by John Klima
—Tell him he could die tomorrow, I say, so he should swear his sons to carry on his patronage. Or tell him that the Butcher of Instantinople shouldn’t be such an old maid.
I wrap paint-rags round my hands and slide down the ladder.
—Tell him, I say, that God will not let him die until his purpose is fulfilled and he stands here, where you and I are standing, looking up into His face; that if he dies before the antesanctum is complete it will be the greatest sin he’s ever committed.
Brooder Matheus points at my forehead and I touch the wetness, wipe the paint off with the back of my hand. Alizarin crimson. Fader Pitro looks unusually stern, but he seems a little distracted, as if there’s something less tangible than money and time worrying him. Brooder Matheus puts a hand on the Fader’s arm.
—Tell him it will be worth it when the chapel is finished, he says. Look. Is it not true?
A mix of indigo and porphyr, the night sky painted on the ceiling of the antesanctum is not black but blue, the purplish hue so deep that in contrast with the crescent moon of Iosef’s raptured face and the plumes and strands of clouds he breathes into existence, it recedes as into an eternal darkness; but it is a poor chiaroscurist who does not understand that there is colour even in the deepest shadows, so although I work in light and dark, there is no black upon my palette, no black in the night sky. I keep a watch on the Fader’s tilted, swivelling chin of pointed beard as his eyes follow the path mapped out for them. On the barrel ceiling, the low relief of Iosef’s face sits off-centre and down so as to catch the eye first by catching the diffuse sun coming in the windows of the southeast wall. The subtler forms of streams of smoke modelled around the image of the Creator lead Fader Pitro round and out; smoke becomes scatterling clouds in a night sky, spatterings of stars. At the edges of the ceiling, as if the viewer is looking up from the middle of a forest clearing, thick plaster foliage of branches and leaves is painted in the olive drab of night and edged in bone white. An owl rises from a branch but otherwise it is a quiet sky, the first few days of Creation. Mankind is yet to appear; the unborn animals are only suggestions in the insubstantial swirls, seeds waiting to be sung and sprung into existence under Orphean’s feet.
—We can’t all create a world in six days, I say.
Fader Pitro’s eye travels the scene, his body turning, stepping back and round to the side every so often to accommodate his angle. I watch with pleasure as he is brought back to the face of Iosef, the beginning and the end.
—I’m just hoping that it’s not six years, he says.
But he nods. He looks around at the sculptures pressing out from the walls all round, shapes emerging from the plaster as if they too are part of the moment above, emerging into existence from the clay of the earth beneath the sky, and he nods, mutters some vague encouragement and leaves.
—Iosef is ill, says Brooder Matheus after he has gone.
—Schitze! says Iosef. I’ll be tending their garden and their graveyard long after the Fader is fertilising my plants. Pitro’s a worrier.
—I’ve noticed, I say. I sometimes think he only took his vows to give his fingers rosaries to play with.
But twice tonight Iosef has been racked by coughing fits that halted conversation as he creased with the effort of containing them, the table shuddering under the weight of his hand. He will not see a doctor and he will not give up his rituals of tobacco, however much his lungs and throat protest with rasping hacks and muffled judders; that much became obvious when I joined him in his nook, taking the chair diagonally across from his customary cushion-raised booth seat, and tried to broach the subject—and the air turned blue with curses and with smoke blown in my face. I’m not sure which of them made my eyes sting more, the invective or the noxious weed, but I thought better of continuing the role of nag. It doesn’t suit me anyway.
Of course, I can remind him of how others worry for his health. Absurdly, I say. But they do worry.
—Let’s talk of something else, he says. Have you decided on the designs for the end walls yet?
He takes a drag on his roll-up and I wince as he explodes into another fit, spluttering into a white-knuckled fist. He thumps the table in frustration and I ignore it. The hobben have a phrase—ch’yem—which roughly translates as May it be. The will of God is inevitable, they mean, as I understand it. I think it is a phrase very close to Iosef’s heart these days.
