Viriconium by M. John Harrison & Neil Gaiman

Author:M. John Harrison & Neil Gaiman [Harrison, M. John & Gaiman, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General, Masterwork, Short Stories (Single Author), Science Fiction, Science Fiction; English, English, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780553383157
Google: aJxlAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0553383159
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 2005-10-25T05:00:00+00:00

10 ALL THE WOUNDS OF THE EARTH

Galen Hornwrack came down into the mysterious city like some legendary failed conquistador. (Fever and magic have defeated his skills. The wastelands he set out to cross in his youth have shown him no enemy but his own ambition. All wells were poisoned; sand has swallowed his troops and his hopes. He lurches back alone into the country of his birth only to find that it too had become shifting, unreliable, changed forever. . . . ) The scars left by his fight with the metal bird, an encounter which he recalled only dimly, had diverted and hardened the characteristic lines of his face, so that a strange asceticism now modified his habitual expression of petulance and self-involvement. His nose was running. The sword of tegeus-Cromis he carried in his left hand, having lost its scabbard somewhere in the rotting landscapes behind him. His torn cloak revealed the mail the Queen had given him, now rusty. His eyes were empty and his gaze appallingly direct, as if, tiring of the attempt to winnow the real from the unreal, he now assigned exactly the same value to every object entering his visual field: as if he had suspended judgement on events, and now merely lived through them.

His desire to see the city had kept him from sleep.

Alstath Fulthor followed him, supporting the woman and her endless prophecies. A radiance, colourless in itself, issuing no doubt from his horned and lobed crustaceal armour, appeared to fill both their bodies, illuminating from beneath the things they wore, crimson and blue, as in some old painting. The alien presence of the city, its equivocal contract with “reality,” had lent new energy to their madness. “In my youth,” sang the woman, “I made my small contribution. Blackpool and Chicago become as nothing; their receding colonnades echo to the sound of vanished orchestras.” At this they stopped to regard one another half in delight, half in horror, their cropped spiky hair and long restless hands giving them the air of children caught in some game of conspiracy. (It was only that they hoped to manipulate Time, as we know: believing that by combination and recombination of a few common images—which are themselves only the symbols rather than the actual memories of acts peculiar to the Afternoon Cultures—they might obtain the “code” which would liberate them from the Evening. Thus Mam Etteilla, shuffling her pasteboard cards . . . )

They dawdled, and Hornwrack sat tiredly in the mud to wait for them.

“That’s enough of that!” he said sharply. He treated them for the most part with a gruff indulgence, but tried to prevent their odd and embarrassing sexual encounters, chasing the woman away with the flat of his sword while being careful to keep his eye on Fulthor’s own great weapon.

“That’s enough!” they mimicked. “That’s enough!”

He did not know why he was here, heading into the world’s deep wound. Bankrupt of purpose when they had fetched him that morning from the

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