Viriconium by Michael John Harrison Page B

three-hundred-foot heaps of grey stone cast back bell-like echoes from the unsteady hooves of the horses. Land-slips were frequent; limited, but unnerving.
    Cromis took no part in the constant amiable bickering: it was as unproductive as the sterile shale. Further, he was concerned by the odd behaviour of the lammergeyer.
    Ten or fifteen minutes before, the bird had ceased flying its customary pattern of wide circles, and now hung in the air some eight hundred feet up, a silver cruciform slipping and banking occasionally to compensate for a thermal current rising from the slag tips. As far as he could tell, it was hovering above a point about a mile ahead of their present position and directly on their route.
    “The bird has seen something,” he said to Grif, when he was sure. “It is watching something. Call a halt and lend me a sword—no, not that great lump of iron; the horse will collapse beneath it—and I’ll go and find out what it is.”
    It was a queer, lonely excursion. For half an hour he worked along the precarious spiral paths, accompanied only by echoes. Desolation closed oppressively round him.
    Once, the terrible, bitter silence of the slag hills was broken by a distant rhythmic tapping—a light, quick, mysterious ring of metal on metal—but a brief fall of rock drowned it out. It returned later as he was urging his horse down the last slope of the range, the Great Brown Waste spread once more before him, Cellur’s metal vulture hanging like an omen five hundred feet above his head.
    At the bottom of the slope, two horses were tethered.
    A pile of dusty harness lay near them, and a few yards away stood a small red four-wheeled caravan of a type usually only seen south of Viriconium— traditionally used by the tinkers of Mingulay for carrying their large families and meagre equipment. Redolent of the temperate South, it brought to his mind images of affectionate gypsy slatterns and their raucous children. Its big, thick-spoked wheels were picked out in bright yellow; rococco designs in electric blue rioted over its side panels; its curved roof was painted purple. Cromis was unable to locate the source of the tapping sound (which presently stopped), but a thin, blue-grey spire of smoke was rising from behind the caravan.
    He realised that it was impossible to conceal his presence from whoever was camped down there—his horse’s nervous, crabbing progress down the decline was dislodging continuous slides of rock, which bounded away like live things—so he made no effort, coming down as fast as possible, gripping his borrowed sword tightly.
    On the last five yards of the slope, momentum overcame him: the horse’s rear hooves slid from beneath it; it pecked; and he rolled out of the saddle over its shoulder. He landed dazed and awkward in the gritty, sterile sand of the waste, and dropped his sword. Fine, stinging particles of dust got into his eyes. He stumbled to his feet, eyes blind and streaming, unpleasantly aware of his bad tactical position.
    “Why don’t you just stand there quietly,” said a voice he thought he knew, “and make no attempt to regain that rather clumsy sword? Eh?” And then: “You caused enough fuss and furore for ten men coming down that hill.”
    Cromis opened his eyes.
    Standing before him, a power-axe held in his knotty, scarred hands, was a thin figure no more than four feet high, with long white hair and amused, pale grey eyes. His face was massively ugly—it had an unformed look, a childlike, disproportionate cast to its planes—and the teeth revealed by his horrible grin were brown and broken. He was dressed in the heavy leather leggings and jerkin of a metal-prospector, and standing on end the haft of his axe would have topped him by a foot.
    “You,” said Cromis, “could have done no better. You are as insubordinate as ever. You are a pirate. Put up that axe, or my familiar spirit”—here, he pointed to the vulture spiralling above them—“will probably