The Malacia Tapestry. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