—The end walls? I say. I do have some ideas.
The Exile From The Garden
—AND WHATEVER will they say at the sight of a whore painted as blessed Queen Titania?
Rosah looks over her shoulder at me with an arched eyebrow; she finds the whole idea both wicked and delicious, but rather than being in conflict over what I’ve asked of her she has thrown herself into it with delight. It is strange, but having heard her say her prayers at night—more open and relaxed with me as she has been in this last year or so—I have discovered a quite pious side to my Rosah, with the little saint statues on the shelf in her room, the single candle that always has a flower at its side, and her tiny bowl of honey and coins. I think that if I’d asked her to be my Titania two years ago she would have refused, saying it was sacrilege, and I would have…laughed probably, in shock. Now I’m not sure why she agreed at all; perhaps the deeper the belief in sin, the greater the thrill of courting it.
—They’ll say you are the very image of her, says Brooder Matheus.
She blows a kiss at him and he mimes a catch, grinning, but blushing at his own boldness. At least it brings some colour to his cheeks; the two of us got roaring drunk in the tavern last night, after visiting Iosef up at the grounds house, and if I woke up with a hangover, the poor brooder, by the look of him, was at death’s door. The original grey erle.
Matheus and I now pace about the studio, setting up the easels and the paper, arranging the mirrors and shades on the windows. Rosah sits on a bench before us, leaning over an open chest of props, holding necklaces of coloured glass jewels up to her throat, throwing feathered boas and fur stoles over her shoulders, trying on a stuffed snake, a tiara—and all the while glancing at herself in the mirror like a child playing dress-up. Every so often, these last few months in particular, I find myself glancing at her when she is not looking and I feel a joy I can hardly explain. It is in moments like this. I try to put my finger on it. She is not performing—no—she is not performing for me, or for the brooder, not seeking our attention, but simply, happily, lavishing it upon herself.
I think that is it. She is no longer my Rosah. Now she is simply Rosah.
When Brooder Matheus and I have everything set up to my satisfaction, she drops the centaurian’s helmet that she’s holding back into the box and stands, walks into the centre of the room.
—You’re ready, yes? Where do you want me? How do you want me?
—In white silk, I say. Just a moment.
I dig the dress I want out of the box, not so much a dress as a drapery of veils and ribbons, and while I untangle it, tease out the folds and complexities, she slips off her shoes, hikes up her skirt to peel down her stockings.
—Brooder Matheus, she says, will you help me with this?
Her hands reaching behind, she turns her back to him and the brooder looks hesitant and shy for a second before taking those steps across the room. His fingers fumble with her buttons, but after the first couple, the rest come loose easily. I notice the delicate confidence with which he slips the straps off her shoulders, the way he can’t help but smooth the palms of his hands over her skin. Last night, in drunken camaraderie, he confessed to me how unsuited he feels to his vows. He had little choice in the matter; as a second son, the law of primogeniture leaves him no estate, no path to follow but war or religion. And while he has no great urge to join with his noble elven brethren, to go and slaughter the demon races that now rule the Holy Lands, he said, chastity was never his strong point.
It’s funny, I suppose; in all the years we’ve known each other now, watching
him grow from adolescent to adult, I had always pegged him as, at heart, an innocent naïf. As it turns out, our naïve brooder lost his virginity two years before I did, and spent most of his youth from that point on tupping any girl who batted her eyelashes at him.
Rosah’s dress slips off her shoulders and crumples on the ground at her feet. She steps out of it and takes the white silk costume from my hands, begins to wrap herself in it. It adorns without hiding, veils without disguising. Every curve of her, every sacred secret place of her is somehow more revealed with it on than in her nakedness, and I’m more sure than ever that this is the Titania of the Exile From The Garden that will go on the wall above the antesanctum’s entrance. This is the faery queen, the virgin whore, the spirit of lush forests, of morning dew like the sweat on a lover’s body, of oceans salty as blood and semen, who runs her fingers over the vine-wrapped trunks of trees, the green-veined cocks of men, through grass and hair, as the ruler of them all, the mother of all living things, mother of Orphean who died for our sins.
