The Malacia Tapestry Read online

  I could not resist saying, 'But the Turks are now decadent. The great days of the Ottoman Empire ended with the death of Suleiman. Since then, a line of weak and vicious Sultans has succeeded him. The armies are corrupt; Tvrtko himself, drawn up outside our gates, does not attack, as a commander in his position unfailingly would have done, a century or more ago.'

  'What a military strategist you are!' exclaimed Bedalar — with sincerity rather than sarcasm, for she squeezed my arm.

  'Since he's been playing General Gerald, there's been no holding him in that direction,' said Armida.

  'Or in any other direction,' said de Lambant.

  The girls laughed so prettily — we were ready to laugh at any nonsense — that their bosoms shook like fresh-boiled dumplings.

  'I just hope you're not trying to accuse me of inconstancy,' I said.

  'There's much to be said in favour of inconstancy, or at least against constancy — which, like a surly porter, drives a lot of useful intelligence from the door,' de Lambant replied.

  It was well said; yet I noted that Armida did not exactly smile over-much, as if recalling that I had tried to drive my intelligence through Letitia's door.

  We were walking by the little river Vokoban, near an old, ruined windmill which marked the limits of the fair. A flighted woman came by overhead from the direction of the city. Like many of her kind, she wore long ribbons in her hair which trailed out behind her. She was young and naked. The sight of her passing in the sunlight was pleasing. As she fluttered down to alight behind the windmill we heard the beat of her wings.

  'They're so free,' Bedalar observed. 'Can't we fly up into the mountains?'

  No sooner suggested than arranged. The flighted people kept a basket-work tower on the perimeter of the fair, where one or two persons could be flown short distances in sedans. We all climbed the tower, which creaked like an old courtesan's stays at every step. Emerging at the top, Armida and I climbed into one of the light sedans and de Lambant and Bedalar into another. Four stalwart flighted men heaved us into the air, while another four attended to our friends.

  'Oh, Perian, it feels so unsafe! Will they drop us?'

  'It's safer than my hydrogenous balloon.' The fliers had harnesses round their shoulders attached to the carriage, as well as good earnest expressions on their red faces. All the same, I had to admit that there were reasons other than affection for the grasp which Armida threw about me. Her grip prevented me from trembling.

  Our sedan was born flappingly just above the heads of the crowd. The afternoon was wearing on. The crowd was thickening, the scene at the stalls becoming more animated, the smell of spitted meats stronger. After dusk would come the gayest time, when the throngs arrived, when flares were lit and masks donned, and Eastern dancers gyrated on scented stages.

  The fair fell away behind us, wing-beat by wing-beat. Vineyards lay below, their grapes clustering in the serried bushes. We threaded our way through a grove of slender birches. Ahead lay another stretch of river, gurgling to itself as it churned over rock. Beyond were some last vineyards and the swelling early hills of the Vokobans.

  'Let's be set down here,' cried Armida, but de Lambant shouted excitedly from the other carriage, 'No, no, further on! I know a little nest ahead, free from interruptions.'

  So amid great flailing of wings, we sailed up slopes bright with camomile to a wide, mossy ledge with a cliff behind. The flighted men set us down on the ledge. They released the sedans, falling on the grass panting and sweating, and fanning themselves with curled wingtips. Soon they rose, collected their pay, and flew off slowly in the direction of the fair.

  We stood and watched them go. Guy and I embraced the girls and all four of us capered about in delight at our newly acquired solitude.

  My impulse was to pour out my love to Armida, only the occasion was one more for gaiety than solemnity. So I took her hand and we ran laughing to examine our stronghold, cached from the eyes of the world.

  Climbing up huge fragments of rock on which all manner of faces and limbs had been carved, we gained a view of the countryside over which we had been lifted.

  Malacia depended for its existence on trade and agriculture. Evidence of the latter lay before us in the vineyards, their geometrical rows wheeling towards the river. All that we could see was bathed in the sane light of afternoon. Instinctively, Armida and I clutched each other, feeling ourselves part of fruitful processes.

