The Malacia Tapestry

When we were exploring an upper floor, Armida led me outside to a ledge of rock otherwise inaccessible, situated several metres above ground level. The ledge was used as a small park in which the Chabrizzis traditionally kept a few tame ancestral animals. Now only three old siderowels were left. In bygone times, these squat beasts had been employed for battle, chained together in rows with lighted fuses on their tails, to throw disorder among the enemy.

The three remaining siderowels were lumbering about, grunting; their sharp side-armour had been filed blunt, to protect them as well as their keepers from harm. Armida ran to fondle one, and it ate leaves from her hand. Initials had been carved on segments of its shell; we found one initial with a date over two hundred years old. These were among the last siderowels in Malacia. All the ancestral animals were dying out.

Inside the palace again, we crept at last to a little chapel, where the richly carved pews of the Chabrizzi faced towards an altar accommodated in a wall of limestone rock. The rock shone with moisture; a trickle of water ran down it with a permanent tinkle of sound which deepended the mystery of the chamber. Ferns grew in the rock, sacrificial candles burning nearby. There was a grand solemn painting of the Gods of Dark and Light, one horned, one benevolently bearded, with Minerva and her owl between them.

We went to the chapel window. It was set against rock. A continual splash of water rained down the panes, dripping from the limestone. From this narrow view we could observe Mantegan in the distance, where my sister and her negligent husband lived. Looking down we gazed into a servants’ court. A thin ray of sun struck down into the shadows of that dank area, picking out two figures. I clutched Armida’s arm in its tight sleeve and directed her gaze to the couple.

A man and a woman stood close in the court. Both were young, though the man was a slip of a youth and the woman fairly buxom, in apron and mob cap. We could see her face as she smiled up at him, squinting in the sunlight. His face could not be seen from our angle. He bent towards her, kissing her, and she offered no resistance; he placed one hand on her ample breast, while his other hand stole up under her skirt and apron. The familiar actions were embalmed by the sun’s rays.

‘Naughty idle servants!’ Armida said, looking at me half-mischievously and half-defiantly. ‘Why are servants always so wanton?’

I kissed her then, and played with the ribbons in her hair, letting my other hand steal under her skirt, much as the servant had done.

Armida immediately broke away, slapping my hand. I saw she was laughing and reached out for her. She moved away and I went in pursuit. Whenever I got too close, she would slap my wrist – except once when I caught her and we started kissing affectionately, with her lips gradually parting and my tongue creeping through her teeth; but then again, when matters were becoming warm elsewhere, she went skipping round the chapel.

At first it was fun. Then I thought her childish.

Tiring of the game, I sank down on one of the quilted stalls and let her sport. Above the altar were two curved folds in the rock, gleaming with moisture, which met in a V where water trickled and flashed, and a fern sent out a spray of fronds.

Now an imp had got into my lady. She was unlike her usual restrained self. She removed her clothes as she pranced, humming a tune at the same time. With a remote expression on her face, she cast away her white stockings, moving her arms and legs as if performing to a select audience – I mean, an even more select one than I provided. Very soon she peeled out of her dress. I paid close attention, only half-believing that this was intended for my benefit. One by one her undergarments came away, the bodice last of all, and there was Armida of the Hoytolas, dancing naked for a poor player, just beyond that player’s reach.

Although her body was on the slender side, nothing about Armida was less than perfectly formed. Her breasts bounced so beautifully, and her taut buttocks, to a rhythm of their own. The hair at the base of her small stomach was as dark and vibrant as that on her head. My eyes stood out like her nipples at this marvellous entertainment. What a peach of a girl! And what did she intend? I prayed that it might be the same as I did.

Finally she stopped before me, still out of my reach, holding her hands before her private parts in belated modesty. Her garments were strewn all over the floor.

‘I danced here like this once before, long, long, ago,’ she said in a meditative voice, ‘and have always longed to do so again – free of my family, free of myself. How I wish I were a wild creature!’

‘We are in a shrine to female beauty. If you turn about, you will see what I mean upon the wall.’

