Orbit 12 - [Anthology] Read online

The chamber assigned me as a nest was high in the Mantegan castle, overlooking the ragged roofs of an inner court. Despite its height, honeysuckle had climbed up to the window and beyond, to the eaves, clinging wirily to the pitted stonework. During my time in bed, the sound of bees filled the room, together with the pale scent of blossoms.

  My sister Katerina sat by my bed for hours. She allowed nobody but her personal servant to attend me. Mostly, she looked after me herself. Katerina was my one surviving sister. I would rouse and open an eye and there she would be, patiently sitting; I would drift off into a realm of feverish dreams, imagining her gone, and then open my eyes again, to the luxury of finding her still there. As I recovered, she took to sitting by the window, stroking her lovely amber-coloured cat, Poseidon, or working at her embroidery.

  She still remained during my convalescence, tranquil by the sunlight, while I lolled in the shade of the room, weak from the effects of my illness, and we turned old times into spasmodic conversation.

  “I’m truly grateful for your care, Katie. Now the summer is here, let’s see more of one another than we have managed recently.”

  “I’m glad of the wish—and yet forces operate in life to separate people, whatever they wish.”

  “We’ll take care that those forces avoid us. We’ll remain light-hearted and rise above them.”

  Silence save for the industrious bees, and then Katerina said, gesturing outside, “These elegant birds with forked tails are flying about our towers again. They arrive every year from somewhere —some say from the bottoms of ponds. They never alight on the ground. I believe they have no feet or legs, according to Aristotle.”

  “They’re called cavorts, and are supposed to come from a continent of southern ice which no man has ever seen.”

  She made no answer, instead producing a small white comb with which she commenced to comb out the lustrous amber coat of Poseidon, till his purr was as loud as the noise of the bees.

  “It’s hard to imagine a land that no living person has ever seen.”

  “Is it? I believe we live in such a land. Close at our hand, everything is mysterious, undiscovered.”

  She laughed. “I’m sure that’s a line from one of your plays!”

  “Whenever I say anything profound, or even sensible, everyone tells me I stole it from some wretched comedy or other. Don’t you recall how clever I was as a child?”

  “I recall how you used to do living statues for us, and we had to guess whom you were supposed to represent. And you nearly drowned in the lagoon when you were doing Triton! I ruined my new dress, helping to rescue you.”

  “It was worth it for the sake of art. You were always the best at guessing, Katie!”

  As she collected a combful of fur, she would pull it away and flick it out of the window. Combful after combful poured out of Poseidon’s coat and drifted out into the warm air beyond.

  “Could it be unlucky to see cavorts on a certain day, do you think?”

  “I never heard so. Who told you that?”

  “Perhaps it’s an old wives’ tale. They say that if you see a cavort on a certain day of the year, you will think about it ever after, and gradually the thought becomes so obsessive that you can think of nothing else.”

  “I’ve heard that theory expounded of other things, but surely not of a mere bird. It’s ridiculous!”

  “Possy, look at all this fur you are wasting, you silly cat! People’s thoughts are funny affairs—perhaps they could be attracted to one special thing, as a lodestone enchants metals.”

  I stretched and climbed off the bed, groaning and yawning pleasurably.

  “Certainly I know people whose thoughts are obsessed by horses or precious stones or women or—”

  “Women are different!”

  “Different each from each other, sister, I agree—“

  “And then there’s poor father, whose thoughts are obsessed by his books...”

  She released yet another handful of fur through the window. I went over to her, lolling against the side of the window and tickling the cat’s head, saying idly, “I suppose we are all obsessed with something or other, even if we don’t recognise the fact.”

  Katerina looked up at me. Witha hint of reproach, she said, “You still generalise about life. You take it so lightly, don’t you? You think everything’s arranged for your amusement.”

  “I have no evidence to the contrary so far. You used to be carefree enough, Katie. Is Volpato unfaithful to you? Does he beat you? Why does he leave you here alone for so long?”

  She did not remove her gaze from me for a while. Then she looked down at her slender hands and said, “I was fascinated by Volpato and the Mantegan family even as a carefree child. On my eighth birthday, an old soothsayer told me I would grow up to marry him. I did so, and I love him, so that’s all there is to it.”

  “Predestination! Have you no will of your own, Katie?”

  “Don’t tease me! You are better, I see. You can leave the castle tomorrow, if you desire.”

  I kissed her hand and said, “Sweet sis, don’t be cross with me! You are such a beautiful person and I have much liked being pampered by you. I shall marry a girl as much like you as possible—and I will leave the castle tomorrow in search of her!”

  She laughed then, and all was well between us, and Poseidon purred more loudly than ever.

  The window at which we all were was deep-set within its embrasure. Its ledge was fully wide enough for Katerina and her cat to sit there in comfort and gaze out at the world below. Or a man might stand there and, with no inconvenience to himself, discharge a musket from the coign of vantage. The woodwork round the window was lined like an aged peasant’s brow with the ceaseless diurnal passage of sunlight; perhaps some such thought had crossed the mind of an old unknown poet who, with many a flourish, had engraved two tercets of indifferent verse on one of the small leaded panes of the window:

  What twain I watch through my unseeing eye:

  Inside, the small charades of men; outside,

  The tall parades of regulating sky!