  Our coign of vantage also commanded a distant view of the fair-booths, the Toi, spanned by its bridges, and the city. Malacia's fortifications, towers and grand buildings lay in a haze as if it were more dream than actuality. A glint of gold came from the Bucintoro.

  Beyond the town to the right, where the ground rose again, we could even see the foothills that hid Tvrtko's encampment. Once a day Ottoman cannon bombarded the city, but it remained a halfhearted bombardment; ammunition was short. At this hour the enemy showed no sign of life.

  Above us and to one side, the rough grey slates of a mountain village showed. We could hardly see it for olive trees and a low wall of stone which ran about its perimeter, up and down ravines. That was Heyst. The people there were dark and strange — we could see one or two of them toiling barefoot among their vines with their man-lizards beside them. In Heyst they spoke their own language and were unfriendly.

  Armida and I rejoined our companions. As we disposed ourselves comfortably, Armida said, 'I've been told that some of these mountain people, who came from the wild north in days gone by, are descended from baboons. They are a younger people than we. Consequently — well, this is what my mother's old nurse told me, so it is probably just a story — but it seems that there were already so many gods in the world that the mountain people's gods could not get born. They are still pent within the rocks, here in the Vokobans.'

  'That's a typical nurse's story, Armida,' de Lambant said, kindly. 'If northern gods can't get born, then they'll be pent in the rocks up north.'

  'It's an allegory,' I said. 'If there are gods that remain unborn, they'll be pent within us, not in mere rocks.'

  Armida showed her spirit as she rounded on us both.

  'Oh, you're so patronizing, you men! You always think you know best. If a god is pent in rock, could he not conceivably move in it, a thousand kilometres if necessary, underground. As for "mere rocks", Professor de Chirolo, what makes you think people are greater than rocks? Mere rocks throw out stranger things than men do, since men themselves were thrown from rocks when the world began.'

  'What? What's that?' I asked, laughing. 'We have developed from the family of bipedal ancestral animals,' but she ignored me, rushing on with her talk.

  'Only last year — I heard this reliably from a scholar friend of my father's — a new sort of crab was born from the rocks on the coasts of Lystra. It exists now in hundreds for all to see. It climbs trees and signals to its friends with a claw especially enlarged for that purpose.'

  De Lambant laughed. 'That's nothing new in the way of crabs. Those fellows have been signalling to their friends and enemies ever since the world began. Much inconclusive communication must have passed between them by now.

  'No, my dear Armida, we require a genuinely new kind of crab — a species that will crow like a cockerel, yield milk every Monday of the month, and raise its carapace when requested to reveal pearls and jewels underneath. Or else an enlarged, tame land-crab the size of that boulder but with a better turn of speed, which could be trained to gallop like a military stallion. Think what a line of such animals could do against the Ottoman! Their shells would be painted in warlike colours.'

  It was shameful to see how the eyes of the girls twinkled when de Lambant showed off. I was forced to interrupt his monologue.

  'That's not enough. Our new crab would have to be amphibious. Then it could swim over rivers, and carry us across the seas to new and undiscovered lands, lands of legend, Leopandis, Lemuria, Mu, Hassh, Tashmana, Atlantis, Dis, and Samarind.'

  'And not only acros
s the seas but under them, ploughing across deep and murky bottoms where time solidifies among cities of coral and forests of weed. We could climb inside the crab's carapace and be secure from the waters outside.'

  'And under water, the shell would become transparent as crystal, so that we could see the lairs of ancient sea monsters, where they still live out their days, encumbered by age and barnacles while they grow as civilized as men.'

  The girls, carried away by fancies no less idiotic than our crabs, joined in the nonsense.

  'I'd grow ivy and brilliant creepers all over my crab, until it looked like a fantastic moving garden, and then it would be famous and everyone would know its name, which would be — er —' That was Bedalar.

  'My crab would have musical claws that played as it ran along. Such irresistible tunes! All the other crabs — even yours, Bedalar — would be forced to stop what they were doing and scuttle after it.' That was my Armida.

  'Girls, girls,' de Lambant scolded, sniggering a little. 'You take up the silly game so violently that you'll batter your brains out on your imaginations!'

