The Malacia Tapestry. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?’ СКАЧАТЬ