I dip into the box again and pull out the velvet robe, dark purple, long and soft as fur. Brooder Matheus reaches out a hand for it but his eyes are on Rosah, transfixed; it takes him a few seconds of grasping in the air to realize there’s no point in me giving him the robe quite yet, and then he turns to me with a wry, sheepish smile on his face, red with a blush or with the flush of sexual tension. Finally he pulls the cassock over his head and stands there, cockish and puffed with an uncertain audacity. He runs his fingers through the dark red hair that silks over his shoulders, brushing it back, half nervousness, half pride. I hand him the robe and he pulls it on, leaves it hanging open. Slender and straight beside her curves, he is the dark to her light, the auburn to her titanium white. The Oberon to her Titania.
As they turn to each other, their hands, their bodies, beginning that exploration of the world outside innocence, discovered in an age long before our own, I walk to my easels and look from chalk to charcoal and back again, trying to decide which to begin with.
The Last Days
I AM ON THE LAST panel now. It has taken me four—no, nearly five—years to paint the antesanctum of the Monadery di Sanze Manitae and at last it is almost complete. I sketch directly onto the wall now, working as fast as I can and keeping a rag at hand to correct my errors and insincerities. Insincerities? In any painting such as this, in any work of a chiaroscurist such as myself, it is easy to become too bold in the drama, too theatrical, too focused on the power that light and dark have to evoke a profound sense of mystery. Subtlety is lost when the artist blusters his own ideas in forms too overblown, brushstrokes too broad. Of all the panels of the antesanctum, I cannot allow this one to lose its import in mere impact. I will not.
So I draw with chalk and coalstick onto the pink plaster, and again and again, I find myself cursing and taking the rag to the wall in bitter frustration because this structure is too crude, that contrast too bold. Too clichéd. Too unusual. Too trite. Too grandiose. It should be the simplest panel of them all, in some ways, for its subject is the most universal. It is one of the most traditional of scenes, though it is usually placed in some dark area, as a hidden mystery.
I am drawing the body of Iosef, which lies upon the altar now. I am drawing death.
I work nonstop for two days finding a form that does not really satisfy me but is, at least, not an insult to his memory, not the self-important sweeping statement of a young chiaroscurist more concerned with the glory of his work than with who and what it is meant to represent. Even as I begin the modelling work, layering on the black and white plasters, building up the relief sculpture of Iosef’s ruined body, I do not know if I can do him justice. Will this reduce his life to no more than an empty symbol, only resonating for the viewer because it is so hollow without the totality of his life to fill it? How can I show in the cracks of his knuckles and the stumps of his fingers, the way those hands worked so delicately with the flowers and herbs of the Monadery garden, or rolled his cigarettes with such unconscious ease and precision that half the time his eyes would be on something else, on myself or Matheus, as he lectured us on our many follies? How can I show in the still barrel of his chest, the wheezing up-and-down of it as he lay in his sickbed for that last year and a half, fighting to keep the last breath in his body? How can I show that the smoke that ruined him was not just the smoke of his own creation but the smoke of his destruction, of the temple with his congregation gathered in it on their holy day to sing the word of God, and the mob outside with fire?
I only knew him for four years and there is so much that I did not know.
All I can show are these last days of him, of his remains.
The decay of the body is quick in the heat of summer. Skin of Payne’s grey; it blotches phthalo blue and viridian in the shadows; it dulls with the yellow ochre, burnt umber, burnt sienna of rot. Maggots wriggle, iridescent and ivory white in the slick of him. The surface of the altar is stained with the blood pooled and coagulated in the lowest areas of his body in the early stages of decay, now transformed by the process into some thicker, darker fluid. I see haematic red in it, alizarin crimson. It glistens aemberic orange in the candlelight. Every colour in my palette is mixed in the putrefaction of the corpse and I paint them on the wall in layer upon layer. I mix paint with plaster and sculpt with my fingers until my nails are filthy and broken by the scratching.
