by David Wise
There came a similarly statued lamb, pig, veal calf, and other objets d'art for our watering tongues. All had been imported, clearly, for the food of Ghastria was notoriously ghastly.
Curator Clairmont, with old, thin lips well greased by the hunks of pig he'd been stuffing through them, spoke to me across the clatter of cutlery. "Ferewood, eat up." He winked. "You can wash it down with the elixir later."
This social effrontery did not go unnoticed by the others gathered, and not a few reddened about the temples to hear their hopes laid open so.
I was not one of them.
"Art is the only elixir I seek," I replied. "Do you speak of some other?"
The burly oaf Krimean interrupted Clairmont's response with a call for more wine, and in the meantime the fat merchant spoke through a chomping grin. "We're great patrons of the arts, you know. Many of Stezen's best artists were funded by us."
"Charming," I replied under my breath, not so much to the fat merchant's comment but to the fact that the flimsy girl Lynn was fairly crawling over our host as he finished his repast. I could see that I'd not have much chance to talk to Stezen during dinner: I'd need a riding crop to get the girl off him.
When the meal was well finished, we all rose to follow Stezen into his famed gallery. At that point, I made my way to the front of the pack, almost as close to our host as the clinging Lynn.
With a gesture, Stezen gathered us as a shepherd before a pasture gate and said," What you all are about to see is the jewel of my crown — my love, my life, my joy. I'll not mar these gorgeous works with shouted commentary, for I wasn't there shouting when the artists crafted them."
A ripple of bemused laughter circulated through the clustered flock.
"But, please, my sweets, gaze and gaze and gaze at these, and converse with them and each other as you wish."
With that, he stepped backward, swinging wide the great black door that stood behind him. A gush of cool air spread deliciously over us. It bore with it the gathered fragrance of old oils and polished wood and gently burning lamps. The faint murmur of music also seeped out.
Following our host, we rolled slowly through the towering doorway, past the velvet curtains that eclipsed the view, and into another room of black-marble floors and dark red walls.
This place, though, had none of the palatial refinement of the rest of the estate. The walls were starkly crimson from some deeply plied pigment, and they met the black ceiling above and the black floor below without ornament of any type. On these walls hung paintings of the crudest sort — some on tablets of stone or wood, others on thick and fibrous reed-papers pressed together. A host of huge and unrefined statues populated the floors, and only now did we catch sight of the music-makers — bards with reed pipes and hand drums, who played tribal songs.
As my fellow feasters spread reverently into the hall, I maintained my close carriage beside Stezen. I cleared my voice and spoke: "Thank you again for the fine meal"-he waved this off — "but as I warned you before, the greater part of me still hungers — "
"Pray, what for —? "
"Or perhaps thirsts is a better term," I continued.
The chit of a girl interrupted," Yes, I'm thirsty, too. Give me a drink, Stezen," but Stezen slipped a hand over her mouth.
I tried again. "You see, word has reached my circles that you have, in your travels, discovered some great elixir that might prove interesting to me. "I cringed the moment these words were full-formed from my lips, for I knew I'd projected my bid and dealt Stezen the upper hand.
He knew it, too. "You are here for the gallery, my friend, are you not? For a man so interested in immortality, you seem rather uninterested in patience."
Ah, yes. Well played. I was fittingly chastised and would hold my cards closer from now on. But also I was encouraged; my host had just proved himself the sort of wily bastard capable of finding the fountain of life and hoarding its waters for himself. Fair enough. Now I had to prove myself worthy to drink.
"The art, yes," I replied quietly.
Even so, I did not turn my attention to the bizarre artwork about me, but rather to my fellow feasters. I watched their faces, their puzzled and disdainful faces, and saw the effect their arrogant ignorance had on Stezen. Krimean, that great, burly oaf, even laughed in nervous bursts as he poked his head through a huge stone wheel. Though he and I shared the same opinion of this primitive junk, he and I did not share the same politick about it.
