Wessex Tales: "The Face in the Floor" (Story 10)

  Chapter 4

  What guided his feet, then his hands, in the following hours, he would never know. He steered for a point between the night-lights, fumbled his way up the steps, collected both lamps off their shelves and took them to the chamber of the tessellated floor. The work looked impressive even in that faint light: the designs, the borders, the scrolling, the unity of the thing. But it mocked its maker. Every element led the eye to the hollow roundel where the Christ face should have been long since—the Coming that so far had failed to come.

  The master looked around, found four lamps on wall shelves and managed to light three. Setting the little lights in a tight circle around the Christ-space, Beletus dragged heavy flat boxes of tiles to him—his, and his workers’ besides—and started slipping tesserae around. Never had he worked so fast, nor been so absorbed, as he was now. Sub-assemblies grew, were rejected and scattered as others flew into their place. An eye here, the line of a chin. A curve of dark tiles, rejected as being too thick for a mouth, became instead a worried crease below the lower lip. A sweep of hair with gaps too broad changed into the subtle shoulder-folding of a pallium. But the colour was wrong. Work the same lines again, in darker tiles! An eye stared up; another came together at top speed with the click of tesserae and the tapping of the master’s hammer on his tile-anvil. The second eye squinted, the size was wrong. Beletus dashed it aside: the staring thing had spirit-life no more. He formed a line, a straight, too perfect line. Why, in a world of curves and facial arcs, a line? It bent a little at one end, and the curve… Of course! Sliding the assembly on his trowel he joined it to another group of tiles. Hammering some, snapping others on his anvil with a blacksmith’s strength of hand, the master felt the force of inspiration surging back. A left eye acquired a thick, arched brow and the line of a long, straight nose. It was coming. The face was coming. One hour or five, he must not stop. Rejected patterns suggested others. He tried them. Merged them. Rejected them again. His hands flew around like a shill playing shell games on fools.

  A lamp flickered and died. No matter. Dawn was breaking through the long, high window in the eastern wall.

  Full daybreak. Four lamps burned. Useless pinpricks now. The new day’s sun threw its favor full upon Bellerophon at the west end of the room.

  Two pairs of feet presented themselves for duty. Otiacus opened his mouth to give the master Good Morning, but Coxucratis silenced the lad before he could speak.

  “Go!” said the master. “Put up the curtain. Let nobody in. Just guard the door!”

  The pair retreated to stations in the corridor.

  A lamp burned out. Three lights remained to stab their feeble competition at the sun. Beneath the master’s hands an arc took shape. It failed as an eyebrow. He turned it this way and that, prepared to scramble it. His hand dashed down to instant execution, and stopped short. The master slid the element onto his trowel, turned it just so, and preserved it forever as a crease in the neck.

  Commotion at the door. The little girl. His men denied her entry, whispered anxious explanations to the nanny.

  “Let her in!” the master roared.

  Julia approached, half afraid of the new persona in a man she thought she knew, the gentle giant of the tiny tiles.

  “Sit down, be still, say nothing and you stay,” Beletus told her without looking up. “Open your mouth and out you go. That clear?”

  “Yes sir,” said she who would one day be the mistress of this house.

  It was the longest sentence the master had spoken since the day before. It would be the longest for many an hour to come.

  The girl sat opposite the master, watching as the Christ-face came together, upside-down from where she sat. The sun skipped two hours. Tesserae clashed and threw apart, like features formed, dissolving, and reforming in a cloud. Here was a chin, dark with worry and strength in roughly equal parts. A right eye, still elusive. Time after time the master started, only to dash it apart.

  From time to time the girl could hear the men behind the dust curtain hushing servants, silencing her nanny, at one point tactfully banning Helena herself.

  Slowly, very slowly so as not to draw attention, the girl assembled tiles from among those she could reach and brought them together in a childish likeness of the missing eye. She had been working silently for some minutes when she realized that the master was gazing across the Christ-hole at the tesserae beneath her hand. She froze, staring back, terrified that he would throw her out. Instead he leaned across, took her assembly on his trowel and stole it away. Silent minutes passed while he shifted her tiles around. “That does it!” the master said softly, and slid a right eye into place beside the left.

  The girl forgot herself. “We did it, sir, we did it.”

  “Yes, dear, we did it. Hush.”

  A lamp expired.

  Beletus formed a cheek and joined it to the chin, transforming lines in both to give them life.

  The girl stayed as long as she could, squirming with discomfort before slipping away to relieve herself. Returning, she faced an inquisition in the corridor that she escaped by sliding through the curtain to sit above the Christ’s shape-taking brow, as quiet as before. By now, half the familias was keeping one eye on the ragged cloth barring the door.

  Morning light came and went. Noon robbed the chamber of the sun. Mid-afternoon restored it, diffused by the curtain at the door. Beletus spent these hours fleshing the face, shifting and toning features relative to each other, building shades of luminance into cheekbones and shadows beneath the chin. Then curls of hair kissed the nape of the neck; folds took shape in a pallium; more toning followed.