This I said ponderously, pointing at the V in the limestone wall and slowly rising from my seat as she turned to look.

‘The rock has delineated the fairest parts of a spectral female. The fern grows where it does out of modesty, do you see what I mean, Armida?’

By which time I placed an arm round her neck from behind, pointing with my free hand until, as I nibbled her ear, that hand was allowed to drop and circumnavigate her swelling hip, where it found its way along a curve of her V and nestled among the foliage growing there. By which time, she had turned about in my arms and our mouths were together. With the other hand now relieved of its duties about her neck, I tore off my own clothes.

Soon I kicked away my boots and breeches, and we were lying together without encumbrance on the wide prayer-bench of the Chabrizzi, who had certainly never had a better altar to worship at than the one I now clasped.

Armida’s last restraints were shed with her clothes – or so it appeared at first, for she seized with delight on what I had to offer and pressed her lips upon it, babbling to it as if it were a dolly, until I feared it would babble in its turn. And yet – even then, she would not allow what I desired. That was reserved for the man she married, she said, or she would have no value in the marriage market; such was the law of her family.

With that I had to rest content – and became content enough for the interdiction entailed the use of pleasant ingenuities to which lovers have become accustomed in our land. The world was lost, transmuted, in her delicious embraces. We enchanted each other until the sun faded from the rocks outside and the siderowels bellowed for their evening gruel. We dozed awhile. We went downstairs languidly, hand in hand through the bewildering passages, into a conflict of shadows. There were no ghosts, only changes in the air as we moved, vapours, and patches of chill or warmth or damp, to which our skins felt unusually sensitive.

Out in the front courtyard Armida’s coach was waiting. With a last amorous glance at me she ran forward, leaving me to wait in the gloom of the porch until I heard the rattle of the coach’s wheels die on the cobbles.

At that hour, my friends would be drinking in one of the inns of Stary Most. My mood was elevated; I felt no inclination to share my happiness. Instead, I walked through the city as evening thickened, determined to call on my priest of the High Religion, shaven-pate Mandaro.

Mandaro lived in a room with another priest, in one of the surviving quarters of the palace of Malacia’s founders. This edifice was the original Malacia. It had once been – and even in decrepitude still was – an enormous pile, almost a city in its own right. Most of it was dismantled, its stones, its gargoyles, its component parts pilfered to form later buildings, including the cisterns under the city and the foundations of St Marco’s itself. Of the surviving palace, not one of the original rooms remained to serve its original function in its original shape. The shifts of the poor hung from balconies where once the scarcely human ladies of Desport, our founder, had basked in the sun.

The denizens of the present, scratching a living for themselves, filled with noises the warren through which I moved. The atmosphere still whispered its linkage with the blind past.

Working my way into this slum, I climbed to the third floor and pushed Mandaro’s wooden door open. It was never locked. Mandaro was there as usual in the evening, talking to a man who rose and left with downcast eyes as I entered. The room had been partitioned down the middle, for the privacy of callers as much as for the priest; I had never seen the priest who lived in the other half of the chamber, although I had heard his deep melancholy voice raised in a chant.

Mandaro was on his balcony. He beckoned to me and I joined him. From a tiny cupboard he brought out a tiny spoonful of jam on a tiny plate, together with a glass of water, the traditional welcome of priests of the High Religion. I ate the jam slowly and drank down the yellowy water without complaint.

‘Something troubles you. Otherwise you would not have come.’

‘Don’t reproach me, father.’

‘I didn’t. I spoke a fact with which you reproached yourself. I can see that it is a pleasing trouble.’

He smiled. Mandaro was a man of early middle-age, well-built if thin. He looked hard, as if he were made of wood; something in the sharp planes of his face suggested he had been roughly carved. He grew a beard to compensate for his shaved head. The brown whiskers had a curl of grey in them, the sight of which reassured me; somehow it made him look less holy. His eyes were sharp, of an impenetrable brown rather like de Lambant’s and he directed them at you all the while.

