Orbit 12 - [Anthology] Read online

  As the meter showed, our carpet had a twelve-foot ceiling, but it bore us swiftly enough, flapping above the motley heads of the people and avoiding other fliers. The girls squealed and laughed prettily, so that Lambant and I looked at each other behind their delicious backs, nodding in silent agreement that we were lucky in finding—and so soon—the two prettiest and most intelligent girls in the autumn fair.

  We left the stalls behind and threaded our way through a grove of slender birches. Ahead lay the river and, beyond, the foothills of the Vokoban Mountains. Lambant pointed to them.

  “Let’s go to a nest I know, safe from interruption!”

  “No, take us no further than the river!” cried the girls. Perhaps they recalled the old legends about what happens when one flies over water on a fine day.

  Lambant would not hear argument, and we sailed across to a mossy ledge high up a slope on which wild autumn crocus grew, pink on pink. So high were we that we could still clearly see the tiny bright booths of the fair, and the fortifications of the town, and even hear, now and again, the strepitation of a tinsel trumpet. Above us, to one side, we could see the jagged grey slates of a mountain village—Heist was its name—and peasants toiling with their man-lizards among the vines below its walls.

  “This is supposed to be an evil mountain,” Chloe said. “My father tells me that the Exiles are imprisoned within the entrails of these peaks!”

  “Are you girls apprenticed to sorcerers that you believe such tales!” I asked. “If there are indeed Exiles, then they are imprisoned in each one of us, and not in mere rocks.”

  “Mere rocks!” said Lise. “Mere rocks throw out stranger things than men, since men themselves were thrown from rock. Only last year, on the coasts of Lystra, a new sort of crab was born from the earth which climbs trees and signals to its friends and enemies with a claw especially enlarged for the purpose.”

  Lambant laughed. “That sounds a very old sort of crab to me! What we require by way of newness in crabs is a species that will crow like a cockerel, yield milk every Monday in the month, and raise its carapace when requested to reveal beautiful doll’s-house jewellery underneath. Or a really big tame land crab the size of that boulder but with a better turn of speed, which we could train to gallop like a stallion.”

  “Marvellous! And it would be amphibious and carry us across the seas to lands of legend!”

  “And not only across the seas but under them, for we could creep inside its carapace and be secure from the waters outside.”

  “Then we should see the lairs of the ancient sea monsters, where they are still supposed to hide, growing as civilized as men and conveying sea lore to one another.”

  “I’d grow ivy and bright creepers and ferns all over my crab, until it looked like a fantastic itinerant garden.”

  “Mine would have musical claws that played as it ran!”

  “Girls, girls, you take up the silly game so violently, you’ll batter your brains out on your imaginations!”

  We laughed again, and sat together beneath a plaque let into the rock, on which was written a legend in the Old Language. They asked me to translate it and with some effort I did so.

  “This sculptured stone has a melancholy voice. It bears an inscription to a friend who appears, from the dating, to have passed over into shade at least eleven centuries ago. It’s a sort of verse. It says...“

  I hesitated, and then spoke firmly.

  “Shall I forget Phalanda? Yea, I shall,

  For Death is a forgetting which contains

  Forgetfulness for mourned and mourner; so

  My tear but not its prompting yet remains;

  The thought of Death dies in a youthful heart

  Or, living, seems but savour to Life’s art

  Now to my autumn, Death’s remembered lot

  Brings more forgetting than my spring forgot.”

  Chloe laughed politely, hand halfway to her pretty mouth.

  “Well, it is certainly elegiac, even if it doesn’t make sense. Of course, such verses don’t rely too strongly on sense for their impact”

  “Nothing about Death makes sense,” said Lambant, striking a pose. “For Death is the negative of sense; we know it not until it bears us hence—and then ‘tis positive we know it not...”

  “...For it and we are both a load of rot!” completed Lise, and we hugged each other and laughed. Meanwhile, Lambant had swung the old plaque open and drawn from behind it a piping and highly spiced dish for our lunch, the saffron rice grains amply punctuated with dates and sultanas and little fish, their gaping mouths stuffed with bunny-cloves, in the Phrustian fashion. We cried with pleasure to the gods and, feeling deeper into the rock, brought out wine in clay bottles and a cream-coloured cloth.

  “All we need is some of Master Bledlore’s glasses, and we have here a feast for a king—or a prince, at the least. After all, even princes have to slim on some occasions. Now, Prian, while we eat, we must talk of more serious matters than Death, whose very existence is suspect on such days as this—besides which, there are spells against him, which is why I wear this serpent’s fang tied by a thread of scarlet cotton at my buttonhole ... So, let’s begin our debate.”

  “Maybe the girls don’t want to talk about decadence,” I said, helping myself to a handful of rice, as the others were doing. “And I for my part would rather talk about the girls.”

  “That’s real decadence for you!” said Chloe. With her ravishing mouth full, she added, “But the fish are delectable!”

  Addressing myself to her sister, I said, “I notice that your sister is the bolder of you in speech. In action, which is the bolder?”

