So, when on the morrow the selector told me to climb the stairs all the way to the top and report to the curator of the Fresco, it sent a thrill of trepidation all the way to my toes.
The selector was watching me closely, the way they always did. “What?” selector asked.
“Ah . . . one has heard … no one should go there except . . . someone who knows . . .”
“If a selector sends someone, someone can go there. Around back, door markedStaff only. Just walk in and ask for the curator.”
At that point, I was on the sixth level, so it wasn’t a long climb, but it felt like I was trying to scale Mount Ever-ice. I was actually gasping for breath when I got to the top, and I stood outside the staff door a long time, letting my gills stop fluttering and my hearts stop pounding before I walked in.
The curator was a tall person in a white gown with a blue apron and cowl. I bowed, muttering, “One regrets not knowing how to address someone.”
“Call me Curator,” it said. “My pronouns are fourth level, ai, ais, and aisos. Come, I will show someone the Fresco!”
Ai took me down a hall, and up a flight of stairs, and through a narrow little door into a gallery above the vast circular floor of the House. The gallery was a narrow ring above the Fresco and below the dome. Though other memories of that time may have faded, one remembers that experience clearly. The floor pave is of compact metamorphic limestone of a lucent ivory color, brought into golden or rosy flushes by the slightest light, the rays making radiant shadows that wander across the polished surface as though searching for the luminous realm from which they have come. Their motion is caused by the wind moving branches of the great trees above the high windows topping the dome, as I came to know later, but the first impression was of a clear stream in which living, questing, nondimensional beings swam. Or, that is how one later described what one then, wordlessly, saw.
Across from the tiny door through which we had entered stood the three great cast metal doors, each between its protecting columns and surmounted by its individual architrave, their surfaces brought into high relief by the same fugitive lights that wandered the floor. The metal was the dark brown of good soil, not shadowed but deliberately darkened to separate it from the room itself. Between the middle door and the right-hand one was the first section of the fresco,The Meeting. Though one had never seen it, one knew that it portrayed Mengantowhai leaning on his staff and reaching out to the Jaupati people, his angelic countenance lit from within as they held out their hands in awed wonder and incipient friendship. Beginning from that point and sweeping sunwise about the great hall, the sixteen other panels of the Fresco told the tale of Mengantowhai’s labors on behalf of the people he had adopted, of their joy and progress, of their tragic overthrow by the envious Pokoti, and of Mengantowhai’s eventual martyrdom at their hands. Between the left hand and middle doors was the final section: The Martyrdom of Kasiwees. Kasiwees was the last Jaupati, shown kneeling as he prayed for Mengantowhai’s return.
Mengantowhai, shortly before his death, had selected Canthorel as an athyci, and these episodes from Mengantowhai’s life had been Canthorel’s inspiration for the Fresco. One knew what the Fresco showed, however, only because one had been told. The Fresco itself was almost as dark as the metal doors, you would call them bronze, and no detail of the painting could be seen with a casual glance, for the place was lit, as it always had been, by hundreds of votive candles set into ornamental frames of iron and brass, and the soot from centuries of such candles had settled upon the divine paintings like a thick varnish, masking the colors and obscuring the figures. The entire room was cleaned annually, and the floors were scrubbed and polished daily. The painting, however, could not be touched. One knew which panel one was looking at only by referring to the small numbers, one through seventeen, carved into the stone beneath them.