"Forgive my eagerness of a moment ago," said I to stall for time. "My eyes were so bent on immortal endings that I was blind to these mortal beginnings."
Stezen's close-lipped smile eased, and I saw that I had scored a point in this odd game we played. "Beginnings?" he asked with an innocence that ill-suited him. "How so?"
My mind struggled to lay hold of something useful — something about the state of nature, the mythic origins of our brains and the bestial seeds of our bones — some such tripe from the Brautslava ethnographer.
"Yes, beginnings. This room is full of perfect beginnings. If my colleagues at the Institute are not fools, I would say that the soul of art is the soul of us, and the soul of us is yet a primal, primitive. . beginning thing."
Now the grudging respect turned to interested appraisement. "Your mind is sharp. I knew that from stories of you. But now I see that your eyes are their match. "He gestured about at the room full of tribal masks and queer pottery and confused guests, many of whom seemed to sense a kind of explanation emerging between the two of us and were coyly drifting this way. He continued," What piece, in this primitive collection of mine, would you say is greatest?"
Now I had to look past the bemused guests and at the art itself. Since all the pieces seemed equally crude and worthless to me, I decided in that moment to choose the first work that caught my eye, and think on my feet for a reason why.
"That monolith," I said, pointing at a huge, trunkshaped stone that stood crude and erect in the center of the floor.
Stezen gestured me forward, and the nervous flock of sheep about us followed. "How so?"
I stroked my chin by way of stalling, then said," Well, to start, it is stone. All things come from stone, I am told. Indeed, one professor of ours claims that this world of ours was stone until the mounting up of corpses and feces gave us the rich black soil in which we plant."
We'd reached the monument now, and Stezen's cocked eyebrow told me he expected more. Fortune was with me, for I now saw that the shaft of stone had been rudely shaped into the general features of a man — a rather giantesque man — who leaned stupidly forward on his fat feet. That gave me an idea.
"The figure is human, but crude still, like a man made of stone who has just risen from the stony ground."
"Or risen from the ranks of beasts," Stezen added.
"Yes. And the fact that he is standing defines him from the stone and from the beasts. For stones and beasts do not rise up to deny the world its pull. He is, in that way, pushing away from the primal and fleshly to the final and empyrean."
"Perhaps," Stezen allowed. I knew then that my reading had been too devout for my host's tastes. He underscored this perception. "Or perhaps he is a great, leaning phallus, born up only by vague and violent and demonic desire toward divinity."
He was that sort of man, Stezen was. I coughed into my hand to hide my discomfort. Others imitated me.
Stezen's next words both thrilled and horrified me. "Well enough, my friend. I can see you still have a primal soul, as you so well said it. Let's hope each of these rooms of my gallery finds your being in an accord. If so, yet may we both drink together from the fountain you seek."
That was it — this game I knew we played from the moment D'Polarno's face appeared behind the door. At last the rules were spelled out. I had thought at first, seeing that feline visage, that ours would be a game of cat and mouse, me hoping for the cheese, and he for the fun of the chase — and perhaps for the kill. Then, as the banquet went on, as more plattered beasts came with compelled w
illingness to be eaten by us, I thought the game would be the subtler, deadlier match of wits, the fencing of intellects that would end in humiliation or death for one of us. But now I knew. This was not a game of bodies or of minds, but of souls. And I had the clear conviction that Stezen intended to prove me either a match for his spirit or another beast that, by a wire through the throat, could be bent in supplication to be, steaming, cut open.
The next room provided a welcome relief from the blood-red walls and the death-black floors. Here, stately silver-white marble filled the floor in elegant patterns of geometric tilework. The same polished stone covered the walls, supported at even intervals by columns, pilasters, and arches. Along the far wall ran a colonnade of massive stone drums, with larger-than-life statuary ensconced in niches along it.
