After a moment he called querulously, “Hello?”
No one answered. Except for Fay Glass they had all got down from their horses and were staring astonished into the massive fluted shadows. Out popped his head like a crumpled leather bag on a stick, and he tapped the side of it mournfully. “We’re all mad here,” he sighed, as if the village, the boatyards, and the ancient stones were all in some way contained within it: which, Hornwrack supposed, in a way they were. Now he recovered himself, smiling ironically, came forward and clasped Fulthor’s hands. “The briefest of aberrations,” he apologised (at this the madwoman pursed her lips enviously, and sniffed); “Please forgive me,” and never referred to it again. “Viriconium has sent observers then, at last!”
Under this misapprehension he led them up a monstrous flight of stairs. They could not correct it because he would not let them speak. He had, he explained, given up hope of ever getting help from the capital. He did not blame the High City for this. Messengers had been sent every six months to Duirinish, which was the regional centre, but patently the messages had not been sent on. This was understandable. In Duirinish they semed to believe that he was quarrelling with some other coastal village. This had not been at all uncommon in the years immediately following the war. What could he do but maintain a philosophical attitude?
Up the vast stairs they went behind him, listening to his monologue float down. His laughter was strained. “Still, now you have come-”
His rooms were full of bald light, strange navigational instruments, clutter. In one room the charts had peeled from the wall and lay all along its foot in odd folds. He took them to a thing like a conservatory built right out on to the roof-“From here I can see twenty miles out to sea.” He smiled proudly, a little pathetically. “I expect you have more profound instruments in the South.” There was a great maze of tubing made of brass into which he invited them to look. They bent one by one to the eyepiece. When it was Hornwrack’s turn to look, all he saw was a sad reticulated greyness, and, suspended indistinctly against it in the distance, something like a chrysalis or cocoon, spinning and writhing at the end of a thread. “Success is slow to come with this particular instrument.” Hornwrack shook his head, but Cellur seemed to be fascinated. As they moved from exhibit to exhibit like reluctant tourists in some artist’s studio, Buffin sat on a stool with his limbs tense. He was like an exhibit himself in the direct odd light filtering through the whitish panes, legs wound tensely round one another, his face like an apologetic bag. “It is not an ordinary telescope.” Out to sea nothing moved.
The rooms were draughty and seemed deserted. When he ordered refreshments they were brought by an old woman but he served them himself. “Would you like some of this dried herring?” Money and men were his most urgent requirements, he said (there was besides a shortage of timber). The fleet was fitted but under-crewed. “Pardon?” He showed them charts, designs, plans for a strategy they could not comprehend. On these maps an unconventional symbol depicted “mist.” The island continent of Fenlen was not marked. Hornwrack looked for it but he could not find it.
“The war,” Alstath Fulthor managed to say. “What is its exact nature?”
Buffin looked surprised.
“Why, it is precisely as you have seen. That is the extent of it.”
He thought for a long time. Then he said that his ships went out well-armed. They were captained by crafty men. At sea they encountered first rough water and adverse currents: then a mist. In the mist was some enemy no one had ever seen. “A madness comes over them, and they throw themselves into the water.” Those that did not drown were destroyed by fire, by unimaginable weapons. Some returned. A strange smell clung to their vessels, and they spoke of sounds so appalling as to be beyond description (though they were not loud).
Fulthor began to show signs of impatience. This sort of conjecture was not to his taste. He looked sideways at Hornwrack, who shrugged. Cellur the Birdmaker, however, had been listening to every word. “Have you ever been attacked on land?” he asked.
“For ten years now,” Buffin said absently, “we have fought a war we cannot see. Since the death of my father something has been out there.”
Fulthor stirred, drew in his breath. “I can make nothing of this,” he said brusquely to Cellur. “We cannot concern ourselves with this.”
Buffin blinked at him and went on, “When the mist rolls inshore at night we can sometimes sense them down there in the fjord, sailing stealthily inland. Where they are going we do not know.” He smiled tiredly. “I’m sorry, the fish is awful.” Momentarily sponged of its lines, his face regained a young and pliant air. “I’m glad you’ve come at last.”
Fulthor got up. He handed over his safe conducts and his letters of introduction. “Our mission is urgent,” he said. “I should like fresh horses if you have them. Otherwise nothing. I’m sorry we cannot help.”
There was a silence.
“That was badly done, Alstath Fulthor,” said Cellur.
Buffin looked at them both. Sleet tapped the milky panes of the greenhouse. Outside, the wind tossed the strings of pennants, and set to swaying the distant mast tops of the half-completed fleet. A mist was coming in off the sea.
“I dreamt last night of a fatal blunder made while asleep,” said Cellur as they made their way back up to the clifftop in the blowing sleet. “A sleep-walker murdered his own son.”
“We have done nothing decent here,” agreed Hornwrack a bit absently. Watching with horror the torment of St. Elmo Buffin, he had suddenly begun to think of his own youth, a faithless season spent in the wet plough of the midlands. He could not quite connect the two except in their antithesis. “That’s certain. Only cooperate in one more High City betrayal.” It was later in the day. They were all mounted on fresh animals. Out of his reverie he gave Alstath Fulthor a look of dislike. (He remembered when it came to it only a touch of dead chrysanthemums on the skin in some still-aired room; rooks sweeping over the heavy earth. What he had taken to be unsentimentality with regard to this had turned out to be quite the reverse. In turn, this caused him to think about the Rue Sepile, and all that implied.)
“I thought I recalled the man,” Cellur said. “Perhaps it was a story heard long ago. And yet the face was very familiar.”
“Quite.”
“I cannot shake off a sense of foreboding.”
At the top of the cliff, about to turn inland, they were accosted by the spectre of the ancient airboatman. Opening and shutting its mouth like a deformed goldfish, it approached them out of the eddying sleet, rotating slowly about its vertical axis. Although, as before, it appeared to maintain only the most precarious contact with the world, a thin grey snow seemed to be settling on its shoulders, the ghostly precipitate of some foreign continuum. It was agitated. It came very close to Hornwrack and plucked at his cloak. (He felt nothing until he tried to beat it off with the flat of his hands, when there was some slight, gelatinous resistance.)
“Few lawn!” it shouted through its cupped hands, as from a great distance. “Fog… Forn… Fenling. Oh, crikey.” It pointed desperately out to sea. It looked inland and shook its head. “FENGLIN! nuktis ’agalma… 254 da parte… ten cans for a boat load… Fengle! ”
And it took up station above his head like a fat angel, staring tragically backwards as they moved inland and signing madly whenever it caught his eye.
Still later, Tomb the Dwarf rode up to his side. He held out the weapon Hornwrack had lost on the quayside.
“You dropped your sword, soldier.”
Hornwrack said bitterly, “Listen, old Dwarf, I thought I had got rid of that. I am not him. Whatever he was to you. Don’t you understand that?”