Читать книгу The Malacia Tapestry - Brian Aldiss - Страница 9

Smoke was drifting through my high window, obscuring the light.

Something was added to the usual aromas of Stary Most. Among the flavours of fresh-cut timber, spices, cooking, gutters, and the incense from the corner wizard, Throat Dark, floated the smell of wood-smoke. Perhaps the sawdust-seller had set fire to his load again.

Going to my casement, I looked down into the street, which was more crowded than usual for this hour of day. The gongfermors and their carts had disappeared, but the Street of the Wood Carvers was jostling with early traffic, including among its habitual denizens a number of porters, beggars, and general hangers-on; they were doing their best either to impede or to further the progress of six burly orientals, all wearing turbans, all accompanied by lizard-boys bearing canopies over them – the latter intended as much to provide distinction as shade, since the summer sun had little force as yet.

The smoke was rising from the sweepings of an ash-merchant, busily burning the street’s rubbish. One good noseful of it and I withdrew my head.

The orientals had probably disembarked from a trireme newly arrived. From my attic, between roofs, its furled sails could be glimpsed alongside the Satsuma, only a couple of alleys distant.

I pulled on my blue ankle-boots, made from genuine marshbags skin; the black pair was in pawn and likely to remain so for a while. Then I went to greet the day.

As I went down the creaking stair, I met my friend de Lambant climbing up to meet me, his head lowered as if compulsively counting the steps. We greeted each other.

‘Have you eaten, Perian?’

‘Why, I’ve been up for hours doing nothing else,’ I said, as we made our way down. ‘A veritable banquet at Truna’s, with pigeon pie merely one of the attractions.’

‘Have you eaten, Perian?’

‘Today not, if you refuse to believe in pigeon pie. And you?’

‘I found a muffin lying idle on a baker’s tray as I made my way here.’

‘There’s a ship in. Shall we have a look at it on our way to Kemperer’s?’

‘If you think it holds any advantage. My horoscope isn’t profitable today. There’s women in it, but not just yet apparently. Saturn is proving difficult, while all the entrails are against me.’

‘I’m too hard-up even to get my amulet blessed by Throat Dark.’

‘It’s marvellous not be troubled by money.’

We strolled along in good humour. His doublet, I thought, was not a shade of green to be greatly excited about; it made him look too much the player. Yet Guy de Lambant was a handsome fellow enough. He had a dark, quick eye and eyebrows as sharp and witty as his tongue could be. He was sturdily built, and walked with quite a swagger when he remembered to do so. As an actor he was effective, it had to be admitted, although he lacked my dedication. His character was all one could wish for in a friend: amusing, idle, vain and dissolute, ready for any mischief. The two of us were always cheerful when together, as many ladies of Malacia would vouch.

‘Kemperer might give us a breakfast snack, even if there’s no work.’

‘That depends on his temper,’ de Lambant said. ‘And that depends on La Singla and how she has been behaving herself.’

To which I made no answer. There was some slight jealousy between us concerning Kemperer’s wife. Pozzi Kemperer was the great impresario, one of the best in Malacia. Both de Lambant and I had been in his company for the better part of two years; our present lack of employment was nothing new.

On the quayside, a swarm of men were in action, mostly working bare-chested and barefoot, heaving on ropes, tugging winches, hauling boxes. The trireme was being unloaded. Various onlookers were delighted to inform us that the vessel had come up the River Toi from Six Lagoons, trading from the West. The optimists thought it might carry statuary, the pessimists that it might bring plague.

As we arrived, customs officials in tricorne-hats were marching off the vessel. They would have been searching for forbidden goods, in particular any new thing which might upset the mellow flow of existence in Malacia; although I could only approve their mission, they were a poor, mothy collection, despite their hats and uniforms, one man limping, one half-blind, and a third, judging by appearances, lame, blind and drunk into the bargain.

Guy and I had watched such scenes since we were children. Boats arriving from the East were a better spectacle than those from the West, since they often carried exotic animals and black female slaves. As I was turning away, not unprompted by the rumbling of my stomach, I noted a strange old figure hopping up and down on the deck of the trireme.

His body was cut into pieces by the yards, but in a moment he turned and came down the gang-plank, carrying a box under one arm. He was stooped and white of hair, while something about his dress suggested to me that he was a foreigner – though he was not one of the mariners; indeed, I believed I had seen him about Malacia before. He wore a tattered fur jacket, despite the heat of the day. What took me was the mixture of delight and caution on his whiskery countenance; I tried setting my face in the same expression. He made off smartly into Stary Most and was lost to sight. The city brimmed with crazy characters.

Several carriages were drawn up along the Satsuma. As de Lambant and I made off we were hailed from one of them. The carriage door opened, and there was my sister Katarina, smiling a sweet smile of welcome.

We embraced each other warmly. Her carriage was one of the shabbiest there, the Mantegan arms peeling on the coachwork. She had married into a ruined family; yet she herself was as neat as ever, her long, dark hair pinned severely back, the contours of her face soft.

‘You’re both looking very idle,’ she said.

‘That’s part nature, part artifice,’ said de Lambant. ‘Our brains are quite active – or mine is. I can’t speak for your poor brother.’

‘My stomach’s active. What brings you here, Katarina?’

She smiled in a sad fashion and gazed down at the cobblestones.

‘Idleness also, you might say. I came to see the captain of the vessel to find out if there was word from Volpato, but he has no letters for me.’

Volpato was her husband – more often absent than present and, when present, generally withdrawn. Both de Lambant and I made consoling noises.

‘There will be another ship soon.’ I said.

‘My soothsayer misled me. So I’m going to the cathedral to pray. Will you join me?’

‘Our Maker this morning is Kemperer, sweet sister,’ I said. ‘And he will make us or break us. Go and act as our Minerva. I’ll come and visit you at the castle soon.’

I said it lightly meaning to reassure her.

She returned me a concerned look. ‘Don’t forget, then. I went to see Father last evening and played chess with him.’

‘I wonder he had time for chess, burrowing among his old tomes! A Disquisition on the Convergences – or is it Congruities or Divergencies? – for I never seem to remember – Between the High Religion and the Natural Religion and Mithraism and the Bishop’s Nostrils!’

‘Don’t make fun of your father, Perian,’ Katarina said gently, as she climbed back into her carriage, ‘His work is quite important.’

I spread my hands eloquently, tilting my head to one side to show pity and resignation.

‘I love the old boy, I know his work is important. I’m just tired of being lectured by him.’

As de Lambant and I walked along the quay in the direction of the Bucintoro, he said, ‘Your sister in her dove-grey dress – really quite fetching in a sober way … I must visit her in her lonely castle one of these fine evenings, though you are disinclined to do so. Her husband similarly, it appears.’

‘Keep your filthy thoughts off my sister.’ We talked instead about de Lambant’s sister Smarana, whose wedding day, determined by a useful conjunction of constellations, was little more than five weeks away. The thought of three days of family celebration cheered us, not least because the two families involved, the de Lambants and the Orinis, had engaged Kemperer’s company to play on the second day. We should have work then, at least.

‘We’ll perform such a comedy as all will remember ever after. I’m even prepared to fall down the stairs again for the sake of an extra laugh.’

He dug me in the ribs. ‘Pray that we eat before that date, or I can see us treading the boards in the Shadow World. Here’s the market – let’s run different ways!’

The fruit market stood at the end of the Stary Most district. At this time of morning it was crammed with customers and buzzing with argument, gossip, and wasps the size of thumbs. De Lambant and I slipped among the stalls at a trot, bouncing off customers, swerving round posts, to arrive together at the other end laughing, with a good muster of peaches and apricots between us.

‘A day’s work in itself,’ de Lambant said, as we munched. ‘Why bother to go to Kemperer’s? He has nothing for us. Let’s make for Truna’s and drink. Portinari will probably be there.’

‘Oh, let’s go and see the old boy anyway, show him we’re alive and thin for want of parts.’

He struck me in the chest. ‘I don’t want for parts. Speak for yourself.’

‘I certainly wouldn’t want to speak for what is doubtless unspeakable. How the women put up with those digusting parts of yours is beyond credit.’

At the corner of a certain scrivener’s stair stood an ancient magician called All-People. All-People stood at the scrivener’s stair whenever the omens were propitious, and had done so since the days when I was taken to market on piggy-back. His face was as caprine as that of the billy goat tethered to the post beside him, his eyes as yellow, his chin as hairy. On his iron altar a dried snake burned, the elements sprinkled on it giving off that typical whiff of the Natural Religion which my priest, Mandaro, referred to contemptuously as ‘the stench of Malacia’.

Standing in the shade of the scrivener’s porch consulting All-People was a stooped man in a fur jacket. Something in his stance, or the emphatic way he clutched a box under his arm, caught my attention. He looked as if he was about to make off faster than his legs could carry him. Always watching for gestures to copy, I recognised him immediately as the man who had come smartly off the trireme.

Several people stood about waiting to consult All-People. As we were passing them, the magician threw something into the hot ash of his altar, so that it momentarily burnt bright yellow. My attention caught by the flame, I was trapped also by All-People’s amber gaze. He raised an arm and beckoned me with a finger, red and twisted as an entrail.

I nudged de Lambant. ‘He wants you.’

He nudged me harder. ‘It’s you, young hero. Forward for your fate!’

As I stepped towards the altar, its pungent perfumes caught me in the throat, so that I coughed and scarcely heard All-People’s single declaration to me: ‘If you stand still enough, you can act effectively.’

‘Thanks, sire,’ I said, and turned after de Lambant, who was already hurrying on. I had not a denario to give, though advice carries a high value in Malacia.

‘Guy, what do you think that means, if anything, “Stand still, act effectively”? Typical warning against change, I suppose. How I do hate both religions.’

He bit deeply into his peach, letting it slobber luxuriously down his chin, and said in an affected scholarly voice, ‘Highly typical of the misoneism of our age, my dear de Chirolo – one of the perils of living in a gerontocracy, to my mind … No, you turnip, you know well what the old goat’s on about. He’s a better critic of the drama than you suspect, and hopes by his advice to cure you of your habit of prancing about the stage stealing the limelight.’

We were falling into a scuffle when my sleeve was clutched. I turned, ready for pickpockets, and there stood the old man with the fur jacket and the box. He was panting, his mouth open, so that I had a view of his broken teeth and chops; yet his general expression was alert and helped by blue eyes, which is a colour rarely met with in Malacia.

‘Forgive me, gentlemen, for the intrusion. You are young Perian de Chirolo, I believe?’

He spoke with an accent of some sort. I admitted my identity and presumed that he had possibly derived some enjoyment from my performances.

‘I’m not, young sir, a giant one for performances, although it occurs I have myself written a play, which –’

‘In that case, sir, whatever your name is, I can be of no help. I’m a player, not an impresario, so?’

‘Excuse me, I was not about to ask for favours but to offer one.’ He pulled the jacket about him with dignity, cuddling his box for greater comfort. ‘My name, young sir, is called Otto Bengtsohn. I am not from Malacia but from Tolkhorm at the north, from which particular adversities what afflict the poor and make their lives a curse have drove me since some years. My belief is that only the poor will help the poor. Accordingly, I wish for to offer you work, if you are free.’

‘Work? What kind of work?’

His expression became very severe; he was suddenly a different man. He regarded me as if he believed himself to have made a mistake.

‘Your kind of work, of course. Playing.’ His lips came together as if stitched. ‘If you are free, I offer you work with my zahnoscope.’

Looking down on him, I formulated the resolve, not for the first time, never to become old.

‘Have you work also for my good friend here, Guy de Lambant, almost as famous, almost as young, almost as poor, almost as skillful as I, old Bengtsohn from Tolkhorm?’

And de Lambant asked, ‘Do the poor help only one poor or two poor?’

To him the old man said, ‘I can afford only one poor for my modest design. All-People, as well as my personal astrologer, indicated that the one should be Master Perian de Chirolo, according to the presentiments.’

I asked what on earth his zahnoscope was. Was it a theatre?

‘I have no theatre, Master.’ His voice became confidential. Picking at one of my buttons for security, he edged his way between de Lambant and me. ‘I do not wish talking in the street. I have enemies and the State has eyes. Come at my miserable place and see for yourself what thing I am offering. It is something more than of the moment passing, that I will say. I stay not far from here, on the other side of St Marco’s, into a court off Exhibition Street, at the Sign of the Dark Eye. Come and see, conform to the forecasts.’