I glanced away over his crumbling balcony, where night was closing in. The Satsuma lay below us, fitfully lighted, with its wharves and ships. Then came the Toi; a restaurant-boat floated down it, accompanied by sounds of music and a smell of cooking oil. On the far bank stood groves of ash jostling a line of ancient buildings. Beyond them, darkly, were vineyards and farther still, the Vukobans, visible as little more than a jagged line cut from pale night sky. The evening star shone. A chick-snake barked towards the Bucintoro. Singing drifted up, punctuated by laughter and voices from nearby rooms.

‘Something troubles me, and it is partly pleasing,’ I said. ‘But I feel myself as never before caught on the fringes of a web of circumstance. Those circumstances offer me advancement and a beautiful girl; they also involve me – well, with people I do not trust as I trust my friends. According to All-People there are dark things in the future. I shall gratify my senses until my carriage shatters.’

‘The wizards and magicians always offer dark things. You know that.’

‘I don’t believe him. Priests threaten dark things. What’s the difference?’

‘You don’t want a lecture on the differences between the Natural and the Higher Religions. They are opposed but allied, as evening mingles with dawn in our blood. They agree that the world was created by Satan, or the Powers of Darkness; they agree that God, or the Power of Light, is an intruder in this universe; the fundamental difference is that adherents of the Natural Religion believe that humanity should side with Satan, since God can never win; whereas we of the Higher Religion believe that God can triumph in the great battle, provided that human beings fight on his side rather than Satan’s.

‘This night seems peaceful, but fires burn under the earth …’

He was away, his imagination warmed by the drama he saw being surreptitiously enacted all about. I had heard and admired him on this theme before. While the performance was one I enjoyed, I hoped for more personal advice. Without wishing to be impolite, I could not appear one of the vacant faithful, swayed by eloquence as if I had none of my own: I remained gazing at the dark, flowing Toi. Like all priests, Mandaro could squeeze a message from a pebble, and incorporated my inactivity into his talk.

‘You see how peaceful night looks, how calm the river. Beauty itself is Satan’s most powerful illusion. How beautiful Malacia is – how often I think so as I walk its streets – yet it suffers under our ancestral curse. Everything is in conflict. Which is why we must endure two complementary but conflicting religions.’

‘But this girl, father –’

‘Beware of all things fair, my son, whether a girl or a friend. What looks to be fair may be foul under the surface. The Devil needs his traps. You should regard also your own behaviour, lest it seem fair to you but is really an excuse for foulness.’ And so on.

As I left him I reflected that he might as well have burnt a serpent on an altar as counsel me the way he did. I found my way down through the intestines of the ancient palace, until I was free of its whispering. The flavours of the river came to me, and the thought of Armida. I walked slowly back to the Street of the Wood Carvers; it was delicious to believe that Mandaro was right, and that Fate was keeping a goat-like eye on me.

The days passed. I neglected my friends and grew to understand Armida’s circumstances better.

Like all young ladies of her rank she was well guarded, and never officially allowed in the presence of men without Yolaria, her prune-faced chaperon. Fortunately, this rule was relaxed in the case of the Chabrizzi Palace, since the Chabrizzis were relations of the Hoytolas.

There was also a simple administrative difficulty which worked to our advantage. Armida had been promised a light town carriage of her own as a present for her eighteenth birthday just past; owing to a fire at the coach-builder’s, the carriage had not yet been delivered. Meanwhile, Yolaria enjoyed riding about town in the family coach, and we were able to turn her late arrivals at Chabrizzi to our pleasant advantage on more than one occasion.

Armida was surrounded by regulations. She was not allowed to read lewd authors like du Close, Bysshe Byron, or Les Amis. Before she could act in front of the zahnoscope, she had had a long lecture from her parents about consorting with the lower orders. She had little talent for acting – even acting of the limited kind required by the zahnoscope – but to escape from the confinement of her family was tonic enough.

Otto Bengtsohn and his wife were supposed to act as chaperons to their employer’s precious daughter on these occasions. Their indifference to such a task rendered it easy for us to slip away into the shadowy aisles of the Chabrizzi. There I came to know Armida Hoytola, her desires and frustrations. I was lucky to receive what I did receive; and, despite her fits of haughtiness, I found myself caught by a desire that was new to me. I longed to marry her.

