Elementals - A. S. Byatt [36]
The envoy was a sallow young man, with liquid brown eyes. The bluff King and the careful Queen were not impressed by his rhetoric. The Princess went on walking round the glass block, staring in. It was not clear that she had heard his latest remarks.
The second envoy from Prince Sasan arrived a few days later, dusty and travel-worn, another sallow man with brown eyes. His gift was dome-shaped. He too, as he unwrapped it, spoke lyrically of the contents. He did not appear to be speaking to a script; lyricism appeared to spring naturally to the lips of the Sasanians. His gift, he said, was an image, a metaphor, a symbol, for the sweetness and light, the summer world which the thought of the Princess had created in the mind of his master.
The second gift was also made of glass. It was a beehive, a transparent, shining form constructed of layers of hexagonal cells, full of white glass grubs, and amber-coloured glass honey. Over the surface of the cells crawled, and in the solid atmosphere hung and floated, wonderfully wrought insects, with furry bodies, veined wings, huge eyes and fine antennae. They even carried bags of golden pollen on their black, thread-glass legs. Around the hive were glass flowers with petals of crumpled and gleaming yellow glass, with crowns of fine stamens, with blue bells and fine-throated purple hoods. A fat bee was half-buried in the heart of a spotted snap-dragon. Another uncoiled a proboscis and sipped the heart of a campanula. So, said the lyrical envoy, was the heart of his master touched by the warm thought of the Princess, so was love seeded, and sweetness garnered, in the garden of his heart. Hugh thought that this might be too much for his austere pupil, but she was not listening. She had laid her cool cheek against the cool glass dome, as if to catch the soundless hum of the immobile spun-glass wings.
The third envoy arrived bloodied and incoherent. He had been set upon by bandits and had been forced to hide his package in a hollow tree, from which he had retrieved it, late at night. He unpacked it before the court, murmuring incoherently, ‘So delicate, I shall be tortured, never forgiven, has harm come to it?’ His package was in two parts, tall and cylindrical, fat and spherical. Out of the cylindrical part came a tall glass stem, and a series of fine, fine, glass rods, olive-green, amber, white, which he built, breathing heavily, into an extraordinarily complex web of branches and twigs. It was large – the height, maybe, of a two-year-old child. Folded into his inner garments he had a plan of the intervals of the sprouting of the branches. The assembly took a long time – the Queen suggested that they go and take refreshment and leave the poor, anxious man to complete his labour unobserved and in peace, but Fiammarosa was entranced. She watched each slender stem find its place, breathing quietly, staring intently. The spherical parcel proved to contain a pleroma of small spherical parcels, all nestling together, from which the envoy took a whole world of flowers, fruit, twining creepers,