  “Pooh, Chloe is not my sister! Does she look like me? Does she speak like me? Do you suppose she thinks like me?”

  “You are alike in beauty and wit, but perhaps, on reflection, both your sentences and your skirts are a bit shorter. And you eat faster!”

  “We should have guessed they aren’t sisters, Prian! How could one matriarchal womb manage to coin two such masterpieces?”

  “Thank you, Master Lambant, we will leave wombs on one side.”

  “Such asymmetry would spoil the look of you ladies.”

  “This decadent conversation proves it a decadent age,” I said, tipping the wine bottle. “How can there be further argument? Girls, concede it cannot be a creative age and we’ll say no more on the subject.”

  “No, no, Prian!” cried Lambant. “I must side with the girls, for was not our decadent conversation about wombs, and what is more creative than a womb? Therefore it is proved a creative age!”

  I gestured largely, spilling yellow grains over them all. “No, I won’t allow it. You don’t follow your own argument deeply enough, Lambant! For how is a womb made to be creative? To give you not too anatomical an answer and spare dear Chloe’s blushes and dear Lise’s divine pallours, it is made creative by the male’s search for ever newer and more intense sensations. And what is the search for ever newer and more intense sensations but the essence of decadence? Thus, in this climax my conception is proved to the hilt”

  “But you cannot conceive what a mistake you make,” said Lise. “Your argument is abortive, for you are merely chopping logic.”

  “Yes, following your own private meaning,” added Chloe.

  “No, for you are privy to it, too. Do you think I want to conceal my movements? My droppings of wisdom all mount to the same thing—that this age is a decadent one. I for one rejoice in it One is comfortable in a decadent age. There are no wars, no major questions to be answered, no cold winds blowing from a religious north.”

  I had steered the conversation to a less facetious turn, having almost wrecked it in the whirlpools of wit. Lise answered me seriously, “But you are not correct. This is what Chloe and I were talking about indirectly before we visited the marionettes. There are always wars—if not between nations, between households, between classes, between ages, between sexes, between one side of a person’s nature and the other.
And there are always major questions to be answered, and will be as long as life is staged in our outrageous universe. Even the marionette show raised questions in my breast I could not answer. Why was I moved by those trumpery wooden dolls? They did not seek to imitate or satirise or even parody people. They were just wooden dolls. Yet I found a part of myself cheering first for Banker Man and then for Robber Man. Was that artistry at work? And if so, then whose artistry? The puppeteers or mine, that I used imagination despite myself? Why do I weep over characters in a book, who have no more flesh and blood than the thirty characters of the printed language? As for your absurd religious winds blowing from the north, Prian, are we not all the time in a storm of beliefs? What has all our talk been but different kinds of belief and disbelief?”

  We heard music far off of a tinkling and involved kind, ignoring it as Lambant took over the discourse.

  “You are admittedly right, Lise, yet right in such a small way that you must let me enlarge the argument on your behalf. It is true that even in a decadent age mankind is assailed by major questions—mysteries, I would prefer to call them. In a decadent age, of course, men simply turn their silken backs on such mysteries, or use them as stage settings. But there are mysteries much bigger than those you list. Look—I’ll name one. Before we met you two angels, my devilish friend and I had been to visit an artist, a miniaturist who engraves his masterpieces on glass, Giovanni Bledlore. He works obsessively for a pittance. Why? My theory is that he feels Time is against him, and so he builds monuments to himself in the only way he knows how, almost like a coral insect whose anonymous life creates islands. Time makes Master Bledlore create Art. Suppose he had all the time in the world! Suppose he could live forever! I’ll wager he would not raise his hand to cut one single goblet! Time is one of those big mysteries which drives all before it with its lash.”

  The music was nearer now, coming and going about the mountainside as intricately as its own measure. And its effect on me was measureless.

  “Whoever the rogue is who plays, he has Time where he wants it,” I said, rising to my feet. “I’ve eaten enough. Lise, though it be the devil himself at his music, I must dance with you!”

  She came into my arms, that beautiful willowy girl, and we danced, so that I felt for the first time the warmth of her vulnerable front against my body, and knew the delicate perfume of her in my nostrils. Her movements against me were so light, so taunting and in tune, that a special spring primed my step, powered by more than music. With a cry, Lambant and Chloe also jumped up and moved into each other’s embrace.

  So we were stepping lightly before the musician came into sight. When he rounded the rock, we scarcely heeded him, so rapt were we in our art, so much a part of our company he had become. I only saw that he was old and small and stocky, playing very gaily on his hurdy-gurdy, and that a man-lizard accompanied him.

  As long as the music went, so went we. It seemed we could not stop, or had no need of stopping. It was more than dance we made; it was courtship, as the music told us, as our own closeness, our own movements, our own looks told us. When we fell apart gasping, and the music died, we were together more intimately than before.