She was telling me about their great country estate, Juracia, where some of the great old ancestral animals still roamed, when I realised that I would overcome all obstacles in our path to make her my wife – if she would have me.

Malacia was acknowledged throughout the civilised world to be a near-utopia. Yet it had its laws, each law designed to preserve its perfections. One such law was that nobody should marry a person of a different station in life until the necessity for it had been proved. The hard-headed and anonymous oldsters of the Council would certainly not admit love as a necessity, though they had been known to admit pregnancy on occasions. I, a common player despite some good connections, could not expect to marry Armida Hoytola, a rich merchant’s only daughter with far better connections.

Either I must take up more dignified work or … I must become an absolute dazzling success in my own chosen line, so that even the Council could not gainsay my rise through individual merit to the heights.

My art was my life; I had to shine on the boards. Which was difficult at a time when the arts in general were depressed and even an impresario like Kemperer was obliged to close down his troupe.

The mercurised play of Prince Mendicula began to assume almost as much importance to me as to Bengtsohn. I pinned many hopes upon it. By the time this state of affairs became apparent to me, I was secretly betrothed to Armida.

It happened on a day when the zahnoscope was busy capturing scenes between the Prince and the Lady Jemima. While Bonihatch and Letitia were undertaking to petrify time, Armida and I escaped, and I escorted her, swathed in a veil, to Stary Most and the Street of the Wood Carvers. For the first time, she stood in my little nook in the rooftops lending it her fragrance. There she commented on all she saw with a mixture of admiration and derision characteristic of her.

‘You are so poor, Perian! Either a barracks or a monastery would have seemed luxury compared to this garret.’ She could not resist reminding me of my pretence that I had been about to join the Army or the Church.

‘If I enlisted in either of those boring bodies, it would be from necessity. I’m here from choice. I love my attic. It’s romantic – a fit place from which to start a brilliant career. Take a look and a sniff from the back window.’

My tiny rear window, deep sunk into the crumbling wall, looked out over one of the furniture workshops, from which a rich odour of camphor wood, brought by a four-master all the way from Cathay, drifted upwards. As she tipped herself forward to peer down, Armida showed me her beautiful ankles. I was immediately upon her. She responded to my kisses. She let her clothes be torn from her, and soon we were celebrating our private version of love. Then it was she agreed that we should be secretly engaged to marry, as we lay on my narrow truckle bed, moist body to moist body.

‘Oh, how happy you make me, Armida! At least I must tell my good fortune to de Lambant. His sister is to be married soon. You must meet them – he’s a true friend and almost as witty and handsome as I.’

‘He couldn’t be, I’m certain of that. Supposing I fell in love with him instead.’

‘The mere thought is torture! But you have better sense than to prefer him. I am going to be famous.’

‘Perry, you are as over-confident as Prince Mendicula himself!’

‘Let’s leave that farrago out of our conversation. Of course I hope that Bengtsohn will be successful, and that the play will do well for us, but after all as a story it is such rubbish – banal rubbish, too.’

‘Banal?’ She looked quizzingly down her pretty nose at me. ‘I love stories about princes and princesses. How can such things be banal? And Princess Patricia is so marvellously proud when she is found out … I have a good opinion of the piece. So does my father.’

‘My father would be very scornful. The situation is as old as the hills. Man and best friend, best friend seduces friend’s wife; the deception is discovered, they fall out and become enemies. Blood is shed. Why, that sort of thing could have been written a million years ago.’

‘Yet Otto has set out the old story in a novel way, and draws a sound moral from it. Besides, I like the setting in the captured city.’

I laughed and squeezed her.

‘Nonsense, Armida, there’s no moral in the piece. Mendicula is a dupe, Patricia unkind, Gerald a false friend, Jemima just a pawn. Perhaps that represents Bengtsohn’s view of the nobility, but it makes for a poor tale. My great hope is that the astonishing technique of mercurisation will carry the charade through to success – aided, of course, by the outstanding handsomeness of fifty per cent of the players.’

