After supper, we cut a long Virginia cigar in half, and smoking it in relays, walked in the secret passage to the subterranean great hall lined with the portraits of former owners of Semper Vero, most of whom had never been near the place in their lives. They were painted in the early Cannonian iconic style, no texture to their furs, medals brighter than their eyes, a two-dimensional condition that I had no problem identifying with in the torchlight. I cannot to this day bear to spend more than fifteen minutes in a museum, but as I walked the great hall with Iulus, those floating transparent half-length images in reddish ochers, gold leaf, and velvety blues, their unselfabsorbed gaze radiating out and down from the axis of their bodies, formed a bond with each other and with me. They were not likenesses but presences. Theirs was not an attitude you could call beautiful, but one which promised somehow to restore fortune and confound enemies. No artist of the Renaissance could approach the ability to understand the virility, madness, and fire-breathing spirit in those tragic golden faces painted upon such programmatic human forms. Most had no frames, though some were equipped with winged doors so they might be closed. It was as if we were surrounded by a curious but friendly mob, full of contradictory emotions, their pride certain at the moment they had been transfixed, but also a supersensuous sadness for the future. In their imperceptibly glazed transitions, the reference for near and far was gone. In their temperas of egg yolk, rye beer, and ground alabaster, it was almost impossible to tell what was physical and what was reflection. Indeed, the panels must have been warped, like the curvature of the earth, or of the eyeball itself; and in the erratic light the brush strokes seemed composed not with temperas but blood and water, the dead matter of paint forgotten. It was as though the owners had all been painted at their last breath, and painted by the same person over five hundred years, so they were at once living and lifeless, imitating life from art. I felt their eyes saw me, and that their hearts understood me, those intercessors bathed in unconditional light.
My life was changed in that moment. I wanted to be counted among the absentee owners of Semper Vero, even if only as temporary custodian. The rays from those golden faces upon my nose seemed more important than any idea I would ever have. I wanted only to see the world through their eyes. “Poor Giotto’s nothing compared to them,” Iulus shrugged as the torch burnt out and my happy indoctrination ended.
I relieved myself in the single guest bath, a long high room with the watercloset set a good nineteen feet above the commode, featuring a quite large painting of a hoopskirted gentlewoman, black curls tumbling from her bonnet, who supported an impeccably dressed but slightly wounded soldier, his head resting on her shoulder, while she gently masturbated him. By comparison, this early Catspaw made the small Roualt over the washbasin seem somewhat academic. Not for nothing was this known as the finest lavatory in Cannonia.
I found Iulus on the terrace, his hands folded behind him, gazing out over the embankment of the Mze. The coots had set up an unceasing shriek in the reed-beds, the primeval agony of a love-factory in late spring. I attempted to return our conversation to matters of the mission, and so inquired after the whereabouts of the Sicherheitshauptamt, that madman of a puppet premier who had inflicted so much needless suffering upon his poor nation. “One can hide forever in Cannonia,” Iulus murmured, “he might well be just down the road, asleep in phlox and snapdragons, or perhaps in the subterranean regions, where even the Russians will not find him. Or perhaps the Americans have offered him a professorship?”
For the first time I saw a lethargic cynicism creep into his eyes as he took a seat.
“You must be tired. I know I am,” he said. Then he sighed. “Is it permissible, to lose interest. . even in evil?” he asked gently. And when I mumbled incoherently, “It must be possible to do something, you just can’t let all this go to the hell. .” he reached across the wrought-iron table to put a cool hand over mine. “You can see that we are more pious, brave, and clever than the rest,” he said. “But you don’t seriously think we can be saved, do you?”
At midnight, we went for a swim in the Crab Pond and bade farewell to our adolescence. We bedded down on the sofas with the dogs wound tight about us, and broke the ancient rule of war, both going to sleep at once without a sentry.
Before first light I was awakened by hoofbeats. I peered out between the dusty damask curtains and could make out an Astingi patrol in jerkins of lilac, mulberry, and sulfur, bows and machine guns slung across their shoulders, winding single file down the fenlands from the source of the Mze. Their complicated demeanor was very like the frescoes of the former owners, at once both tranquil and agitated. Like their country, their aroma preceded them, a combination of dead lilies, saddle leather, jasmine, and mocha. They galloped once around the fresh grave mound in silent lamentation, and then wound their way down the drive, all pale hair and plumed shakos, lances and lopsided triple crosses. Their gray and white carts were tilted in their shafts from their burdens. Young girls in loose trousers, suckling buttoneyed infants, walked beside the black kneeboots of their mounted husbands, abetted by red rough-coated dogs and black unbelled oxen. Behind the last cart, on a silver chain, an eagle walked desultorily as a chicken. They moved in sluicelike silence, taking a shortcut around the town, and raising only a wisp of dust into the sunrise.
Dawn came early and pallid as a lemon-rind as the sun rose out of Russia. It was time to get down to business. I reminded Iulus of the crown. He threw up his arms as if in a mock surrender, and led me, chuckling, across the cour d’honneur to a small Tudor cottage connected by a broken arbor to an unkempt cutting garden. He turned on the gas lamp, and we picked our way across a floor littered with smashed flowerpots and broken-handled rakes and spades. The cottage’s shelves were filled with old letter files, metal cigar boxes, small carriage trunks, matched plaid luggage, Gladstone valises, and a great profusion of loose, half-destroyed papers. “Observations of a literary nature,” he reassured me, “and without intelligence value.” In a corner, amongst a huge nest of shredded correspondence, framed in a whelping box constructed of a dozen inlaid woods, a litter of just-weaned red pups yipped and scurried.
The crown was hung on a peg near a small rear window, its dull golden gleam and rough unfaceted dark gems testifying to an ancient, unrefined smelting process. It was topped with a bent lopsided triple cross, an exciting pagan touch. He handed it to me casually, pointing out the fragment of the Pope’s gemstone, Gemma Augustea, and the Byzantine silvery filigrance of the first czar, Monomach. And then he related the Astingi curse attached to that bizarre object, which translates imperfectly as, “Wear the crown and lose your culture.”
I also inquired, as instructed, as to the whereabouts of the Lost King.
“The King is hidden,” he snapped, “and shall remain so.”
Through the scent of milky feces, crusty gruel, and moldy paper, there was also the stench of fetid flesh wafting down from the sedge-green forest above us. He shot me a glance, and I knew it was useless to inquire further about our men behind the lines.
Sensing my discomfort, Iulus flipped the crown back on its peg like a horseshoe, leading me next door to the ruined cloister, which served as a barn, and where a cart filled with fresh straw, its tongues open, blocked the drive. He methodically harnessed the single horse left in the stable, a horse as calm and affectionate as a dog. It was not so much a horse as an enormous blocky blond pony, with Iron Age bones and a black dorsal stripe running down his back from forelock to tail. He was at least sixteen hands high, with a neck so strong it spoiled his shape, his hooves the size of dinner plates. Beneath the cart lay the parents of the litter, one dead, the other terribly aged. The mother had passed away that morning, her purple breasts exploding with mastitis, swollen white tongue clenched between her teeth. Next to her lay the sire, haunches twisted with arthritis, goatee and forepaws graying, his golden eyes clouded with cataracts.