The Best of Electric Velocipede

by John Klima

  The carter lays another barrel on the ground, a blond rock of a man, unconcerned by our atmosphere of agitation. Brooder Matheus keeps glancing at Iosef and the Fader. Iosef has a look set on his face.

  *

  —The Fader is right, Iosef, I say. Now’s not the time for stubbornness.

  Iosef crouches down to clip a twig off a shrub with his secateurs. Ignoring me completely, he stomps over to a bench sat against the wall, puts the secateurs down and picks up a fork and trowel. He puts them down again and turns to me.

  —Am I to spend my life cowering in the shadows? he says angrily. Is that what I am? A half-thing of the darkness? Half the height so half the man? Hide in the shadows, Iosef?

  He points past me.

  —Maybe I can crawl under the altar and hide there, eh?

  I think of the stories he has told me of his old town, of hobben boarded up inside their burning homes, the elders of his little community dragged out into the streets to have their beards hacked off with razors as trophies for the mob, gnomes who had harmed no-one moaning out of broken, skinned jaws. Choking in a smoke-filled hiding-hole.

  He strides past me, past the carter and into the antesanctum.

  —Perhaps you should spend the night here as well, Maester, says Fader Pitro.

  —No, I say. I’ll be all right.

  *

  —And how she squealed for her mother!

  I gaze at the flame of the candle, the flicker so vibrant, so alive, and without pattern. How can something so chaotic be so beautiful? The candle is low, most of its wax now dribbled and solidified as white trails layering the dark-green glass of the bottle that serves as candlestick. A molten lump like some limestone grotto’s creation, slick and glistening in the dark. A drip of wax splashes on the table and I dip a finger into it before it cools, smooth it over the fingertip with my thumb.

  —Some more of this fine cat’s piss here, man.

  The peregrin officers fill the tavern though there’s only half a dozen of them; they fill it with their boorish brags, their swaggering contempt that shoves its way through crowds with elbows in the side or hands flat in the face, and with the ugly stares of men hungry for violence. Brooder Matheus and I sit at a corner table, safe with the carter sat across from us, as calm, he is, as if the peregrins were simply nuisance children running wild in the absence of authority. Everyone knows the reputation of the carter’s guild, men who are trained to see a cargo safely through the wildest regions of the hinter, whatever bandits or demons might lie in their path. Everyone knows the legends.

  —I hear . . . says one of the peregrins, I hear there’s a filthy hobben in this town.

  The carter slugs his beer back and stands up. His voice when he speaks is quiet, loaded.

  —Brooder. Maester, he says. Do you have a message for the Fader?

  He has no reason to return to the Monadery, of course, but . . .

  —If you’re going that way, I say, I think we both might join you, eh Brooder?

  Brooder Matheus nods and downs the last of his beer for courage, coughs.

  *

  —You are mistaken, m’sire, says Fader Pitro.

  His voice, outside, is loud and clear but there’s a waver in it, audible fear. The peregrins are gathered outside the very doors of the antesanctum, the officers and their whole band. They announced themselves on the staggering march up from the tavern with a pounding drum of swords on shields, a chorus of ape-calls. There are curses and laughter now.

  —Bring him out and we’ll cut him down to size! shouts someone.

  More laughter.

  Brooder Matheus sits on a crate, looking nervous, and I wonder if there’s anyone out there he would recognise, some second cousin twice removed perhaps. Elven nobility, I think. Iosef stands on the dais itself, a hand touching the altar. They would not kill him in a house of God, would they? I stand at the door, listening.

  —There are no hobben here, says Fader Pitro and I hear the sound of someone spitting in reply.

  The carter moves me aside with one hand. The other holds his spike, the seven-foot steel-bladed lance that can be used as sword or staff or spear. There is one story that the guild was formed from an order of knights sworn to protect the early peregrins on their way to the Holy Lands, before these sons of the gray erles twisted the pilgrimages into a crusade. Even if there is no truth to it, I have seen for myself the brutal skill with which a carter wields his spike. He takes the brass handle of one of the doors and swings it full open, suddenly, smoothly.