A gilded berlin, lumbering too close, gave me the chance to move away from him without forfeiting my button.

‘Go back to your dark eye and your dark court, my venerable friend. We have other business, nothing to do with you or the stars.’

He stood there with his box gripped firmly under his arm, his mouth stitched again, his face blank. No disappointment or anger. Just a disconcerting look as if he had me summed in a neat ledger kept in his head. He was indifferent to the people who jostled past him, going this way and that.

‘You ought to see what he has to offer. Never miss a chance for advancement, de Chirolo,’ said de Lambant, as we went on our way. ‘He’s bedraggled enough to be a wealthy miser. Perhaps he came away from Tolkhorm with the city treasure.’

I imitated the old man’s Northern accent. ‘“I have enemies and the State has eyes …” He’s probably a Progressive or something equally shady. I’m a fair judge of character, Guy. Take it from me that that old eccentric has nothing to offer except a certain scarcity value.’

‘You could be right.’

‘I’ve never heard you concede that before.’

He spat a peach-stone into the gutter. ‘I’m a pretty fair judge of character too, and my judgment is that Pozzi Kemperer will offer us nothing but the point of his buckskin boots if we manifest our faces at his house this morning. I’ll keep to my original intention and go to Truna’s. Portinari should be there, if his father spares him. And Caylus, if the bulls have spared him. I grow increasingly friendly with Caylus, bless me. Come with me.’

‘You agreed to come to Kemperer’s.’

He pulled an impudent face. ‘Now I disagree. I know you only want to see Kemperer’s little wife. She favours you more than me, being a myopic little hussy. We’ll see each other at Truna’s this evening probably.’

‘What has Caylus to offer so suddenly?’ Caylus Nortolini was a lordly young man with numerous sword-wounds and maidenheads to his credit; his scornful airs were not to everyone’s taste.

Assuming a cringing air, holding out one paw like a beggar, de Lambant said, ‘Caylus is always in funds and generous with them. He likes to impress, and I’m very impressionable …’ The paw turned to a claw and the voice altered. ‘My impression is that his sister, Bedalar, is extremely beautiful and generous. I met her with Caylus at the Arena, where the appearance of the lady inflamed my heart and much else besides.’

Then he was off, assuming what was intended for a lecherous gait.

He cut through the cloisters of the Visitors’ Palace while I made for the Fragrant Quarter, where our worthy impresario lived. Here, throughout the palmier centuries of Byzantium, spice ships had sailed in to the end of the Vamonal Canal and off-loaded their aromatic goods into tall warehouses. The trade was less brisk nowadays, and several warehouses had been converted into dwelling-houses. The street was quiet. Two flighted people swooped overhead playing flutes.

A faint aroma of cardamom and cloves lingered in the air like memory as I presented myself at Pozzi Kemperer’s courtyard gate. There was always some difficulty about gaining entrance. I was admitted past snarling dogs, broken carriages, and bits of statuary. In a cage in almost permanent shadow sat Albert, a melancholy ape-sloth brought long ago from the New World. Albert had once been a favoured household pet but was sentenced to this shady exile – so the players said – on the day that, surprising Pozzi naked in the arms of a Junoesque prima donna, he had sunk his teeth into his master’s buttocks in an irrepressible expression of animal envy. Now he ate with the dogs. The titbits of the table were gone for ever. Kemperer was not a forgiving man. Nor were his buttocks quick to heal.

My timing was faultless. Coffee still steamed on the breakfast table. The chairs had been pushed back and Kemperer and his wife were through the curtains on the far side of the room, taking a snatch of rehearsal. For a moment I stood in the gloom, while their figures were outlined sharply by sun shining through tall windows at the other end of the apartment – a light that in its clarity matched La Singla’s beautiful voice.

Neither saw me, so preoccupied were they. She was in another world, his eyes were on her. As I moved towards them I gathered from the table thin slices of cheese and smoked ham where they lay curled on patterned plates, cradling them into a still-warm bread roll garnered from its nest in a wicker basket. I tucked this snack inside my shirt for safety.

La Singla began to expand her voice. She looked every inch a queen, she was a queen, as Kemperer conducted with prompt book in hand. He was a thin man, often gawky in his movements, yet in rapport with his wife so graceful and involved that it would be difficult to determine which inspired the other.

Now her regal mouth cried of damnation. She was dressed still in deshabillé, with flimsy slippers on her feet and her golden hair trailing about her neck, knotted carelessly with a white ribbon. Good and ample though her figure was, it held something of the stockiness of the generations of Malacian peasants from which she had sprung (at least according to one account of her origins). Yet it also radiated majesty as she ranted to a dying lover on a battlefield long ago.

‘“Oh, I will be revenged for your lost life, Padraic, never fear! Far worse than enemies, friends it was who brought your downfall. This is not war but treachery, and I will root it out – for am I not come of a great line of warriors, of generals, admirals, high-mettled princes? My remotest forebears lived in the old stone towns of Sasqui-Halaa, and from them rode out to vanquish those half-human armies of Shain and Thraist, a million years ago –”’

‘No, my thrush. “A million years ago …”’

‘That’s what I said, “A million years ago, from out –”’

‘No, no my dear, confound it, listen “a mill-i-ion years ago …”, or else you break the rhythm.’ He offered her some yellow teeth which achieved at one glint both of wolfishness and supplication.

‘“A million years ago, from out the tepid prehistoric jungles swarming. So shall the armies of my hate –”’

She noticed me by the curtain and became La Singla again. The transformation was sudden. Her face broadened as she smiled in sheer good nature. Maria, La Singla, was about my age. She had good teeth, good eyes, and a good brow; but it was her good nature I most loved. Kemperer, furious at the interruption, snarled at me.

‘How dare you sneak into a gentleman’s house, you puppy, without being announced? Why is my privacy always invaded by rogues, relations, and renegade mummers? I’ve but to call one of my men –’

‘Darling Pozzi-wozzy,’ remonstrated La Singla.

‘Hold your tongue, you minx, or you’ll get a cudgelling too!’ Such abrupt turns of mood caused us to fear him and ape him behind his back.

‘How could I not be drawn in at the sound of that divine tragedy of Padraic and Heda?’ I asked, assuming the role of diplomat.

‘There’s no work for you today, as you well know. You flounce in here –’

‘I don’t flounce. You mistake me for Gersaint.’

‘You sneak in here –’

‘Maestro, allow me to hear more of the Padraic tragedy. I never weary of it.’

‘I weary of you. My little thrush Maria is to give a recitation before the joust at the Festival of the Buglewing, that’s all. I merely coax her, coax her, coax, as fox coaxes fowl, to smooth the ragged edges of her diction.’

‘I’d never dare to make an appearance without your coaxing, my good spouse,’ piped the fox’s wife, coming so near the fox that she could peep over his dandruffy shoulder at me.

Mollified, he tickled her chin.

‘Well, well, well, I must powder my wig and get down to the jousting field to see that our box is properly constructed. Do it yourself or it’ll never get done … Attention to detail, the mark of a man of genius … True artist never spurns the practical … Reality the common clay of fantasy … “A million years ago, from the tepid prehistoric jungles swarming …” A bold line, if not mouthed to death.’

As he chattered in a way I knew well, Kemperer was whisking about the room with La Singla and a man-servant in pursuit, preparing to venture out, I took the opportunity to pull my provisions from their hiding-place and have a bite.

When he had his wig in place and the servant was helping him struggle into his coat, Kemperer glanced suspiciously at me and said, ‘You understand what I say, de Chirolo? You shall play Albrizzi at the Lambant-Orini marriage ceremonies, but, while Byzantium is in such a bad way, engagements are few and far between, so it’s no good your hanging about my doors hoping for favours.’

‘Then I’ll stay and coax La Singla in her part as Heda,’ I said, taking up his prompt book where it lay open on a sofa.

He flew into a tiny rage, snatching the book from me. ‘You’ll coax her in none of her parts. Show her impeccable respect and that’s enough. You young nincompoops, think yourselves bucks, trying to spoil the peace of mind of my dear wife! You’ll come with me. I’m not leaving you loose in my house.’

Drawing myself up, I said, ‘I shall be happy to accompany you, Maestro, since to be seen walking with you can but increase my reputation – provided I understand correctly that you cast no slur on my unsullied regard for La Singla, the great actress of our day.’

Mollified, but still given to the odd mutter, he seized my arm before I could elaborate farewells of his wife, and led me across the courtyard – glancing neither right nor left, not even to take in Albert, who set up a forlorn chattering at the sight of his master.

When the gate closed behind us, and we stood in the street, I asked him which way he was going.

‘Which way are you going, de Chirolo?’ He always had a suspicious nature.

I pointed hopefully north towards St. Braggart’s, thinking that he would have to turn south to get to the Arena, where the jousts were held in time of festival.

‘I go the other way,’ he said, ‘and so must deprive myself of your company. What a loss, dear, dear! Remember now – nothing happening until Albrizzi, unless I have you sent for. Don’t hang about. And don’t imagine I like an idle season any more than you do, but in the summer the grand families go away to the country. Besides, there’s a confounded Ottoman army marching about somewhere near Malacia, and that’s always bad for theatre. Anything’s bad for the theatre.’

‘I look forward to our next meeting,’ I said.

We bowed to each other.

He stood where he was, feet planted firm on the ground, arms folded, watching me walk to the corner and turn it. As I turned, I glanced back to see him still observing me. He waved a mocking farewell, dismissing me with every bone in his skeletal wrist. Once round the corner, I hid behind the pillars of the first doorway I came to, and there I waited, peeping out to see what happened. As I expected, Kemperer appeared round the corner himself. Looking foxy, he scanned the street. When he had made sure it was clear, he muttered to himself and disappeared again.

Giving him time to get well away, I retraced my steps, to present myself once more at his gate. I rang the bell, and was soon admitted into the sunny presence of La Singla.

Since I left her a few minutes before, she had thrown a robe of blue silk over her flowing night garments, but could not be said to be any more dressed than before. Her hair still lay on her shoulders, golden. Ribbons fluttered about her person as she moved.

She sat at the table, daintily holding a coffee cup to her lips.

‘Remember, I must show you my impeccable respect,’ I told her.

‘And much else besides, I expect,’ she murmured, glancing down at the white cloth on the table, thus giving me the advantage of her long lashes.

Bounding forward, I knelt beside her chair and kissed her hand. She bade me rise. I crushed her to me, until I felt the cushioning of her generous breasts doing its worst against a mixture of ham, and cheese and bread.

‘Dammit, my tunic!’ I cried, and snatched the mess from its hiding-place.

She burst into the prettiest and best-rehearsed laughter you ever heard.

‘You must remove your shirt, dear Perry. Come into my boudoir.’

As we trotted into her fragrant room, I said, laughing in high humour, ‘You see how famished a poor actor can be that he sneaks food from the table of the woman he admires most in the world! You discover ham in my tunic – what may not be concealed in my breeches …?’

‘Whatever is there, it shall not take me by surprise.’ Matching action to words, she put her hands behind her back and started to tug at the laces which held her dress.

In another moment, the two of us were one, rolling in delight, naked upon her unmade couch. Her kisses were hot and thirsty, her body gloriously solid, while she had, as the orientals say, a little moon-shaped fishpool, into which I launched my barque until the waters grew altogether too delighfully stormy for sense. After which, rapturously shipwrecked, we lay about in the bed and I gazed upon her soft and verdant shores.

‘… “the torrid prehistoric jungles swarming …”’ I misquoted.

She kissed me juicily until my barque ran up its sail again. As I reached for her, she wagged her finger at me in slow admonition.

‘The secret of any happiness is never to have sufficient. Neither the rich nor the evolutionaries recognise that profound truth. We have enjoyed enough for both of us, provided the future promises more. My husband can’t be trusted to stay away for any length of time. He is insanely suspicious, poor dear, and takes me for a perfect harlot.’

‘So you are perfect,’ I declared, reaching for the scrumptious mounds of her breasts, but she was away and slipping into her shift.

‘Perfect, maybe, but not a harlot. In truth, Perian – though you’d never comprehend this, for you are a creature of your lusts – I am far more affectionate than promiscuous.’

