Wessex Tales: "The Face in the Floor" (Story 10), Page 2

  Chapter 2

  Days passed, the floor progressed, and summer warmth ensured that the ragged dust-curtain across the door at the western end came down.

  Beletus and his team had a more of less constant audience as members of the villa’s familias paused in the corridor to stare and admire. All ranks passed by, from the humble to the high. Among the coloni, young women and field workers trod on the new tiles gingerly, confining themselves to the floral scroll around Bellerophon and the corners of his panel, where Beletus had limned two-handled chalices.

  The theme of Bellerophon riding Pegasus and slaying his Chimera spoke to the motif of courage, of light over darkness. That theme was as divine in the old, comfortable world of the spirits as in the new, unfolding, pagan world of Christ. And the chalices: were they amphorae or holy grails? This work was a compromise among many religions and spirit worlds.

  The long summer days between sheep shearing and harvest often drew the mistress of the villa to her tessellated floor. Helena bore herself like a natural aristocrat—helped by the fact that she shared her given name with the emperor’s mother. She was tall for a woman, her face too drawn to be a true beauty, with graying-blonde hair in a ribbon-tied tress at the back of her head. She it was who had commissioned the majestic, tessellated floor. The lady favored blue silk, Beletus noticed, in keeping with the cool, aristocratic manner of her bearing. It was as much as the mosaicist could do to take his eyes off her skirts. People said silk was woven with long hairs that grew on the leaves of a tree in a land a full year’s travel beyond the eastern edge of the known world. Silk was a rare commodity.

  “It’s coming along nicely, Beletus.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  “This outer room is a delight. Those floral scrolls around Bellerophon look so complicated.”

  “Practice, Ma’am,” the master mosaicist said modestly. “And, as you see, we make a good team.”

  The boy, Otiacus, was tiling background beneath the belly of the stag to the right of the door. Watched by his master and the client the apprentice rose to heights of diligence as never before, sweating every detail with his tongue between his lips.

  Beletus gave silent thanks for the fact that he had assigned Otiacus to work on the stag just before Helena stopped by. The boy’s body, bent over the panel, hid a major imperfection. The workshop had delivered a panel in which a leaping hound chases a stag. Above the stag’s back, the head and neck of a hind turn to face the pursuer. So far so good. But the hind has no feet. It was all very well for the mythical Chimera to have a goat’s head in its back and a serpent for a tail. But there was nothing mythical about the hind and the stag. Back at the workshop that fool Denorex must have been drunk again.

  Feeling perhaps that the apprentice needed encouragement, the mistress moved to watch Otiacus at work.

  In a flash Beletus signaled his journeyman, Coxucratis, who was tiling a similar scene near the northern wall. “I hope, Ma’am,” said the journeyman, “that you approve the lines of this panel.” Coxucratis wiped dusty hands on his leather apron-front and scratched his unconventional full beard. Pushing away hammer and trowel he smiled at the lady.

  The ruse shifted Helena’s attention to the northern wall. Lifting her hem, she crossed the tiles on an incomplete section of rope-weave border beneath the Chimera. “Indeed,” she told the journeyman, “it’s very leafy.”

  Coxucratis looked pleased. A hound with a studded collar was chasing a stag through the green intensity of a mosaic Eden. The scene was beautifully rendered and quite primeval, except for the collar on the hound, which denoted human intrusion on the Garden’s perfection.

  “Very well executed,” the mistress went on. “Thank you.”

  “It moves the eye, Ma’am, this one and the one opposite,” the journeyman said, indicating the line of the chase. “We’re leading the eye to the inner chamber.”

  “We look forward to seeing that.” Helena turned to the master. “How long do you think it might take?”

  “Inside of two months.” To escape the mistress’s cool, appraising gaze, Beletus turned away, appearing to study the base of the future Christus-floor in the inner chamber. The outlines of the geometry—quarter-roundels, semi-roundels, diagonals, the central roundel—were marked in charcoal on a plaster coating spread over the foundation. “Inside of two months,” Beletus repeated, stung with an apprehension he hadn’t felt since his first commission as a master. This floor would be his crowning work, the sum of his life’s skill. Since designing it he had known it would be so. The geometry spoke a wholeness that no floor he had ever seen could match. Only one obstacle lay between his knowledge and his goal. He had to do the work, and perfectly.

  “Good.” Helena’s tone implied the audience was at an end. She plucked up her hem, trod delicately around Bellerophon and, in a flurry of blue silk, dust and an air of grace befitting one whose fortune might lay several such floors, Helena left the room.