  The hellish orange of torchlight pierces the antesanctum, picking out Brooder Matheus as he stands up from the crate, a palette knife in his hand of all things. Iosef at the altar. The peregrins cannot fail to see him there, surely. But they cannot fail to see the carter either, the way his eyes and spike capture the flame of their torches and reflect it back at them, so bright that the antesanctum behind must be darkness in comparison.

  He simply stands there, silent, until they leave.

  *

  The Temptation Of The Faithful

  —I have to go, I say. Brooder Matheus will be waiting for me eager as a pup. I lay the first stroke today.

  —Brooder Matheus can wait till you’ve had breakfast, says Rosah.

  She kicks down the bedsheet and pulls herself up onto her elbow. I admire her as I pull on my linen trousers and shirt, all crisp and freshly laundered, perfumed by the petals left in the bottom of the basket by Maria, Hier Nerjea’s wife, who rules the tavern’s lodging rooms with the same ironclad sense of hospitality as her husband rules the public house below. Rosah is beautiful and she lies there on the bed, my angel whore, knowing it. Her skin is pale as porcelain, paler than it should be with such amber hair and eyes of flashing green; when I undressed her that first night I expected freckles, copper skin, the feel of powder on my fingers as I caressed her face, but there was only the silk of skin, as soft and clean as if it was just out of the bath and towelled dry. It is I who am usually masked in powder, charcoal and chalkdust griming my face and fingers when I come back to the tavern late to take my supper and drink with her, and later as the night goes on, slip my arm around her waist and pull her, laughing with lust the both of us, up to my room. Rosah’s beauty is unsoiled by rouge or eyeshadow, her only concession to vanity the vermilion lipstick with which she paints my chest with a kiss each night over my heart. I feel my cock stirring as I look at her coquettish contrapposto pose, the locket that hangs between her breasts, the trim of her fuzz; I am remembering her salty taste. I leave the shirt untucked as cover, shaking my head.

  —You will spoil me for other women, I say.

  *

  —Then you must marry me, she says. Take me away from all this and make an honest woman of me.

  I sit on the bed to kiss her. It is a little joke that has developed between us these last few months but like all such jokes it has just the tiniest sting of truth behind it and we are both sometimes, I think, a little sad, thinking it might be nice and knowing it will never happen.

  —Me? I say. I am as much a whore as you. More so, mi caria, since I have slutted myself in more cities than you could probably imagine.

  —Ah, but if you took me with you when you go, I could give you some competition, I am sure.

  I laugh. I love Rosah, as a friend and as a sensual delight, as a favorite whore and as a trusted confidante; and her fondness for me runs deep enough for her to declare now and then, on some night when perhaps she feels a little lonely, tonight there is no money and no clock, mister painter, no limits, only you and I, and we will explore each other’s body as if we had never even touched before. We are both whores, yes, but I think we are both whores by vocation, willing to give more of ourselves in our work than most.

  But neither of us will ever lose ourselves in the other, I know. Even in the nights when we make love rather than merely fuck, we are never truly lovers.

  —I have to go, I say.

  —Artists, she says. You’re no whore.
You’re more married than the Nerjeas.

  —Tonight? I say and kiss her on the forehead.

  —Eat something, she calls out the door after me as I go down the stairs. Maria! Make him have some breakfast.

  *

  —Breakfast? I say.

  I throw the apple across the antesanctum to Brooder Matheus, who catches it in one hand. I polish another on my shirt and take a crunching bite.

  —Fader Pitro was asking how things were going again, he says. I told him you’re two months behind and that yesterday you completely wiped the first four panels of the south-east wall.

  He takes a bite out of the apple, a mischievous gleam in his eye.

  —I am a bad influence on you, I say.

  —It’s the truth.

