M. Harrison: A Storm of Wings

Fulthor was intrigued, and a little taken aback. It was a strange place for such a meeting. He shrugged and smiled,

'Why do you waste yours in asking, old man?'he answered.

The old man shivered, and with a quick unconscious movement of the head glanced up at the southern sky before he spoke again. The high, naked shriek of a fish eagle echoed over the fells; but there was no moon yet in the sky.

In a palace like a shell – in Methven's Hall where the Proton Circuit draws itself up into a spiral on a hundred pillars of thin black stone – Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, Queen in Viriconium, who in her youth had taken to the windy birch-stands and glacial lakes of the Rannoch Moor, hunted away by the Chemosit and wild as any moss-trooper's daughter (with the last of the Methven limping and scarred to guard her, a poet and a dead metal bird to guide her, and a giant dwarf to expedite her passage), sat before five false windows in a tall room floored with cinnabar crystal. She was surrounded by precious, complex objects of forgotten use – machines or sculptures excavated from ruined cities in the Rust Desert beyond Duirinish; curtains of pale, fluctuating light drifted irregularly about the chamber like showers of rain; and through the dreamlike shadows thus created shambled the Queen's Beast-one of the great white sloths of the southern forests, who are said to be the fallen remnants of a star-faring race invited or lured to Earth during the madness of the Afternoon.

Eighty years had passed since Usheen, the first of her beasts, died on Canna Moidart's knife, and in dying sealed the final defeat of the North. Tegeus-Cromis, lay two decades still and dead beneath the fields of sol d'or at Lowth. Methvet Nian was no longer young, even by the standards of the Evening. Still, in her purple eyes there might yet be discerned something of the girl who in the space of one year lost and gained the Last Kingdom of the world: and in the dreaming light where those five false windows showed landscapes to be found nowhere in Viriconium, her age weighed only lightly on her – like the hand of some imaginary child. Inside, the windows flickered. Outside it was autumn; and under a cold moon processions of men with insect faces went silently through the streets.

A curious thing happened to her.

Often in that flickering room the past had come to touch her with quiet persistence, tugging at her sleeve in the effort to capture her attention: white hares in the twilight at Shining Clough Moss or Torside Naze; the long brown sweep of the Rannoch peat moors like a brush stroke in some enormous written language; desert dust piling itself noiselessly in the bleak plazas of ruined Drunmore. But these were no more or less than the sad fingerprints of memory on her brain (she remembered the verses tegeus-Cromis made, the ancient cry of the fish eagles, and his voice out of night and morning): tonight it was something more. The windows flickered; the windows shimmered: the windows said

'Methvet Nian.'

All five went blank and dark.

'Methvet Nian!'

Smoke and snow filled them, a pearly-grey light like dawn over the tottering seracs of some marine glacier in the north beyond the North. It shivered and was wrenched away -'Methvet Nian!'

Fused sand, and a sky filled with mica, the rolling dunes and dry saline wadis of the sempiternal erg. In the fierce air hung a perfect mirage of the City, pastel towers tall and mathematical, cut with strange designs. The wind stooped likeahawk- 'Methvet Nian!'

She approached the windows fatalistically, and with a sense of being drawn or invoked (seeing herself perhaps walk complaisantly through them and out into some other time). Now they poured out on her a green and submarine radiance, as if the palace she stood in truly were a shell, or a ship full of drowned sailors spinning forever beneath the ancient clammy sea. All other lights in the throne room were dimmed; the sloth whimpered, rearing puzzledly up on its hind legs, great ambered claws extending and retracting nervously.

'Hush,'she said: 'Who wishes to speak to me?'and was still.

'Methvet Nian.'

The deep-sea gloom surged, foamed, blew away, like spindrift off a wave in the invisible wind, only to be replaced by the image of a cavernous, ruined room which seemed to be full of dusty stuffed birds. Moonlight filtered through rents in the walls. An old man stood before her, pentadic, five-imaged. His long domed skull was yellow and fleshless, his eyes green and his lips thin. His skin was so fine and tight as to be translucent, the bones shining through it like jade. His age, she thought, has outstripped mere physical symptoms, and exalted him. His robe was embroidered with subtle gold designs having this property, that in every draught of air they seemed to shift and flow, responsive to each movement of the cloth but independent of it.

She trembled. She put out a hand to touch cold glass.

The cry of gulls rang in her ears, and the sound of a cold grey sea lapping on black sand far away and long ago.

'Do the dead live in that country, then?'she whispered, twisting her fingers in the white fur of the sloth. 'Beyond the windows?'

'Methvet Nian.'

East and South of Monar runs a strip of heathland whose name, when it still had one, was a handful of primitive syllables scattered like a question into the damp wind. It is a deserted and superseded country, that one, full of the monuments and inarticulate ghosts of a race older than Viriconium, younger than the Afternoon Cultures, and possibly more naive than either: a short-lived nation of tribal herdsmen who buried their dead once-yearly in tiered barrows and knew nothing more of their heritage than that it should be avoided. Of the future they knew nothing at all. Worked metal was the death-knell of them, tolling from the crude and ceaseless smithies of the North. Their works, ridge-path and necropolis alike, have now taken on the air of natural features and, overgrown with gorse and young beech, become one with the sombre expanse of long mounds and shallow valleys sloping away to merge imperceptibly with the Rannoch beyond.

This place avoided the poisoned hands of the Afternoon only to age and grow enfeebled instead. Curlews make free of its sad desuetude; hares play in the deep cloughs and sheltered hollows of a land which has quietly exhausted itself; it ignores the traveller, and gently seeks the night. Here on many an evening in the latter part of the year darkness visits the earth while the pale wreck of the sunset still commands the sky. The air is suffused with brightness yet somehow lacks the power to illuminate. In a moment each declivity has brimmed up with shadow and become the abode of mumbling wind and the shy thin ghosts who never cireamed of the Afternoon or knew its iron, at first or second hand. On just such an evening one autumn, eighty years after the Fall of the North, grey smoke might have been seen issuing from the chimney of a small red caravan parked on an old ridgeway deep in the heart of the heath; and from a considerable hole newly-dug in the ground nearby, the chink of metal on metal -It was a four-wheeled caravan of the type traditionally used by the Mingulay tinker to move his enormous family and meagre equipment along the warm summer roads of the south. Indeed, the south vibrated in it, every panel and peg, lively atrocious designs in electric blue rioting over its sides, its thick spokes picked out in canary yellow, the curved roof a racy purple to throw back the last of the light in a challenge to the sombre crawling umbers of the heath. The hilarious, slovenly children, it seemed, were not long departed, run off snot-nosed to go blackberrying among the brambles. Smoke rose, and a smell of food. Two dusty ponies tethered to the backboard with a bit of frayed rope cropped the short ridgeway turf in noisy self-absorbtion, lop ears cocked to catch the voice of their master who, though rendered invisible by the embankment of fresh sandy soil surrounding his pit, could be heard from time to time punctuating with vile threats and oaths the low monotonous humming of some Rivermouth dirge. But no children returned from the bracken (we hear their voices fade and recede across the long darkness of the heath); and this impatient excavation continued unwearyingly until the light had almost left the sky. Long shadows engulfed the caravan; its chimney ceased to smoke; the ponies shuffled at the end of their tether. Fresh showers of earth added height to the ramparts. Then a peculiar thing happened.