Fader Pitro sits vigil over Iosef’s body while I work, because this is the tradition of the hobben and there are no others in the town to perform the rites. I think that Iosef would have wanted the Fader at his side anyway, but this is cold comfort to the monk; he frets that he is failing, that he cannot do it properly, that it should be done properly. The brooders recite verses from the Old Book in Litan but they do not know the hobben words or the soaring wavering tunes this poetry should be sung to, so as I work, their choral chants echo in the antesanctum, giving the same sentiments in the words and song they know.
We have sent word to Matheus and Rosah but I do not think they will arrive before the burial.
I am laying a stone on his grave when I feel the hand on my shoulder. Rosah. Matheus stands behind her. I embrace my Titania, kiss her on the forehead. Matheus and I shake hands, both of us two-handed, clasping each other’s grip firm and tight as if anchoring each other. We talk for a while, words that we forget as soon as they have been spoken. Sometimes there is laughter, sometimes tears. Matheus is still not sure of what he will do now he has left the Order, but the two of them seem, even in sorrow, to have found their true vocations in each other. Have I really finished now? they ask. Yes. And did I really paint the Death Of God as the very focus of the whole chapel, the work you see first as you enter through the doors? Yes. They will see how the structure of light and shadow in the antesanctum demanded it. When they see it they will understand, I hope.
After a while I leave them to have some time alone at the grave and return to the antesanctum.
The walls are filled with the townsfolk and the brooders, every character based on one local or another—the Nerjeas, Rosah and Matheus, even Fader Pitro as a saint in one high corner—but it is Iosef whose face holds you as you walk in, not in the moment of creation on the ceiling but on the wall behind the altar, on a dead body, lying on its back with its head turned towards you, the face staring out with hollow eyes, eaten away to bone here and there, a white skull cloaked in the shadows of flesh and night. I do not know if I am satisfied with it. I could not hope to paint, in his death, the whole reality of his life; all I can show are his remains, on the painted artifice of an altar on the wall behind the real thing as if it were a dark mirror still reflecting what is no longer there.
Maybe those few precious glimpses that I had, in the years of moments that I knew him…maybe these are enough to know the form of someone, even if the rest is darkness.
* * *
L•Y•C•E•U•M
ly·ce·um li-'sē-em, 'li-sē-em
noun
/> 1: a hall for public lectures or discussions
2: an association providing public lectures, concerts, and entertainments
3: lycée
* * *
Lyceum
LIZ WILLIAMS
WHEN SAO ENTERED the Lyceum, he saw that the Duality members had already arrived and were conversing upon the steps. Their back-faces were turned towards him and he took the moment of respite to check that all was as it should be, that the welcoming committee had hung the correct banners from the pillars and that the air was scented with a dust pleasing to the Duality. There had been a regrettable incident during the last confluence, involving the Murn, and they did not want a similar unfortunateness occurring on the Duality’s first visit to Karquom for many years. But all appeared correct. The mica-fronted columns of the Lyceum glittered in the desert light; the three-hundred-foot windows showed the panorama of the eastern mountains in their best aspect. Apart from a little turret, the last traces of the Uniqt city had been swallowed by the sandstorms during the previous season, something Sao regretted as a lifelong archivist, but which caused him to feel a kernel of secret relief. The Uniqt were gone, and now Karquom belonged purely to the Lyceum.
Not many universities, especially human ones, had the luxury of an entire planet. At least they didn’t have to fight for funding. And it had become a popular conference venue, as witnessed by the presence of the Duality now.
“Vice Chancellor?” Archivist Moynec sidled up. “Things seem to be going very well.”
“So far.” Sao had been accused of a predisposition towards gloom. He had retaliated by saying that he’d stop being a cynic when he stopped being proved right. “What about their welcoming banquet? Did you get those fruit?”