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BARKER
    perhaps five artists). The steep benches were filled with people, their bus-tle evoked with quick, contentious strokes. Some people seemed to be standing; some sitting. Two more groups of spectators were approaching the stadium from the outside, though there was no room for them inside.
    But what drew Zeffer’s eye, and made him realize that the Father had been right to wonder aloud whom he might show this masterwork to, was the event these spectators had assembled to witness. It was an arena of sexual sport. Several performances were going on at the same time, all unapologetically obscene. In one section of the arena a naked woman was being held down while a creature twice her size, his body bestial, his erection monstrous, was being roped back by four men who appeared to be controlling his approach to the woman. In another quarter, a man had been stripped of his skin by three naked women. A fourth straddled him as he lay on the ground in his own blood. The other three wore pieces of his skin. One had on his whole face and shoulders, her breasts sticking out from beneath the ragged hood. Another sat on the ground, wearing his arms and pulling on the skin of his legs like waders. The third, the queen of this quartet, was wearing what was presumably the pièce de résistance , the flesh which the unhappy owner had worn from mid-breast-bone to mid-thigh. She was cavorting in this garish costume like a dancer and, by some magic known only to the maker of the mystery, the usurped skin still boasted a full erection.
    “Good God . . .” Zeffer said.
    “I told you,” Sandru said, just a little smugly. “And that’s the least of it, believe me.”
    “The least of it?”
    “The more you look, the more you see.”
    “Anywhere in particular?”
    “Go over to the Wild Wood. Look among the trees.”
    Zeffer moved along the wall, studying the tiles as he went. At first he couldn’t make out anything controversial, but Sandru had some useful advice.
    “Step away a foot or so.”

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    In his fascination with the details of the stadium, Zeffer had come too close to the wall to see the wood for the trees. Now he stepped back and to his astonishment saw that the thicket around the arena was alive with figures, all of which were in some form or other monstrous; and all unequivocally sexual. Erections were thrust between the trees like plum-headed branches, women dangled from overhead with their legs spread (a flock of birds, thirty or more, swooped out of the sex of one; another was menstruating light, which was splashing on the ground below the tree.
    Snakes came out of the scarlet pool, in bright profusion).
    “Is it like this all over?” Zeffer said, his astonishment unfeigned.
    “All over. There are thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight tiles, and there is obscene matter on two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight of them.”
    “You’ve obviously made a study,” Zeffer observed.
    “Not I. An Englishman who worked with Father Nicholas did the counting. For some reason the numbers remained in my head. I think it’s old age. Things you want to remember, you can’t. And things that don’t mean anything stick in your head like a knife.”
    “That’s not a pretty image, with respect.”
    “With respect, there’s nothing pretty about the way I feel,” Sandru replied. “I feel old to my marrow. On a good day I can barely get up in the morning. On a bad day, I just wish I were dead.”
    “Lord.”
    Sandru shrugged. “That’s what living in this place does to you after a while. Everything drains out of you somehow.”
    Zeffer was only half-listening. He was exhilarated by what he saw, and he had no patience with Sandru’s melancholy; his thoughts were with the walls, and the pictures on the walls.
    “Are there records documenting how this was created? It is a masterpiece, in its way.”
    “One of a kind,” Sandru said.
    “Absolutely one