“Good God … ” Zeffer said.
“I told you,” Sandru said, just a little smugly. “And that’s the least of it, believe me.”
“The least of it?”
“The more you look, the more you see.”
“Anywhere in particular?”
“Go over to the Wild Wood. Look amongst the trees.”
Zeffer moved along the wall, studying the tiles as he went. At first he couldn’t make out anything controversial, but Sandru had some useful advice.
“Step away a foot or so.”
In his fascination with the details of the stadium, Zeffer had come too close to the wall to see the wood for the trees. Now he stepped back and to his astonishment saw that the thicket around the arena was alive with figures, all of which were in some form or other monstrous; and all unequivocally sexual. Erections were thrust between the trees like plum-headed branches, women dangled from overhead with their legs spread (a flock of birds, thirty or more, swooped out of the sex of one; another was menstruating light, which was splashing on the ground below the tree. Snakes came out of the scarlet pool, in bright profusion).
“Is it like this all over?” Zeffer said, his astonishment unfeigned.
“All over. There are thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight tiles, and there is obscene matter on two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight of them.”
“You’ve obviously made a study,” Zeffer observed.
“Not I. An Englishman who worked with Father Nicholas did the counting. For some reason the numbers remained in my head. I think it’s old age. Things you want to remember, you can’t. And things that don’t mean anything stick in your head like a knife.”
“That’s not a pretty image, with respect.”
“With respect, there’s nothing pretty about the way I feel,” Sandru replied. “I feel old to my marrow. On a good day I can barely get up in the morning. On a bad day, I just wish I were dead.”
“Lord.”
Sandru shrugged. “That’s what living in this place does to you after a while. Everything drains out of you somehow.”
Zeffer was only half-listening. He was exhilarated by what he saw, and he had no patience with Sandru’s melancholy; his thoughts were with the walls, and the pictures on the walls.
“Are there records documenting how this was created? It is a masterpiece, in its way.”
“One of a kind,” Sandru said.
“Absolutely one of a kind.”
“To answer your question, no, there are no records. It’s assumed that it was funded by Duke Goga, who had lately returned from the Crusades with a large amount of booty, claimed from the infidel in the name of Christ.”
“But to build a room like this with money you’d made on the Crusades!” Zeffer said incredulously.
“I agree. It seems like an unlikely thing to do in the name of God. Of course none of this is proved. There are some people who will tell you that Goga went missing on one of his hunts, and it wasn’t him who built this place at all.”
“Who then?”
“Lilith, the Devil’s wife,” the Father said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “Which would make this the Devil’s Country, no?”
“Has anybody tried to analyze the work?”
“Oh yes. The Englishman I spoke of, George Soames, claimed he had discovered evidence of twenty-two different styles amongst the designs. But that was just the painters. Then there were the men who actually made the tiles. Fired them. Sorted out the good from the bad. Prepared the paint. Cleaned the brushes. And there must have been some system to align everything.”
“The rows of tiles?”
“I was thinking more of the alignment of interior with the exterior.”
“Perhaps they built the room first.”
“No. The Fortress is two-and-a-half centuries older than this room.”
“My God, so to get the alignment so perfect — ?”
“Is quite miraculous. Soames found fifty-nine geographical markers — certain stones, trees, the spire of the old abbey in Darscus — which are visible from the tower and are also painted on the wall. He calculated that all fifty-nine were correctly aligned, within half a degree of accuracy.”
“Somebody was obsessive.”
“Or else, divinely inspired.”
“You believe that?”