Envoy Extraordinary

Beaming, he reached out his hand, laid it gently on Phanocles' arm, turned him without force. And, compelled to follow by the first stirrings of courtiership, Phanocles kept in step, bowing a little towards the Emperor. The curtains swung open, released a flood of light that received and hid them. The light lay uninterruptedly on the secretary, the soldier, the empty chair; gleamed brightly from Amphitrite's brass boiler and funnel.

2. TALOS

Mamillius stepped down from the loggia to the garden. He was pleased with his appearance. The wide straw hat, enabling one to stand or walk in a pool of shade, was sufficiently un-Roman to be a declaration of independence without being openly defiant. The light cloak, attached to either shoulder and cut from the thinnest Egyptian linen, added masculine dignity without oppression. If one walked fast-and for a moment he did so quite deliberately-it floated on the air and gave an effect of mercurial speed. The tunic was daringly short and slit at the sides but this, after all, was merely fashionable. If I were to come on her now, he thought, sitting between the lichened Naiads, would she not draw the veil from her face and speak? He kept his eyes open for her as he passed down the many steps, but the hot gardens were deserted. Each square of lawn was like velvet as it should have been according to literary convention and the clipped yew patterns were less alive than the statuary they surrounded. He peered into arbours and herb gardens, threaded his way between groups of stone Hamadryads, Fauns, Bronze Boys; he made the usual salutation mechanically before the Herms that stood among the denser thickets.

But the trouble was she would not speak and was rarely to be seen. I know a little about love now, he thought, and not only from reading about it. Love is this nagging preoccupation, this feeling that the treasure of life has condensed itself to the little space wherever she is. I guess ahead and understand that love was reared in the wilderness and sucked the lion's dug. What does she think of me, how does she speak, is she in love?

A kind of burning spread over him and set his flesh trembling. I dislike this, he thought, I must not think of her. At that, a procession of horribly masculine lovers presented themselves to his imagination. By the time he had reached the lily-pond on the edge of the cliff at the foot of the garden he was struggling up out of his mind like a diver coming out of deep water.

"I wish I were bored again."

Perhaps the hat had not been such a good idea after all. The edges of his private pool of shadow were dulled and though the heat was already intense the sky to seaward was not as blue as it had been yesterday. There was a faint haze lying along the horizon and spreading towards the land. He spoke to a weather-beaten Satyr.

"We shall have thunder."

The Satyr continued to grin toothily. He knew what it was all about. Euphrosyne. Mamillius jerked himself away and turned to the left where the tunnel ran through the little headland and down to the harbour in the next cove. The sentry at the mouth of the tunnel came to attention. Partly because of the uninviting tunnel and partly because talking to soldiers always gave him a comfortable feeling of superiority, Mamillius spoke to him.

"Good morning. Are you comfortable here?"

"Sir."

"How many of you are there?"

"Twenty-five, sir. Five officers and twenty men, sir."

"Where are you billeted?"

The soldier jerked his head.

"Through the tunnel, sir. In the trireme alongside the quay."

"So I shall have to climb across her if I want to visit the new ship?"

"Sir."

"Tiresome. Pleasanter in the Emperor's garden than in the harbour, isn't it?"

The soldier thought.

"Quieter, sir. Very nice for them as likes a bit of quiet."

"You prefer your billets in hell?"

"Sir?"

Mamillius turned away and walked into the dark tunnel and a confusion of green after-images that remembered the toothy Satyr. He held his breath for as long as possible because the guards used the tunnel as more than an approach to the gardens. The after-images were pierced and then replaced by his first view of hell.