New Writings in SF 26 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  She smiled again, with a lazy, sensual slowness. ‘Well, who knows, who knows...’ And Karangetti felt an emotion rise within him, as though conjured by witch’s gestures. A deep tenseness, and a growing heady fire. He laughed, and nodded defeat.

  Still remembering that there had been a magic lady, once ...

  His sitar and gear lay on the grass by the path to the cottage door. He glanced at it, then into the heart of the old rose-bower which was floored with mossy turf and a carpet of delicate flowers; he looked crookedly at her.

  ‘ ‘Our bed is green, my love...’ ‘

  And she was—terrible, as an army with banners.

  Writhing blue and smoky across the sky, clouds hid the dwindling afternoon and later the sun showered itself chill upon their warmed and drowsing flesh. He knew then it was time to go underground, and for their duel of love to intensify and deepen. Time for the sensual and abandoned poppy-oblivion of sex, or the merging of symbolic blood-red and white roses which was the truer self-transcendance of real, holy love. So, lighting a whale-oil lantern for the unlit sections, Karangetti led her into the labyrinth, fearing the darkness, the dank cold, or simply fearing: because it was time for changes.

  * * * *

  Three

  It was early evening. The Gospel was saying to her,

  ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ...’

  ‘And the Lord God planted a garden, eastward, in Eden.’

  She slipped among the silky pages of the huge iron-flanged lectern Bible, amazed. An Authorized Version!

  Those subterranean passageways and rooms Karangetti had tacitly ushered her through had the complexity of a Chinese puzzle-ring: each connecting series of fused-glass chambers, as they passed within, had acted as a Whispering Gallery. Flutter-echo and phasing; that was what Karangetti was very often reminded of as he re-wound the maze.

  Soon his footsteps resounded to her.

  Glancing up from the Book on its low coffee-table, propping up the small, rounded chin on the heel of one hand, she saw how he entered, his brief nod, and just where his erratic glances were focusing: into the ingle-nook by the great fireplace where the room’s pearly phosphorescence was gleaming smoothly over the shellacs and gold-leaf of a baroque, ornamental harpsinette. And so she asked, ‘perhaps I can play for you. One of the folio of compositions you brought me-? I like Maple Leal Rag. That chiming, sort of fin-de-siecly piano piece .. . It’s from, ah, Aemerica, is it not?’

  Again he nodded slowly, once, twice, and trudged over to the thin vertical slit of windows which gave a clear prospect of the feverishly shifting sun-burnished sea. The sky was pink. Construing his behaviour as a moody man’s assent. Ana got up and walked, smoothed her paisley-patterned brocade skirt, sat down, and, from memory, played some favourite pieces.

  A stride piano beat out the ragtime time; then, a la Debussy, a golliwog cake-walked; then, she played the ‘Clair de Lune’ to Karangetti, who saw moonlight. More vivid images still jostled before Karangetti’s inner eye; but he bit his lip and tossed his head, half angry, and coldly ignoring the neurotic cinema-show his psyche was staging. When she ceased, silence fell, clear as a bell, a stilly mutual hush. Then, after choosing a poem with wry, astringently self-contemptuous care, he opened the calfskin-bound anthology he carried, and began to read her Flecker’s ‘To a poet, a Thousand Years Hence.’

  Emphatically, he sensed he had touched Anatera of the White Leaf; he saw, hating himself, tears gleaming just below her green, perpetually innocently surprised eyes. But, he acknowledged, their boring, yet—moving—emotional charades would, have to wind on to their conclusion of vivid lovetrysts simply because he needed her. But nothing in him would ever be changed ... Cynically, he quoted himself the terrifying promise of the Book of Revelations: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

  ‘Will you play, Richard Mantree, and verbalize this for me-?’

  ‘Mmh?’ He turned.

  She offered him the manuscript. ‘Explain this music to me as you recreate it. You speak with such beauty of all your arts.’

  So she curled comfortably against his legs as Karangetti sat and fingered a voice from the ivories and the ebonies. And he thought, inferior musicianship will once again disguise itself with indulgent emotionality...