  I am behind schedule admittedly, but what the brooder didn’t tell the old monk is that the cleaning of the panels is the next stage of the process. I look around at the surfaces of the antesanctum—what you can see behind the scaffolding—ceiling and walls all but covered in the chalk and charcoal sketches copied from the papers that now carpet the concrete floor. The panels above the door and behind the altar are the only that have still to be filled; I have not made my final decision on the latter yet and the former, well, the idea I have in mind I would rather keep from the Fader’s prying eyes right now.

  As for the four panels that I ‘wiped’ yesterday, though, the ones around the far-left window—Brooder Matheus may be amused at the thought of the Fader in a flap but yesterday it was himself looking on in horror as I went at them with my rags and fluids. I gave him a few minutes of panic before explaining that charcoal and chalk make a less than effective surface for my technique and, you see, I have the images that belong there imprinted in my mind now so I only have to close my eyes to visualise them. The cleaning was only preparation for the real work to begin.

  *

  The outlines of the four panels bordering the window are the only charcoal marks left from the previous months of work on this area. Offset and defined by one line running out from each corner of the window, the panels should produce a sort of elliptical structure on the whole, moving the eye around from this one to the next. I decide to start with the panel on the lower-left.

  The brooder has already prepared the buckets of water and the basins we will need, so I crack open the barrel of plaster mix and set him to work while I wind the clockwork pick then start to vandalise the smooth pink skin of the first panel. The little steel point of it whirrs as it hammers, chipping away at the surface, roughing it up so that the plaster I apply will bond. There should be no danger of my work crumbling off the wall three years after completion in the middle of some funeral . . . as happened with di Vineggio’s Nocturna d’il Houri.

  I finish preparing the first panel and take the first two basins of plaster from Brooder Matheus, handing him the pick to wind. It is the same sculpting plaster in each bowl—thicker than normal plaster, softer than clay—but where one basin is white the other is tinted dark with the same black ink the monks use in their Vellumary. The two will mix a little as I apply them, but that is to be expected. I will be painting over them anyway; all I am doing now is building up the undercoat of light and shadow, the white that will shine through from beneath a cerulean sky, the darkness that will lurk behind a devil’s eyes, building it up gradually, with a finger and thumb of slick plaster here or there, a thick wet lump smoothed into shape with a knife, another lump on top of it.

  Slowly the form of a face starts to take solid shape, as if emerging from the very wall. After a while, I stand back to uncrick my shoulders.

  —It catches the light, says Brooder Matheus. Where you’ve put the white plaster, it catches the light coming in the window. Just so, just . . .

  —Just right? I say. That’s the general idea.

  *

  The Seeding Of The Earth

  —And, generally speaking, do you have an idea of when it will be finished?

  It has taken me two years just to do the ceiling and the Fader manages to sound casual in his enquiry, but I can hear the note of worry in his voice. The costs are escalating now that the paint is flowing and the wagon rolling constantly between here and Murchen, bringing the pigments and media I require from the great Artist’s Market of the Strazza d’il Tintorum, powders made from rock and plant, sulphuric yellow from the Salt Sea or green-gold sapphiron from the distant Aurient, porphyr made from mollusc’s shells in the Phonaesthian city-states or the iridescent verdan of Aegys’s crushed scarab wings. Elysse, north and south, is full of natural hues, nut-browns and ochres, sumbers and siennas, and I make full use of these, but the pigments most saturated with yellow, red and blue must be imported from their more exotic origins, so these materials are expensive; and although the brooders’ benefactor, the Duke Irae, is rich with the plunder of the Holy Lands even he may balk at paying such a ransom for escape from Hell.

  So the Fader sees the antesanctum only a fraction complete and, thinking of how much money it has cost already and how far it has to go, has visions of catastrophe.

  *

  —It will probably be finished, I say, the day after you give yourself a heart attack, Fader . . . at this rate. Or if you want I could paint the rest all white and you could tell the Duke it symbolises God’s eternal radiance. That way it would be finished within the week.

