Cyberia - The City of Ladies

Orlando Non Furioso was pleased to see his old friend, the distinguished Viscount Armstrong Dumaurier call in to the studio, on his way to the docks at Southampton.  “Got another assignment, my friend?” he asked the man, who was dressed in a rich dark cloak, new boots, ruffled neck shirt and fine silk cravat.  His own hands were covered in earthy clay, working as he was at digging underground and making pots at his ancient wheel.  “Certainly, tutoring a young woman on a Grand Tour to Rome and thereabouts,” he answered, the jewels on his ringed fingers glinting in the shadows of the pale afternoon sun.

“Take these with you, as a guide,” said Orlando, giving the Viscount two fragments he had found that morning under the earth.  A piece of marble and a sliver of oriental china.  The Viscount looked intrigued as he turned them over in his fine hands, even a little puzzled.

“You will know what they mean.  Think of them as clues, you know, like a treasure map in a way, to an ancient history,” said Orlando, and then busying himself at the wheel again, splashing water over the drying clay.

The Viscount tipped his fine hat at him and smiled as he left for the docks.

…The story continues at “Imogen’s Grand Tour” as part of the Soul Food Cafe Grand Tour Project…

(copyright Imogen Crest 2006.)

There are many marvelous stories of potters in ancient China. In one of them a noble is riding through town and he passes a potter at work. He admires the pots the man is making: their grace and a kind of rude strength in them. He dismounts from his horse and speak with the potter. “How are you able to form these vessels so that they possess such convincing beauty?” “Oh,” answers the potter, “you are looking at the mere outward shape. What I am forming lies within. I am interested only in what remains after the pot has been broken.”

– M. C. Richards quoted in A Potter’s Companion

It was after the visit to Baba Yaga that Belenus, the intellect-ruled donkey, changed forever.  And this was not because there was anything wrong with him, but because he wanted it that way.  Metamorphosis brought him to a Villa on the outskirts of the City of Ladies, in Cyberia, where he paints the bright pots he makes from rich clay, in his pottery studio in the ancient ways.  Had he been human, his name would have been like that of the famous knight of the ancient tales, so angry had he grown about the world, and only relying on the intellect.  Yet, now he was human, by transformation.  Daily he uncovers ancient treasures from the earth, and uses his hands to create, the thing he envied his very good friend Imogen Crest for.  His Villa is known to change colours with the weather, and sometimes with the mood he is in.  And of course, Imogen has lost none of her affection for him, residing as she does in her Hermitage Villa in the City of Ladies, closeby, and following her dreams of the intellect and the heart.