‘You’re lovely as you are.’

When we were dressed, she gave me a glass of melon juice and a delicious cut of cold quitain. As I was eating, I asked her, ‘Do you know someone called Bengtsohn? – an old man with blue eyes, a foreigner, who says he has enemies everywhere. He comes from Tolkhorm, and has written a play.’

She was getting restless. ‘Pozzi has used him to paint scenery. He was a good worker but I think he’s a Progressive.’

‘He offered me work with his zahnoscope. What’s a zahnoscope?’

‘How you do talk! Pray eat up and permit me to let you out of the side door, or Pozzi will come back and fall into such a frenzy of jealousy that we shall have no peace for weeks on end.’

‘I wanted to talk to you …’

‘I know what you wanted.’ I picked up my drumstick and made off obediently. There was no fault in this fine girl, and I was anxious to please her. Her main interests were bed and the play which, I supposed, was the reason she was always so sweet-tempered. It seemed no more than just that Kemperer should pay tax in kind on such a precious possession.

In the streets, my elation began to wear almost as thin as my clothes. I had nothing, and was at a loss. My father was no support; I could not sponge off my sister. I could go to a tavern but, without a single denario to my name, could hardly expect my friends to welcome me with open purse. Most of them were in similar straits, except Caylus.

For want of better amusement I followed various citizens, studying their walks and expressions, until I reached St Marco’s Square. The usual morning market-stalls were set up, with the usual crowds of country men and women in attendance, their horses and mules tethered along the shaded side of Mount Street.

About the edges of the great square, clustering particularly under the colonnade of the Old Custom House, were booths for less serious-minded personages and children, where one might view two-headed calves, dioramas of ancient time, animated human skeletons, oriental jugglers, live ancestral animals, snake-charmers from Baghdad, fortune-tellers, marionettes, gaudy magic-lantern shows, and performing shaggy-tusks no bigger than dogs.

How I had hung about those enchanted booths with my sister Katarina as a child. The magic-lantern shows, with their panoramas of shipwreck, noble life and majestic scenery, had been our especial delight. Here they still were, unchanged.

What was unusual about this day was that it was the first Thursday of the month, the day set since time immemorial for the Malacian Supreme Council to meet. Not that the affairs of those greypates concerned me, but older people took an interest. I heard them murmuring about the Council as I walked among them.

Bishop Gondale IX blessed the Council in public, but the deliberations of the Council were held in secret. The results of those deliberations were never announced; one could only deduce what had happened by observing who disappeared into the capacious dungeons of Fetter Place, there to be strangled by capable hands, or who was beheaded in the public gaze between the great bronze statues of Desport’s slobbergobs in St Marco, by the cathedral, or who reappeared as piecemeal chunks about various quarters of the city, or who was found with his mouth nibbled away by pike in the whirlpools of the River Toi. If the Council saw fit to dispatch them, then they were troublemakers, and I for one was glad to know that everything worked so well for the contentment of our citizens. The immemorial duty of the Supreme Council was to protect Malacia from change.

I found a hair in my mouth. Removing it from between my teeth, I saw it was golden and curly. Ah, the Supreme Council could drown all its citizens in the canal, if so be I might get near enough to La Singla to pasture on that same little mountain.

The traders at their stalls were discreet, knowing well the system of informers which helped maintain the peace of Malacia, but I gathered from a couple of them that the Council might be discussing Hoytola’s hydrogeneous balloon, to decide whether or not it could be approved. Nobody understood the principle of this novel machine, but some magical property in that phrase, ‘Hoytola’s hydrogenous balloon,’ had given it a certain lifting power in the taverns at least. The reality had yet to be seen; it was the Council which had ultimate say on such possibilities.

One of the traders, a tallowy man with blue jowls and the same innocent look as the dead geese in his basket, said, ‘I reckon the balloon should be allowed to fly. Then we’ll be the equal of the flighted men, won’t we?’

‘All that’s interesting happens on the ground,’ I said. ‘Heroes, husbands, heretics – leave the air to sun and spirits.’

I knew nothing of Hoytola. The sending up of small hot-air balloons had been a child’s pursuit in Malacia for ages. I remembered my father ponderously explaining how a whole fleet of hot-air balloons tied together might transport an army to surprise the Ottoman enemy. He had had a pamphlet printed concerning it. Then a captain in the Militia had called on him and dissuaded him from taking further interest in current affairs.

It was enough that there were flighted people not greatly different from us, except for wings. They talked our language, married, died of the plague, much as we. Three of them soared about the square as I strolled through it, to settle by their cote at the top of St Marco’s campanile, traditional eyrie of these traditional sentinels of Malacia.

I was hailed several times by stall-keepers as I went by. They had been groundlings when I performed here or there, and still cherished my performances. What a thousand shames that I should have arrived at the highest pitch of my art to find no chance to exhibit it to those who would appreciate it.

As I scowled to myself, a figure close by said, ‘Why, Master de Chirolo, you look to bear the cares of the old wooden world on your shoulders!’

Sidling up to me was the gaunt figure of Piebald Pete, so known because of the tufts of black hair which survived on his head among the white. He was the fantoccini man; the large, striped frame stood behind him, its red-plush curtains drawn together.

‘I haven’t a care in the world, Pete. I was merely acting out a drama in my head, as your marionettes act it out in their box. How’s the world treating you?’

I should not have asked him. He spread wide his hands in despair and raised his black-and-white eyebrows in accusation to heaven. ‘You see what I’m reduced to – playing in the streets to urchins, me, me who once was invited into the greatest houses of the state. My dancing figures were always in demand – and my little Turk who walked the tightrope and chopped off a princess’s head. The ladies liked that. And all carved out of rosewood with eyes and mouths that moved. The best fantoccini figures in the land.’

‘I remember your Turk. What’s changed?’

‘Fashion. Taste. That’s a change the Supreme Council can’t prevent, any more than they can prevent night turning into day. Only a year back I had a man to carry the frame, and a good man he was. Now I must hump the frame everywhere myself.’

‘Times have been easier.’

‘We used to do great business with evening soirées. That’s all but gone now. I’ve had the honour of appearing at the Renardo Palace more than once, before the young duke, and before foreign emissaries in the Blue Hall of the Palace of the Bishops Elect – very proper, and no seduction scenes there, though they applauded the Execution and insisted on an encore. I’ve been paid in ten or more currencies. But the demand’s dropped away now, truly, and I shall go somewhere else where the fantoccini art is still appreciated.’

‘Byzantium?’

‘No, Byzantium’s a dust-heap now, they say, the streets are paved with the bones of old fantoccini men – and of course the Ottoman at the gate, as ever, I’ll go to Tuscady, or far Igara where they say there’s gold and style and enthusiasm. Why not come with me? It could be the ideal place for out-of-work actors.’

‘All too busy, Pete. I’ve only just come from Kemperer’s – you know he makes you sweat – and now I must hurry to see Master Bengtsohn, who beseeches something from me.’

Piebald Pete dropped one of his eyebrows by several centimetres, lowered his voice by about the same amount, and said, ‘If I was you, Master Perian, I’d stay clear of Otto Bengtsohn, who’s a troublemaker, as you may well know.’

I could not help laughing at his expression. ‘I swear I am innocent!’

‘None of us is innocent if someone thinks us guilty. Poor men should be grateful for what they get from the rich, and not go abusing them or plotting their destruction.’

‘You’re saying that Bengtsohn –’

‘I’m not saying anything, am I?’ Looking round, he raised his voice again as if he hoped the whole bubbling market would hear it. ‘What I’m saying is that we owe a lot to the rich of the state, us poor ones. They could do without us, but we could hardly do without them, could we?’

The subject plainly made Pete and everyone nearby uncomfortable; I moved on. Perhaps I would visit Bengtsohn.

As I walked down a side-alley towards Exhibition Street, I recalled that Piebald Pete had performed in my father’s house on one occasion, long ago. My mother had been alive then, and my sister Katarina and I little children.

The show had enchanted us. Afterwards, when the magic frame was folded and gone, my father had said, ‘There you have observed the Traditional in operation. Your delight was because the fantoccini man did not deviate from comedic forms laid down many generations earlier. In the same way, the happiness of all who live in our little utopian state of Malacia depends on preserving the laws which the founders laid down long, long ago.’

I slipped through a muddy by-lane, where a few market-stalls straggled on, becoming poorer as they led away from the central magnet of St Marco, towards the sign of the Dark Eye. At the entrance to the court stood the Leather-Teeth Tavern, its doors choked with red-faced countrymen, drinking with a variety of noise, enjoyment, and facial expression. Fringing the drinkers were whores, wives, donkeys, and children, who were being serenaded by a man with a hurdy-gurdy. His mistress went round the crowd with a cap, sporting on a lead a red-scaled chick-snake which waltzed on its hind legs like a dancing dog.

Beside the tavern, stalls of fresh herrings had been set up. I tucked my coat-tails under my armpits to get by. Beyond, a couple of bumpkins were urinating and vomiting turn and turn about against a wall. The overhanging storeys of the buildings and their sweeping eaves made the court dark but, as I got towards the back of it, I came on Otto Bengtsohn washing his hands at a pump, still clad in his mangy fur jacket.

His arms were pale, hairless, corded with veins; ugly but useful things. He splashed his face, then wiped his hands on his jacket as he turned to examine me. Beyond him, lolling in a doorway, were two young fellows who also gave me an inspection.

‘So you altered your mind to come after all! What a cheek you have also! Well, you’re only once young.’

‘I happened to be passing this way.’

He nodded. ‘All-People was right.’ He stood contemplating me, rubbing his hands up and down his jacket until I grew uncomfortable.

‘What’s this zahnoscope of yours?’

‘Business later, my young friend. First, I must have something for to eat, if you don’t mind. I’m on the way to the Leather-Teeth, and perhaps you’ll join me for some bite.’

‘It would be a pleasure.’ There was merit in the old man after all. ‘I am feeling peckish.’

‘Even the poor have to eat. Those of us what are going to change the world must keep ourselves fed up … We aren’t supposed to think about change in Malacia, are we? Still, we’ll see …’ He grinned at me in a sly way. He pointed up at the leather-toothed ancestral depicted on the tavern sign, its segmented wings outspread. ‘You have to have jaws like that creature to eat here. Do you mind visiting our slum, de Chirolo?’

We pushed into the tavern.

There, Bengtsohn was known and respected. In short order, a grimy girl placed soup, bread and meat balls with chillies and a pitcher of ale before us, and we set to, ignoring the jostling bodies at our elbows. I ate heartily.

Sighing after a while, and resigning myself to his pouring me more ale, I said, ‘It’s good to feel the stomach full at midday for a change.’ There I checked myself. ‘Why should I say “for a change”? Everyone today seems to have been talking about change – it must be because the Council’s meeting.’

‘Well, talk, yes, but talk’s nothing – foam off from the sea. Malacia never changes, hasn’t done for thousands of years, never will. Even the conversations about change don’t change.’

‘Aren’t you introducing change with your – zahnoscope?’

He dropped his fork, waved his hands, shssh’d me, leant forward, shook his head all at the same time, so that I found my face peppered with half-chomped meat ball. ‘Remember that whereas talking about change is proper and fit, anyone who makes bold as to implement change IN THIS DEAR OLD STABLE CITY OF OURS’ (said loud for effect as he groped with his fork) ‘is liable to finish up in the Toi with his throat cut to shreds …’

Silence while we ate. Then he said, in a tone of voice suggesting that the statement might be of particular interest to any eavesdroppers in the vicinity, ‘I work in the field of art, that’s all what interests me. Happily, art is a central interest of this dear city, like religion. Art’s safe. Not a better place in the world for to pursue art, though heaven knows it don’t pay all that much, even here. But of course I don’t complain of that. How I’ll go through next winter with a greedy wife … Come on, mop down your platter with the crust and let’s get back at the workshop. Work’s the thing, if it earns fair pay.’

Back through the court we went, and into the workshop, which was a dim and dirty place, cluttered with all manner of objects. Bengtsohn waved his hand in a vaguely descriptive way which took in a number of apprentices at benches, some munching hunks of bread.

‘You have a busy place.’

