The Malacia Tapestry (38 page)

‘Will they ever be finished? Does Volpato pay him?'

She laughed. ‘Don't be silly. What with? That's why Fatember still lives here, always planning, never achieving. At least he has a roof over his head for himself, and his family. The family still grows … Oh, well, go and talk to him. We'll meet this evening in chapel.'

It was saddening that she looked so resigned.

I always loved to walk through Volpato's castle. Its perspectives were like no others. With its impromptu landings, its unexpected chambers, its many levels, its never-ending stairs, its aspirations and failures, its descents from stone into wood, its fine marbles and rotting plasters, its noble statues and ignoble decay, it outshone even the Chabrizzi Palace in individuality.

The Mantegan family had not been rich within living memory. My brother-in-law was the last of the direct line, Julius and the others being distant cousins and equally impoverished.

It was whispered of Volpato that he had poisoned his elder brother and sister, Claudio and Saprista, in order to gain control of what family wealth remained – Claudio by spreading a biting acid on the saddle of his steed, so that the deadly ichor moved from his anus upwards to the heart, Saprista by smearing a toxic orpiment on a statue of Minerva which she was wont to kiss during her private devotions, so that she died rotting from the lips inward.

Whether this story was true or false, Volpato never revealed. Dark legends clustered about him, but he behaved tolerably with my sister, and had the goodness to stay away for long periods, seeking his fortune among the wilds of the northern world.

Meanwhile, the castle on the banks of the Toi fell into decay, and his wife did not become a mother. But I loved it, and my dear sister for marrying so well – the only de Chirolo as yet to move into court circles.

The way to Nicholas Fatember's quarters lay through a gallery in which Volpato displayed the last of his treasures. Those treasures were few. Rats scuttled among them in the dimness. Among much that was rubbish were some fine blue-glazed terracotta dishes brought back from the lands of the Orinoco; ivories of hairy elephant carved during the last anthropoid civilization for the royal house of Itssobeshiquetzilaha; parchments rescued by a Mantegan ancestor from the great library at Alexandria (among them two inscribed by the library's founder, Ptolemy Soter) and portraits on silk of the seven Alexandrian Pleiades preserved from the same; a case full of Carthaginian ornaments; jewels from the faery smiths of Atlantis; an orb reputed to have belonged to Birsha, King of Gomorrah, with the crown of King Bera of Sodom; a figurine of a priest with a lantern from the court of Caerleon-on-Usk; the stirrups of the favourite stallion of the Persian Bahram, Governor of Media, that great hunter; tapestries from Zeta, Raška, and the courts of the early Nemanijas, together with robes cut for Milutin; a lyre, chalice, and other objects from the Chankrian Period; a pretty oaken screen carved with figures of children and animals which I particularly liked, said to have come from distant Lyonesse before it sank below the waves; a thumbnail of the founder, Desport, couched in a chased silver relic-case; together with other items of some interest. All that was of real worth had been sold off long ago, and the custodian sacked, to keep the family in meat and wine.

I paused on my way among the relics and opened an iron-strapped chest at random. Books bound in vellum met my gaze, among them one more richly jacketed in an embroidered case studded with ruby and topaz.

Carrying it over to the light, I opened the book and found it bore no title. It was a collection of poems in manuscript, most probably made by the poet himself. The verse looked impossibly dull, with odes to Stability or The Chase plodding after apostrophes to the Pox and Prosody. Then, as I flicked the pages, a shorter poem in
terza rima
caught my eye.

The poem consisted of four verses – the first two of which were identical with those adorning my bedroom window! The title of the poem made reference to an emblematic animal over the main archway of the castle: ‘The Stone Watchdog at the Gate Speaks'. Whoever had transcribed the first half of the poem to the window had been ingenious in accrediting its meaning to glass, rather than to the watchdog. I read the final verses.

No less, while things celestial proceed

Unfettered, men and women all are slaves,

Chaining themselves to what their hearts most need
.

Methinks that whatso'er the mind once craves
,

Will free it first and then it captive take

By slow degrees, down into Free Will's graves
.

