The Malacia Tapestry

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.’