‘I don’t have it. It isn’t mine. I can be booted out from here tomorrow, with boss’s boots. This is an extensive works, biggest in Malacia. These workshops and glass factories back on the great exhibition gallery. You’ve been in that, I suppose – the gallery of the Hoytola family, Andrus Hoytola.’

‘Hoytola’s hydrogenous balloon.’

‘That’s another matter. I’ve been here during some years now, ever since I have come from Tolkhorm with my family. There are some worse masters than Hoytola, I’ll grant you that. Here’s Bonihatch – he’s foreign to Malacia too, and a good man.’ He made reference to one of the apprentices, who loitered up in shirt-sleeves.

Bonihatch was my age, dark, small and wiry, with untidy blonde whiskers. He nodded, looking suspiciously at my clothes without addressing me.

‘A recruit?’ he asked Bengtsohn.

‘We’ll see,’ Bengtsohn replied.

After this enigmatic exchange, Bengtsohn, with Bonihatch in surly attendance, showed me some of his work. A small den off the main workshop was stacked with slides for magic lanterns, all categorized on shelves. He pulled slides down at random and I looked at them against a flickering oil lamp. Many of the scenes were Bengtsohn’s work. He was an artist of a rough but effective order. Some of the hand-painted transparencies, especially those depicting scenery, were attractive, the colour and perspective harsh but nevertheless effective. There was an arctic view, with a man in furs driving a sledge over ice; the sledge was pulled by a reindeer, and the whole scene was lit by a sky full of northern lights which reflected off a glacier. As I held it before the lamp, he saw something in my face and said, ‘You like it? As a young man, I have gone beyond the Northern Mountains to the ice lands. That’s what like it was. A different world.’

‘It’s good.’

‘You know how we make these slide-paintings?’

I indicated the stacks of glass round about, and the long desk where assistants worked with brushes and a row of paint-pots. ‘Apart from your genius, Master, there’s no puzzle about the production.’

He shook his head. ‘You think you see the process but you do not see the system behind the process. Take our topographical line, what is popular perennially. Travellers from far parts will make sketches of the fabulous places they have visited. They return home to Byzantium or Swedish Kiev or Tolkhorm or Tuscady or some other great centre, where their sketches are etched and sold, either as books or separately. Our factory then buys the books and artists are converting the pictures to slides. Only the slides live, because light itself puts the finishing touches to the painting, if you follow me.’

‘I follow you. I too am proud to call myself an artist, though I work in movement rather than light.’

‘Light is everything.’

He led me through a choked passage where great sheets of tin stood on either side, to another shop. There, amid stink and smoke, men in aprons were making the magic lanterns which formed part of the Hoytola enterprise. Some lanterns were cheap and flimsy, others masterpieces of manufacture, with high fluted chimneys and mahogany panels bound in brass.

Eventually, Bengtsohn led me back to the paint shop, where we watched a girl of no more than fifteen copy a view from an etching on to a glass.

‘The view is being transferred to the slide,’ announced Bengtsohn. ‘Pretty, perhaps, but not accurate. How could we transfer the view to the glass with accuracy? Well, now, I have developed a perfectly effective way so to do.’ He dropped his voice so that the girl – who never looked up from her work – should not catch his words. ‘The new method employs the zahnoscope.’

Bonihatch spoke for the first time. ‘It’s revolutionary,’ was all he said.

Gripping me by the muscle of my upper arm, Bengtsohn took me through into another room, poky and enclosed, where the window was framed by heavy curtains. A support rather like a music-stand stood at one end of the room with a lamp burning above it and a water globe next to it. In the centre of the room was something which resembled a cumbrous Turkish cannon. Constructed almost entirely of mahogany and bound in richly chased brass, its barrel comprised five square sections, each smaller than the next and tapering towards the muzzle. It was mounted on a solid base which terminated in four brass wheels.

‘It’s a cannon?’ I asked.

‘It could cause a breach in the walls of everyone’s complacency – but no, it is my zahnoscope merely, so-called after a German monk what invented the design.’

He tapped the muzzle. ‘There’s a lens here, to trap rays from the light. That’s the secret! A special large lens such as Malacia’s glass workers do not produce. I received it from ship only this morning – it has just been fitted. You saw me with it when All-People summoned you.’

He tapped the breech. ‘There’s a mirror in here. That’s the secret too! Now I shall show how it works.’

Taking a coloured topographical view from a shelf, he propped it on the music-stand, turned up the wick of the lamp, and adjusted the water globe between stand and lamp so that the beams of the lamp focused brightly on the view. Then he drew the curtains across the window. The room was lit only by the oil lamp. Bengtsohn motioned me to a chair by the breech.

It was as if I sat at a desk. The flat top of the desk was glass. And there, perfectly reproduced on the glass, was the topographical view, bright in all its original colour!

‘It’s beautiful, Master! Here you can have a perfect magic-lantern show.’

‘This is a tool not a toy. We place the glass of our slides over the viewer and can adjust the barrel – what adjusts the focal length of the lenses – until we have the exact size of picture necessary for the slide, no matter what the dimensions from the original etching. We can then simply paint over the image with accuracy.’

I clapped my hands. ‘You are more than an artist! – You are an actor! Like me, you take the poor shadowy thing of real life and magnify it and add brighter colours to delight your audience … But what do you want me here for? I can’t handle a paintbrush .’

He stood pulling his lower lip and squinting at me.

‘People come in two kinds. Either they’re too clever or too foolish to be trusted. I can’t reason out which group you’re in.’

‘I’m to be trusted. Everyone trusts Perian de Chirolo – ask Kemperer, for whom you once worked, who knows me minutely. His wife will also say a good word for me.’

He brushed my speech aside, stood gazing into the distance in very much a pose I have used for Blind Kedgoree.

‘Well, I need a young man not too ill set-up, there’s no denying that … The older you get, the more difficult things become …’

At last he turned back to me. ‘Very well, I shall take you in my confidence, young man; but I warn that what I tell you must not be repeated with nobody, not with your dearest friend, no, not even with your sweetest sweetheart. Come, we’ll walk in the exhibition gallery while I will explain my invention and my intention …’

He drew back the curtains, turned down the lamp, and led me back to the workshops. We climbed some steps, went through a door, and were in another world where disorder was forgotten. We had entered the elegantly appointed gallery itself, the walls of which were lined with thousands of glass slides, aligned on racks for easy viewing. The slides could be hired for varying amounts, depending upon quality and subject. There were long sets of twenty or thirty slides which told in pictures heroic stories of old, as well as vivid portrayals of brigandage or disaster, which were most popular. Well-dressed people were walking about and gazing at the pictures; Bengtsohn kept his voice down.

‘Despite this place stinks of privilege, it preserves a part of the cultural thought of Malacia as well as Count Renardo’s state museum. Andrus Hoytola exploits cheap labour, no use to deny that – a class enemy if there was one – yet he is not a merchant just but also an artist and a man of foresight. However, to my invention …’

There was a secretiveness about him which did not suit my open nature. He manoeuvered me into a corner, saying he would lecture me upon matters not generally understood.

‘It has long been known through the learned alchemists that there are certain salts what have an empathy with or aversion against the light, so that some say they are fallen from the sun or the moon. I have developed here a process whereby a judicious mixture of silver iodine will secure on a slide of glass an image of whatever is placed before the zahnoscope. A second process involving oils of lavender and heated mercury fixes the image permanently on the glass. This is painting without hands, my dear de Chirolo …’

When he beamed at me, he looked years younger.

‘Why tell me your secret?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not mine but Nature’s. All what wish can share it. You do not realise the oppressiveness of the state what we live in –’

‘I love my native city.’

‘I what am a foreigner should not criticise? Nevertheless, any such scientific processes what I describe are suppressed … Justice is denied – and beauty.’

He snatched from one of the exhibition racks a slide which he urged me to hold up to the light. It was a volcanic eruption. I stared through a volcano in full spate, with streams of lava furrowing its snow-clad slopes – to see one of the most beautiful faces I had ever come across, a face with a high-bridged nose, two dark-golden eyes, a mouth that was flashing a brilliant smile – though not in my direction – and a delicate head of cultivated unruly hair, jet-black and tied with a length of blue ribbon at the back.

Even as this face materialised through the volcanic eruption, it turned into profile and then went into eclipse, with only the tresses and ribbons at the back of the head available to my view. Even that was thrilling enough; but never had I seen a profile so adorable, or so originally designed, with the entire physiognomy depending from that patrician nose, without the nose being too large even by one delicious millimetre.

Lowering Mount Vesuvius slightly, I regarded the body to which this fabulous head was such an exquisite adjunct. Though I beheld it only from behind, I saw that the waist was slender, the hips generous, and the buttocks altogether matchless enough to put the snowy slopes of any volcano to shame. The whole enchanting figure was sheathed in a long, crisp dress of apricot-coloured silk which swept to the floor. My aesthetic senses, roused by the proportions of the face, were overtaken by my carnal ones and I resolved to approach this beauty at whatever cost.

All the while, Bengtsohn was talking in his cracky way, mistaking the subject of my absorption, ‘… this beautiful view was never touched by human hands …’

‘Glad I am to hear you say it.’

‘The exciting effect of fire and snow in conjunction …’

‘Oh, yes, and that conjunction …’

‘Yet this is but an imitation of an imitation …’

‘No, that I can’t believe! This is the real thing at last.’

‘You flatter me, but the zahnoscope can be made to capture the real thing, to go straight to life rather than art …’

I put the slide down. The vision was preparing to leave the gallery; I might never see her again and my happiness would never be complete.

‘You must excuse me, Maestro – I do have more preference for life than for art, just as you do. You must manage your affairs and I mine –’

Seeing I was making to go, he grasped my arm.

‘Listen, please, young man. I’m offering you work and money. All-People can’t be mistaken. You have not work or money. I want to do a new thing with the zahnoscope. I want to mercurise – that’s how I call it – I want to mercurise a whole story on slides, using real actors, not just paintings. It will be a dazzling new success, it will be revolutionary – and you can take prominently part in it. Now, come into the workshop and let me explain properly all.’

‘I’ve just seen a friend – who’s the fair creature at the far end of the gallery?’

He answered sharply. ‘That’s Armida Hoytola, daughter of the gallery-owner, a difficult, flighty girl. She’s a parasite, a class enemy. Don’t waste your time –’

‘A thousand thanks for for the meal, but I cannot work for you. All-People looked at the wrong constellation. There is other work more fitting …’

I bowed to him and left. He drew himself up, folding his arms over his ancient coat, with the funniest expression on his face.

At the far end of the gallery, beyond the counter, was a doorway into a coffee lounge. My fair creature was making her way through it with a friend. No chaperons that I could see. The friend was about the same age as – Armida? – Armida! – and striking too in her own way, a plump girl with chestnut ringlets. On an ordinary day she would certainly have attracted one’s attention; her only fault was to be caught with the divine Armida. They made a pretty pair as they moved into the lounge, although I had eyes for only one of them.

Pausing in the doorway, I wondered whether to appear tragic or cheerful; the poverty of my clothes decided me on the latter course.

The two of them were settling at a nearby table. As Armida sat back, our eyes met. Streams of animal magnetism poured across the room. On impulse, holding her gaze, I went forward, seized one of the empty chairs at her table, and said, ‘Ladies’ – but I addressed myself only to her – ‘I see in your faces such human warmth that I ventured uninvited to thrust my company upon you. I desperately need counsel and, since we are total strangers to each other, you can give me impartial advice at a time when my whole life is in crisis.’

There was hauteur in their manner directly I started speaking. As they looked at each other, I saw that the companion with the brown hair was quite a beauty, by no means as elegantly slender as Armida, but with a chubbiness that had its own undeniable attractions. Whatever passed between them I know not; I only know that when they looked back towards me, the ice had slightly melted.

‘Perhaps your crisis will allow you time to drink chocolate with us,’ Armida said in a voice freighted with light musics.

Gratefully, I sat down. ‘Five minutes only … Then urgent business must take me elsewhere. You were enjoying the exhibition?’

‘It’s tolerably familiar to us,’ said Armida, waving a dismissive hand. ‘What is your crisis, sir? You have us agog, as I expect you intend.’

‘We all confront crises in our lives …’ But that would not do. ‘My father,’ I said, thinking quickly, ‘he’s a stern man. He is forcing me to decide my future career. I have to tell him by the week’s end whether I will enter the Army or the High Religion.’