  Day after day the design in the larger, eastern chamber took shape, more than fulfilling the promise of the charcoal pattern sketched on the foundation. Beletus discovered what it was that made this composition special when he tackled the complicated borders and floral scrollwork made necessary by the nearly hemispherical scenes along each edge. In terms of visual weighting the sizes of panels, borders and fill were roughly equal. Even the central Christus-figure, when it was done, would not overwhelm the supporting design.

  The plan called for human heads in the four corners. Altars to Mithras were done that way, with wind spirits at cardinal points. But, in the icons of a new religion alien to Beletus, the four figures would be graced with the dignity of word-bringers, evangelists.

  It was here that Otiacus, who had grouted the background since the project began, was at last assigned to depict a human face. Beletus set him working on the evangelist in the northwest corner. Coxucratis took the southwest corner, while the master worked on the spatial geometry, which was to integrate the patterns as a whole.

  Visitors got bolder as the floor filled in. They stood in the arch to watch while the work progressed. A frequent admirer was the mistress’s little girl. Ten years old, Beletus reckoned. She came tugging her nanny behind her, sat down across from him, and watched. She avoided Coxucratis. When the others teased him, he blamed it on his beard.

  All things considered, little Julia was no trouble. One day Beletus was fashioning the floral scrollwork leading from the southwest corner to the centre of the room. The nanny, dark, rustic and ever watchful, sat on the peltae strip between the rooms. Her charge, a tall, precocious child with Venus tresses to her waist, sat fidgeting until the master pushed across a box of tiles. “Make a flower,” he told her, “make a leaf.” In due time he admired her handiwork and put away the tiles. Sometimes she wanted nothing but to talk.

  “My daddy almost drowned,” she confided.

  “Oh?” Beletus bedded a green tile in a leaf and studied a handful more.

  “That’s why you’re putting in this floor.”

  The dumpy housemaid, Afrixa, had told the men how the master of the house had tried to breach a beaver dam in a flood season, almost drowned, and caught pneumonia into the bargain. Lucky to be alive, they said. The way Afrixa told it, the paterfamilias had lain half through Death’s door for months till a Christian hermit laid on his hands and drew out the spirits of sickness in the name of a Hebrew god. From that day forth the family adopted the Christus as primus inter pares, the first among deities in their pantheon of family gods.

  “What will he look like?” the little girl asked.

  “Who?”

  “The Christus, of course.”

  “Ah,” said Beletus. He rattled a fistful of tesserae and pondered the question. He had no idea. Like a man, he supposed. Less heroic than a Greek, less magisterial than a Roman deity. The Christ’s Chi-Rho symbol was all the rage nowadays. Having been adopted by the victorious emperor some thirteen years before, the Chi-Rho was the height of
fashion as a good luck charm. Beletus himself had laid at least two. But what face should he give a new god?

  From its frame of hair as pale as summer grass, the earnest face of the girl repeated her question. “Well, what will he look like?”

  The apprentice broke off from his work on the face in the corner. “Like me,” he told her flippantly.

  The girl threw her hair over her shoulder, followed it with a turn of her head, and considered Otiacus’ suggestion with the earnest honesty of a child. “You’re much too young,” she said. Turning back, she caught Coxucratis chuckling in his corner. “Christus didn’t have a beard, either,” she told him. It was the apprentice’s turn to laugh.

  “Brown eyes or grey eyes,” Beletus speculated.

  “Brown, please,” she implored. “My friend has brown eyes.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “He lives in the villa across the river.”

  “I know the one.”

  “They’ve got a lovely floor. With lines of leaves and lovely curvy borders. Just like this.” Her hand traced the plaited edging of a hunting scene. “I bet you can’t do our floor nearly as well as that.”

  Her nanny hushed her, but Beletus just laughed and waved her off. “My dear, I know it well. I laid it. This one will be better. You just watch.”

  Good work pays twice, folk say. True enough. When Helena went shopping for a tessellated floor in honor of the god who saved her husband’s life, the mistress of the villa four miles away gave her Beletus’s name.

  What would the god look like? The question had nagged him for weeks. Every detail in the floor led to that face. The unity of design was perfection. The weight and balance of its elements were perfection. The size of the roundel waiting to accept the face was perfect with respect to its size, its lights, its darks. Even with the wretched Otiacus making heavy weather of the word-bringer in the northwest corner, every other element in the great floor would more than compensate.

  “Here,” the master told the girl, pushing his heavy flat box of tesserae across to her. “You make a face and show me how he ought to look. I’m going to check on my mortar crew.” Beletus stood up stiffly, pressed his back against the arch to straighten his spine, and carried his years across Bellerophon and out along the corridor to the afternoon light in the courtyard beyond.