  He said, faintly, closing his eyes and furrowing his forehead in pain: ‘Beethoven. The ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Written 1800. Here, a sublime poignancy, sweet sadness intensifying into a profoundly meditative tension: one’s visual image is a full silver moon, beaming over and glittering in the Danube at midnight. Overall, an occasional savagery of statement will combine with an almost Motzartian delicacy and elegance: you see,’ he went on, ‘I perceive myself in the whole work, in this subtle combat, this spirit-clash of alchemical elements; it is fire and roaring air, against water and earth. In myself, I mirror this Romanticism, the appassionato, versus the old, eighteenth century stately blandness. Rousseau’s jungle, versus Montesquieu’s jardin anglais, the orderly, pseudo randomness—listen! That sense of hierarchy, the coolness, against this angst-ridden drive to freedom and to revolution!’

  His fingers ceased playing as he turned for a moment and explained the image-motif further. ‘It has moments of Gothic, like the symphonies: moments of a Constable landscape: of course there is a tendency towards the grotesque. It is,’ and he resumed music-making, ‘Handel struggling to be Nietzsche—And in this movement, outwardly a simple, nursery-rhyme-like melodic happiness; andante con moto, a pleasure of no more than maidenly intensity. Which ripens ...’ he waited, while Ana was frozenly aware of both his absurd egocentricity and the immense gulfs which separate knowledge from ignorance, ‘into true and adult passion, and I of course dare n-’

  It hurt. For that moment of pure schizophrenia, Karangetti was dazed. He pressed his beringed hands to his eyes, wondering if he had now awoken from a dream—or into a dream? But he did not know. And suddenly now he knew his chrysalis of irony and indifference was beginning to crack as his spirit quaked and heaved, becoming unwillingly naked. What am I? he thought. Who am I? Who am 1?

  * * * *

  At that point he opened his eyes, and he laughed. The last pink gauze of dusk was darkening against the west’s purples and blue-blacks, and there a dirigible sailed by a delicate ghost of tinted cellophane, its interior lit up by phosphorus-and-salt torches. It was a Chinese lantern, caught by the wind. He heard its motors distantly thrum, though their sound was almost drowned by the sea’s hiss.

  ‘Richard? What is it?’

  There was real worry in her voice; his mind cleared, and in one sudden motion of unpremeditated tenderness, he fell to his knees, and took Ana’s body in his arms; Karangetti murmured in her ear, began smoothing down her enchignoned, raven-black hair, and then met her in a kiss.

  ‘Whoo,’ she said, breaking away. ‘Richard, I—’ she broke off, chagrined, suddenly realizing that whatever his mysteries were, she would not serve the elders of her Order against his wishes. And inwardly, he was measuring his ‘genius’ against his behaviour, and finding himself merely pathetic and emotional—not a figure emanating the authentic, Byronic charisma. Not at all.

  Her Book of Corpus Christi lay open and forgotten, as did the file of Hokusai reproductions he had unearthed: they knew that they could relate now only to each other. Suddenly he remembered that, in the sky, the sun was set, and now the dim blue third magnitude stars were coming out to make constellations with their gaudier brethren.

  Firstly, they avoided one another’s gaze. Then she sighed, and sprawled back upon the fur-strewn, iridescent glass of the floor, and he unsealed his ancient vacuum flask, lay with her, and poured out two steaming-hot saké cups of whisky-laced kerl. They drank together, rolling the rich, liqueur-like flavours about their tongues. And although the silence deepened, it became wordlessly sensual, mutual, and entirely pleasant. They smiled.

  Upon which, he rose, and stoked the po
ppy-red burning of the fire with driftwood speckled with seasalt, and green, young boughs. She tossed her harvested roses into the blaze. And so, before the crackling and the poppings, they dozed, or talked love-talk, or sang wordless harmonies, one to another. Later, Ana said that it was the Night of All Moons; they must beware of the eerie lunacy that conjunction of illuminations caused. Karangetti chuckled comfortably then, and told her of one of the Christian mysteries, about a transfiguration in a Garden...