‘I’m sure your heart’s pure enough for the Church,’ said Armida, smiling with enough warmth to cook an egg. ‘Is it not brave enough for the Army?’

‘My dilemma is that I wish as a good son to please my father, but I want to become something more fulfilling than a monk or a grenadier.’

Two pretty heads went to one side as they gazed upon me. My head was turned completely.

‘Why not,’ said the brown-haired one, ‘become a player? It’s a terribly varied career which gives pleasure to many.’

My hopes rose within me, so much so that I reached forward and seized her hand where it lay on the table. ‘How kind of you to suggest it!’

Armida said, ‘Pooh, not a player! They’re poor and the stories they play out are dull … It’s the lowest form of animal life! There’s no advancement in it.’

The effect of this speech from those lips was enough to cool my blood by several degrees, down almost to frost level. Matters were only saved by Armida’s leaning forward and adding, confidingly, ‘Bedalar’s latest fancy is a player – he’s handsome, grant you that – so she thinks nothing male is of any use unless it basks before the limelights every evening at seven.’

Bedalar put out a pretty tongue at her friend. ‘You’re only jealous!’

Armida showed her an even prettier tongue back. I could have watched such rivalry all evening, while thinking how cordially I would receive that nimble little tongue into my own cheek. So involved were my senses that only later did Bedalar’s name register on me; I had heard it before that day.

Armida’s air of imparting a confidence had soothed me, but there was a chill in the conversation, as the two girls gazed at each other and I gazed moodily at them.

Fortunately, chocolate arrived in a silver pot, and we occupied ourselves with drinking.

Setting down her cup, Bedalar announced that she must leave.

‘We all know whom you’re going to meet, so don’t be so coy,’ said Armida. Turning to me as her friend left, she said, ‘The new-found player. He’s out of work, so they can enjoy a rendezvous at any old time that Bedalar’s chaperon is out of sight. I have a friend of high connection – one must not say whom – who is involved with his duty today, and many other days as well.’

I thought this was more unkindness and said, ‘Perhaps you wish me to leave …’

‘You may go or stay as you like. I didn’t invite you to sit down.’

It was no good sulking before this little minx. ‘I came voluntarily, yes; I now find myself unable to leave voluntarily. I am already under such a spell as it would take a dozen gentlemen of connection, drunk or sober’ – I thought I’d strike there – ‘to disperse.’

She half-pouted, half-laughed.

‘How silly I shall look on the street with you running behind my carriage. And you even sillier, following rather like a carriage dog.’

‘I make it a rule never to run behind carriages. Let’s walk together instead. Come, we will walk in Trundles Park and see who laughs at us.’

I rose and offered my arm. She got up – and what a movement that was! La Singla could not have managed it better – and said with exquisite seriousness, ‘And I’m supposed to pay for the chocolate consumed by all and sundry?’

‘Is this not your father’s establishment? Do you insult them by trying to offer them money?’

‘You know who I am … I don’t frequent many strata of Malacian society, so I have no notion who you are.’

When I told her my name, I noted that it was unfamiliar to her, although in view of her poor opinion of players that was possibly as well.

I offered my arm again. She rested four gloved fingers upon its upper surface and said, ‘You may escort me to my carriage.’

‘We are going to walk in the park.’

‘You are presumptuous if you believe I will do anything of the sort. I could not at all afford to be seen in the park with you.’

We stood looking at each other. Close to she was startling. Hers was a face which beauty made formidable; yet there was about her mouth a kind of wistfulness which seemed to contradict the hauteur.

‘May I see you tomorrow, then, in whatever circumstances you prefer?’

She adjusted her hair and the ribbons in her hair, and put on a bonnet which an assistant brought. A smile grew about her lips.

‘You’ll be involved in battles or canticles tomorrow, won’t you?’

‘Swords and holy vows alike mean nothing to me where you’re concerned. You are so beautiful, Miss Hoytola, I’ve never seen anyone like you.’

‘You are certainly a forward young fellow – although I don’t necessarily hold that against you. But I begin a special commission – not work of any kind, naturally – tomorrow, and so shall not be at liberty.’

We moved towards the door, which a lackey opened, bowing low and hiding a glint of envy in his eye. We emerged into the mid-day street, almost empty as siesta took over Malacia.

‘What sort of commission, Miss Hoytola?’

A frown, barely rumpling the exquisite brow. ‘That’s no concern of yours. It happens to be something to please the whim of my parents, who fancy they cannot have enough portraits of me, doting things. So I am to pose a little for a mad foreigner in our employ, one Otto Bengtsohn. He’s something of an artist in his fashion.’

Although I had lingered to the best of my ability, we were at her equipage. The carriage shone like a crown with sun and polish: A highly groomed mare waited between the shafts. The powdered driver was opening a door for Armida. She was lifting her apricot skirts, preparing to climb in and be whisked away.

‘We must part here, sir. It was pleasant making your acquaintance.’

‘We shall meet again, I feel sure.’

She smiled.

The door was closed, the driver mounted behind. The whip was cracked, she waved, they were off. Stand still to act effectively; it had no application here.

As I turned, the gallery was closing for siesta, the blinds were being drawn down. I walked slowly away.

Of course I could not be in love.

Strolling down the street I ran over our brief conversation in my mind. I was far too poor for her, for Armida Hoytola. Yet she had been interested. Her friend could be Bedalar, Caylus Nortolini’s sister, whom de Lambant had mentioned. If Bedalar deigned to look at a player, then her friend might also find it fashionable. Unbidden, a picture came to my mind of my marrying Armida and walking secure in the sort of society I knew I would enjoy …

The vision passed, and I was left with her words about the commission with Bengtsohn. There lay my opportunity!

At once I turned down the expansive Exhibition Road and into the narrow alleys behind, until I found myself again in the gloom of the Court of the Dark Eye.

A group of men, all dingily dressed, stood in the darkest recesses of the court; there were women among them, old and young. They turned guiltily as I entered. One of them came forward, carrying a stout stick; it was the apprentice I had met, Bonihatch.

‘What do you want?’

‘I need to speak to Bengtsohn.’

‘We’re busy. There’s a meeting, can’t you see? Shove off, as you did before.’

But Bengstsohn moved up behind him, saying mildly, ‘It’s siesta and we talk of pigeon racing, de Chirolo. What do you wish from me? You left me abruptly enough.’

I gave him a bow. ‘My apologies for that discourtesy. I had a mission.’

‘Thus it seemed.’

‘I am interested in the work you offered me, if you would be kind enough to tell me what exactly you require.’

‘Come back this evening. I have business now. I will then talk with you.’

I looked at Bonihatch, who stood ready with his stick.

‘I may have become a monk by evening, but I’ll see what I can manage.’

Love, what a power it is! Nothing but love could have induced me to enter that dreary court three times in one day – and what dedication I showed, for the lady had revealed herself to be uncertain-tempered, vain, and I know not what else besides. Also irresistible.

How wise one feels to be a fool of love!

‘Even a fool can do this job,’ Bengtsohn said. ‘Is why All-People indicated an actor, I suppose.’

By night, moving behind smoky lanterns in intermittent shadow, Bengtsohn looked almost sinister, his sunken eyes sometimes hiding, sometimes glittering, in their sockets. His long fingers were talon-like as he wove his explanation.

‘I told how I have discovered the method to mercurise real views through the zahnoscope, so that they have become implanted on glass slides. My ambition is to tell a story by such methods. People I need, actors. A simple story to begin. Big acorns from little oaks grow. I will mercurise the actors against real or painted settings. The product will be of an extraordinary originality and cause certain consequences. You shall be one from the four characters in the simple drama. The scenes of the drama will be emblazoned on glass far more faithfully than what artist could ever depict. This will be the real image, painted by light – light, that great natural force what is free for all, rich and poor alike.’

Keen to make him look a little less inspired, I said, ‘It will only be like a stage play with the action stopped, and paralysis suddenly overtaking everyone.’

‘You players are so ephemeral, your actions sketched in the air and then gone, the whole thing forgotten when the final curtain will come down. But when you are mercurised through the zahnoscope, why, then your actions become imperishable, your drama continuous. I will not mind wagering that the drama what you will enact for me will still be viewed by connoisseurs after you yourself will have grown old and died, young Perian!’

At that, I had to laugh. He was cutting an absurd figure, stroking an old japanned magic lantern with fluted chimney as he spoke, as if he expected a genie to emerge.

‘And what is this great drama you wish me to perform? Are we to put Sophocles of Seneca on glass?’

He came closer. Then he took a turn away. Then he returned, and clutched my hands in his. Then he dropped my hands and raised his to the sky.

‘Perian, my life is beset with difficulties and hedged by enemies. Let there be trust between us, as well as business also.’

‘You told me when we met that you had enemies and the State had eyes.’ The proposition was somehow more reasonable here in the stuffy darkness of his workshop than it had appeared in the sunlit street.

‘We must each trust each. We are both in a same situation – namely we don’t have security in the world. I am old and have a wife for to support, you are young and free but, believe me, the gods – and society, more important – are against us both. That is a political situation. I have two passions, art and justice. As I grow more old, justice becomes more important. I hate to see the poor grinded down by the rich, hate it.’

‘That’s a natural law. I intend to be rich one day.’

He scratched his head and sighed. ‘Then we will defer justice for a day later and instead talk about art. Is that more to your taste?’

‘Tell me about your drama.’

He sighed again, staring about the untidy workshop, shaking his head. ‘Young men care so little.’

‘You have no business saying that. Why do the old always hold the young in contempt? I’m a fine actor, as you can discover if you enquire, and my art is my life. My life is my art. Tell me about this drama of yours, I ask you, if you want my help.’

‘My dear young man … Well, let’s keep to art if you wish it! I have a love for all the arts, all the arts, including the drama, though I am always too much poor to pursue them. For the first mercurised production, I have written a contribution to drama, entitled, Prince Mendicula: or, The Joyous Tragedy of the Prince and Patricia and General Gerald and Jemima.’

‘A striking title. What is a Joyous Tragedy exactly?’

‘Well, Doleful Comedy, if you will – minor details aren’t too clear in my mind yet – clear, but not too clear … I have some troubles with detail. Indeed, for simplification on to glass, I plan a drama without detail …’

‘Am I to be Prince Mendicula?’

He beamed, showing his shortage of teeth. ‘You, my dear boy, you have insufficient years for to be Prince Mendicula. You shall play the dashing General Gerald.’ And he began to unravel the beauties of a plot which would enrich, if not indeed terminate, world drama. I paid what heed I could. As he talked with increasing rapidity, he took me to a lumber room and showed me some props for his drama. They were very poor, the clothes almost threadbare.

My interest in Bengtsohn’s affairs was generated by the understanding that they would involve divine Armida Hoytola. I began to see that there might also be profit for my career here; Bengtsohn was supported by a powerful patron, the Hoytola family, and, if the novelty of his mercurised melodrama were to catch popular fancy, it would be advantageous to have my name associated with it.

I broke in the old man’s account and said, ‘Will you not let me play the Prince?’

He drummed the fingers of his left hand upon his stringy cheek. ‘Gerald is more suitable for you. You might make a good general. You are not venerable enough for Mendicula.’

‘But I can make up my face with beard and black teeth and a patch and what-you-will. Whom have you marked out for this princely part?’

He chewed his lip and said, ‘You understand this is a – what’s the word? – yes, unproved venture. We all take a chance from it. I cannot afford to pay for more than one real player, and that is yourself. Your looks and modest reputation will help. Whereas to play the Prince I rely on one of the boys in the workshop, the not ill-favoured man called Bonihatch.’

‘Bonihatch? With the yellow whiskers? What acting experience has he? He’s just an apprentice!’

‘For mercurised play, little acting is required. Bonihatch is a good man, what I depend on. I must have Bonihatch, that’s my decision.’

‘Well. The others? Princess Patricia?’

‘For the Lady Jemima, with whom the prince is captivated, I will hire a seamstress who lives in this court, by name Letitia Zlatorog. She will be happy to work for a pittance. Her family has a sad history what exemplifies injustices. Her uncle is a friend of mine, a friend of poverty. A pretty girl, too, with quite an air about her, is little Letitia.’

‘And what blazing bundle of talent and beauty is destined for the role of Princess Patricia?’