The art here was also far more pleasing to the civilized eye: well-rendered statues in granite, frescoes of stately figures reclined at table, sturdy and supple black pottery with silver scenes inlaid upon them, stone friezes and reliefs of epic battles between men and centaurs. .
My fellow revelers either appreciated this stuff more — as I did — or masked their feelings more assiduously than before. I noticed that Krimean and a few others of the more overtly baffled or amused feasters apparently had been ushered out of the tour due to their disruptions. Unfortunately, prehensile Lynn still held on.
Despite this clear warning to scoffers, a few of the elite women who'd been clinging to each others'arms and disdaining males throughout the evening did not rein in their opinions in this new room. In fact, they openly ridiculed the masculine gods statued about, as well as the harsh paters of the domain where these artworks originated. They were likewise excused from the tour.
Meanwhile Stezen and I, and the pack of hangers-on we'd gathered, ended up before a rather grim example of the very oppression the women had ridiculed. The frieze was a lower fragment from a once-magnificent stone pediment, the whole of which could not have fit in this room. The carving showed a mother standing with head bowed, a swatch of her toga drawn up to shield weeping eyes. In the other loose folds of her robe, two small daughters clung fearfully to her legs. Their tearringed eyes had been bored deep by the sculptor, and they seemed connected by strong cords of grief to the third sister. This child was but an infant, and lay on its back, a leather thong piercing its ankles and wrists to bind them together.
I shuddered.
Stezen noticed. "Yes. I see you have not only the beast's bones and heart and soul, but the citizen's mind in you as well. I see that you cringe."
"And who would not?" I asked, though a moment later I could think of an easy handful who wouldn't and saw some of them standing beside me. "It is brutal," I explained.
"But well rendered," Stezen replied," as is childhood."
This comment brought my mind back on its perpetually curving course, toward the subject of immortality. Sickened as I was by the display before us, I knew I'd best hide this feeling or choose to be ushered out with the rest.
"The artistry of this relief goes without question," I said in an imitation of distraction. "But, I must confess, the exact purport of the scene eludes me."
"As it should. Ours, though still a brutal society, no longer leaves girl children to die of exposure."
Now I saw it. The depicted mother and her two daughters, each of whom had no doubt narrowly escaped the thong through the heel, now had been forced by some grim pater to work this very crime on their sister and daughter.
"It's not art, it's butchery," muttered the plump merchantwife a little too loudly to her now-wary husband. Before the fidgeting and mustachioed man could cover his wife's errant comment, I jumped in to win Stezen's favor.
"Not butchery, milady, but childhood. As children we are the hopeless and powerless chattel of our parents, who may nurture or slaughter us, as the shepherd does the sheep. And as adults, we become the chattel of gods, who exercise the same rights."
Stezen was pleased: that much I could see. The merchant and his wife were not, and neither were the others.
The crowd thinned.
The next room was truly elegant, the flower of our time. It was lit by shimmering chandeliers and bedecked in gold traceries and moldings and bosses. The windows on all four sides of it were festooned with garlands and draped with the richest red-velvet curtains, which hung to the floor into pools of fabric. And the paintings and statuary were of the finest quality, the eyes of the subjects peering out hauntingly to follow all who walked past.
But that was not the only haunting thing about this room. I'd walked to the center of it before I realized that the windows could not possibly be on all four walls, for we had entered through one wall from a room of equal size, and would exit through the opposite to a room no doubt the same.
I wandered with Stezen and our dwindling group of followers to one of the windows that stood beside the door where we had entered. Peering out, I saw not the wall of the other room where it should have been, nor even the estate grounds I had walked through to arrive. Instead, outside lay a strange, moon-washed landscape of trees that roiled up like smoke or curdling milk into a mackerel sky. There were peaks of mountains out there that I knew stood nowhere in these lands, and were, themselves, impossibly tall and pointed. Glancing out another window on an adjacent wall, I saw a morning field dotted with grazing cattle.
With amusement, D'Polarno took in my amazement and trembling shock. He similarly noted the horrified gasps of the others.