  Thus I a barrier am between a tide

  Of man’s ambitions and the heavens’ meed—

  Of things that can’t endure and things that bide.

  Poseidon changed his position and lay stomach upward on my sister’s lap, so that it was now combsful of white fur which were released on the breezes to join the brown. The afternoon had created within the courtyard a bowl of warm air which spilled outward and upward, carrying the cat’s fur with it; I was surprised to find that not a single strand had reached the ground. Instead, the brown and white tufts floated in a great circle, moving between the facades of the rooms on this side of the courtyard and the next, the stables and lofts with their little tower opposite us, and the tall and weather-blasted pines which stood on the fourth side, by the wall with the gatehouse. A whole layer of air, level with our window, and extending to each of the four limiting walls, was filled with Poseidon’s fur. It floated like feathers on water, but in a perpetual stir. Katerina squeaked with amazement when I pointed it out; with her attention fixed on me, she had not noticed the pleasant phenomenon.

  The cavorts were also busy. There were perhaps six pairs of them, and they swooped up from their positions in eaves and leads, tearing at the layer of fur, and whisking it down again to line their nests with. We stood watching, delighted by their activity. So intent were the little birds on their work that they often blundered almost near enough to our window to be caught. Majestically round and round floated the fur, and erratically up and down plunged the birds.

  “When the baby birds are born, they’ll be grateful to you, Poseidon!” said Katerina. They’ll be brought up in proper luxury!”

  “Perhaps they’ll form a first generation of cat-loving birds!”

  When at length we went downstairs, the fur was still circulating, the birds still pulling it to shreds, still bearing it back to their aerial nests.

  “Let’s play cards again tonight .
. . Birds are so witless, they must always be busy—there’s nothing to them but movement. I never find that time hangs heavy on my hands, Prian, do you?”

  “Oh, I adore to be idle. It’s then I’m best employed. But I wonder time doesn’t hang heavy for you here, alone in the castello.”

  Placing a hand on my sleeve, smiling in a pleasant evasive way, Katerina said, “Why don’t you employ yourself by visiting our wizard of the frescoes, Nicholas Dalembert? There’s a man with a mind obsessed by only one thing, his art Like his wife, he’s melancholy but interesting to talk to—when he feels disposed to talk.”

  “Dalembert’s still here! It’s many a moon since I last saw him, and then he was threatening to leave the castle on the morrow! The man is probably one of the geniuses of our age, if unrecognised.”

  As we descended to her suite of rooms, and her pretty black maid, Peggy, ran to open the doors for her, Katerina said, “Dalembert is always threatening to leave. I’d as soon believe him if he threatened to finish his frescoes!”

  “How can your husband afford to pay him?”

  She laughed. “He can’t! That’s why Dalembert still lives here. He is so lazy! At least he has a free roof over his head. And he’s safer here in isolation now there’s plague again in Malacia.”

  “It always comes with the hot weather.”

  “Go and talk to him. You know the way. Well meet this evening in the chapel.”

  It was always pleasant to stroll through the irregularities of the Mantegan family castle. Its perspectives were like none I knew in the world, with its impromptu landings, its unexpected chambers, its dead ends, its never-ending stairs, its descents from stone into wood, its fine marbles and rotting plasters, its noble statues and ignoble decay.

  The Mantegan family had never been rich within memory of living man; now they were positively bankrupt, and my brother-in-law, Volpato, was the last of the line. It was whispered of him that he had poisoned both his elder brother, Claudio, and his elder sister, Saprista, in order to gain control of what little family wealth remained—Claudio by spreading a biting acid on the saddle of his stallion, so that the deadly ichor moved from the anus upward to the heart, Saprista by smearing a toxic orpiment on a golden statue of the Virgin which she was wont to kiss during her private devotions, so that she died rotting from the lips inward. If all this was true or not, Volpato did not reveal. Evil stories clustered about him, but he acted kindly enough in his treatment of my sister, as well as having the goodness to be away for long periods, seeking his fortune among the megatherium-haunted savannahs of the New World.

  Meanwhile, his castle on the banks of the Toi fell into decay, and his wife did not become a mother. But I was proud of it, and of my dear sister for marrying so well—the only one of us to marry into court circles.

  The way to Dalembert’s quarters lay through a long gallery in which Volpato displayed some of his treasures. Rats scuttled among them in the dim light. Among much that was rubbish were some fine blue-glazed dishes brought back from the lands of the Orinoco; ivories of mastodon carved during the last Neanderthal civilization for the royal house of Itssobeshiquetzilaha; parchments rescued by a Mantegan ancestor from the great library at Alexandria (among them two inscribed by the library’s founder, Ptolemy Soter) and portraits on silk of the seven Alexandrian Pleiades preserved from the same; a case full of Carthaginian ornament; jewels from the faery smiths of Atlantis; an orb reputed to have belonged to Birsha, King of Gomorrah, with the crown of King Bera of Sodom; a figurine of a priest with a lantern from the court of Caerleon-on-Usk; the stirrups of the favourite stallion of the Persian Bahram, Governor of Media, that great hunter; tapestries from Zeta, RaSka, and the courts of the early Nemanijas, together with robes cut for Miluitin; a lyre, chalice, and other objects from the Mousterian Period; a pretty oaken screen carved with dim figures of children and animals which I particularly liked, said to have come from distant Lyonesse before it sank below the waves; together with other items of some interest. But all that was of real worth had been sold off long ago, and the custodian sacked, to keep the family in meat and wine.

