Elementals - A. S. Byatt [35]
The portraits, the letters, dispersed through the known world. After a time, the presents began to return. A small golden envoy from the East brought a silken robe, flame-coloured, embroidered with peacocks, light as air. A rope of pearls, black, rose, and luminous pale ones, the size of larks’ eggs, came from an island kingdom, and a three-dimensional carved chess game, all in different jades, with little staircases and turrets edged with gold, came from a tiny country between two deserts. There were heaps of gold and silver plates, a leopard in a cage, which sickened and died, a harp, a miniature pony, and an illuminated treatise on necromancy. The King and Queen watched Fiammarosa as she gravely thanked the messengers. She appeared to be interested in the mechanism of an Orcalian musical box, but only scientifically interested, so to speak. Then Prince Boris’s envoy arrived, a tall fair man with a gold beard and two gold plaits, riding a hairy, flea-bitten warhorse, and followed by packhorses with great pine chests. He opened these with a flourish, and brought out a robe of silver fox-fur, an extraordinary bonnet, hung with the black-tipped tails of ermine stoats, and a whalebone box, polished like a new tooth, containing a necklace of bears’ claws threaded on a silver chain. The Princess put her thin hands, involuntarily, to her slender throat. The envoy said that the necklace had been worn by Prince Boris’s mother, and by her mother before her. He was clad in fleeces and wore a huge circular fur hat coming down over his ears. Fiammarosa said that the gifts were magnificent. She said this so gracefully that her mother looked to see if some ancestral inkling in her responded to bears’ claws. There was no colour at all in her lips, or in her cheeks, but with her that could be a sign of pleasure – she whitened, where other women blushed. The King thought to himself that a man and his gifts were not the same thing. He thought that the narrow neck would have a barbaric beauty, circled by the polished sharp claws, but he did not wish to see it.
The last envoy declared that he was not the last envoy, having been parted from his fellows on their dangerous voyage. They had travelled separately, so that one at least of them might arrive with his gift. Prince Sasan, he said, had been much moved by the Princess’s portrait. She was the woman he had seen in his dreams, said the envoy, lyrically. The Princess, whose dreams entertained no visitors, only white spaces, wheeling birds and snowflakes, smiled composedly, without warmth. The envoy’s gift took a long time to unwrap. It was packed in straw, and fine leather, and silk. When it was revealed, it appeared at first sight to be a rough block of ice. Then, slowly, it was seen to be a glass palace, within the ice, so to speak, as hallucinatory turrets and chambers, fantastic carvings and pillars, reveal themselves in the ice and snow of mountain peaks. But once the eye had learned to read the irregularities of the surface, the magnifications and the tunnels within the block, it was seen to be a most cunningly wrought and regularly shaped transparent castle, within whose shining walls corridors ran into fretted chambers, staircases (with carved balustrades) mounted and descended in spirals and curves, in which thrones and pompous curtained beds stood in glistening cubicles, in which miraculous fine curtains of translucent glass floated between archways in still space. The glass castle was large enough for the centre to be hidden from the eye, though all the wide landings, the narrow passages, the doors and gangways, directed the eye to where the thickness of the transparent glass itself resisted penetration. Fiammarosa touched its cool surface with a cool finger. She was entranced by the skill of the layering. It was all done in a crystal-clear glass, with