"A hunt?" he asked at last. "What kind of hunt?"
  	"Oh, every kind," Sandru replied. "Pigs, dragons, women-"
  	"Women?"
  	Sandru laughed. "Yes, women," he said, pointing towards a piece of the wall some 
yards deeper into the chamber. "Go look," he said. "You'll find the whole thing is filled 
with obscenities. The men who painted this place must have had some strange dreams, let 
me tell you, if this is what they saw."
  	Zeffer pushed aside a small table, and then pressed himself between the wall and 
a much larger piece of furniture, which looked like a wooden catafalque, too large to 
move. Obliged to slide along the wall, his jacket did the job his handkerchief had done 
moments before. Dust rose up in his face.
  	"Where now?" he asked the Father when he'd got to the other side of the 
catafalque.
  	"A little further," Sandru replied, uncorking the brandy and shamelessly taking a 
swig from the bottle.
  	"I need some more light back here," Zeffer said.
  	Reluctantly, Sandru went to pick up the lamp. It was hot now. He rummaged in one 
of the nearby boxes to find something to protect his palm, found a length of cloth and 
wrapped it around the base of the lamp. Then he tugged on the light-cord, to give himself 
some more play, and made his way through the confusion of stuff in the room, to where 
Zeffer was standing.
  	The closer Sandru came with the light the more Zeffer could make out of the 
painting on the tiles. There was a vast panorama spread to left and right of him; and up 
above his head; and down to the ground, spreading beneath his feet. Though the walls were 
so filthy that in places the design was entirely obliterated, and in other places there 
were large cracks in the tiles, the image had an extraordinary reality all of its own.
  	"Closer," Zeffer said to Sandru, sacrificing the arm of his fur coat to clean a 
great portion of tiled wall in front of him. Each tile was about six inches square, 
perhaps a little smaller, and set close to one another with a minimum of grouting, so as 
to preserve the continuity of the picture. Despite the sickly right off the bulb, its 
luminescence still showed that the color of the image had not been diminished by time. 
The beauty of the renderings was perfectly evident. There were a dozen kinds of green in 
the trees, and more, sweeter hues in the growth between them. Beneath the canopy there 
were burnt umbers and siennas and sepias in the trunks and branches, skillfully 
highlighted to lend the impression that light was falling through the foliage and 
catching the bark. Not all the tiles were rendered with the same expertise, he saw.
  	Some of the tiles were the work of highly sophisticated artists; some the work of 
journeyman; some-especially those that were devoted to areas of pure foliage-the 
handiwork of apprentices, working on their craft by filling in areas that their masters 
neither had the time nor perhaps the interest to address.
  	But none of this spoiled the power of the overall vision. In fact the 
discontinuity of styles created a splendid energy in the piece. Portions of the world 
were in focus, other parts were barely coherent; the abstract and the representational 
sitting side by side on the wall, all part of one enormous story.
  	And what was that story? Plainly, given the kind of quarry Sandru had listed, 
this was more than simply a hunt: it smacked of something far more ambitious. But what? 
He peered at the tiles, his nose a few inches from the wall, trying to make sense of what 
he was seeing.
  	"I looked at the whole room, before we put all the furniture in here," Sandru 
said. "It's a view, from the Fortress Tower."
  	"But not realistic?"
  	"It depends what you mean by realistic," Sandru said. "If you look over the other 
side-" he pointed across the room "-you can see the delta of the Danube." Zeffer could 
just make out the body of water, glittering in the gloom: and closer by a mass of swampy 
land, with dozens of inlets winding through it, on their way to the sea. "And there!" 
Sandru went on, "to the left-" again, Zeffer followed Sandru's finger "-at the corner of 
the room, that rock-"
  	"I see it."
  	The rock was tall, rising out of the ocean of trees like a tower, shrubs 
springing from its flank.
  	"That's called the May Rock," Sandru said. "The villagers dance there, on the 
first six nights of May. Couples would stay there overnight, and try to make children. 
It's said the women always became pregnant if they stayed with their men on May Rock."
  	"So it exists? In the world, I mean. Out there."
  	"Yes, it's right outside the Fortress."
  	"And so all those other details? The delta-"
  	"Is nine miles away, in that direction." Sandru pointed at the wall upon which 
the Danube's delta was painted.
  	Zeffer smiled as he grasped what the artists had achieved here. Down in the 
depths of the Fortress, at its lowest point, they had recreated in tile and paint what 
could be seen from its pinnacle.
  	And with that realization came sense of the inscription he'd read on the 
threshold.
  	Though we are in the bowels of Hell, we shall have the eyes of Angels. This room 
was the bowels of Hell. But the tile-makers and their artist masters, wherever they'd 
been, had created an experience that gave the occupants of this dungeon the eyes of 
angels. A paradoxical ambition, when all you had to do was climb the stairs and see all 
this from the top of the tower. But artists were often driven by such ambition; a need 
perhaps, to prove that it could even be done.
  	"Somebody worked very hard to create all this," Zeffer said. "Oh indeed. It's an 
impressive achievement."
  	"But you hide it away," Zeffer said, not comprehending the way the room had been 
treated. "You fill the place with old furniture and let it get filthy."
  	"Who could we show it to?" the Father replied. "It's too disgusting..."
  	"I see nothing-" he was about to say disgusting, when his eye alighted on a part 
of tile-work that he'd cleaned with his arm but had not closely studied. In a large grove 
a round stadium had been set up, with seating made of wood. The perspective was off (and 
the solution to the perspective changed subtly from tile to tile, as various hands had 
contributed their piece of the puzzle. There were perhaps twenty tiles that had some 
portion of the stadium represented upon them; the work of perhaps five artists). The 
steep benches were filled with people, their bustle 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 who he might show this master-work 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