He gave me another mouth-numbing smile.

‘Oh, I thought you had discovered that. The success of our enterprise, alas, depends heavily on my employer. So we are exploited. To satisfy his whim – and not from other reasons – the role of the Princess Patricia will be played by Armida Hoytola. It is a consolation that she is not ugly.’

‘Armida as Patricia … Well, you know that my art is all to me. It comes as a surprise to learn that Armida, whom I scarcely know, is also to act in your drama. Even so, I will work with you for the sake of this marvellous new form of drama you have perfected.’

‘Arrive here punctually at eight in the morning and that will suit me. There’ll be time enough for speeches then. And let’s keep secret the enterprise for a while. No boasting, if you can withstand it.’

It is a curious fact about old people that, like Bengtsohn, they do not necessarily soften if you speak them fair. It is almost as if they suspect you of being insincere. This trait manifests itself in my father. Whereas you can always get round friends of your own age.

But Bengtsohn was civil when I appeared next morning, cutting me a slice of solid bread-and-blood pudding for breakfast; he even paid my half a florin in advance for my work, from his own pocket. I helped him, his wife, and Bonihatch load up a cart with the things he needed, including the zahnoscope, a tent, several flats, and some costumes, before the others arrived. As we worked a true seigneur rolled up, the great Andrus Hoytola himself stepping down from his carriage.

Andrus Hoytola was a well-built, dignified man, lethargic of movement, with a large, calm face like a pale sea. He wore a flowered silk banyan over pantaloons that buckled at the knees. He had white silk stockings and his feet were thrust into slippers. His hair was in a short stumpy queue tied with grey velvet ribbon. He looked slowly about him.

I gave him a bow. Bengtsohn made a salute and said, ‘We are getting forward with our matters, sir.’

‘One would expect so.’ He helped himself to a pinch of snuff from a silver box and strolled across to regard the zahnoscope. I had hoped for an introduction; none was forthcoming. My consolation was the sight of his daughter Armida, who alighted from the other side of the carriage.

Her reserve was perhaps to be accounted for by the presence of her father. She evinced no surprise and little interest that I was engaged to act with her in the drama of Prince Mendicula; her attention was rather on her dress. Like her father, she was fashionably garbed, wearing a plain decolleté open robe of ice blue with long, tight sleeves which ended in time to display her neat wrists. When she walked, her skirts revealed a hint of ankle. A fragrance of patchouli hung about her. And what a beauty she was! Features that tended towards the porcine in her father were genuinely inspiring in Armida, especially when they lit as she said smilingly, ‘I see that the walls of neither monastery nor barracks have closed about you yet.’

‘A blessed reprieve.’

The cart was loaded and harnessed to a pair of mules, black of visage, long of ear, and inclined to foam at the mouth. We climbed on or walked behind, while the Hoytolas returned to their carriage. Bonihatch explained that we were heading for the Chabrizzi Palace beyond the Toi, where our play would be enacted.

The Palace of the Chabrizzis was set in a striking position at no great distance from Mantegan, where Katarina passed the days of her married life. The Palace was built under a last outcrop of the tawny Prilipit Mountains, to stare loftily across the city.

Within its gates we rolled to a stop in a weed-grown courtyard. Two urchins played by an elaborate fountain. Windows confronted us on all sides, straight-faced. To one side, cliffs loomed above the rooftops.

Everything was unloaded and placed on the flagstones. Armida climbed from her carriage. Her father merely sat back in his seat and suddenly, at a whim, drove away without speaking further to anyone.

Bonihatch made a face at Bengtsohn.

‘Looks as if the Council didn’t make up their mind regarding the hydrogenous balloon.’

‘Or maybe the zahnoscope either,’ said Bengtsohn grimly.

‘I’d prefer you not to discuss my father’s business,’ Armmida said. ‘Let’s get on.’

Later, the mule-cart was driven off. While a primitive outdoor stage was being set up, Armida talked to a timid girl in work clothes. I went over to speak with them and discovered that this was Letitia Zlatorog, the little seamstress engaged to play Lady Jemima.

It would be difficult to imagine anyone less fit for the role, although she was pretty enough in an insipid way. She was pale, her hands were red, and she had no mannerisms. She appeared all too conscious of the honour of meeting a player from the great Kemperer’s company. I took care to appear rather grand; nevertheless, when Armida’s attention was elsewhere, I slipped an arm about her waist to set her at ease.

Even more strongly than before, I felt that I, as the one professional member of this ludicrous cast, was entitled to play the Prince, and so be married to Armida. I knew how the simulated passions of the stage often translated by sympathetic magic into genuine passions off stage; to think of the cocky apprentice Bonihatch embracing Armida was not to be borne.

Having failed to convince Bengtsohn on this point, I took Bonihatch himself aside, intimating as tactfully as I could that as mine was the name which would win audiences, mine should be the right to play the title role of Mendicula.

‘Think of this as a co-operative enterprise,’ he said ‘in which all work as one, not for profit or fame, but for the common good. Or is such an ideal too much for your imagination?’

‘I see no disgrace in fame as a spur! You talk more like a Progressive than a player.’

He looked at me levelly. ‘I am a Progressive. I don’t wish to make an enemy of you, de Chirolo. Indeed, we’d all be glad to have your co-operation. But let’s have none of your fancy airs and graces round here.’

‘Take care how you speak to me. I imagine a good thrashing would impress you.’

‘I said I didn’t want to make an enemy of you –’

‘Now now, young gentlemen,’ said Bengtsohn, bustling up. ‘No quarrels as we inscribe a new page in the massive volume from Malacia’s history. Give me your hand to setting up this ruin.’

He had some flats representing a destroyed town. Bonihatch and other apprentices went to his aid. I tucked my arms under my cloak and made myself look tolerably moody, remarking to Armida, ‘This is a melancholy old place. What has become of the Chabrizzis? Did they all kill themselves in a fit of spite, or have they gone to look for the Lost Tribes?’

‘Poor Chabrizzis, they squandered several fortunes in the service of the Nemanijas and Constantinople. One branch of the family turned to Mithraism. Of the remainder, one of them – my great grandfather – married into the Hoytolas, though for a noble to marry a merchant’s daughter was generally condemned. They both died of the plague within a twelvemonth, leaving a little son. So their history may be reckoned, as you say, a melancholy one. All the same, I love this old palace and played here often as a small girl.’

‘That news makes it sound immediately more friendly.’

One part of the inner courtyard was bathed in sun. Here Bengtsohn’s paraphernalia was set up. In rooms nearby we disguised ourselves in his scruffy costumes, except for Armida, who wisely insisted on retaining her own dress.

‘Capital!’ cried Bengtsohn, clapping his hands as each of us emerged into the sunlight.

He began to pose us, moving us about like chairs. Bonihatch, absurd in Prince Mendicula’s tinsel crown, stood to one side, gesturing to the nearest wall and the flat of the sacked city. Feeling hardly less silly with cork sword and general’s tricorne made of paper, I stood behind him, while Armida in a small tinsel crown was placed close beside me.

When he had us as he wanted, Bengtsohn aimed the zahnoscope at us, adjusting its barrel and flinging a velvet cover over the glass panel at the rear.

‘Stand still, all of you!’ he cried. ‘Not a movement, not one movement, for five minutes, or all will be spoilt.’

Then he ran round to the front of his machine and removed a cover from the lens. We stood there until I grew tired.

‘When do we begin to act?’ I asked.

The old man swore and replaced the lens-cover, shaking his hands before his face in wrath.

‘I tell you just to stand still without even a movement for five minutes, and you begin immediately to talk!’ he cried. ‘While the sun is bright, we must make so many pictures as we can, but each image takes five minutes for to form on the prepared slide. For the image to be crisp, you must be still – as quiet as rats. Don’t you understand?’

‘You never told me that item in your secret recipe.’ I said angrily. Armida and the others were looking at me in disapproval. ‘We shall be here all day, standing like statues for five minutes at a time. That’s got nothing to do with acting, the secret of which lies in mobility.’

‘You do not act, you stand like dead statues. Thus for several days. That is why you are having so well paid. We have fifty slides to make to contain the whole drama of the Prince. Now, prepare yourself again. This time neither a word nor a twitch, de Chirolo.’

I said, ‘But you begin before we have learned or even read our parts. What is the story? What sort of a drama is this?’

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ Armida said. ‘We do not speak. We supply only the images, in a series of tableaux. When the slide-drama is eventually shown to audiences, Otto will recite what is happening, to bring out the beauty of the tableaux. Can’t you understand the principles of a mercurised play?’

Titters from Bonihatch and Letitia.

I froze, and again Bengtsohn went through his mysteries with the machine. There we all stood like waxworks, while he counted the time on a large hour-glass. It is no easy matter standing still for five minutes, particularly in the open air, where idleness alone induces a tendency to sneeze.

At the end of the first five minutes, I was already preparing to make my excuses and abandon this exercise, despite the proximity of Armida. But Bengtsohn seemed so pleased, scuttling his first slide away into a dark baize-lined box, that I had not the heart to upset him. All the same, I was happy that my friends de Lambant and Portinari could not see our antics.

‘Famous, famous!’ quoth Bengtsohn. ‘Now we will perform an indoor scene, where the Prince leaves his lovely princess in General Gerald’s care.’

As I made to move into the palace, the old man caught my arm.

‘I should have explained to you as I have to the others, for to make our matters crystal-clear. Owing to the present limitations of the zahnoscope, what needs plenty of light to achieve its miracles, we have to mercurise even the indoor scenes outside.’

A sofa was drawn up, a curtain pulled behind us. ‘Indoors’ was parodied. This scene was more to my taste. Bonihatch made a noble gesture, arms spread wide, while I as Gerald bowed and clutched Armida’s hand. Five minutes of that was easily borne, as I felt the little living thing sweat gently in my grasp. In reminding me of all the other treasures of hers which might fall into my grasp, it was enough to make me stand rigid.

The five minutes up, Bengtsohn clapped his hands and fiddled with another slide.

‘The next scene will also be indoors, what is situated at a country tavern. We shall see Prince Mendicula meeting with Jemima. Letita, if you will step forward please, and look a little haughty. Not at him but rather above or through him, yes, through him, to indicate that you are of good birth … I hope the zahnoscope does not become too hot, or the salts will fail.’

All was ready. Bonihatch and Letitia assumed rigid poses, becoming their idea of the noble prince and the Lady Jemima. With a few tawdry props behind them and the sun shining overhead, history would be made. Bengtsohn looked raptly at the velvet cover over his slide, as if the secret of the universe lay there. Time stood still. Armida and I, waiting on one side and watching the tableau, found ourselves also transfixed. The minutes took longer to pass than when we ourselves stood before the zahnoscope.

Eventually the sand lay in the lower half of Bengtsohn’s hourglass, and he called for the pose to be broken. We all came alive again.

Patting his dark box grimly as he tucked the third slide into it, he said, ‘These I will mercurise in the workshop this evening. If they develop well, then we again proceed tomorrow. If luck is not on our back, then we re-enact the same scenes. So, to do another while the light is good. Meanwhile, to keep occupied your minds while we work, I shall recite to you the story of our drama, just as I shall recite before audiences … provided anything so novel is allowed for to be shown to Malacian audiences …’

The morning passed in little five-minute loaves of time as Otto Bengtsohn unfolded his preposterous tale of Prince Mendicula, while his characters confronted the sunshine with tinsel crowns and cork swords.

Prince Mendicula: or, The Joyous Tragedy of the Prince and Patricia, as Intertwined with the Fates of His General Gerald and the Lady Jemima (announced Bengtsohn, blowing a fake fanfare through pursed lips in order to convey an impression of grandeur commensurate with the occasion). A co-operative production by the Bengtsohn Players, mercurised by Otto Bengtsohn of Tolkhorm, under the grand patronage of Andrus Hoytola, to whom our humble efforts are unworthily dedicated with all gratitude and undue prostrations, and so on and so on, to the limits of the capacity …

The great and handsome Prince Mendicula, what you here see in the full glory of his youth, power, and privilege, has just conquered the city of Gorica, what lies in ruins for all to see and sorrow over in the background.

Mendicula has been aided by his general, the noble, powerful, and privileged Gerald, who is almost as personable as his prince. As you see.