  We took up the bottles of wine and passed some to the gallant old musician and his friend. The hurdy-gurdy player was small and densely built, so that he seemed in his fustian clothes as thick as the city wall. His complexion was swarthy and we saw how old he was, his eyes sunken and his mouth receding, though there were black locks yet on the fringes of his white head. My friend and I recognised him at once. We had seen his likeness that very day.

  “Do you not live by the flea market, O tuneful one?” asked Lambant.

  “It’s undeniable, sir.” His thin, used voice had none of the brilliance of his music. “I have a poor shack there, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “We saw you portrayed on one of Master Bledlore’s glasses.”

  The old musician nodded. He came forward, holding out his instrument. It was painted all over yellow and bore a picture on its casing. We looked and saw there two children, chasing each other with arms outstretched. They were laughing. We knew the workmanship at once—and the children.

  “This must be Bledlore’s art! These children—they are the same ones on the azure vase in his studio?”

  “As you so rightly say, sirs! The very same, bless their lovely hearts. Since Giovanni used me as his model to paint, he painted these other models here as his fee. They are my little grandchildren—or at least I should say they were, and the apple of my eye, until the thrice-cursed chills of last winter carried them both off. They would dance all day to my music if you let them, pretty little things. But the magicians at the North Gate put a spell on them and now they are no more than compost, alas!” He began to weep. “I have nothing left of them but their little picture here,” and he cuddled his hurdy-gurdy to his cadaverous cheek.

  “How fortunate you are to have that consolation,” said Chloe pertly. “Now give us another tune, for we can’t dance so nimbly to your tears as to your music.”

  “I must make for Heist, to earn myself a few kopettos,” he said. “For it will soon be winter, however hard you young people dance.” He shuffled on, and the lizard-man followed, upright on his two sturdy legs and giving us the smile of tight-lipped kindness which belongs to his kind. As for Lambant and me, we fell to kissing and petting our pretty dears when the others were scarcely out of sight.

  “Poor old man, his music pleased us but not himself,” said Lise’s beautiful lips, close to mine.

  I laughed. “The object of art is not always consolation!” I pulled her dark hair about my face.

  “I don’t really know what the object of art is—but then, I still don’t know what the object of life is, either. Fancy, Prian, those little children dead, and yet their images living on after them, engraved on something as fragile as glass!” She sighed. “The shadow so eclipsing the substance . . .”

  “Well, art should be enduring, shouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you might say the same about life.”

  “You girls are so morbid! You talk so, when what you are enduring is only my hand groping up your silken underclothes . . . Ah, you delightful creature!”

  “Oh, dearest Prian, when you do that ... No art can ever . . .”

  “Ah, sweet bird, now if only . . . yes . . .”

  But there is little merit in reporting on a conversation as incoherent as ours became for, of all the arts, none translates into words less readily than that we then pursued. Suffice it merely to say that I—in the words of my most favourite poet—”‘twixt solemn and joke, enjoyed the lady.”

  So much for us. As for the meteorological phenomena, the beautiful anticyclonic weather brought down a sunset of ancient armorial gold, so that the world glowed like an old polished shield before night sank in upon it, and scarcely a wind stirred meanwhile. The six-hour spell on our flying carpet was allowed to run out, until it lay there limp and useless, incapable of further transports—and, at last, the same condition held for lucky Lambant and me, relaxed in the arms of our still loving ladies.

  We slept there in a huddle, the lamps of the distant fair our nightlights, with kisses for prayers.

  A cold predawn stirring woke us. One by one, we sat up and laughed at our negligence. The girls attended to their hair. In one corner of the sky the cloud cover had opened like a reluctant jaw, showing light in its gullet, but the light was as chill as the breeze that moved about our temples. We rose and made our way down the mountainside, following the path among the goosefoot, the amaranthus, and the gaudy spikes of broom. No movement or illumination showed from the city; up near the grey walls of Heist, however, where the mountain dialect was still spoken, dull-gleaming lanterns showed that peasants were already astir, going to a well or making for their slanting fields. Birds were beginning to call, without breaking the mountain hush.

  We came down to the riverside and headed for a wooden bridge. An old wooden wizard still stood
guarding it, leaning and well weathered as an ancient goat—but I saw that flowers had been laid fresh in his wormy hand, even this early in the day, and the symbolism was cheering. Taking Lise about the waist, I said, “However early you wake, someone is awake before you. However light you sleep, someone sleeps lighter. Whatever your mission, someone goes forth on an earlier one.”

  Lambant took it up, and then the dear girls, improvising, starting to chant and sing their words as we crossed over the creaking slats of the bridge.

  “However light your sleep, the day is lighter. However bright your smile, the sun is brighter.”

  “However overdue the dawn, no dues delay it . . . And what it owes the morn, in dew ‘twill pay it.” My clever little puss!

  “However frail the blossoms that you bring, year after year, they still go blossoming.”

  “The water runs below our feet, ever-changing, ever-sweet, the birdlings burble and the brittle beetles beat!”

  “However long night breezes last, day overthrows them, though day’s overcast.”