Model, The by Aickman Robert

Author:Aickman, Robert [Aickman, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, Novel
ISBN: 9780571316823
Google: o9uJoAEACAAJ
Amazon: 0877958785
Publisher: William Morrow & Co
Published: 1987-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

Above the gates were the usual ghastly heads on spikes, which no one ever quite knew when to remove. Around the gates, and depending from the walls, sometimes hardly less dexterously than Ismene, were people of all colors, all costumes, all languages, all purposes. No effort was being made to protect them from one another, or even from themselves.

Lexi had no trouble in signifying either his rank or his position. Elena noticed that the big gates were stuck down and rusted. Probably they had not been closed for years and years, whatever the regulation might be. Security was in the hands of the gatemen, who were covered with ornamental knives and antique pistols from shoulder to knee. Here too, Elena wondered how she would have fared, had she emerged footsore and without papers. She was much too young to have papers, besides being a female.

The streets were crowded with charlatans, mountebanks, and nursemaids. There was a samovar at every comer, either steaming or being mended. The thousand churches tinkled their bells gloriously, as if to welcome the new ballerina; the gold decorations everywhere flashed in the sun; the multicolored doves swooped and wheeled and purred. Elena did not know whether there really were a thousand churches, but it seemed likely. Everything was completely different from her own small town.

Birs and Fors were imbibing now, as well as munching, and singing too, though less blithely than Mikhail, and neither in unison nor in harmony. The dogs plodded engagingly, as if still crossing the boundless fens, even though none of the populace seemed to see them, let alone make way for them. Every now and then a young officer of dragoons galloped past with a message. Each one of them either saluted Lexi or waved gaily to him, and in some cases, there was time for Elena to bow slightly.

“Dear Smorevsk!” murmured Lexi, knocking out his pipe on the underside of the coach seat. “City of Joy, I always say.”

He even let down both windows, so that the inside of the coach smelled of people in the streets and not only of combustion.

They drove straight to the Opera House. Had not Lexi so directed almost immediately he had ingathered Elena? The building had a stone facade in a scholarly classical manner, but was smaller than Elena had expected, or had provided for in her model. A monk was preaching Repentance on the other side of the square in a pulpit improvised from carbine boxes. All the time Elena could hear his words through the open window.

But Lexi proclaimed too: “Alight, enter, and conquer,” he cried out when the carriage had come to a standstill.

“Aren’t you coming too?” gasped Elena, too appalled to think.

“I am the administration and the finance, and it is not for administration and finance to break rudely in upon parturition and interpretation.”

The dogs were silently clustering round the coach in their usual way, despite all the urban uproar, and the men on

the box were beginning to thwack one another, in sport or otherwise.

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