"Charming," I replied under my breath, not so much to the fat merchant's comment but to the fact that the flimsy girl Lynn was fairly crawling over our host as he finished his repast. I could see that I'd not have much chance to talk to Stezen during dinner: I'd need a riding crop to get the girl off him.
When the meal was well finished, we all rose to follow Stezen into his famed gallery. At that point, I made my way to the front of the pack, almost as close to our host as the clinging Lynn.
With a gesture, Stezen gathered us as a shepherd before a pasture gate and said," What you all are about to see is the jewel of my crown — my love, my life, my joy. I'll not mar these gorgeous works with shouted commentary, for I wasn't there shouting when the artists crafted them."
A ripple of bemused laughter circulated through the clustered flock.
"But, please, my sweets, gaze and gaze and gaze at these, and converse with them and each other as you wish."
With that, he stepped backward, swinging wide the great black door that stood behind him. A gush of cool air spread deliciously over us. It bore with it the gathered fragrance of old oils and polished wood and gently burning lamps. The faint murmur of music also seeped out.
Following our host, we rolled slowly through the towering doorway, past the velvet curtains that eclipsed the view, and into another room of black-marble floors and dark red walls.
This place, though, had none of the palatial refinement of the rest of the estate. The walls were starkly crimson from some deeply plied pigment, and they met the black ceiling above and the black floor below without ornament of any type. On these walls hung paintings of the crudest sort — some on tablets of stone or wood, others on thick and fibrous reed-papers pressed together. A host of huge and unrefined statues populated the floors, and only now did we catch sight of the music-makers — bards with reed pipes and hand drums, who played tribal songs.
As my fellow feasters spread reverently into the hall, I maintained my close carriage beside Stezen. I cleared my voice and spoke: "Thank you again for the fine meal"-he waved this off — "but as I warned you before, the greater part of me still hungers — "
"Pray, what for —? "
"Or perhaps thirsts is a better term," I continued.
The chit of a girl interrupted," Yes, I'm thirsty, too. Give me a drink, Stezen," but Stezen slipped a hand over her mouth.
I tried again. "You see, word has reached my circles that you have, in your travels, discovered some great elixir that might prove interesting to me. "I cringed the moment these words were full-formed from my lips, for I knew I'd projected my bid and dealt Stezen the upper hand.
He knew it, too. "You are here for the gallery, my friend, are you not? For a man so interested in immortality, you seem rather uninterested in patience."
Ah, yes. Well played. I was fittingly chastised and would hold my cards closer from now on. But also I was encouraged; my host had just proved himself the sort of wily bastard capable of finding the fountain of life and hoarding its waters for himself. Fair enough. Now I had to prove myself worthy to drink.
"The art, yes," I replied quietly.
Even so, I did not turn my attention to the bizarre artwork about me, but rather to my fellow feasters. I watched their faces, their puzzled and disdainful faces, and saw the effect their arrogant ignorance had on Stezen. Krimean, that great, burly oaf, even laughed in nervous bursts as he poked his head through a huge stone wheel. Though he and I shared the same opinion of this primitive junk, he and I did not share the same politick about it.
"Forgive my eagerness of a moment ago," said I to stall for time. "My eyes were so bent on immortal endings that I was blind to these mortal beginnings."
Stezen's close-lipped smile eased, and I saw that I had scored a point in this odd game we played. "Beginnings?" he asked with an innocence that ill-suited him. "How so?"
My mind struggled to lay hold of something useful — something about the state of nature, the mythic origins of our brains and the bestial seeds of our bones — some such tripe from the Brautslava ethnographer.
"Yes, beginnings. This room is full of perfect beginnings. If my colleagues at the Institute are not fools, I would say that the soul of art is the soul of us, and the soul of us is yet a primal, primitive. . beginning thing."
Now the grudging respect turned to interested appraisement. "Your mind is sharp. I knew that from stories of you. But now I see that your eyes are their match. "He gestured about at the room full of tribal masks and queer pottery and confused guests, many of whom seemed to sense a kind of explanation emerging between the two of us and were coyly drifting this way. He continued," What piece, in this primitive collection of mine, would you say is greatest?"
Now I had to look past the bemused guests and at the art itself. Since all the pieces seemed equally crude and worthless to me, I decided in that moment to choose the first work that caught my eye, and think on my feet for a reason why.
"That monolith," I said, pointing at a huge, trunkshaped stone that stood crude and erect in the center of the floor.
Stezen gestured me forward, and the nervous flock of sheep about us followed. "How so?"
I stroked my chin by way of stalling, then said," Well, to start, it is stone. All things come from stone, I am told. Indeed, one professor of ours claims that this world of ours was stone until the mounting up of corpses and feces gave us the rich black soil in which we plant."
We'd reached the monument now, and Stezen's cocked eyebrow told me he expected more. Fortune was with me, for I now saw that the shaft of stone had been rudely shaped into the general features of a man — a rather giantesque man — who leaned stupidly forward on his fat feet. That gave me an idea.
"The figure is human, but crude still, like a man made of stone who has just risen from the stony ground."
"Or risen from the ranks of beasts," Stezen added.
"Yes. And the fact that he is standing defines him from the stone and from the beasts. For stones and beasts do not rise up to deny the world its pull. He is, in that way, pushing away from the primal and fleshly to the final and empyrean."
"Perhaps," Stezen allowed. I knew then that my reading had been too devout for my host's tastes. He underscored this perception. "Or perhaps he is a great, leaning phallus, born up only by vague and violent and demonic desire toward divinity."
He was that sort of man, Stezen was. I coughed into my hand to hide my discomfort. Others imitated me.
Stezen's next words both thrilled and horrified me. "Well enough, my friend. I can see you still have a primal soul, as you so well said it. Let's hope each of these rooms of my gallery finds your being in an accord. If so, yet may we both drink together from the fountain you seek."
That was it — this game I knew we played from the moment D'Polarno's face appeared behind the door. At last the rules were spelled out. I had thought at first, seeing that feline visage, that ours would be a game of cat and mouse, me hoping for the cheese, and he for the fun of the chase — and perhaps for the kill. Then, as the banquet went on, as more plattered beasts came with compelled willingness to be eaten by us, I thought the game would be the subtler, deadlier match of wits, the fencing of intellects that would end in humiliation or death for one of us. But now I knew. This was not a game of bodies or of minds, but of souls. And I had the clear conviction that Stezen intended to prove me either a match for his spirit or another beast that, by a wire through the throat, could be bent in supplication to be, steaming, cut open.
The next room provided a welcome relief from the blood-red walls and the death-black floors. Here, stately silver-white marble filled the floor in elegant patterns of geometric tilework. The same polished stone covered the walls, supported at even intervals by columns, pilasters, and arches. Along the far wall ran a colonnade of massive stone drums, with larger-than-life statuary ensconced in niches along it.