One of those was Lynn, who'd finally found an impulse other than errogeny. "This place is unnatura-"
"Of course it is," Stezen broke in. "Didn't a single one of you look at the outside of this estate before you came into it? Didn't any of you notice that these rooms through which we have been walking could not possibly fit into my manor house? "
"Where are we, then?" Lynn returned angrily.
"Why, we are in my famed gallery, don't you know? "
"I'm going back," she cried. "I didn't want to come in here anyway. "She charged back toward the doors.
"Oh," D'Polarno said innocently," you can't go back. They've barred the doors behind us."
"Others went back!" she shouted, pouting as she pushed on the unforgiving wood.
D'Polarno merely shook his head. "The only way out is forward. You are here. Why not enjoy the rest of the tour? Besides, you should not be so greatly disturbed by these windows that apparently lead to other worlds. Have you never seen magic before? "
"Of course not!" she cried, pounding like a child on the impassive doors.
"I have," I said, which was true, though I've never been sure why I said it. Perhaps it was because I was not yet sure what I thought of this place, and some part of me thought that if I got to speaking, I would be able to sort out my thoughts. You see, I was fearful like the rest, but these queer examples of Stezen's power only assured me that perhaps, beyond that next door, lay the goal of my quest, the fountain from which I might drink of eternity. So, frightened as I was, I still wanted to believe in him, believe in this all.
"I. . had once made the acquaintance of an actual magician on the Brautslava staff — that was before the purges, of course. He was an illusionist by speciality, and showed me many simple spells that could account for such an illusion."
"Precisely," Stezen responded through wicked teeth. "Lynn, darling, think of these not as preternatural windows, but as paintings of a different sort — magical paintings, if you will."
But she would not be appeased; she shook the doors violently and shouted indecipherables.
It was then that motion in the corner of my eye drew my attention to the window with the moonlit trees. There! It was the merchant and wife from the other room, the ones who had maligned the relief sculpture. I knew it was they — he fidgety and fearful, she plump and vital — running away from us into the pitching and dissolving trees beyond the magic windowpane.
Despite myself, I let out a small yelp of surprise that, by virtue of its pitch or its fear
, stopped the struggles of Lynn and drew her attention to the window.
"They did escape!" she shouted in desperate triumph. "See! They did escape!"
Next moment, she was running toward us — not actually us, but the great window. En route, she snagged a small granite statue from a wobbling pediment and brandished it in her tight fist as she ran toward the glass. The helmeted head of the warrior statue struck the window first, and the glass shattered like a thunderstroke. I backed away due to the sheer loudness of the event, and Stezen, too, retreated as though to avoid being struck by flying particles. Lynn turned a fevered, leering, hopeful face toward me, by way of invitation to join her, then ran the statue through the splinters and chips and triangles of glass that remained. Without another word, she jumped through the frame.
This window, clearly, was no illusion. I saw the girl scramble away across the grass-that-was-not-grass, looking back occasionally and squinting, as though she could no longer see the estate.
"Extraordinary," I commented unnecessarily.
"Exactly."
The subject broached, I felt I had nothing to lose. "Where, precisely is she now? "
"Why, in the painting," Stezen replied with mock incredulity. "Don't you remember my explanation? "
"Yes, that it was a magical painting, an illusion. But how could she break the glass if it were an illusion? "
"Are you saying illusory glass would be harder to break than real glass?" Stezen asked. "Come now. I'm beginning to lose faith in your deductions."
He was right. Clearly, if the magical window were easily conjured, a magical broken window with a girl running through it would just as easily be produced. Besides, I knew that I must not jar his faith now, so near to the goal.
D'Polarno had turned to address the remaining guests, some scant ten or so who'd not been weeded out earlier. Even so, these looked anything but the pick of the litter. They were uniformly wide-eyed and cringing, their faces a ghastly green that belied the bounteous meal they had eaten.