Alas, when addressed, Prosody had not replied. Yet the sentiment expressed might be true. I find myself generally agreeing with the truth of moralizing in poems. Little can be said that is a flat lie, provided it rhymes. Thoughtfully, I tore the page from its volume and tucked it in my doublet, tossing the book back into the chest among the other antiquities.

Beyond the gallery was a circular guard-room, with a spiral stair up to the ramparts. The guard-room had once stood as a separate building; it now came within the embrace of the castle which, like some organic thing, had sprouted passages and wings and additional courts, century by century, engulfing houses and other structures as it grew. Yet the guard-room retained something of an outdoor character. A pair of cavorts skimmed desperately round its shell, trapped after venturing in through boarded arrow-slits. On the floor by my feet lay a shred of Poseidon's fur which the birds had dropped in their panic.

The character of the castle was transformed again beyond the guard-room. Here stood old stables, now converted to quarters for the Mantegan family's resident artist. Nicholas Fatember had his studio in what had been the loft; while his children romped on the cobbles below in rooms that had been a harness-house.

I called his name. After a moment, Fatember's head appeared in the opening above. He waved, and began to climb down the ladder. He started talking before he reached the bottom.

‘So, Master Perian, it's almost a year – a long while since we've seen you at Mantegan. As God is my witness, it is an inhospitable place – lonely, gloomy, chilly, bankrupt, and up to its eye-sockets in starving rats! What can have brought you here now? Not pleasure, I'll be bound.'

I explained that I had been ill, and that I would be leaving on the morrow. Natural modesty forbade me to make any reference to the devil-jaw.

Fatember placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, while using the other to scratch his armpit. He was a ponderous man with a heavy face, from which his beard curled down like fungus on a dead tree bole. Only in his eyes was there something which defied decay.

‘Ah, Mantegan is a suitable hole to fall sick in, that I'll say. Yet you'll never get the plague here. The plague likes juice and succulence, and there's nothing of that in Mantegan – even the cockroaches shun it – it's too draughty for them. Ague, now – yes, the ague in plenty, but better ague than
plague.
'

He repeated this with some relish, in the manner of one chewing a bone, while gloomily regarding his many children, who were busy flogging an old greyhound they had cornered. They were not the plumpest of children, and their shirts were patched and torn; as many bones showed through on them as on the greyhound.

Although Fatember was as hefty as befits an artist who spends much time dissecting men, horses and ancestral animals, every year bowed his broad shoulders a little further, and trained a mass of grey hair about those shoulders. Age and bitterness had added to his ruin since I last saw him; yet those startling black eyes held their power, reinforced by the great black line of his eyebrows. There was no man I respected more than he: if this was failure, then I admired it, and was proud to be in its company.

‘I came to see how the frescoes were progressing, Nicholas.'

‘All finished this very day. No, they're as incomplete as they were, Buglewing before last, when you and the players were performing in the great hall. God will not allow me to portray the happiness of princes while my family starves – my damned principles interfere with my brush strokes, you know. Nothing's happening. I can't work any more without pay and – although I don't want to complain to your face about your own brother-in-law – Milord Volpato would be better employed setting his lands in order than involving me in his schemes for self-aggrandizement. Everything always comes back to land. Use it well, your life's fulfilled, use it ill, your life wastes. Of course, we wretches who never owned a bean-strip find it easy to perceive such fundamentals. Give a man a dowry of a dozen farms and he finds truth more difficult to get at. I'm so hard up I've even had to sack the lad who was colouring in my skies.'

As he was making this speech, Fatember led me through a side door and across a court where no sun penetrated. Although he ranked among the greatest painters of the age, he had wasted a decade here – indeed, seemed to have settled for ever, for ever working or not working on the Mantegan frescoes, for ever experimenting with a dozen other arts. His genius was of the truculent kind which generates its own impediments.

‘If I marry well, Nicholas, I will see to the money.'

