then, his wounds gaping at him every time he closed his eyes, Galen Hornwrack abandoned his familiar rooms, his stale but bearable captivity. Nothing was said. Nothing was explained. The shrewd whores watched him go (moving abstractedly from window to window, fingers raised to a drooping underlip, a leaded cheek, a favourite comb). The boy, too, followed him with uncommunicative eyes. Did he understand what had happened? Would he wait for as much as a day before drifting away into some desperate, motiveless new liaison? Hornwrack could not care for him (both of them bore too obviously the signature of the City, the impassive self-indulgence, the narcissism which precludes compassion): but he'had a sudden quick vision of the boy's thin shoulders hunched against a corrosive yellow lamplight; of dripping brickwork and energetic shadows; and he found himself searching for something to say in farewell, some gift or acknowledgement. Nothing came, so he said nothing, and let the inevitable profitless curves of the Rue Sepile carry him out of sight.

Eventually, he knew, his present inertia would be replaced by a faint bitterness, a sense of betrayal which, though directed away from himself, would yet be experienced on behalf of the boy. In this way he managed his crippled emotions. For now he could only watch covertly the faces of his unwelcome companions, waiting for some indication of their purpose. Beneath his cloak he had hidden his second best knife, a thing with a peculiar hilt and an old black stain he could not remove.

They had fetched him a horse, though he hated that method of travel, and urged him silently to get up on it. Now, the Plaza of Unrealized Time and its shabby dependencies behind them, they shepherded him through the Low City. Alves passed like a dream, its breached copper dome and sprawling rookeries lapped in the silence of desuetude. Along the Camine Auriale a drizzling rain commenced. The earthy wounds of the Cispontine Quarter opened before them like a freshly-dug graveyard.

.. Eastward, where the Artists'Quarter huddles up to the skirts of the High City (and Carron Ban, it's said, deserted by her sour daughter, still waits for Norvin Trinor in the inexpressibly sad shadows beneath the heights of MinnetSaba), dawn had filled the streets with faces Hornwrack knew. The curdled horizontal light picked out a wicked jaw, an eyebrow like a punctuation mark – here a blanched cheek, there a goitre like a pregnancy or some prodigal carious baring of the teeth. Deformed and weary, furtive or gleeful, they were the faces of usurers and wastrels, of despairing cannibals and blemished martyrs, all corroded in the moral marrow and burnt to the underlying bone with the City's mark: Equipot the one-eyed merchant with his sardonic grin and rotting septum; pale Madam 'L', her haematitic eyes full of fever, hurrying to keep an appointment in the Boulevard Aussman; Paulinus Rack the undertaker's agent, his very large head covered with broken veins, carrying a short jade cane…