She smiled. ‘You mean the fifty per cent lying here on this bed?’

‘All glorious hundred per cent of it!’

‘While you are playing with these figures – and with my figure too, if you don’t mind – may I refresh your memory on one point? Otto’s venture will come to naught if my father does not settle his dispute with the Supreme Council. Father is very ambitious, and so is feared. If he falls, then so fall all who depend on him, including his daughter.’

‘You refer to that business of the hydrogenous balloon? Balloons have sailed from Malacia before, for sport and to scare the Turk. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Nothing is going to be changed if the balloon does go up.’

‘The Council think differently. But if popular opinion is too much against them, then they may yield. Alternatively, they may strike against my father – which is why he now seeks powerful friends.’

I rolled on to my back and gazed up at the patches on the ceiling.

‘It sounds as if your father would be best advised to forget about his balloon.’

‘Father intends that the balloon should ascend; it would be an achievement. Unfortunately, the Council intends that it should not. That is a serious situation. As common usage comes between us, so it can come between my father and his life. You know what happens to those who defy the Council for too long.’

What I saw in my mind’s eye was not a corpse in the sewers but its daughter sharing my little bare garret.

‘I would defy anything for you, Armida, including all the fates in opposition. Marry me, I beg of you, and watch me excel myself.’

She would have to have a dozen horoscopes read before she could consent to that; but she did agree to a secret betrothal, and to the same sort of bond that existed between General Gerald and the fair Princess Patricia, our absurd alter egos.

Scents of sandalwood, camphor and pine mingled with patchouli and the precious aromas of Armida’s body as we forthwith celebrated our intentions.

A Balloon over the Bucintoro

When you take a stroll through our city along the banks of the River Toi, and especially along the elegant Bucintoro, where pavements are of gold, you can look north and regard verdant expanses of countryside stretching into the Vokoban Mountains, which are themselves, at least on their southern slopes, green and well-favoured.

When from any other vantage point in Malacia you gaze towards the country, you see nothing so enticing. True, there is the long, dusty road to Byzantium, while to the south-east lies the Vamonal Canal, tree-fringed for most of its course; but in general the vistas consist of undulating plain – ochre, sullen, primitive; all those things against which the idea of Malacia is most opposed. To the west lie the no less uninviting Prilipit Mountains, where the terrain is distorted and uncouth.

Among the folds of the Prilipits, even as Armida and I were luxuriously plighting our troth, gathered an Ottoman army intent upon laying waste Malacia.

There was a general alarm and mustering of arms. Not a citizen but feared for his well-being, his wife, or something he held dear. But such armies had gathered beyond our fortifications before, had been defeated, and had retired in disarray.

The Council and the general did what they deemed necessary. They paraded our own forces, they polished our cannon-balls, they set the blue and black flag of Malacia flying from every battlement, they drew a barrage across the rivers, they increased the price of fish and flour in the markets.

While these high strategies were in process, groups of citizens climbed to vantage points in the city – up rickety staircases to belfries – to espy the gaudy tents of the foe; but most of us saw it as our duty to continue living as usual, whilst paying more for loaves and sprats.

Some there were, of course, who fled the city, going by barge to Vamonal or by foot or litter to Byzantium. Others bolted themselves in houses or cellars. For myself, I feared nothing; Armida had cast a spell over my life.

All know what it is to be in love. When I opened my casement window and the breeze wafted down from a meadow outside the city, that breeze might have touched her cheek on its way to me; when I trod the street, the ground beneath my feet led somewhere to her, was trodden by her feet; when I glanced up and happened to see a bird flying in the sky, it might be that she saw it at the same instant, so that our gazes interlocked. Whenever I touched an object, it reminded me of touching her; when I ate, the action made me recall that she ate; when I spoke to anyone, I recalled what it felt like to speak to her; when I kept silent, it put me in mind of her lips, unspeaking. The world became a conspiracy of her.