‘That “if” you give me is one of the great shattering weapons of Time. Don't talk like Volpato … Don't marry well, either. No man needs to be the butt of envy. I'm spared that, at least.'

We entered the banqueting hall, with its pendant vaulting and a splendid lattice window, fantastic with carved transoms, over-looking the bustling water traffic of the Toi. Fatember's unfinished frescoes took their orientation from this window, and their lighting schemes.

The theme of these famous frescoes was the Activities of Man under the Dereliction of Evil and the Valour of Good. Only one or two pastoral scenes and an ancestral hunt were complete; for the rest, several isolated figures or details of background stood out on the expanse of naked wall behind the scaffolding. On a trestle-table lay sheets of paper, most of them covered with Fatember's bold cartoons. Perfection was adumbrated, but had still to be realized.

As for the great man himself, he stood stock still, resting a hand heavily on my weaker shoulder and staring about the room as if he had never entered it before. Then he broke away and marched ponderously over to the window, to stand on the dais before it and glower back at me. In the quiet of the great room, as I waited, a brown mouse jumped from the table and scuttled into a corner.

‘And Time has other skilled torturers,' Fatember continued. ‘I see a pigment in my mind's eye. So real, I could almost pluck it from my pupil. I work for a week to mix it, and then not only is it not as I imagined but the tonal quality I had in mind is lost, wiped out.'

‘Nothing comes out quite as you visualize it, Nicholas.'

He stamped his foot so vigorously that dust rose from the boards beneath his sandal.

‘Don't respond if you have no truer response than that! Why should a vision not be realizable in actuality? Why should it not? Why are we granted visions, if not that they are capable of realization?'

‘Visions may be their own realization. They may themselves be actual. I've just been through an experience –'

‘Nonsense. What do you know about it? My vision for these walls remains in all its magnificence. I know that you and Volpato and your sister and half of damned Malacia cannot comprehend on their life why I don't produce – why I don't yield like a meadow, why I don't yoke myself up to my genius and get pulling until all is complete, my vision fulfilled. Well, for one thing, if I'm a meadow, I'm a sour one, over-cropped, never dunged. And if I'm an ox, I've been out to forage for too long, and no longer care for the rasp of the yoke on my shoulders. But if I'm a fool, that's different! Mayhap I prefer to leave the vision in all its glory where it retains its glory, inside my great wooden pudding of a head' – he smote it – ‘where the mice and merchants can't get at it. Hey? Rather than trot it out on plaster and have not a thing left to warm the rest of my years. Such visions as mine come only once in a lifetime, Perian, understand that.'

He strode about, angrily pleased to have an audience.

‘Is it impertinent to suggest that we should all be better for being able to share your vision?'

‘Better? Better? Is a man morally improved by an eight-course meal? Art don't
improve
you like blood-letting. The great artists have all been villains, yes, and the great patrons, give or take a few sanctimonious exceptions. No, you may
want
my vision, you may think you deserve my vision, but the truth is I care for nobody's wants but my own and God's when it comes to painting.'

He marched about the hall, making it echo with his words and the slap of his sandals on the tiles. Thought of his vision warmed him. It seemed to materialize in the air as he expounded on what he intended to do despite the world.

Then he fell gloomily silent, scratching his armpit and gnawing his bearded lip.

‘New horizons … New perspectives on failure …' he muttered.

I stood looking at the grand marriage scene. It existed complete as a scaled cartoon, and had been sketched life-size on one wall, with areas of basic colour blocked in. It commemorated the marriage of an early Mantegan to Beatrice of Bergonia.

Beatrice was a slender figure, leaning backwards in a chariot shaped like a swan and extending a hand to the handsome young spouse beside her. She was more fully finished than the rest of the composition, which existed in ghost form. Light lingered on her with a serene intimacy – and on her banners and followers with no less lucidity, into the distance. The cathedral, with its gothic galleries, and a view beyond it of plain and mountain, were boldly drawn in over delicate construction lines, proof of Fatember's command of perspective. I saw that when and if the scene were completed, it would stand for the ideal in all marriages.