Brian Aldiss - The Malacia Tapestry

I gave him a bow. Bengtsohn made a salute and said, ‘We are getting forward with our matters, sir.’

‘One would expect so.’ He helped himself to a pinch of snuff from a silver box and strolled across to regard the zahnoscope. I had hoped for an introduction; none was forthcoming. My consolation was the sight of his daughter Armida, who alighted from the other side of the carriage.

Her reserve was perhaps to be accounted for by the presence of her father. She evinced no surprise and little interest that I was engaged to act with her in the drama of Prince Mendicula ; her attention was rather on her dress. Like her father, she was fashionably garbed, wearing a plain decolleté open robe of ice blue with long, tight sleeves which ended in time to display her neat wrists. When she walked, her skirts revealed a hint of ankle. A fragrance of patchouli hung about her. And what a beauty she was! Features that tended towards the porcine in her father were genuinely inspiring in Armida, especially when they lit as she said smilingly, ‘I see that the walls of neither monastery nor barracks have closed about you yet.’

‘A blessed reprieve.’

The cart was loaded and harnessed to a pair of mules, black of visage, long of ear, and inclined to foam at the mouth. We climbed on or walked behind, while the Hoytolas returned to their carriage. Bonihatch explained that we were heading for the Chabrizzi Palace beyond the Toi, where our play would be enacted.

The Palace of the Chabrizzis was set in a striking position at no great distance from Mantegan, where Katarina passed the days of her married life. The Palace was built under a last outcrop of the tawny Prilipit Mountains, to stare loftily across the city.

Within its gates we rolled to a stop in a weed-grown courtyard. Two urchins played by an elaborate fountain. Windows confronted us on all sides, straight-faced. To one side, cliffs loomed above the rooftops.

Everything was unloaded and placed on the flagstones. Armida climbed from her carriage. Her father merely sat back in his seat and suddenly, at a whim, drove away without speaking further to anyone.

Bonihatch made a face at Bengtsohn.

‘Looks as if the Council didn’t make up their mind regarding the hydrogenous balloon.’

‘Or maybe the zahnoscope either,’ said Bengtsohn grimly.

‘I’d prefer you not to discuss my father’s business,’ Armmida said. ‘Let’s get on.’

Later, the mule-cart was driven off. While a primitive outdoor stage was being set up, Armida talked to a timid girl in work clothes. I went over to speak with them and discovered that this was Letitia Zlatorog, the little seamstress engaged to play Lady Jemima.

It would be difficult to imagine anyone less fit for the role, although she was pretty enough in an insipid way. She was pale, her hands were red, and she had no mannerisms. She appeared all too conscious of the honour of meeting a player from the great Kemperer’s company. I took care to appear rather grand; nevertheless, when Armida’s attention was elsewhere, I slipped an arm about her waist to set her at ease.

Even more strongly than before, I felt that I, as the one professional member of this ludicrous cast, was entitled to play the Prince, and so be married to Armida. I knew how the simulated passions of the stage often translated by sympathetic magic into genuine passions off stage; to think of the cocky apprentice Bonihatch embracing Armida was not to be borne.

Having failed to convince Bengtsohn on this point, I took Bonihatch himself aside, intimating as tactfully as I could that as mine was the name which would win audiences, mine should be the right to play the title role of Mendicula.

‘Think of this as a co-operative enterprise,’ he said ‘in which all work as one, not for profit or fame, but for the common good. Or is such an ideal too much for your imagination?’

‘I see no disgrace in fame as a spur! You talk more like a Progressive than a player.’

He looked at me levelly. ‘I am a Progressive. I don’t wish to make an enemy of you, de Chirolo. Indeed, we’d all be glad to have your co-operation. But let’s have none of your fancy airs and graces round here.’

‘Take care how you speak to me. I imagine a good thrashing would impress you.’

‘I said I didn’t want to make an enemy of you –’

‘Now now, young gentlemen,’ said Bengtsohn, bustling up. ‘No quarrels as we inscribe a new page in the massive volume from Malacia’s history. Give me your hand to setting up this ruin.’

He had some flats representing a destroyed town. Bonihatch and other apprentices went to his aid. I tucked my arms under my cloak and made myself look tolerably moody, remarking to Armida, ‘This is a melancholy old place. What has become of the Chabrizzis? Did they all kill themselves in a fit of spite, or have they gone to look for the Lost Tribes?’

‘Poor Chabrizzis, they squandered several fortunes in the service of the Nemanijas and Constantinople. One branch of the family turned to Mithraism. Of the remainder, one of them – my great grandfather – married into the Hoytolas, though for a noble to marry a merchant’s daughter was generally condemned. They both died of the plague within a twelvemonth, leaving a little son. So their history may be reckoned, as you say, a melancholy one. All the same, I love this old palace and played here often as a small girl.’

‘That news makes it sound immediately more friendly.’

One part of the inner courtyard was bathed in sun. Here Bengtsohn’s paraphernalia was set up. In rooms nearby we disguised ourselves in his scruffy costumes, except for Armida, who wisely insisted on retaining her own dress.

‘Capital!’ cried Bengtsohn, clapping his hands as each of us emerged into the sunlight.

He began to pose us, moving us about like chairs. Bonihatch, absurd in Prince Mendicula’s tinsel crown, stood to one side, gesturing to the nearest wall and the flat of the sacked city. Feeling hardly less silly with cork sword and general’s tricorne made of paper, I stood behind him, while Armida in a small tinsel crown was placed close beside me.

When he had us as he wanted, Bengtsohn aimed the zahnoscope at us, adjusting its barrel and flinging a velvet cover over the glass panel at the rear.

‘Stand still, all of you!’ he cried. ‘Not a movement, not one movement, for five minutes, or all will be spoilt.’

Then he ran round to the front of his machine and removed a cover from the lens. We stood there until I grew tired.

‘When do we begin to act?’ I asked.

The old man swore and replaced the lens-cover, shaking his hands before his face in wrath.

‘I tell you just to stand still without even a movement for five minutes, and you begin immediately to talk!’ he cried. ‘While the sun is bright, we must make so many pictures as we can, but each image takes five minutes for to form on the prepared slide. For the image to be crisp, you must be still – as quiet as rats. Don’t you understand?’

‘You never told me that item in your secret recipe.’ I said angrily. Armida and the others were looking at me in disapproval. ‘We shall be here all day, standing like statues for five minutes at a time. That’s got nothing to do with acting, the secret of which lies in mobility.’

‘You do not act, you stand like dead statues. Thus for several days. That is why you are having so well paid. We have fifty slides to make to contain the whole drama of the Prince. Now, prepare yourself again. This time neither a word nor a twitch, de Chirolo.’

I said, ‘But you begin before we have learned or even read our parts. What is the story? What sort of a drama is this?’

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ Armida said. ‘We do not speak. We supply only the images, in a series of tableaux. When the slide-drama is eventually shown to audiences, Otto will recite what is happening, to bring out the beauty of the tableaux. Can’t you understand the principles of a mercurised play?’