  He twirls a lock of hair between his fingers, brushes his lips with the end of it.

  —It’s not my heart giving out that I’m worried about, he says. The Duke has expressed his desire to have . . . given all the honor that he can to God while still on this earth.

  I grab a bar of scaffolding, swing from my crouch up on the plank down to the platform beneath. Holding onto a ladder that rises up past me, I lean out into the fifteen feet of air that separates me from the Fader and Brooder Matheus standing behind him.

  —Tell him he could die tomorrow, I say, so he should swear his sons to carry on his patronage. Or tell him that the Butcher of Instantinople shouldn’t be such an old maid.

  I wrap paint-rags round my hands and slide down the ladder.

  —Tell him, I say, that God will not let him die until his purpose is fulfilled and he stands here, where you and I are standing, looking up into His face; that if he dies before the antesanctum is complete it will be the greatest sin he’s ever committed.

  Brooder Matheus points at my forehead and I touch the wetness, wipe the paint off with the back of my hand. Alizarin crimson. Fader Pitro looks unusually stern, but he seems a little distracted, as if there’s something less tangible than money and time worrying him. Brooder Matheus puts a hand on the Fader’s arm.

  —Tell him it will be worth it when the chapel is finished, he says. Look. Is it not true?

  *

  A mix of indigo and porphyr, the night sky painted on the ceiling of the antesanctum is not black but blue, the purplish hue so deep that, in contrast with the crescent moon of Iosef’s raptured face and the plumes and strands of clouds he breathes into existence, it recedes as into an eternal darkness; but it is a poor chiaroscurist who does not understand that there is color even in the deepest shadows so, although I work in light and dark, there is no black upon my palette, no black in the night sky. I keep a watch on the Fader’s tilted, swivelling chin of pointed beard as his eyes follow the path mapped out for them. On the barrel ceiling, the low relief of Iosef’s face sits off-centre and down so as to catch the eye first by catching the diffuse sun coming in the windows of the south-east wall. The subtler forms of streams of smoke modelled around the image of the Creator lead Fader Pitro round and out; smoke becomes scatterling clouds in a night sky, spatterings of stars. At the edges of the ceiling, as if the viewer is looking up from the middle of a forest clearing, thick plaster foliage of branches and leaves is painted in the olive drab of night and edged in bone-white. An owl rises from a branch but otherwise it is a quiet sky, the first few days of Creation. Mankind is yet to appear; the unborn animals are only suggestions in
the insubstantial swirls, seeds waiting to be sung and sprung into existence under Orphean’s feet.

  —We can’t all create a world in six days, I say.

  Fader Pitro’s eye travels the scene, his body turning, stepping back and round to the side every so often to accommodate his angle. I watch with pleasure as he is brought back to the face of Iosef, the beginning and the end.

  —I’m just hoping that it’s not six years, he says.

  But he nods. He looks around at the sculptures pressing out from the walls all round, shapes emerging from the plaster as if they too are part of the moment above, emerging into existence from the clay of the earth beneath the sky, and he nods, mutters some vague encouragement and leaves.

  —Iosef is ill, says Brooder Matheus after he has gone.

  —Schitze! says Iosef. I’ll be tending their garden and their graveyard long after the Fader is fertilising my plants. Pitro’s a worrier.

  —I’ve noticed, I say. I sometimes think he only took his vows to give his fingers rosaries to play with.

  But twice tonight Iosef has been racked by coughing fits that halted conversation as he creased with the effort of containing them, the table shuddering under the weight of his hand. He will not see a doctor and he will not give up his rituals of tobacco, however much his lungs and throat protest with rasping hacks and muffled judders; that much became obvious when I joined him in his nook, taking the chair diagonally across from his customary cushion-raised booth seat, and tried to broach the subject—and the air turned blue with curses and with smoke blown in my face. I’m not sure which of them made my eyes sting more, the invective or the noxious weed, but I thought better of continuing the role of nag. It doesn’t suit me anyway.