The Best of Electric Velocipede (11 page)

*

The outlines of the four panels bordering the window are the only charcoal marks left from the previous months of work on this area. Offset and defined by one line running out from each corner of the window, the panels should produce a sort of elliptical structure on the whole, moving the eye around from this one to the next. I decide to start with the panel on the lower-left.

The brooder has already prepared the buckets of water and the basins we will need, so I crack open the barrel of plaster mix and set him to work while I wind the clockwork pick then start to vandalise the smooth pink skin of the first panel. The little steel point of it whirrs as it hammers, chipping away at the surface, roughing it up so that the plaster I apply will bond. There should be no danger of my work crumbling off the wall three years after completion in the middle of some funeral . . . as happened with di Vineggio’s
Nocturna d’il Houri
.

I finish preparing the first panel and take the first two basins of plaster from Brooder Matheus, handing him the pick to wind. It is the same sculpting plaster in each bowl—thicker than normal plaster, softer than clay—but where one basin is white the other is tinted dark with the same black ink the monks use in their Vellumary. The two will mix a little as I apply them, but that is to be expected. I will be painting over them anyway; all I am doing now is building up the undercoat of light and shadow, the white that will shine through from beneath a cerulean sky, the darkness that will lurk behind a devil’s eyes, building it up gradually, with a finger and thumb of slick plaster here or there, a thick wet lump smoothed into shape with a knife, another lump on top of it.

Slowly the form of a face starts to take solid shape, as if emerging from the very wall. After a while, I stand back to uncrick my shoulders.

—It catches the light, says Brooder Matheus. Where you’ve put the white plaster, it catches the light coming in the window. Just so, just . . .

—Just right? I say. That’s the general idea.

*

The Seeding Of The Earth

—And, generally speaking, do you have an idea of when it will be finished?

It has taken me two years just to do the ceiling and the Fader manages to sound casual in his enquiry, but I can hear the note of worry in his voice. The costs are escalating now that the paint is flowing and the wagon rolling constantly between here and Murchen, bringing the pigments and media I require from the great Artist’s Market of the Strazza d’il Tintorum, powders made from rock and plant, sulphuric yellow from the Salt Sea or green-gold sapphiron from the distant Aurient, porphyr made from mollusc’s shells in the Phonaesthian city-states or the iridescent verdan of Aegys’s crushed scarab wings. Elysse, north and south, is full of natural hues, nut-browns and ochres, sumbers and siennas, and I make full use of these, but the pigments most saturated with yellow, red and blue must be imported from their more exotic origins, so these materials are expensive; and although the brooders’ benefactor, the Duke Irae, is rich with the plunder of the Holy Lands even he may balk at paying such a ransom for escape from Hell.

So the Fader sees the antesanctum only a fraction complete and, thinking of how much money it has cost already and how far it has to go, has visions of catastrophe.

*

—It will probably be finished, I say, the day after you give yourself a heart attack, Fader . . . at this rate. Or if you want I could paint the rest all white and you could tell the Duke it symbolises God’s eternal radiance. That way it would be finished within the week.

He twirls a lock of hair between his fingers, brushes his lips with the end of it.

—It’s not
my
heart giving out that I’m worried about, he says. The Duke has expressed his desire to have . . . given all the honor that he can to God while still on this earth.

I grab a bar of scaffolding, swing from my crouch up on the plank down to the platform beneath. Holding onto a ladder that rises up past me, I lean out into the fifteen feet of air that separates me from the Fader and Brooder Matheus standing behind him.

—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 color 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 south-east 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 now 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 color 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 gray erle.

*

Matheus and myself 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 colored 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 this 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 go and slaughter, with his noble elven brethren, 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 naive 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-grown 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 realise 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.