  * * * *

  Four

  Upon the smooth tapestry-draped wall a chronometer ticked and tocked. Elsewhere, Anatera was quietly clattering, her sounds were of washing-up and towelling, domestic and quite peaceful. So he crept away from her, into the labyrinthian ways.

  Later, as he elbowed shut the massive, iron-knubbed wooden door, Karangetti’s right heel slid away on the moistureslick, mossy granite flagstones. He felt afraid, and night had drowned his sight in its blackness. But he followed the ruined road.

  Under his breath, he was mumbling some invocatory, exalting lines of William Wordsworth, about a communion with

  ‘... something far more deeply interfused

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

  And the round ocean, and the living air.

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

  A motion and a spirit..

  There were gates of brass, three times the height of a man, and a glimpse of moonlit gardens beyond: hefting his Indian musical instrument, he turned the huge key, heaved, and the curlicued barriers creaked open to his push. He walked on into the islets of trees with a hypnotized steadiness; among a strange rock garden’s sculptures; between hedges of wild, vast goldroses, brushing aside some of the silently jangling, ghostly flowers as he passed. Westward, a melodious night-bird sang a madrigal, and clouds of swallow-tailed butterflies danced darkly across the pale face of a moon.

  He stood motionless, upon the hump of a little stone bridge. Below, trees lisped about the crazy midnight confusion of flowers, some of which were faintly glowing, some night-black. On the love-sick wind, from everywhere, there was a sensible a mutual awareness: thus, his mind regarded that great moat of flowers, and the gardens exaltingly responded to his gaze. He felt his soul expand in the sensuous dark. In the light of the three moons, a dew was falling upon his upturned face, a cobweb spun from the complex silvers of the ever-shifting shadows.

  In its coffin of round skull, Karangetti’s soul stirred, mindlessly, restlessly reaching for the overwhelming presence of the greenery, still faintly motifed with heraldic symbols, the Lilies, the Leopards. Over his shoulder, the ringing clumps of whispering trees, each copse arranged as in some eighteenth century French garden, were overlaid with significance. Some Presence had glaçed the tiny, turning hands which were their green, wavering leaves. All the growing things he saw quickened with beauty, significance, and otherness.

  He smiled beatifically as the glass surfacing the Universe melted; he could see through—no, he was—the eye of Eternity. The senses of his body were all hypersensitive, yet somehow they dwindled. Now he looked about him, and was frozen by the synaesthetic weirdness of every sound he could hear having its individual veil of colours. He felt awe, and something of Nirvana, the bliss of not-being.

  ‘This spinning-top world’, he thought, ‘is a whirligig, a circling bird trapped in gravity’s net, a dancer about this incredible furnace called the Sun, which is itself whirling through the galaxy, and those one hundred thousand million suns, all bathed in light are turning, turning, in a maze of heat and sound, and all the island universes are flying apart. The Universe is a great four-dimensional chalice, brimming with colour, and sound, and life. It is ineffable. It is glory.’

  Somewhere, in the resounding, cool caverns of his exhilaration, he searched for a sharp image, and conceived a pavane of light within a sacrosanct music.

  ‘O!’ he said, ‘And the clouds unfold...’

  —For a moment, he was Blake, and his voice was tuned as purely as an oboe-

  ‘... I... see... a world, in a grain of sand.

  Heaven in a wild flower.

  Hold infinity in the palm of my hand,

  And eternity in an hour...’

  After some time a star fell, like a single strand of spider-web drawn across the black echoing sky. It sang a wan, ecstatic song of light, Kyrie eleison ... gloria, gloria. To a music that might have come from striking icicles, so clear and melodiously bittersweet was it, a girl’s voice suddenly returned from the ancient past to haunt his mind: ‘Judy Collins sang Yeats, ‘The Lake-Isle of Innisfree’. Most beautifully and aetherially, it said: Home. A world more with us than we can ever know. Home.

