The Iron Tempest by Ron Miller Read Free Book Online

repress a gasp of surprise and then of awe. She replaced her sword and removed her helmet, for that seemed the proper thing to do upon entering a cathedral.
    At first she had thought it a cavern of unprecedented proportions, a cavern of Gothic perpendicularity, a vast, solemn chamber, its vaulted ceiling supported by a forest of slender alabaster columns. But she quickly realized, with a shudder of superstitious awe, that the fluted columns and the elaborate ornamentation were manmade. Or perhaps , she thought with a shudder, demon-made . The beautifully multicolored walls, which she had assumed were mineral deposits and incrustations of crystals, were resolved into wonderfully-detailed mosaics, tapestries and paintings. She immediately crossed herself, not wanting to take any chances.
    The scenes and figures on the walls, half-hidden in the darkness, assumed an eerie liveliness in the wavering light and shadows that she did not like at all. They were not, as she had first assumed, scenes and figures from the Bible or the lives of the saints. She recognized many of them as representations of the pagan gods of Greece and Rome—since her education was not so strictly ecclesiastical as to exclude the study of either history or the classics. She was modern-thinking enough to realize that, considered as parables, even pagan myths often contained worthwhile morals; that ethical truths can come in many guises. However, as she looked more closely at the murals and tapestries, it was becoming evident that their artists had not been particularly interested in moral or ethical lessons. Indeed, these works seemed to be limited so exclusively to the various permutations of carnal lovemaking as to be obsessive. She felt her face grow hot with indignation and righteous embarrassment. The various abductions and rapes committed by Jupiter seemed to be a popular subject; it did not much matter that Bradamant knew that the bull having its way with Europa or the swan with Leda were in fact Jupiter disguised: she knew bestiality when she saw it. The conjugations of Psyche and Eros were illustrated with an unblushing candor normally reserved for medical textbooks. As were the randy peccadilloes of the fauns, satyrs, nereids, dryads and nymphs, to say nothing of Pan’s joyous and indiscriminate coupling with a startling and unlikely variety of wild and domesticated animals. There were baldly frank Dionysian rituals and reveling, ithyphallic Seileni. There were superb copies—if they were copies—of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidus, to which the Greeks had devoted an altar in honor of its perfect beauty, and his Aphrodite of Delphi (whose model had been Phryne of Thespiae, notorious for having been accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and who was acquitted only after her lawyer bared her naked body to the court, revealing that she “was even more beautiful in the unseen parts.” Such beauty, declared the awestruck judges, could only be divine). Bradamant was shocked to see Jupiter’s unnatural love for Ganymede graphically illustrated as was Apollo’s affection for youthful Hyacinthus. A pornographic frieze was dedicated to Ovid’s Art of Love and there were murals from Pompeii that may have been originals for all Bradamant knew. One of them was a shockingly explicit Atalanta and Meleager; Bradamant was glad to recognize Atalanta—she had always felt a kinship with that tomboyish heroine—though she certainly disapproved of Atalanta’s present company and activity, which she believed must surely be the libelous invention of the artist. She even recognized gods and goddesses older than those of the Greeks and Romans. Isis was there and Cybele, and Liber (from whom derived the word “libertine”, so little more need be said about her ), and neolithic mother goddesses, and Atum-Re and Osiris and the scented starry vault of the night-goddess Nut; there was Min of Coptos and the virgin goddess Ninlil (who had once mourned to her lover