convien che tanto il ciel), stranded for so long in the fractured white spaces, a hundred years of pearly silence in the garden behind the world: there I lay in the biting wind -ABRACADABRA – there ate in the shadow of the veinous wing manna (perch'io indugiai alfine i buon sospiri); and what for? WAR! Now they burrow in the great borrowec abracadabra of my surviving soul. Ah! Fear death from the air! What a lovely piece of meat, my dear!'

– And so on, punctuated by roars of pain or rage as rolling slowly from one corner of the room to another, he attempted to right his huge floundering bulk or adjust its height from the floor. At times he seemed quite solid, while at others an appalling smell filled the throne-room and his outlines became vague and mucous again. In moments of solidity he would struggle and thresh; he waved his arms, perhaps for attention, perhaps to keep his balance in whatever grotesque medium he was floating. (It was plain that the air of Earth could not support so gross a body – he wallowed rather in some mysterious waterglass, some dimension of his own.) When he faded, his voice faded too, becoming feeble and distant and distorted, as if by passage through some inhospitable aether.

Cellur the birdmaker was transfixed. 'This is none of my doing!'he cried, full of an ancient excitement. 'Hornwrack, it is the voice from the Moon!'

('It's a voice from a sewer,'declared Hornwrack, and, sotto voce: 'A voice from a pantomime.')

Cellur addressed the floating man. 'Many nights I listened to you. What have you to tell me? Speak!'

'Blork,'said the floating man.

Thereafter he disregarded Cellur, but courted Hornwrack vigorously, his eyes ingenuous and fishy behind the tinted faceplate of his mask. Sidling up to the assassin he would wink coyly and embark on some earnest incoherent suit; only to topple helplessly over on his side before he could complete it, like the corpse of some small decomposing whale. 'Listen to me, my lad (black buggery!) I can see you're a flier. Listen, the regenerated word burrows within me! We must have a talk, you and I – 'Then, making a terrified pushing motion: 'No more, no more of that!'And off he would go, bobbing about the throne-room at the height of Hornwrack's head, a sour fluid dribbling from the edges of his mask.

This was too much for Hornwrack, who, eyeing the apparition superstitiously, got out the sword of tegeusCromis and followed it about, making lethal cuts at the air. 'Back to your sewer!'he shouted. 'Back to your madhouse!'while Cellur in an attempt to restrain him plucked feebly at his cloak and 'the apparition evaded them both, chuckling and sneezing.

Nothing could be got from it. If they left it alone, it harangued them mercilessly, in fragments of infernal languages. When they pursued it, Cellur in a spirit of conciliation, Hornwrack with murderous blows, it merely hiccupped behind its mask and blundered off. For half-an-hour this pantomime continued, until, in the face of the growing daylight, its periods of stability became fewer, it. outline grey and debatable. Its voice faded into an enormous echoing distance in which might be heard quite distinctly the sound of waves on some unimaginable shore. Eventually it vanished into the same odd brew of light as had engendered it, and they were left stranded in the empty throne-room, furious and futile.

This was how Alstath Fulthor found them: staring breathlessly into the vacant air. Had he listened carefully, as they begged him, he might have heard a feeble buzzing voice exhorting him to 'Fear death from the air!'The sound of waves, or something like it. Silence. But what were voices 'to him, who now heard them constantly in his head?

'It is long past dawn,'he said irritably, 'and the Queen will be waiting for us.'

· In the event they saw very little of her, for it was a brutally cold day: only a white face in a window near the top of a tower; a white hand raised; and then nothing. Alstath Fulthor, his great black horse and blood-red armour glowing heraldically beneath the overcast, drew an ironic cheer from the handful of Low City dwellers who stood in the slush to watch them through the Gate of Nigg. Viriconium, foundered across the stream of time behind them, like some immense royal barge abandoned to winter! This zone of monstrous narcissism and gigantic depressions behind him, Hornwrack sensed the beginnings of the new phase signalled by the manifestation in the throne-room. We are all mad now, he thought. On an impulse he unsheathed the old steel sword and held it high. But when he looked back Methvet Nian had already left the tower.

Outside on the low brown foothills of Monar lay the first snow of the season, drifted up against the stone intake walls and sheep enclosures. The pack animals were fractious, the wind bitter. They travelled slowly; but the dwarf, who had been sleeping in some straw, did not catch up with them until much later.

When he did, he said, 'This “bloated ghost” you speak of: he was the finest airboatman of them all.'

And that night, huddled by a dying fire in the hills above the distant City, he continued: 'At Mingulay he flew one machine against eight. Cooking rats in the sun at noon we watched, my long-dead friends and I, from the beleagured city. His boat was old, his crew haggard; the drugs he took to stay awake had made him shake and stagger: but how that boat spun and turned, how it dropped like a hawk amid the violet bolts of the power cannon! How the brassy light of the South glanced off its crystal hull! Benedict Paucemanly: seven wrecks dotted the arid plain before the siege was lifted; the eighth he rammed afterwards, in an oversight.

'But war was never enough for Paucemanly. When the world was still young (and the Methven still casting their shadows across it) he flew round it. I know, for I was with him, a dwarf of few summers who fancied himself an adventurer. We crossed the oceans, Hornwrack, and all the broken continents! Deserts drifted beneath our hull, rapt in their millenial declining dream. At the poles, aurorae cascaded and roared above us like spectral rivers. We sampled the tropics; the equatorial air burned about us. That was Paucemanly's first flight in the Heavy Star. But if war failed to satisfy him, so did the world. He grew bored. He grew melancholy and thin.

'He began to stare each night at the wan and sovereign Moon.

'Oh, he yearned after that sad planet. His plan was to go there. “The mysterious navigators of the Afternoon,” he reasoned, “had commerce with it daily, in just such boats as these. The space outside the Earth was of no consequence to them. Perhaps,” he persuaded himself, “the boats remember the way.” We watched him leave on a black night, in that famous ship. She rose into the darkness, hunting like a compass needle. Old senses revived in her. She trembled in anticipation, and strange new lights glimmered at her stern.

'We never saw her again, any of us. The Heavy Star, the Heavy Star! That was a hundred years ago -The old dwarf's eyes were red and flat in the gloom,

reflecting the firelight like the eyes of an animal. 'Hornwrack,'he whispered, 'she knew her way. Don't you

see? This “bloated ghost” you describe is Benedict Paucemanly returned to us. He has been a hundred years in the Moon!'

Hornwrack stirred the embers with his boot. 'That is all very well,'he said a little cruelly (for he envied

the dwarf these memories, with which he had nothing to compare): 'But what has he brought with him past the gates of Earth? And why is he a gibbering idiot?'

The dwarf looked at him thoughtfully.

Later, Cellur the Bird Lord was to describe their journey north in these terms:

'Among the stone crowns and aimless salients of the empty foothills we received hints of some state of being we could not imagine. The world was bleached of its old meanings even for those of us who had previously accepted them. (I do not count myself among these. How could I?) This happened immediately we left the City. It was as if a protection had been removed from us. Mosaic eyes seemed to observe us from behind the dry-stone walls. In the outline of a ridge or a wayfarer's tree might be contained the suggestion of quite another object – a folded wing, for instance, or the coiled tongue of a moth.