General Gerald has become the close friend and adviser of his prince, what has encouraged Gerald in every way and made him a favourite in preference over many other estimable courtiers. Here you see the two of them inspecting the ruined city. The conquered city, that is to say; conquest is a princely habit. With them Mendicula’s wife is, the beautiful Princess Patricia. You observe with what delight she views the vanquished of Gorica, whose hearts go out to her.

Here you see her telling her husband, the Prince, how enchanted she is by his prowess in war. He clutches her hands. So consumed by love of her is he that the prince bestows the city – without consulting the feelings of the inhabitants, of course – upon her for a gift, what marks the first three years of their happy life married.

The general expresses content with this arrangement. Here he announces that from henceforth he will abstain from warlike action – as generals enjoy to do after battles – thinking what they may get their heads shot off next time. He declares that he will hang up his arms to marry a charming lady of Gorica what he has just met. They will settle in Gorica – or Patriciagrad, as the unfortunate city will shortly be ceremoniously rechristened, once the corpses are cleared from off the streets.

Amid general enthusiasm, Prince Mendicula leaves his wife Patricia in Gerald’s care and goes for a tour of his new territory – you see it in the background – to meet alike nobility and peasants, but chiefly nobility, of course. At a certain country inn by a lake, Mendicula decides to rest for the night. We see him entering – observe tankards arranged by the window – and here he meets the enchanting mystery woman, Lady Jemima, what claims to be the daughter of the landlord, though the prince cannot believe this. In fact, he believes that anyone so pleasing cannot spring from such low society. As you may notice, the little Lady Jemima is as dark of hair and complexion as the Princess Patricia is fair. Well, we get the ladies’ hair colour correct, we hope.

She spurns his advances, gracefully but inflammably with what looks like a slap of the face. The prince orders local wine and becomes hopelessly inebriated in the course of the evening. Fortunately he is anonymous, so that nobody notices nothing remarkable in his insobriety.

This is early dawn, as you can see, shining bright. Prince Mendicula, whose head feels so thick as that of any low serf, wakes to repent of his folly and have a conscience attack as he recalls his neglected wife Patricia back in Gorica. We witness his agony – the clenched fists, the look to heaven – as he becomes afraid that Patricia might have been unfaithful to him yielding during the night to the advances of the General Gerald. He rides furiously back to Gorica, a prey to remorse and jealousy.

Arriving early at the Gorica Palace, his spurs clattering over the marble corridors – well, matting, as you can see – the prince finds both Patricia, his beloved, and his general are slumbering virtuously in their different compartments in different parts of the building. How sweet she looks asleep, those lovely pink cheeks – she is always well fed, our princess! Mendicula awakens her with a kiss and pours out his love. At this point in Bengtsohn’s story, I thought to myself, Well, it is all very splendid for Bonihatch that he plays the prince! He enjoys most of the excitement of both the women! This is what I get for acting with a pack of Progressives. Now I understand why the State suppresses them. Sooner or later, Bonihatch is going to linger a whole petrified five minutes – which in the circumstances rates considerably longer than eternity – with his lips upon Armida’s lips, as the slumbering Patricia. He’ll be more than mercurised, the low churl! I should have played the prince!

And what impression will I make on my audience as the stupid General Gerald, lying guilelessly abed, eyes closed and moustaches rolled in a white handkerchief. This fustian does me no favour.

Even as Prince Mendicula embraces Patricia and pours out his affectionate declarations (continued Bengtsohn, moving us about for the next tableau as if we were dummies) she can smell that he has been drinking away the night. Instinctively, the sensitive girl a trifle draws away from him.

Examine, if you will, the psychology in his countenance! For how does he respond to this slight withdrawal of hers? Why, a tiny seedling from doubt blooms in his mind. Perhaps the withdrawal implies that she after all did lie with the general. Much pleasure of the intimate sort may be had in two hours without spending all night about it, particularly if you are the passionate disposition what he knows Patricia to be, because she lives off the best meats and fruits, unlike the poor.

Ah, this next picture! ‘Trust vanquishing Doubt!’ No more soon does dark mistrust spring in the prince’s mind up than he suppresses it with scorn. He believes it to be a reflection of his own guiltiness and unworthy totally of him – also of her what he loves and honours. (Here we shall move the zahnoscope so that we see only Mendicula’s noble face in the appropriate slide …)

Abolishing all base doubts like apples from an orange tree, Prince Mendicula from this moment holds Patricia and his soldier-hero more highly than ever in his self-esteem. More, he encourages them to be friends, to share confidences, and to enjoy generally each other’s company without fear of restraint on his account. Witness the three of them, arms about each, people of noble birth behaving nobly, eh?

Contentedly, Mendicula steps back and engages himself in administering the realm, allowing General Gerald to escort Patricia to balls, to the opera, and other idle occasions. Far from showing to her husband gratitude for his trust, Patricia is slightly cool towards him, as he notes with sorrow, hand on brow. Again, far from blaming her, he still blames himself for having chased Jemima.

So he is forced into a position where thoughts of Jemima pursue him. Although she repelled his advances, he knows she liked his company. We’ll have some music here. One day, he rides back through the forest to see her. To the prince’s delight, Jemima still resides at the inn. He discovers her polishing one of the tankards. They fervently talk for hours. He presses her for a kiss, which she warmly bestows. Although she permits no liberties further, her company is so animated that Prince Mendicula sits all night up talking to her. As you observe, the Lady Jemima also plays the lute and sings well.

Night passes too soon. When dawn filters across the lake, which of course is outside, the Prince once more remembers the realities of his life. Embracing Jemima and thanking her courteously, he tears away himself from her to saddle his horse and ride furiously back to Gorica. Or possibly he will have to run furiously, since Bonihatch and I cannot find no horse what will stand motionless in a galloping position for five minutes in a time.

Back to the city, he bursts into Patricia’s room. He has dismounted first, by the way, if he has a horse. If not, then not. Her bed lies unemployed. The prince then runs to General Gerald’s apartments. The general’s bed is empty also. In anguish, he rushes through the entire building, to come upon them both in the garden of roses.

Sharply, he dismisses his general, what goes out looking so angry as you can observe, and questions sharply his wife about her actions. She becomes as cold as a snowman, explaining how it happened merely that both she and Gerald rose early and met in the garden by accident. This is after all a day of festival, when many people rise early. Here we see some of them, having risen. She says he has no right to question her.

Trouble-sore and saddle-sore, the prince sinks to a bench. She says nothing. He faintly asks her if she and Gerald kiss like lovers. At this, she becomes more angry, evades his question, and demands to know where he has been all night; word has reached her ear – you see how beautiful it is – that what he has somewhere a woman outside the city. The prince replies that no woman means anything in his life except her to what he is wedded to. Patricia scorns this remark, saying that she has observed how he is continually interested in women. We see them stand backs to backs in a picture of frustration and good breeding.

This difficult position is resolved by the return of General Gerald in his military hat. He has put on a good face and a new tunic to announce that on the morrow he will bring his betrothed to Gorica to meet the prince. Patricia walks away with her bunch of roses. Or perhaps just one rose, to save expense.

Once again, Mendicula summons up all his upbringing and dismisses suspicions to the wall. He shakes warmly hands in the eternal emblem of friendship with Gerald, proclaiming what a good friend he is and commending Gerald for his attention to Patricia at a period when their marriage goes through a difficult tunnel. He would do anything to make Patricia happy. Gerald says he would also. They agree.

In a little formal speech, so typical of a military man, Gerald thanks the prince for his indulgence, praising his enlightened attitude and jealousy lack. As we see, they on the shoulder slap each other and Prince Mendicula then admits, man to man, that there is another lady for what he feels attraction, and begs Gerald to continue undeterred his kindnesses to Patricia.

That is rather a long conversation. Perhaps we shall enliven it for the performance with views of sportive nymphs and shepherdesses, or something refined.

So now good relations appear to be restored between the prince and his lovely wife. They amiably ride together on a hunt for ancestral animals in a nobleman’s park. The bag will provide food for the nuptials forthcoming of General Gerald. Towards the end of this golden afternoon, when they are by a lake – that flat will serve twice – a messenger arrives from Gorica with a message for Mendicula. As we observe, he tears it open. It comes from the Lady Jemima, announcing her arrival in the city and craving a mere hour from his time in order to him bid farewell.

In this scene, note the high colour of the participants. Mendicula tells Patricia that urgent matters of state require attention, so he must leave for a while. She is suspicious. She becomes angry and accuses him of assignations. He in turn angers. He begs her to practise toleration, just as he tolerates her fondness with General Gerald. She replies that that relationship has to do nothing with their marriage. He cannot understand this remark, but keeps quiet wisely and rides from the park in high dudgeon. Or perhaps he strides from the park. Or we possibly may procure a stuffed horse what will hold still.

Prince Mendicula goes to the palace to change into state regalia and slip into a crown. There he is met by a deputation from the defeated city councillors. They have honest faces but gloomy ones. They try to prevail upon him to issue an immediate proclamation curtailing activities of his soldiery. These soldieries have been laying waste the countryside and, more importantly, looting, pillaging and raping, and – where rape is inapplicable – seducing in the streets of Gorica in a thoroughly traditional military manner. Mendicula admits the tradition is obnoxious and agrees that a proclamation shall be made through his general. This is the messenger being despatched to Gerald, asking him to curb the natural inclination of soldiers, possibly by shooting a few. We shall not show actual scenes of rapine. These things are best left in the imagination.

This important meeting takes a while, so that the prince is some hours late by the time he arrives to the noble house at what Jemima is lodging.

Here a servant admits Mendicula to Jemima’s room, and the prince is seen standing aghast at the sight of her alone and weeping in a lace handkerchief. In response to his agonised inquiries, she says there is one what she loves; it was for his sake that she rebuffed the prince’s advances, and not because she intended disrespect to the royal line. Now she has learned that this lover of hers has been faithless, consorting with another woman even as he prepared their marriage ceremony, a splendid affair to last three days and no spared expense, which we shall not have fortunately to show. Jemima’s tears fall like the outlet of a fountain. She wets her lute.

The prince is so much moved that he falls on one knee. Or maybe two. Putting his arms about her, he endeavours to comfort. One thing leads to another thing; in particularly, condolence leads to prurience. They go together to the bed, lying in rapture in one another’s arms as if it was habitual to their mutual comfort and amusement. The slides here will be optional, depending on the company. We will not try Letitia’s modesty too far, since she is not a real actress. It’s a challenge.

More pictures. Dawn, if not exhaustion, brings a change from mood. Jemima awakes from a nap and sits up with a look of total repentance for expression. Here comes her wedding day and she faces it a soiled woman – although she freely admits that she is less soiled than if she would have laid with a commoner. Nevertheless, royalty is no substitute for chastity. She declares that she must kill herself.

Assuming the royal breeches, Mendicula attempts to dissuade. He also has a high code of honour but she is exceeding.

Petulantly, she cries that he has placed her into a situation where she would prefer to die. She is no landlord’s daughter. She also has some good blood. The poor must live with all their disgraces about them; she must not. He has her utterly undone, while the man what is to be her husband has spent the night undoubtedly with his paramour.

Mendicula is struck by the coincidence that this will be her wedding day and that also of his close friend, the General. He pronounces Gerald’s name. Jemima gives a cry and reveals that he is none otherwise than her betrothed.

Together they cling. She weeps afresh. The prince feels heavily that he has dishonoured her and his friendship, but he can clear at least half of her double disgrace.

Ringingly, he proclaims that he can deaden the unworthy suspicions what she entertains for General Gerald. For Gerald’s supposed paramour is none otherwise than his spotless own wife, Princess Patricia. He explains how he has heard from Patricia’s own fair mouth that nothing untoward passes between her and Gerald. They have his secure trust, and only since a previous few hours she assured that her fondness for Gerald will not harm their marriage in every way.

Jemima is so cheered that she dresses behind a screen. But the happy night what she and the prince have just passed cannot be blotted so easily out. She bursts forth, crying dramatically with a slight tearing of the hair how she feels herself doubly guilty of misconduct if Gerald is the honourable man what Mendicula just described. Mendicula protests that she is too scrupulous. He and she will forthwith part, despite the fondness what they hold towards each other; he will never more seek out her. Anything between them is now ended, and it will have been as if their joyous one night never will have existed.