  Afternoon passed into late evening before the master worked and reworked the finishing details into the Christ-god’s cheeks. Not that the passage of time meant much on this long summer day. The light was redder. That was all.

  Beletus had not eaten, not slept, not moved from the spot for more than three quarters of a day and a night. At last, fitting a final tile into the face he told the girl—who had been taking progress reports to the others as if expectant kin awaited a birth—“It’s done!” Beletus moved away from the Christ and lay down.

  The girl had been sitting across from Beletus since morning, on and off, watching the Christus take shape, upside-down. “He’s lovely, Master,” she whispered. “Just like a god.” Her fingers rubbed the rough, ungrouted tiles of the new-laid image that seemed always to have been. “Shall I ask them to come in?”

  Beletus didn’t answer. He lay on the Tree of Life, asleep.

  The girl came around the roundel and solemnly studied Christ the right way up. Then, as if stirring a sleeping bear, she shook Beletus awake. “Master, can I show the Christus-god to Mummy and Daddy now?”

  He lay staring at a ceiling made red with evening light. “Of course you can.”

  The child couldn’t contain herself any longer. She ran shouting happily into the corridor to fetch her parents in.

  Beletus rolled onto his hands and knees, crawled over to the Christ and studied it. Only now did it hit him: the face in the floor was that of the world-weary stranger encountered the night before. The likeness was perfect. No more, no less. Great Hercules, the man must be one of the villa community, a family retainer! Beletus had enshrined a deity with the visage of the patron’s book-keeper or major domo. He, the master mosaicist, would be the laughing stock of Dorchester. He had debts to pay against supplies for this commission. He would never work again!

  Grabbing a trowel, Beletus prepared to rip the central features from the face just as his client appeared at the end of the room.

  Not even her daughter’s tug on her arm could ruffle Helena’s regal calm. “You’ve kept us on edge all day, Master. There isn’t a soul in the familias who isn’t clamoring behind that cloth to see the Christ.”

  The master mosaicist bowed, his face a mask, his heart thumping the anxiety of the condemned at the approach of his executioner.

  Helena hitched up her skir
ts to avoid construction dust and circled the central roundel, standing beside Beletus to examine the bust. Seconds stretched into what seemed like hours. Then the mistress was down on her knees before Christ, her silk in the dust, touching the tiles in the tired face. “He is magnificent, Beletus,” she said, never taking her eyes off the image. “No one could have given us a better portrait of a god.”

  The master acknowledged his client’s compliment with a flat “Ma’am,” which served to cover his confusion. Did she not recognize the face of a man who was one of her own?

  “Go let the others in,” the mistress told her daughter. Julia ran to the curtain. The cascade of hair down her back made her look like a moving corn stook.

  Soon a crowd filled the room, elbowing for position, staring down, talking in low, respectful voices, some kneeling to touch the tiles. In their eagerness, the master was shouldered aside. Someone must soon recognize the source of that face. He waited for the inevitable, “He looks like so-and-so!” But the moment never came.

  “My husband has gone to bed,” Helena was telling him. “He is mending, thank the gods, but he is still far from well. Justin asked me to convey his thanks, Beletus. He’ll pay his respects to your marvelous floor in the morning.”

  “You’re very kind, Ma’am.”

  Now the master became the centre of attention, as field workers, stockmen, cooks and clerks offered their congratulations and slapped him on the back. He accepted their acclaim with grace, still expecting the inevitable.

  “Are you all right, Beletus?” Helena was taking note of the odd, resigned expression on the master’s face.

  “Just tired.”

  “Of course. You must be. Come!” she commanded her people. “Let this poor man get some rest.” Shepherding the crowd before her, Helena made for the door.

  Alone with his men, Beletus examined the damage done by the press of feet to ungrouted tiles. It amounted to a day’s work on the wave design in the innermost border, nothing more. The face was undamaged. The crowd had meant well.

  Promising to follow, the master sent his men away. He knelt down to study the face in the floor. He still had pomegranates to place on either side of the head. They could wait until morning.

  Without warning, a voice: “I told you, Beletus, you’re a Genius tesserae!” The housemaid, Afrixa, had slipped in again, quietly. She was standing across from him, where Julia had been, staring down at the face in the floor.

  “Do you know a man who looks like that?” he asked.

  “Should I?”

  “Someone around the villa. Someone who looks like that.”

  She noticed the worry in his eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  “I saw him last night.”

  “You’ve been working too hard. Come! Time to relax.” Afrixa, extending a hand to take his arm, was elated when he took her hand instead. Hand in hand they headed through the door.

  “I was sure …” he began.

  Something made him uneasy. Afrixa could tell. She would have to make light of it, to reassure him somehow. “Beletus, love,” she told the master jokingly, “you must have seen a ghost.”

  By the light of the moon she watched his puzzled face search the empty courtyard and then turn to look back through the darkened door. Deep in the chamber the last little lamp burned out. The master’s fingers stiffened in Afrixa’s grip.

  ‘The Face in the Floor’ has a sequel, ‘Julia’ (Story 11).