The Iron Tempest by Ron Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

sang them silently toward the dark mosaic knight whose eyes, even though only chips of obsidian, glinted and winked with understanding:
    When I contemplate thy cheek,
    Formed in the image of the moon,
    O my love,
    It is in truth the effect of divine grace
    That I am contemplating.
    The reply seemed to come in a thousand voices, as though all of the gods, goddesses, heroes and heroines paused in their juicy recreations, craned necks and squinted eyes and unentangled limbs to better see what so rare a thing this girl was, and spoke to her in unison as though raising a great cheer:
    The soul that hath not experienced true love,
    T’were better never born.
    Its existence is but shame.
    Be drunk with love, for love is all.
    Outside the pleasures of love there is no way to God.
    It was no dour Christian prayer she had just sung and its answer had come from no choir of saints—certainly not from the shriveled breast of Paul, in any case. Indeed, she thought, it sounded suspiciously pagan, perhaps something from that false holy book the heathens called the Koran, which she had always confused in her mind with the luxurious tales of The Arabian Nights . It was certainly the coarsest of blasphemies. But then, she considered, had not the wise King Solomon sung to his love: “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!”? She had been told by her old priest that Solomon’s lush, sweet, passionate song was in reality nothing more nor less than a description of Christ’s love for His Church, but she had found that difficult to believe. What did the priest imagine Christ could possibly have been thinking when He said—according to the priest’s argument—that the Church’s “two breasts are like two young roes that are twins”? No, she had decided, the Song was neither more nor less than what it was: a joyous—and openly honest—hymn to human sensuality and love. How it had ever become part of the Bible, she had no idea—an editorial lapse, she supposed—, but it had once filled her with a bursting warmth and longing she couldn’t understand and could not reconcile with the ascetic religion of her church. It had placed her in a quandary: the words must be Godly, for after all they were in His book, yet the feelings they engendered seemed anything but chaste. There seemed to be no purpose to them—no end, no moral—except that of simple sensuality, and that, she had been carefully taught, was quite wrong. She had done her best to simply forget the verses, but the damage had been done. “I am my beloved,” she thought as the words rushed back to her and her tongue and nostrils filled with the smell and taste of olives and pomegranates, myrrh and figs and lilies of the valley, “and my beloved is mine. I am my beloved and his desire is toward me. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.
    “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city, in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.”
    Her virginity resisted the onslaught of that hot desert scirocco, intoxicating with the blood and musk of tawny animals. “Oh!” she raged, her fists clenching until her nails dug into her palms, a droplet of red welling around each point, “I am a garden inclosed! A spring shut up! A fountain sealed!”
    The houris’ chubby, mosaic ankles were belled and the rhythmic, insistent jingling seemed to echo the pounding of Bradamant’s blood, which made her veins twitch like firehoses, her mutinous body throb to the unfamiliar harmony, resonating like a sympathetic drum. There was the scent of patchouli and sandlewood and jasmine. The air reeked of incense and musk.
    There was soft music on the piccolo.
    The flickering illumination whose inconstancy had animated the lifeless people of oil, tempera, glass and stone came from a flame that burned