LITMIR.BIZ

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throughout the civilised world to be a near-utopia. Yet it had its laws, each law designed to preserve its perfections. One such law was that nobody should marry a person of a different station in life until the necessity for it had been proved. The hard-headed and anonymous oldsters of the Council would certainly not admit love as a necessity, though they had been known to admit pregnancy on occasions. I, a common player despite some good connections, could not expect to marry Armida Hoytola, a rich merchant’s only daughter with far better connections.

      Either I must take up more dignified work or … I must become an absolute dazzling success in my own chosen line, so that even the Council could not gainsay my rise through individual merit to the heights.

      My art was my life; I had to shine on the boards. Which was difficult at a time when the arts in general were depressed and even an impresario like Kemperer was obliged to close down his troupe.

      The mercurised play of Prince Mendicula began to assume almost as much importance to me as to Bengtsohn. I pinned many hopes upon it. By the time this state of affairs became apparent to me, I was secretly betrothed to Armida.

      It happened on a day when the zahnoscope was busy capturing scenes between the Prince and the Lady Jemima. While Bonihatch and Letitia were undertaking to petrify time, Armida and I escaped, and I escorted her, swathed in a veil, to Stary Most and the Street of the Wood Carvers. For the first time, she stood in my little nook in the rooftops lending it her fragrance. There she commented on all she saw with a mixture of admiration and derision characteristic of her.

      ‘You are so poor, Perian! Either a barracks or a monastery would have seemed luxury compared to this garret.’ She could not resist reminding me of my pretence that I had been about to join the Army or the Church.

      ‘If I enlisted in either of those boring bodies, it would be from necessity. I’m here from choice. I love my attic. It’s romantic – a fit place from which to start a brilliant career. Take a look and a sniff from the back window.’

      My tiny rear window, deep sunk into the crumbling wall, looked out over one of the furniture workshops, from which a rich odour of camphor wood, brought by a four-master all the way from Cathay, drifted upwards. As she tipped herself forward to peer down, Armida showed me her beautiful ankles. I was immediately upon her. She responded to my kisses. She let her clothes be torn from her, and soon we were celebrating our private version of love. Then it was she agreed that we should be secretly engaged to marry, as we lay on my narrow truckle bed, moist body to moist body.

      ‘Oh, how happy you make me, Armida! At least I must tell my good fortune to de Lambant. His sister is to be married soon. You must meet them – he’s a true friend and almost as witty and handsome as I.’

      ‘He couldn’t be, I’m certain of that. Supposing I fell in love with him instead.’

      ‘The mere thought is torture! But you have better sense than to prefer him. I am going to be famous.’

      ‘Perry, you are as over-confident as Prince Mendicula himself!’

      ‘Let’s leave that farrago out of our conversation. Of course I hope that Bengtsohn will be successful, and that the play will do well for us, but after all as a story it is such rubbish – banal rubbish, too.’

      ‘Banal?’ She looked quizzingly down her pretty nose at me. ‘I love stories about princes and princesses. How can such things be banal? And Princess Patricia is so marvellously proud when she is found out … I have a good opinion of the piece. So does my father.’

      ‘My father would be very scornful. The situation is as old as the hills. Man and best friend, best friend seduces friend’s wife; the deception is discovered, they fall out and become enemies. Blood is shed. Why, that sort of thing could have been written a million years ago.’

      ‘Yet Otto has set out the old story in a novel way, and draws a sound moral from it. Besides, I like the setting in the captured city.’

      I laughed and squeezed her.

      ‘Nonsense, Armida, there’s no moral in the piece. Mendicula is a dupe, Patricia unkind, Gerald a false friend, Jemima just a pawn. Perhaps that represents Bengtsohn’s view of the nobility, but it makes for a poor tale. My great hope is that the astonishing technique of mercurisation will carry the charade through to success – aided, of course, by the outstanding handsomeness of fifty per cent of the players.’

      She smiled. ‘You mean the fifty per cent lying here on this bed?’

      ‘All glorious hundred per cent of it!’

      ‘While you are playing with these figures – and with my figure too, if you don’t mind – may I refresh your memory on one point? Otto’s venture will come to naught if my father does not settle his dispute with the Supreme Council. Father is very ambitious, and so is feared. If he falls, then so fall all who depend on him, including his daughter.’

      ‘You refer to that business of the hydrogenous balloon? Balloons have sailed from Malacia before, for sport and to scare the Turk. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Nothing is going to be changed if the balloon does go up.’

      ‘The Council think differently. But if popular opinion is too much against them, then they may yield. Alternatively, they may strike against my father – which is why he now seeks powerful friends.’

      I rolled on to my back and gazed up at the patches on the ceiling.

      ‘It sounds as if your father would be best advised to forget about his balloon.’

      ‘Father intends that the balloon should ascend; it would be an achievement. Unfortunately, the Council intends that it should not. That is a serious situation. As common usage comes between us, so it can come between my father and his life. You know what happens to those who defy the Council for too long.’

      What I saw in my mind’s eye was not a corpse in the sewers but its daughter sharing my little bare garret.

      ‘I would defy anything for you, Armida, including all the fates in opposition. Marry me, I beg of you, and watch me excel myself.’

      She would have to have a dozen horoscopes read before she could consent to that; but she did agree to a secret betrothal, and to the same sort of bond that existed between General Gerald and the fair Princess Patricia, our absurd alter egos.

      Scents of sandalwood, camphor and pine mingled with patchouli and the precious aromas of Armida’s body as we forthwith celebrated our intentions.

       A Balloon over the Bucintoro

      When you take a stroll through our city along the banks of the River Toi, and especially along the elegant Bucintoro, where pavements are of gold, you can look north and regard verdant expanses of countryside stretching into the Vokoban Mountains, which are themselves, at least on their southern slopes, green and well-favoured.

      When from any other vantage point in Malacia you gaze towards the country, you see nothing so enticing. True, there is the long, dusty road to Byzantium, while to the south-east lies the Vamonal Canal, tree-fringed for most of its course; but in general the vistas consist of undulating plain – ochre, sullen, primitive; all those things against which the idea of Malacia is most opposed. To the west lie the no less uninviting Prilipit Mountains, where the terrain is distorted and uncouth.

      Among the folds of the Prilipits, even as Armida and I were luxuriously plighting our troth, gathered an Ottoman army intent upon laying waste Malacia.

      There was a general alarm and mustering of arms. Not a citizen but feared for his well-being, his wife, or something he held dear. But such armies had gathered beyond our fortifications before, had been defeated, and had retired in disarray.

      The Council and the general did what they deemed necessary. They paraded our own forces, they polished our cannon-balls, they set the blue and black flag of Malacia flying

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