  Then we all laughed, and sat down together beneath a wide stone plinth let into the rock, on which was written a legend in the Old Language. The girls asked me to read it; with some effort I did so, for my father had taught me the tongue as a boy.

  'This stone has a mocking voice,' I said. 'It bears a verse dedicated to a friend who has passed over into the shades. The date shows that it was written to a defunct Phalander some eleven millennia ago, but the subject is a perennial one. It goes something like this…'

  I hesitated, then spoke.

  'Phalander, your virtues were never too legion:

  Your friendship was feigning, your loving mere folly,

  Your lies evergreen as the prickle-tongued holly.

  Why do we recall you — now snatched to Death's region —

  As one who seduced us to thinking life jolly?'

  Armida laughed, hand raised to her pretty mouth. 'It is written by someone high-born because it's so witty.'

  'I find it touching,' said Bedalar.

  'It doesn't quite make sense. Fortunately verse doesn't rely solely on sense for its impact, any more than love,' said de Lambant.

  Laughing exaggeratedly, he jumped up and turned to the plinth. Swinging it open, he drew from behind it a warm and highly spiced dish, ideal for our refreshment, and set it in our midst. Sometimes gods and men see eye to eye; then stomach and heart are in accord. Saffron rice-grains staunched with sultanas and dates and garlic and little fish, their mouths stuffed with chillies, lay piled in invitation. With a whoop, I felt deeper into the warm rock, bringing out a dish of vegetables and red wine in green clay bottles.

  'All we need now is a quartet of Master Bledlore's glasses,' I said as I set the bottles down. 'Here's a meal fit for a king, or for Prince Mendicula at least. Well, a snack, let's say, if not a full meal. It certainly seduces me into thinking life is most jolly.'

  I dipped my fingers down into the rice.

  We lay against one another and ate the welcome food. Below us, a huntsman appeared, walking quietly among small oaks. Once we caught a glimpse of the yellow hauberk or chick-snake he stalked. We heard neither scuffle nor cry, so presumed that the ancestral escaped its fate.

  'This is surely decadent,' de Lambant said, simultaneously taking up the bottle and our earlier topic of conversation. 'A feast unearned. It makes me feel gorgeously corrupt. A sylvan feast unearned. All we need is music. You didn't have the forethought to steal a flute from the flute-seller, did you, de Chirolo?'

  'I'm not that decadent.'

  'Or that far-sighted.'

  'Enough of your unpleasantries.'

  It was Bedalar who spoke next, in a dreamy voice.

  'Somebody told me that Satan has decided to close the world down, and the magicians have agreed. What would happen wouldn't be unpleasant at all, but just ordinary life going on more and more slowly until it stopped absolutely.'

  'Like a clock stopping,' Armida suggested.

  'More like a tapestry,' Bedalar said. 'I mean, one day like today, things might run down and never move again, so that we and everything would hang there like a tapestry in the air for ever more.'

  'Until the celestial moths got at us,' de Lambant said, giggling.

  'That's a decadent idea,' I said. 'The whole notion of the end of everything is decadent.'

  Yet I was struck by Bedalar's vision of becoming a tapestry — presumably for the edification of the gods, who could then inspect us without interference. Looking across the countryside to the city, golden in afternoon sun, I felt a suspended quality in the air. Puffs of smoke, round and white, were dispersing slowly over the Prilipits, signifying another bombardment of Malacia; but no sound reached us in our haven; we might ourselves have been gazing at a tapestry spread for our delight as we ate.

  'Things can't be decadent,' Armida said. 'Decadence is a human quality. Doesn't it mean something like physical or moral decay?'

  'I'm not sure what it does mean, but that needn't stop us arguing about it, my love. We've called this a decadent age, although you disagreed, yet there is physical or moral decay at any time, isn't there? Take our friends the Princess Patricia and General Gerald. They lived in a heroic age of great military achievement. Yet her behaviour was decadent — not just in being unfaithful, which admittedly happens fairly often, but in being impenitent afterwards, making a virtue of what she did, and practising a deceit that she pretended was no deceit.'

