“Captain, they come from the capital-”
But he only wiped his mouth and laughed wildly. “Ay, and look at them! Some yellow old man, and a woman. Two city lordlings and their dwarf!”
A fit of dry retching shook him. “There will never be any help from Viriconium,” he said indistinctly. There was self-pity in his voice, and after a moment or two he acknowledged it with a disgusted twist of his mouth. “Did you see anything out there?” he asked, and when the other shook his head, whispered, “I pity those that did.”
He tried to squeeze the salt water from his hair.
“One of our own vessels rammed us, that’s certain,” he continued thoughtfully. “But by then we were already burning.”
He shrugged.
“It was as usual. Those who saw anything were struck mad immediately. Those who did not, got lost in the mist.”
Thus the defeated, locked in their dreams of defeat.
“You are bound to help us!” shouted Alstath Fulthor suddenly.
“Leave them alone, Fulthor,” advised Hornwrack. Often enough he had been among the defeated himself. His sudden compassion surprised him nevertheless, and that he should recognise it as such surprised him even further. He looked sidelong at Tomb the Dwarf to see if he had noticed anything, but the dwarf wasn’t interested-he only grinned pleasantly and unforgivingly down at the sailors and said, “There is no enemy in sight now.”
“They are bound by those signatures to help us,” said the Reborn Man less loudly.
They regarded him with puzzlement, and some scorn.
“Go up to the new hall,” was all they said, “and leave us alone.” And they wandered off along the quay to where the remaining mast of the foundered ship poked up at a strange angle from a scum of floating wreckage. There a smell of lemons clung, as if some bitter dew had condensed on that doomed hull during its confused final voyage. It was an unearthly, chemical smell. The horses hated it.
The crowd, sensing a termination, looked on emptily for a minute or two, then began to disperse-the children drawn by a kind of magnetism toward the wreck while their elders took to the cobbled road which wound up into Iron Chine proper, where they vanished in twos and threes among the little two-storey houses with the wet slate roofs, the drying nets, and lines of flaccid laundry. Dulled by the cold and continual privation, they seemed unable to react to a tragedy which, as someone in Fulthor’s party pointed out later, must have involved them all. One woman did stand for a time staring out into the estuary, a few tears drying on her cheeks in the wind. Only then did Hornwrack realise that more than one vessel had been involved. A spatter of rain blew out of the west (where like a great ancient fish there lay in wait the island continent of Fenlen) and into his face. He could see the “new hall” on a rise above the village. He felt wretched.
“This wind is prising my joints apart,” said Cellur the Birdmaker cheerfully. When no one answered him he gave an impatient shrug. “These people need more help than they could ever give us,” he told Fulthor. “When you stop sulking you will see that.”
It came on to rain in earnest as they passed through the Chine. The peeling walls had once been gaily whitewashed, the window boxes tended; now pale faces observed them from behind the streaming windows. Higher, they found they could look down into the boatyards of St. Elmo Buffin, from which rose the masts and spars of his white and fated fleet- rakish three-hulled craft fitted with those peculiar slatted metal sails over which rioted orange lizards, green beetles glowing like fresh tattoos, and subtly distorted geometrical figures. Designed by the Afternoon, built by the Evening, blessed by a new madness of both, they were arming for some invisible war. DEATH proclaimed one sail, and LIFE another, in calligraphies rich and outlandish; while on the decks beneath, shipwrights and sailors swarmed like rats.
“No hint of this war has ever come to us in the High City,” said Alstath Fulthor wonderingly. “It is no wonder they are poverty-stricken here.”
Higher still, the “new hall” hung above them like a threat. Sombre, columnar, mysterious of purpose, it had about it a most appalling air of age, an age which emptied out the cultural luggage of Alstath Fulthor’s vanished race-all the moral atrocities and philosophical absurdities and expired technologies-and found it meaningless; rendering meaningless in the end even the deserts which were their only legacy to the Evening. As he approached it, wincing from the weather, huddling into his cloak against a wind a million years old, it spoke to Galen Hornwrack from an age fully as naive but by no means as puzzled as his own. It was a survivor of the Morning.
There was a ramshackle new construction perched on its roof like a greenhouse; from this flags were flying which no one could identify, though Fulthor and the dwarf argued desultorily over their provenance. And down at its ancient front door, his big-knuckled hands clasped like a bunch of dice, stood the solitary principal of that lost maritime demesne, genius of a doomed fleet, St. Elmo Buffin.
Elmo Buffin, that sad travesty, with his limbs like peeled sticks! He was seven feet tall and a yellow cloak was draped eccentrically about his bony shoulders. Plate armour of a dull-green colour encased him, sprouting all manner of blunt horns and spurs, little nubs and bosses which seemed chitinous and organic. It pulsed and shivered in its colour, for it had come to him from his father, a Reborn Man of the defunct House of medina-Clane, one of the first to be resurrected by Tomb the Dwarf and now dead. What his mother-a dour Northwoman and fishwife of Iron Chine, whose first husband had died in the War of the Two Queens-had bequeathed him is hard to say. Neither strain had bred true, for between Afternoon and Evening there is a great genetic as well as temporal gulf. Epilepsy racked him twice a week. His eyes were yellow and queer in that slack clownish face, which seemed too large for his thin limbs. His brain heaved like the sea; across it visions came and went like the painted sails of his own fleet. Of years he had twenty-six; but his insanity made of that forty or fifty. Since the death of his father (himself an eccentric but principled man, who had consented to the miscegenation in order to cement the two halves of his biracial community) the whole weight of the Chine had rested on his shoulders.
How many of the villagers actually believed in his invisible enemy, or his experimental fleet? It seems immaterial. Those who died at sea knew the truth, as do we. Those that did not were nonetheless inspired by him. And if it did not thrive, well then, the village survived. Buffin’s success was as a symbol-queasy but enduring-which enabled past and present to collaborate. (His failure lay in underestimation-in being, if you like, not quite mad enough-but that was not to become clear until later, and who anyway could have been quite so mad as to imagine the actual state of affairs?) Now he stood in the doorway of the ancient hall, with its dreadful disregard for the passage of Time and its rooftop contraptions worn with the air of a rakish hat, watching from the corner of his eye Fulthor’s party as it approached. He was dwarfed by the dark columns. He could not keep still. He rubbed his hands to warm them in the cold air. He leant unconcernedly on the doorpost. Then he must look at his feet to admire his boots. Then, muttering to himself, jerk upright and practise a handshake with some imaginary visitor.
“ ‘News from the city!’ ” they heard him murmur. “Shall I say that? No. I must not appear so anxious. Shall I then enquire (thus, with a politic solicitude), ‘Your journey, it was comfortable?’ Manifestly though, it was not-”
He snapped his fingers impatiently.
“Oh, what shall I say!”
Suddenly he dodged back among the columns and was lost to view. (Though it had no basis, Hornwrack retained for some time an impression of him huddled up there somewhere in the gloom the way a child might huddle breathless and white-faced behind the great half-opened doors of some echoing abandoned palace into which it has wandered, that palace being the world.)