'I had no life,'said Buffin, 'even as a child.'Hornwrack bent close to the cold lips to hear. 'My father bade me, “Watch the sea.”'

'I've had no life either,'said Hornwrack.

He forced himself to look through the one surviving telescope. At first he could see nothing. A sailor rushed into the room behind him shouting, 'Buffin, they are among us in the fog!'Seeing Hornwrack he halted uncertainly. A pleading note entered his voice. 'Buflin, only one ship

remains. Let us take you aboard her!'

'He is dead,'said Hornwrack, who now discerned a sad grey ground, and against that something spinning at the end of a thread. 'What's happened here?'

'A fog followed us ashore this morning. The women and children are all dead of it.'He stared at Hornwrack's back. 'Great locusts inhabit it!'

'They are your longtime enemy. Where does this last ship sail?'

'West, after the fleet, as he would have wished.'

Spinning, spinning.

'Take me then,'said Hornwrack, 'instead.'

He turned from the telescope and went out of the door. In the empty room a masked figure materialised briefly in the air above the corpse, and was gone.

During the journey from Agdon Roches, Alstath Fulthor had regained a measure of his sanity – that is to say he now remembered where and, to an extent, who he was; but the girl had chopped his hair to a ragged stubble one night while he slept, giving him something of her own hollow-eyed, perpetually-surprised expression; and his skin had taken on a bleached unearthiy look, like a saint's. They were often together, reciting the rhymes that comprised her vocabulary, practising the scraps of meaningless dialogue and lists of non-existent cities which seemed to be her 'keys'to the Past. Fulthor was learning, in the way the child of an exile learns those bits and pieces of its heritage that remain (and which, after so much repetition, undergo a sea-change, bearing less and less relationship to a vanished culture in a land it has never seen). Hornwrack tried to ignore their public tendernesses, their strange, almost unemotional sexual contacts; and clothed his embarrassment in a characteristic surliness.

He found them now down in the port, two tall, awkward figures wrapped in cloaks, standing uncomfortably near the burning boatyards. Despite the heat and smoke they were waiting exactly where he had left them, the flames reflected in their calm odd eyes. Later, at the rail of the last ship, watching the sailors warp her sadly from the bleak shore, Fulthor seemed disposed to talk. He was lucid, polite, aware:

but each new immersion in the stream of memory had carried him further from his Evening existence and its events; and he had forgotten his earlier shoddy treatment of St Elmo Buffin. So when he asked, 'How then did the shipwright die?'it was cruel of Hornwrack to reply,

. 'He cut his own throat, but it was you he died of.'

Iron Chine would not survive him. Fires had now sprung up among the cottages, set by the sailors before they left; and small flames danced behind the panes of the dilapidated conservatory above the town. The strip of black water between the boat and the quay grew wider. The frigid cliffs slipped past; the curious flags and strips of coloured rag flying over the conservatory blazed up one by one; above everything burned the clouds, like the bloody auroral sunset of some other planet.

What happened to the fleet of St Elmo Buffin? It was not provisioned well. He had given small thought to navigating

it. Much of it was lost immediately amid the white water and foul ground, the atrocious currents and uncharted islands which outlie the jagged coast of Viriconium. Much of it, hampered by the ice which formed on decks and rigging, turned quietly turtle in the gelid sea. There were fogs, too, lying in hundred-mile banks across the straits which separate Fenlen from Iron Chine; and in these the greatest loss was incurred. Each ship fought alone, wrapped in a dreamlike shroud of pearly light. Ice burned like alum on the ratlines and stays. There were collisions, mutinies, accidental fires and shouts as of other men desperate and dying beyond the nacreous wall of fog. It was in all aspects a lost venture. The fog smelled of rotting fruit; and at the sound of wings men leapt overboard or cut their own throats, staring dumbly for a last few seconds at a universe faceted like an insect's eye. One ship survived.

Imagined a low dark coastline shelving back through a series of eroded fossil beaches into a desolation which makes the deepest waste of Viriconium seem like a water-meadow. Nothing lives about these beaches but limpets and kelp; a few curiously furtive terns which survive for the most part by eating one another's eggs; and in season a handful of deformed seals. Chemical rivers make their way here from the continental marshes north and west; tars and oils from sumps a thousand years old and a thousand miles inland trickle sluggishly down the terraces of black pumice, staining them emerald green, ochre, purple. Imagine a glaucous ocean; a low swell at the freezing point, lapping at the brutal shore. Strings and bulbs of mineral pigment wave beneath the water like weed, growing from the chemical silt. There is no wind to speak of. Out to sea about a mile, a bank of mist is rolling south, parallel to the coast.

Imagine a white ship: rudderless, masts bent beneath their load of ice.

Her deckplates are up, buckled like lead foil, her wheelhouse blackened by the same fire which lately ate into her hull amidships. Her figurehead hangs loose in a wreck of stays, a partly human form difficult of exact description. She is down at the stern and listing to starboard. Silently, captured by some current invisible from the shore, she is drawn in toward the beach; quicker and quicker until she rams the stained pumice shelves with a groan and, ripped open, goes over by the bow and begins to sink. A few birds fly up from her yards. Chips of ice rattle down. A sail, partly unfurled by the shock of the collision, shows a great drunken beetle to the empty beach. Bedded in the poisonous silt, she will settle no further, but nudges the shore with every wave.

After a few minutes a grotesque shape begins to form in the cold air above her shattered deck, like a crude figure of a man projected somehow on a puff of steam.

9: The Explanations of the Ancient Airboatman

Midwinter clutches the Pastel City, cold as thought.

In the Cispontine Quarter the women have been to and fro all day gathering fuel. By afternoon they had stripped the empty lots to the bare hard soil, bobbing in ragged lines amid the sad induviate stems of last year's growth, their black shawls giving them the air of rooks in a potato field. Not an elder or bramble is left now but it is a stump; and that will be grubbed up tomorrow by some enterprising mattock in a bony hand. At twilight, which – exhaled, as it were, from every shattered corner – comes early to the City's broken parts, they filled the nearby streets for half-an-hour, hurrying westwards with their unwieldy bundles to where, along the Avenue Fiche and the Rue Sepile, Margery Fry Road and the peeling old 'Boulevard Saint Ettiene', the old men sat waiting for them with souls shrivelled up like walnuts in the cold. Now they sit by reeking stoves, using the ghost of a dog-rose to cook cabbage!

Cabbage! The whole of the Low City has smelt of this delicacy all winter. It is on everyone's breath and in everyone's overcoat. It has seeped into the baize cloth of everyone's parlour. It has insinuated itself into the brickwork of every privy, coagulated in alleys, hung in unpeopled corners and conserved its virtues, waiting for the day when it might come at last to the High City. This evening, like an invisible army, it filtered by stages along the Boulevard Aussman, where it woke the caged rabbits in the bakers'back yards and caused the chained dogs to whimper with excitement; flowed about the base of the hill at Alves, investing the derelict observatory with an extraordinary new significance; and passed finally to the heights of Minnet-Saba, where it gathered in waves to begin its stealthy assault on the High Noses. On the way it informed some strange crannies: inundating for instance a little-used arm of the pleasure canal at Lowth, where its spirit infected incidentally a curious tragedy on the ice.