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СКАЧАТЬ jungles swarming …”’ I misquoted.

      She kissed me juicily until my barque ran up its sail again. As I reached for her, she wagged her finger at me in slow admonition.

      ‘The secret of any happiness is never to have sufficient. Neither the rich nor the evolutionaries recognise that profound truth. We have enjoyed enough for both of us, provided the future promises more. My husband can’t be trusted to stay away for any length of time. He is insanely suspicious, poor dear, and takes me for a perfect harlot.’

      ‘So you are perfect,’ I declared, reaching for the scrumptious mounds of her breasts, but she was away and slipping into her shift.

      ‘Perfect, maybe, but not a harlot. In truth, Perian – though you’d never comprehend this, for you are a creature of your lusts – I am far more affectionate than promiscuous.’

      ‘You’re lovely as you are.’

      When we were dressed, she gave me a glass of melon juice and a delicious cut of cold quitain. As I was eating, I asked her, ‘Do you know someone called Bengtsohn? – an old man with blue eyes, a foreigner, who says he has enemies everywhere. He comes from Tolkhorm, and has written a play.’

      She was getting restless. ‘Pozzi has used him to paint scenery. He was a good worker but I think he’s a Progressive.’

      ‘He offered me work with his zahnoscope. What’s a zahnoscope?’

      ‘How you do talk! Pray eat up and permit me to let you out of the side door, or Pozzi will come back and fall into such a frenzy of jealousy that we shall have no peace for weeks on end.’

      ‘I wanted to talk to you …’

      ‘I know what you wanted.’ I picked up my drumstick and made off obediently. There was no fault in this fine girl, and I was anxious to please her. Her main interests were bed and the play which, I supposed, was the reason she was always so sweet-tempered. It seemed no more than just that Kemperer should pay tax in kind on such a precious possession.

      In the streets, my elation began to wear almost as thin as my clothes. I had nothing, and was at a loss. My father was no support; I could not sponge off my sister. I could go to a tavern but, without a single denario to my name, could hardly expect my friends to welcome me with open purse. Most of them were in similar straits, except Caylus.

      For want of better amusement I followed various citizens, studying their walks and expressions, until I reached St Marco’s Square. The usual morning market-stalls were set up, with the usual crowds of country men and women in attendance, their horses and mules tethered along the shaded side of Mount Street.

      About the edges of the great square, clustering particularly under the colonnade of the Old Custom House, were booths for less serious-minded personages and children, where one might view two-headed calves, dioramas of ancient time, animated human skeletons, oriental jugglers, live ancestral animals, snake-charmers from Baghdad, fortune-tellers, marionettes, gaudy magic-lantern shows, and performing shaggy-tusks no bigger than dogs.

      How I had hung about those enchanted booths with my sister Katarina as a child. The magic-lantern shows, with their panoramas of shipwreck, noble life and majestic scenery, had been our especial delight. Here they still were, unchanged.

      What was unusual about this day was that it was the first Thursday of the month, the day set since time immemorial for the Malacian Supreme Council to meet. Not that the affairs of those greypates concerned me, but older people took an interest. I heard them murmuring about the Council as I walked among them.

      Bishop Gondale IX blessed the Council in public, but the deliberations of the Council were held in secret. The results of those deliberations were never announced; one could only deduce what had happened by observing who disappeared into the capacious dungeons of Fetter Place, there to be strangled by capable hands, or who was beheaded in the public gaze between the great bronze statues of Desport’s slobbergobs in St Marco, by the cathedral, or who reappeared as piecemeal chunks about various quarters of the city, or who was found with his mouth nibbled away by pike in the whirlpools of the River Toi. If the Council saw fit to dispatch them, then they were troublemakers, and I for one was glad to know that everything worked so well for the contentment of our citizens. The immemorial duty of the Supreme Council was to protect Malacia from change.

      I found a hair in my mouth. Removing it from between my teeth, I saw it was golden and curly. Ah, the Supreme Council could drown all its citizens in the canal, if so be I might get near enough to La Singla to pasture on that same little mountain.

      The traders at their stalls were discreet, knowing well the system of informers which helped maintain the peace of Malacia, but I gathered from a couple of them that the Council might be discussing Hoytola’s hydrogeneous balloon, to decide whether or not it could be approved. Nobody understood the principle of this novel machine, but some magical property in that phrase, ‘Hoytola’s hydrogenous balloon,’ had given it a certain lifting power in the taverns at least. The reality had yet to be seen; it was the Council which had ultimate say on such possibilities.

      One of the traders, a tallowy man with blue jowls and the same innocent look as the dead geese in his basket, said, ‘I reckon the balloon should be allowed to fly. Then we’ll be the equal of the flighted men, won’t we?’

      ‘All that’s interesting happens on the ground,’ I said. ‘Heroes, husbands, heretics – leave the air to sun and spirits.’

      I knew nothing of Hoytola. The sending up of small hot-air balloons had been a child’s pursuit in Malacia for ages. I remembered my father ponderously explaining how a whole fleet of hot-air balloons tied together might transport an army to surprise the Ottoman enemy. He had had a pamphlet printed concerning it. Then a captain in the Militia had called on him and dissuaded him from taking further interest in current affairs.

      It was enough that there were flighted people not greatly different from us, except for wings. They talked our language, married, died of the plague, much as we. Three of them soared about the square as I strolled through it, to settle by their cote at the top of St Marco’s campanile, traditional eyrie of these traditional sentinels of Malacia.

      I was hailed several times by stall-keepers as I went by. They had been groundlings when I performed here or there, and still cherished my performances. What a thousand shames that I should have arrived at the highest pitch of my art to find no chance to exhibit it to those who would appreciate it.

      As I scowled to myself, a figure close by said, ‘Why, Master de Chirolo, you look to bear the cares of the old wooden world on your shoulders!’

      Sidling up to me was the gaunt figure of Piebald Pete, so known because of the tufts of black hair which survived on his head among the white. He was the fantoccini man; the large, striped frame stood behind him, its red-plush curtains drawn together.

      ‘I haven’t a care in the world, Pete. I was merely acting out a drama in my head, as your marionettes act it out in their box. How’s the world treating you?’

      I should not have asked him. He spread wide his hands in despair and raised his black-and-white eyebrows in accusation to heaven. ‘You see what I’m reduced to – playing in the streets to urchins, me, me who once was invited into the greatest houses of the state. My dancing figures were always in demand – and my little Turk who walked the tightrope and chopped off a princess’s head. The ladies liked that. And all carved out of rosewood with eyes and mouths that moved. The best fantoccini figures in the land.’

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