  Tempted by a whim for which I could not account, I paused on my way among the mouldy relics and flung open an iron-strapped chest at random. Books bound in vellum met my gaze, among them one more richly jacketed, in an embroidered case studded with beads of ruby and topaz.

  Taking it over to the light, I opened it and found it had no title. It was a collection of poems in manuscript, probably compiled by their creator. At first glance, the poems looked impossibly dull, odes to Liberty and the Chase, apostrophes to the Pox and Prosody, and so on. Then, as I flicked the pages, a shorter poem in terza rima caught my eye.

  The poem consisted of four verses—the first two of which were identical with those adorning my bedroom window! Its title had reference to the emblematic animal over the main archway of the castle: “The Stone Watchdog at the Gate Speaks.” Whoever had transcribed part of the poem onto the window had been ingenious in accrediting its lines to the transparent glass. Amused by the coincidence, for coincidences were my daily dish, I read the final verses.

  No less, while things celestial proceed

  Unfettered, men and women all are slaves,

  Chaining themselves to what their hearts

  most need.

  Methinks that whatsoe’er the mind once craves,

  Will free it first and then it captive take

  By slow degrees, down into Free Will’s graves.

  Alas, Prosody had not replied when addressed! Yet the sentiment expressed might be true. I generally agreed with myself on the truth of the moralising in poems. Perhaps very little could be said that was a flat lie, provided it rhymed. Thoughtfully, I tore the page from its volume and tucked it in my doublet, tossing the book back into the chest, among the other antiquities.

  Beyond the long gallery was the circular guard room, with its spiral stair up to the ramparts. Although the guard room had once been a building standing alone, it had long since come within the strangling embrace of the castle which, like some organic thing, had thrown out galleries and wings and additional courts, century by century, engulfing houses and other structures as it went. The old guard room retained something of its outdoor character despite being embedded inside the masonry of the castle; a pair of cavorts skimmed desperately round the shell, trapped after venturing in through carelessly boarded arrow slits on the inside-facing wall. On the floor lay a shred of Poseidon’s fur which the birds had dropped in their panic.

  The character of the building changed again beyond the guard room. Here were stables, now converted to the usages of the Mantegan family’s resident artist, Nicholas Dalembert. Dalembert worked up in the loft, while his many children romped over the cobbles below.

  I called to him. After a moment, his head appeared in the opening above, he waved, and began to climb down the ladder. He started to speak before he reached the bottom.

  “So, Master Prian, it’s almost a year—it’s a long while since we’ve seen you at Mantegan. As God is my witness, this is an inhospitable place. I wonder what can have brought you here now. Not pleasure, I’ll be bound.”

  I explained that I had been ill, that my sister was caring for me, and that I might be leaving on the morrow. “At first I thought it was the plague troubling me! There’s much of it in Malacia, especially in the Stary Most district—brought from the East, the medicos say, on the backs of the Turkish armies. Whenever you fall into a fever these days, you fear the worst.”

  “You’re safe from the plague here, that at least I’ll say. The plague likes juice and succulence, and there’s nothing of that in this place.” He cast a gloomy eye down on his children, then busy flogging an old greyhound they had cornered; certainly they were not the plumpest of children.

  Dalembert was a hefty fellow, as befits an artist who spends much time dissecting men, horses, and dinosaurs. The years had bowed his broad shoulders and trained a mass of grey hair about his shoulder
s. He had a huge cadaverous face with startling black eyes whose power was reinforced by the great black line of his eyebrows.

  “I came to see how the frescoes were progressing, Nicholas.”

  “They’re as incomplete as they were last Giovedi Grassi Festival, when you and the players were performing here. Nothing can be done—I can’t work anymore without pay and, although I don’t want to complain to you about your own brother-in-law, Milord Volpato would be better employed setting his lands in order than involving me in his schemes for self-aggrandisement. I’m so hard up I’ve even had to sack the lad who was colouring in my skies for me.”

  As he was making this dismal speech, he was leading me through a side door and across a narrow court. His steps were heavy, his manner slow and deliberate. I wondered at him and his situation. I had no doubt that he was among the greatest painters in the land, and not just in Malaria; yet he had wasted a decade here—indeed, seemed to have settled here, forever dawdling on the Mantegan frescoes, forever experimenting with a dozen other arts. Sometimes he quarrelled with Volpato and threatened to leave. All the while, he complained of Volpato’s stinginess. Yet Volpato also seemed to have some justice on his side when he, in his turn, complained that he housed and supported an idle painter and got no reward for it