01 Zaragoz

Author:Brian Craig
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

INTERLUDE

ORFEO PAUSED IN his narrative as one of the candles guttered and went out. It was not until he moved, and pain shot along his right arm from shoulder to elbow, that he realized how stiff he had become, entranced by the intensity of his narrative.

He was not the only one who seemed entranced. He looked across the table into the face of Alkadi Nasreen, who had been listening so intently that his features seemed carved from wood. Two or three empty seconds passed before the Caliph’s concentration was broken; then he scowled.

‘This is a devilish long story,’ said Alkadi Nasreen, shifting an empty wine-cup and looking around. ‘It has kept us here all night.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Orfeo. ‘When I saw how interested you were, I became determined that you should not miss the slightest detail of the tale.’

‘But it is all mysteries and riddles! Are all your Bretonnian tales so convoluted?’

‘They tend that way,’ Orfeo admitted, ‘but in this case, the convolutions were not built in by me. I am simply reconstructing the pattern by which events unwound. I can promise you solutions to most of the mysteries and some of the riddles, but true stories are never as neat as the ones a player makes up for the telling.

‘When I invent, I am like a god who knows all, and can intervene in the interests of justice to ensure that the guilty are punished and the good rewarded. When I remember, I am only a man, who sees but the smallest fraction of what occurs, and has no authority to command or understand those higher beings whose work it is to determine who shall live and who shall die.’

‘If you know the answers to these mysteries now,’ said the Caliph, speaking as though he had a sour taste in his mouth, ‘then you need not make mysteries of them while you tell your story.’

‘A story is still a story,’ Orfeo replied, ‘and must proceed from beginning to end. And besides, there are questions whose answers you have chosen to hide from me, in order to contrive a little drama of your own - for you have not told me precisely where your interest in my story lies, thus insisting that I risk offending you. If you would tell me what name you bore before you were Alkadi Nasreen, Caliph of Mahabbah and Lord of the Twin Seas

.’

‘Damn your infernal curiosity!’ retorted the other. ‘I want the truth, not half-truth bent to the purposes of clever flattery in the hope of securing your release. You are a slave here, Master Orfeo, and it is I who have the sole right to make demands and ask questions. How much longer will the telling of this story take?’

‘It is difficult to judge,’ said Orfeo, ‘as I have never told it before.’

‘We have storytellers in Araby, too,’ said the Caliph, coldly. ‘Among the stories which they tell is the tale of a wife sentenced to execution, who obtained stay after stay

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.