Wessex Tales: "The Face in the Floor" (Story 10)

~ WESSEX TALES ~

  Eight thousand years in the life of an English village

  ‘The Face in the Floor’

  ‘The Face in the Floor’ is Story 10

  of 38 Wessex Tales stories.

  Its sequel is ‘Julia’ (Story 11)

  Robert Fripp

  Copyright 2013 Robert Fripp

  The Search Term “Wessex_Tales:Fripp”

  helps find my stories on the web.

  This file ends with story synopses.

  Thank you for your support.

  Cover

  The central feature in the fourth century mosaic

  discovered at Hinton St. Mary, Dorset, in 1963.

  Copyright, The Trustees of the British Museum 1965.

  Cover design:

  The Design Unit: Wimborne, Dorset, U.K.

  WESSEX TALES stories : ‘The Face in the Floor’

  ISBN 978-0-9918575-1-7

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Author’s note

  Books by Robert Fripp

  Reach me online

  A List of my Stories

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  WESSEX TALES

  ‘The Face in the Floor’ (Story 10)

  Chapter 1

  Among the cherished objects in the British Museum, a mosaic floor portrays one of the earliest likenesses of Christ to be found in the British Isles. Indeed, it is the only likeness of Christ found in a mosaic floor laid during the days of the Roman Empire. Why such a treasure came to light under the grass of a Dorset meadow remains a mystery. Only one thing about this floor from Hinton St. Mary is certain. It was laid around 325 A.D., twelve years after Constantine became the first emperor to convert to Christianity. Such a magnificent floor demands a history. Why was it laid in a remote farming villa, miles from any important Roman town? Here is the tale our floor deserves…

  “You must be awfully clever, Beletus.”

  “All in the mind’s eye, Afrixa.” The master mosaicist rocked back on his knees to look up at the housemaid’s dumpy frame. She stood over him for the umpteenth time, shameless adoration lighting every feature in her moon-like face.

  “From now on I’m calling you Genius tesserae,” she announced. The animating spirit in mosaic tiles. Well, why not? As apprentice, journeyman or master, Beletus had laid more floors and slipped more tiny tesserae through his fingers than any craftsman within a three-day ride of Dorchester.

  “If you don’t let me get on with it, there won’t be a tessellated floor,” the master chided Afrixa gently.

  “That’ll make Mistress cross.” Afrixa’s tone implied she had bigger things to worry about. But she took the hint and walked away, casting a sly glance back.

  A spotty youth behind the master said, “She fancies you, Beletus.”

  Without looking up, the master shot back, “Keep your eyes on that floor, boy!” He was not about to let his apprentice see him blush. “You’d think you were crafting a face over there! Fill in that background, Otiacus, and be quick about it, or I’ll have you mixing mortar for the rest of time!”

  “Yes, Master.” The lad stuck out his tongue at his master’s rump. Then, wisely, he continued to bed little tiles in a waiting matrix of wet mortar surrounding a mosaic likeness of Bellerophon. It was the master who had animated the beautiful likeness of Bellerophon slaying his Chimera. He, Otiacus, filled in the grout.

  The fact was that Beletus fancied Afrixa, too. She looked like a woman with whom he could be comfortable. What with his dear wife dead these past two years…

  The master mosaicist knelt motionless, like a man at prayer, staring into the roughcast foundation before him. Piercing grey eyes offset his wild fringe of dark, graying hair, as if a palisade of stumps defended a great, bald head. Even on his knees Beletus suggested a man of bulk and strength. He was built like a wrestler or an animal-trainer, not an artisan who crafted eternal beauty with sleight of hand and tiny tiles.

  The master sighed, adjusted his sheepskin kneeling cloth and studied the array of tiles in the flat, partitioned box beside him on the floor. Here were fine-textured tesserae fired from baked clays in every brown and reddish hue; worked stones from Purbeck in blacks, grays, yellows, blues; whites and grays in Portland limestone. Rapidly, like a paymaster pulling together coins to pay off a line of laborers, Beletus took up tesserae of several colors. Turning his attention to the floor he began to fashion the head of an antlered stag with such speed as to make it appear that the pieces came thrusting into places that Fates had pre-ordained.

  Beletus sometimes felt that higher forces guided his hand. He always prepared his floor plans carefully: client approval depended on it. But limning preliminary drawings and coaxing tiles into subtleties of feature and tone were hard-practised years apart. Beletus was good, but not proud; he valued guidance from whatever source it came. He was certain that gods sometimes guided his hand, breathing into him—in/spiring—an eye for design much greater than his alone. Faces, features, even panels took shape spontaneously beneath his hands, as if they were faces forming in clouds. He had once set out to create a fish, only to find that his hands delivered a stork. What the gods give, take! The artist’s genius stood apart, observing, driven to animate stone, clay, metal, wood; but it was often the gods who spoke through the mortal agency of the master’s hands. He expressed spirit voices in pictures, making their anima live. Beletus never fought the instinct in the tiles. He would toy with tesserae until they took shape as the pre-ordained creature they must become: a conch shell, a dolphin, Hercules.

  Sea creatures were popular with Dorset people, but not in this commission. Afrixa had told him, “Master nearly drowned himself. He was ever so sick. For two, three months we thought he’d die.” So, no water beasts!

  For the first time since his wife’s death, Beletus felt a deftness, a new creative power, perhaps even a level of skill he had not attained before. Tesserae flew from his hands to take up their natural places in glorious patterns across the great sweep of the floor—twenty-eight feet by nearly twenty. Images materialized as if they already lived, with tiles falling into place beside neighbors to form a destiny conceived long since by a genius the master could not explain. More than ever, Beletus imagined himself the spirits’ instrument.

  He had laid many floors. If the gods so willed, he would lay many more. But none would be so whole, so balanced in the integration of its parts as this one. Barely a third of it was laid—the Christus-room was still to come—but the master could tell.

  He shifted his seat to rest his back on the arch between the two parts of the room. The apprentice, who had been taking his time behind his master’s back, found new enthusiasm for fitting a background around Bellerophon’s head. But Beletus had no eyes for Otiacus. He was scanning the section of peltae pattern under the arch between the rooms. The key to peltae was a six-armed star shape, four of whose rays curved off to link diagonally with similar shapes in adjoining rows. Peltae was intricate beyond geometry, intuitive past reason, and beautiful. Beletus had done fine peltae before—another commission not far away came to mind—but not like this. The colours, the weave, the spacing; it was as close to perfect as he had ever seen, with its curviform lines linking elements in different rows. Here were stars of heaven, all linked; fish of the sea, united in their element. The native art of Britain had long since been debased by Roman conventions, but artisans knew that Nature and life still hid in the lines of a Celtic curve. A stylized stem, a leaf, a beast lurked among the tiny tiles.

  The mas
ter traced the curving union of a peltae line across the newly finished piece of floor, leaned back against the plastered arch and closed his eyes.

  “Are you all right, Master?”

  “Just tired, boy.” Inspiration had deserted him, but it would come again. For the moment he must fall back on mere expertise. He must not fail this floor. Nor must the floor fail him.