Elementals - A. S. Byatt [38]
The visits were the occasion of much diplomacy and various energetic rides and hunting expeditions, on which, since it was high summer, the Princess did not join the company. In the evenings, there were feasts, and musical entertainments. The island prince had brought two porcelain-skinned ladies who played exquisite tinkling tunes on xylophones. The curly prince had a minstrel with a harp, and Prince Boris had two huntsmen who played a rousing, and blood-curdling, duet on hunting-horns. The Princess was sitting between Boris and the curly prince, and had been hearing tales of the long winters, the Northern Lights, the floating icebergs. Prince Sasan beckoned his squire, who unwrapped a long black pipe, with a reed mouthpiece, from a scarlet silk cloth. This he handed to the Prince, who set it to his own lips, and blew one or two tentative notes, reedy, plangent, to set the pitch. ‘I based this music,’ he said, looking down at the table, ‘on the songs of the goat-herds.’ He began to play. It was music unlike anything they had ever heard. Long, long, wavering breaths, with pure notes chasing each other through them; long calls which rose and rose, trembled and danced on the air, fell, whispered, and vanished. Circlings of answering phrases, flights, bird-cries, rest. The Princess’s mind was full of water frozen in mid-fall, or finding a narrow channel between ribs and arches of ice. When the strange piping came to an end, everyone complimented the Prince on his playing. Hugh said, ‘I have never heard such long phrases ride on one breath.’
‘I have good lungs,’ said Prince Sasan. ‘Glassblower’s lungs.’
‘The glass is your own work?’ said the Princess.
‘Of course it is,’ said Prince Sasan.
The Princess said that it was very beautiful. Prince Sasan said:
‘My country is not rich, though it is full of space, and I think it is beautiful. I cannot give you precious stones. My country is largely desert: we have an abundance only of sand, and glass-blowing is one of our ancient crafts. All Sasanian princes are glass-blowers. The secrets are handed on from generation to generation.’
‘I did not know glass was made from sand,’ said the Princess. ‘It resembles frozen water.’
‘It is sand, melted and fused,’ said Prince Sasan. His eyes were cast down.
‘In a furnace of flames,’ said Hugh, impulsively. ‘It is melted and fused in a furnace of flames.’
The Princess trembled slightly. Prince Sasan lifted his gaze, and his black look met her blue one. There were candles between them, and she saw golden flames reflected in his dark eyes, whilst he saw white flames in her clear ones. She knew she should look away, and did not. Prince Sasan said:
‘I have come to ask you to be my wife, and to come with me to my land of sand-dunes and green sea-waves and shores. Now I have seen you, I – ’
He did not finish the sentence.
Prince Boris said that deserts were monotonous and hot. He said he was sure the Princess would prefer mountains and forests and rushing cold winds.
The Princess trembled a little more. Prince Sasan made a deprecating gesture with his thin hand, and stared into his plate, which contained sliced peaches, in red wine, on a nest of crushed ice.
‘I will come with you to the desert,’ said the Princess. ‘I will come with you to the desert, and learn about glass-blowing.’
‘I am glad of that,’ said Prince Sasan. ‘For I do not know how I should have gone on, if you had not.’
And amidst the mild uproar caused by the departure from protocol, and the very real panic and fear of the King and Queen and Hugh, the two of them sat and looked steadily across the table at the reflected flames in each other’s eyes.
Once it became clear that the Princess’s mind was made up, those who loved her stopped arguing, and the wedding took place. Fiammarosa asked Hugh to come with her to her new home, and he answered that he could not. He could not live in a hot climate, he told her, with his very first note of sharpness. Fiammarosa