  Suddenly, he realized,

  —I am speaking to the Moon—

  She seemed to call him. He answered, at first glibly and inconsequentially, but soon he was confessing it all, to everyone. She lisped her responses in the susurant voice of the grasses, the wind and flowers and trees.

  At last he was granted absolution. And so the moons descended upon him in the guise of an argent, shadowy beckoning maiden. She led him on, so he forded waist-deep through the moat of dewy flowers, to where the moonlight’s magic transmutation had turned stone into sugary icing, and flowers into glowing, stained glass. The fountain tinkled like a chandelier.

  Marguerite turned then. Her eyes were huge, and, except for moondapple, quite empty. Her lips opened, and words blossomed soundlessly in his mind.

  —In the name of yourself, sing, sing, sing. Be a poet, and name everything. Do not fear—do not fear—

  She departed then, the Lady of the Leopards, but to remind him of his curse, she first aged into a grey-robed, bent crone who offered him the broad wicker basket her arms enclosed, which was heaped with lilacs and roses. Then she faded into the shadows flickering about the bonsai.

  * * * *

  Karangetti looked about the glade, realizing where he was. The sky was quite clear of cloud. Fastened to the stone drinking-fountain by the self-same chain was an iron cup. He picked it up, pulled the brass spigot, and rinsed it out in the icy springwater. When he drank, it was like a sparkling champagne. Seating himself against the squat stone shape in an almost lotus-posture, he pulled his sitar to him. First he plucked a ringing, resonatingly buzzing chord, and then began to sing.

  It was an old tune, with medieval words, about the Grail. It was the Corpus Christi Carol that he sang.

  Lully, lulley, lully, lulley,

  The falcon hath borne my mak away.

  He bore him up, he bore him down.

  He bore him into an orchard brown.

  In that orchard there was a hall,

  That was hanged with purple and pall.

  And in that hall there was a bed:

  It was hanged with gold so red.

  And in that bed there lieth a knight,

  His wounds bleeding by day and night.

  By that bed’s side there kneeleth a maid,

  And she weepeth both night and day.

  And by that bed’s side there standeth a stone,

  ‘Corpus Christi’ written thereon ...

  He ceased, and everything was stilly hushness. His soul was all dewy wet. It was as if some subtle music rose with his welling blood, sweet chord after chord. He heard it clearly, above the lap of the water, as, enchanted, he walked through fresh-eyed marigolds to the lake. There were golden fishes, and stepping-stones, and in the bewildering, translucent depths swam reflections of the moons. His sitar moved slightly twanging.

  Karangetti paused, took several deep breaths, and looked blindly about him. Then he walked into the icy lapping waters of the moon.

  * * * *

  When he emerged, he went back. And seeing her he thought her flesh was become transparent. For through it, as a multicoloured flame, he could see beauties, and darker ugliness, and a fiery music: it was Anatera’s soul. As he enclosed her, a brightness fell upon her face.

  ‘I know the secret,’ he whispered
, touching her face. ‘We are the secret. All of us; and we are unstoppable love...’

  * * * *

  Five

  The next morning he partially spent showing her around. She looked at him secretly, wondering if she really believed all his wild and whirling words about ‘Earth’, and those long-past centuries. Once she stopped in front of a dusty reproduction hung upon a wall, and looked at it for a moment. Then she turned and said: ‘Who is she?’

  Karangetti sighed. ‘Once in a land called Italy there was a nobleman called Ludovico. When he was forty years old he married a girl of fifteen called Beatrice d’Este, who was herself the daughter of a duke. And she died at twenty-two, and Ludovico was inconsolable. That is her portrait, by a man called Leonardo.’

  ‘A sad story, for such a beautiful picture.’

  ‘It’s true to the nature of life.’ He paused, tiredly. ‘Da Vinci knew that, but he once saw some hope: Cosa bella mortal passa e non d’arte. Mortal beauties pass away, but not those of art... Come.’

  * * * *