Moreover, he will bestow on his general a title, together with another city what they will overrun, where Gerald can live in content with Jemima, so that the parties need never to be exposed against temptation again. Amid music, we see them laugh and cry and embrace each other for the last very time, that doleful phrase in love’s book.

Returned at the Gorica palace, Prince Mendicula goes to the princess’s compartments, full still of goodwill. There is Patricia with her toilet. He passionately declares to her that never again will he vex by looking at other women; he has found his true centre and implores of her forgiveness.

Great his consternation is when Patricia greets this announcement with coolness, turning away as if she heeds scarcely what he says. Shaken, he repeats that he is aware all too much at having neglected her, but that the neglect will end, has already ended. She is his true love.

In a cold voice, perhaps moving to the window, Patricia declares that everything he says is a confession merely that he has a secret lover, as she just suspected and he has denied. She supposes that Mendicula has quarrelled now with the hussy and needs to come back creeping to her. He protests with spirit everywhere. Angry by the way his magnanimity is received as if it is old clothes, he admits with ill-timed honesty that he has been interested in another lady, but that he now has put her for ever away.

Patricia becomes at this even more remote and haughty. She inquires if he makes all this fuss because of herself and Gerald.

The prince does not understand her meaning. He repeats that he relinquishes the other lady and her friendship because simply it is causing pain both to her and to Patricia, what he cannot bear to hurt. He ascribes Patricia’s continued coolness to her suspicions making her unhappy; now she has no further need for coolness or unhappiness.

Once more on his knees, the prince admits freely her right to have disapproved and asks forgiveness for hurts done; the matter is entirely between the two of them and has no concern for Gerald, what has stood by them nobly all along. Why does she introduce his name at this juncture?

We’ll need powder for you here, Miss Armida. Patricia becomes pale of cheek. She turns away from her husband. Her hands shake as she tugs at the curtain. She says in a distant voice that he may repent as much as he likes but it has come too late. She does not intend to discontinue her affair with Gerald – she is enjoying it too much.

At these words, the prince clutches his heart. With dry throat, he forces himself to ask – are she and Gerald then lovers?

‘Of course we are! What else do you think we shall have been doing?’

Mendicula falls back, ashen of face, unable to speak, looking silly.

She turns on him. ‘You have your affair, I have mine.’

He can only shake his head.

‘And you knew Gerald and I were lovers,’ she cries, very haughty.

‘No, no, I trusted you both.’

‘You knew and you encouraged. The other day only you spoke with him privily and commended him, commended him for what he was doing. You told him at his face that he was good for me. That happens to be true! He took your meaning and praised your enlightened attitude. Why, you told him even you had a woman – oh, yes, he informed what you said! And you told me that you tolerated our fondness. You knew what was happening.’

‘If you believed really that you were not deceiving me, then why did you so falter from revealing the truth to me now?’

She merely rages at him and throws a hairbrush or something.

All the prince’s ideals fall like rags from his eyes. He does not even then beat her or berate. Instead, he tries to explain that when he found them both innocent of vice after the first night he spent away from Gorica, he accepted the virtue in them both, thinking them honourable people who could hold their lusts in check for the greater interests of friendship and policy. From then on, he quelled unworthy doubts what arose and trusted them to sustain a proper friendship. That he had encouraged, and he did not deny. She needed a good friend in a strange city and, since Gerald was his sworn friend, owing him many debts of favour, he banished entirely any suspicions of dishonour as dishonouring them. Was his code of behaviour so unworldly? What sort of man would he be if, as she pretended, he had acted as pander to his own wife with a friend as gigolo?

To these questions, she had no answer. Hers is the way of scorn.

‘I thought your behaviour generous and wise. So Gerald did. We honoured you then.’

‘In bed you honoured me?’

‘Now I merely scorn you. So he will.’

Far from being penitent, she is unmoved alike by his anger or his misery. She says that she and Gerald simply amused themselves. She has no intention of now relinquishing Gerald, when they are enjoying both the affair.

‘I tried to be all in all to you. Why are you so cold and hard now?’

‘You were never enough frivolous for my taste.’

‘But he … he … has someone else …’

‘He can have many women, so long as I am one of them …’

‘Patricia, my love, do not degrade yourself! He has debased you …’

Something of that sort. The prince is gentle in his despair, but at that moment, General Gerald himself enters the room, very light and airy – as you do so well, de Chirolo.

In rage, the prince charges him with vile deception in seducing the wife from a man he has called his closest friend, and in betraying totally the trust laid upon him. Gerald uneasily laughs. He adopts a superior attitude and says that the prince has been trifling also. The two wrongs make a right: it is after all the way of the world, and Mendicula would do best to keep quiet. He suspects that if Patricia cares to investigate the matter, she shall discover that the prince has seduced several of her maidservants.

‘You smooth villain, you lie to save your face!’

Gerald takes Patricia’s arm. She clings to him.

‘Besides, admit, my spoilt prince, you encouraged me. By keeping Patricia happy, I merely was trying to improve your highness’s marriage.’

This is more than the prince can tolerate.

‘You will make a fool of me no longer!’ he cries, drawing his sword. Gerald draws also. They fight. Patricia looks on, pale and unmoving. Well, of course unmoving on the slide.

After many a desperate parry, Gerald draws back, his sword arm pinked. He trips on a rug, sprawling against the princess’s bed. He is open utterly to a mortal wound.

As Mendicula hesitates, an army messenger hurries in and announces that the Lady Jemima has been found dead in her room by a maid, dressed in full bridal array. A note by her head declares that she felt herself too much dishonoured to marry such a man of honour as the General Gerald.

At this news, it is the prince who falls back in grief. Seizing his chance, Gerald snatches up his sword and runs it through Mendicula’s side. With a last glance at Patricia, the prince dies upon her bed.

Sad fanfares herald the end of our drama of the Prince Mendicula.

Promptly at siesta hour, the Hoytola carriage arrived at the Chabrizzi Palace, with Armida’s chaperon, Yolaria, sitting rigid inside. Armida made her farewells and was whisked away.

Next day, the same procedure was followed. I was not to see as much of her as I had hoped. Bengtsohn was secretive about the mercurisation and would let nobody view the results. But all appeared to be well because we continued to work slowly through the tableaux. With Armida, it seemed as if mercurisation had not taken place between us. I wondered how I could change matters. Accordingly, I walked through the thick afternoon heat to speak to All-People. De Lambant came with me for support.

All-People stood stooped in his whiskery nook by the bottom of the scrivener’s stair. His antiquity, his frailty, made it appear that his stiff raiment supported him. His goat was tethered nearby; bluebottles investigated its beard. Neither man nor animal moved. Slow smoke trailed off the iron altar and slipped round the corner about its own business. Because of the hour, nobody was waiting to consult him.

I put down a few paras, all I could spare from the money Bengtsohn had paid me.

‘You were correct in what you said, All-People.’

‘I see the truth is worth little.’

‘Alas, so am I. You said, “If you stand still enough, you will act effectively”. You referred to old Otto Bengtsohn’s zahnoscope, didn’t you? Why was I chosen?’

He threw a crumb of powder on his ashes. They gleamed dully. The stench of Malacia was in my nostrils.

‘The Earth lies in an everlasting penumbra some mistake for light. The Powers of Darkness created all. One shadow merges with another.’

‘There is a girl, All-People, also involved in Bengtsohn’s affairs. How can I make sure that my shadow crosses hers?’

‘I am not the one who blesses your amulet. Go ask of him.’

‘I will consult Seemly Moleskin, of course. But you already have a hand in my affairs. I am ambitious and hope you can encourage me more.’

He closed his eyes, lids falling like wrinkled lips, as if to end the session. ‘The Lord of Darkness has his brand on every one of us. To please him, you must gratify your senses until the carriage shatters.’

I stood looking at him, but the long yellow face had closed itself off from my ken. I shuffled, the goat shook its head, nothing else happened.

Going over to de Lambant, who stood at a respectful distance, as the custom was – to overhear someone else’s predication was fatally to entangle your own lifelines – I said, ‘Why does the Natural Religion always rouse fear and confusion? Why do I never understand what the magicians tell me?’

‘Because it’s all old-fashioned rubbish,’ said de Lambant. ‘I haven’t had my amulet blessed in weeks and am I any the worse for it? You’re taking this too seriously. Let’s get Portinari and have a drink.’

‘All-People said something about my body being shattered. My carriage, a carriage. It sometimes crosses my mind that life’s more complex than you think. I’ll go and see Mandaro.’

Guy shook his head. ‘My dear de Chirolo, priests are worse then wizards. Stay away from them. Come, it’s hot. Let’s tip Portinari out of bed and have a drink and a chat with him.’

‘You go. I’ll come along later.’

We parted. I told myself that it was absurd to have a heavy heart when my purse was so light. The priest would do me no good. The company of my friends would be a lot more cheerful. I turned. De Lambant was not out of sight. Giving him a call, I ran to join him, and we headed together for Portinari’s house.

On the third day of our enactment of the tragedy of Prince Mendicula, the mighty zahnoscope was trained upon us when a great clatter started in the courtyard and Bengtsohn bid us wait.

The Chabrizzis were leaving for their summer vacation in the Vukoban Mountains. In other years, Armida told me, they holidayed in a fertile valley in the Prilipits to the south of Malacia where they owned estates; but this year there were reports of Turkish armies moving in that area. As usual, Malacia was encompassed by enemies.

Soon we were surrounded by a congregation of coaches, carriages and waggons piled with luggage and musical instruments, horses, dogs, pet snaphances, cattle and poultry, not to mention adult and infant Chabrizzis, together with their friends and servants. It was all too much for our tableau. Bengtsohn’s wife, Flora, tried to dispel the crowd, but it was not to be dispelled until it was ready. Our impresario dismissed us and walked away grumpily with his dark box under his arm.

We were interrupted in the scene where I as the dishonourable General Gerald was taking Princess Patricia to grand balls (represented by one other dancing couple) and similar splendid occasions (represented by a painting of a marble staircase). Such enforced intimacy served to ripen the relationship between Armida and me, not only because we were the two left outside a Bengtsohn-Bonihatch comradeship which extended to most of the rest of the workshop, but because she had taken a dislike to Mendicula, whose bonihatchian sidewhiskers tickled her unendurably for minutes on end as well as – so Armida said – smelling of stale custard.

She took me to one side. ‘The Chabrizzis will leave the palace almost empty, with only a few servants to deter robbers,’ she said. ‘They’ll all be gone in another five minutes. Fancy, I haven’t entered the old place for years – there was some coldness between our families. Now’s my chance to explore those nooks and crannies I recall so well before Yolaria arrives with the carriage.’

‘Don’t get lost – or found!’

She slipped her hand into mine. ‘Oh, I dare not go alone. You see how grotesque the palace is, standing under that looming rock. Besides, it is haunted by an ancient wizard with flaming eye-sockets.’

‘I’ll come too. Shall we take a bucket of water in case we meet the eye-sockets?’

‘Slip in round the side so that nobody will notice us. Come on, it’ll be fun!’ She turned her face up, smiling in excitement.

I followed her round to a side door and we plunged together into the gloom of the palace. The clatter of the courtyard was lost. In a way, it was like being trapped inside the zahnoscope, with long vistas of light and shade contrived by window and tapestry and wall and corridor. What a place for an assignation! It was up to me to rehearse General Gerald’s role as thoroughly as possible, and I followed Armida’s ice-blue robe with despatch.

I mentioned that the palace was set under an outcrop of rock. At this point, the Prilipit Mountains had deposited a last great chunk of limestone, some hundred metres high, upon the landscape. The ingenious Chabrizzis, for reasons of defence, had built their home under and into the face of this mass of rock, upsetting the symmetry of composition intended by their architect.

The interior of the building was confusing. The men who built the place had been so baffled by topography that they had in some instances left a curve of staircase incomplete, or caused a passageway to double back upon itself in despair, or left a potentially grand chamber unshaped, its rear wall broken rock.

Armida, a small venturesome girl again, pulled me through the labyrinth, in and out of compartments, up or down large and little flights of stairs, through small doors that yielded enormous prospects, and a banqueting hall that led into a cupboard. Through tall windows, we saw the vacationing party move slowly out of the main gates and down the hill.

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.