  'You have her all wrong, Perian. Patricia pretends nothing. She is deceived by your General as greatly as Mendicula is. It is Gerald who plays the deceiver, deceiving even Jemima whom he professes to love.'

  'Well, then his behaviour is decadent. We agree on that?'

  'Let's agree about the beautiful taste of the fish,' Bedalar said. 'I tire a little of hearing about your Mendicula play.'

  'Agreed entirely about both fish and play,' de Lambant said, brushing rice from his hose. 'Let's agree that this is a comfortable age, shall we? No major questions struggling for answer, no cold winds howling in from the dim religious north, and not too many headless corpses in the sewers. I was made for this age and it for me.'

  'You speak lightly but you are not correct,' Armida said. 'This is what Bedalar and I were talking about indirectly before we stopped to watch the marionettes.

  'There are always wars of some kind, even when heads are not literally blown off. And even when not between races and nations, then between households, between classes, between ages — heavens, Guy, between sexes — and between one side of a person's nature and the other. Those wars could almost be said to constitute life.

  'As for there being no major questions struggling for answer, that can never be the case as long as living creatures move about the world's stage. Even the marionettes at the fair raised questions in my breast I could not answer.'

  'Such as why and how is Piebald Pete such a poor performer,' laughed de Lambant.

  'Such as why was I moved by Pete's trumpery dolls. They neither imitate nor parody real people; they are just wooden shapes, worked to amuse us. Yet I was concerned. I cheered first for Banker Man and then for Robber Man. A sort of magic was at work. If so, was the artistry the puppeteer's? Or was it mine, in that my imagination stirred despite myself and part of me became Robber Man and Banker Man?

  'Why do I weep over characters in a play or book, who have no more flesh and blood than the thirty characters of the printed language?'

  'Enough, enough,' cried de Lambant. 'I spoke foolishly. You speak copiously.' He knelt beside Armida, placing his clasped hands in her lap.

  She smiled at his clowning and placed a hand — I thought contemptuously — on his head, while proceeding to demolish his one remaining point.

  'As for your absurd idea about no religious winds blowing, don't we go about in a storm of beliefs? What has our talk been but of contrasting beliefs and disbeliefs?'

  'It was mere banter, mistre
ss, mere banter! Mercy, I pray.'

  'Banter often conceals deep underlying beliefs. My father taught me that.'

  Bedalar took my hand and said, 'Although we went to the same academy, Armida is much cleverer than I. Why, I don't think I have any beliefs at all in my head.'

  'I liked your speculation about the tapestry. No doubt you have other nice things up there,' I said.

  'Oh, but the tapestry idea was put there by someone else.'

  We heard music far off, of a spirited and involved kind. It drifted down the mountainside like a herbal scent. We all turned our heads except de Lambant, who was busy making up to Armida.

  'Even I, a fool of love, recognize that there are major questions unanswered and probably unanswerable. The nature of Time, for instance. Before we met up with you two angels, my handsome friend here — Perian de Chirolo, no less — and I visited Giovanni Bledlore, the glass-miniaturist.

  'Bledlore works obsessively for a pittance, barely supporting himself and his old wife. Why does he do it? My theory is that he feels Time — and Dust, the advance patrol of Time — as well as its rearguard — to be against him. So he builds tiny monuments to himself in the only way he knows, much like the coral insect whose anonymous life creates islands. Time makes Master Bledlore secrete Art. What algebraist ever found a harsher formula than that?

  'Now — suppose that Bledlore had all the time in the world. Suppose that a magician gave him a magic potion so that he could live for ever. I'll wager that he would not then lift his hands to incise a single goblet! Nobody would know the abilities in him. Time is one of those big questions, hanging at our door like an unsettled bill.'

  The music was nearer, coming and going about the mountainside as intricately as its own measure. Its effect on me was measureless. I jumped up and took Armida's hand.

  'Whoever the rogue is playing, he has Time where he wants it,' I said. 'We've eaten and talked. Armida, it may be Devil-Jaw Man himself at the strings, but I must dance with you.'