Chapter Two: Battlefields & Bedrooms
While the world was in agony over the omens of change, and the portents brought about in the sky, storm-clouds from the storms in the hearts of the people, the powdered men and women were having a masquerade ball beneath the vaulted, glimmering ceiling of the Marie's favorite ballroom.
Aziraphale did not thrive on parties or on the crush of bodies, or on the laughing but demure women mingling with the distilled men in dark velvet waistcoats. It was both glitter and gold, certainly, but it was also the type of beauty he did not prefer to be a part of. Too cultured and too contrived.
With powdered breasts and constrictive corsets, the women swished across the dance floor, masks held up to their porcelain faces, long lashes blinking behind the bejeweled eye holes.
With cultivated swaggers the men moved back and forth between groups of those rustling silk-and-velvet-gowned noblewomen, watching the arc of their necks and the delicacy of their wrists in secret from behind their own costumes.
His own mask, orange and black, mimicked an out of proportion monarch butterfly, but was nowhere near as fragile or as beautiful, in all its gaudiness.
There was still something about this world that he enjoyed, not the pomp and not the pretence, but rather the glamour. It was attractive. It was most attractive when the men and women knew that it was, and they wore their attractiveness like costumes at a masquerade ball.
High above them all, the great diamond chandelier caught the light in a thousand refractions, like a miniature model of the sun, angled edges speaking of riches, of power, of the light-headed feelings good wine gave you, of the wonderful aching in your stomach as you wondered whether or not you were a part of these beautiful people and their asexual dancing.
A woman dropped a fan at his foot.
He picked it up and returned it to her. From behind its helpless fluttering she smiled up at him through her lashes, which blinked suggestively up at him. A diamond sequin glinted at the corner of her left eye.
"Er," Aziraphale said, "would you excuse me."
"You are quite the dangerous man," said a familiar snake mask that had half-followed him all night, as he pulled away from the young woman and her trembling lashes, her quivering, powdered bosom. "The gentlemen should all make sure they keep their daughters away from you." The blue eyes of a butterfly turned to catch the gold reptilian slits of a verdant, silkily embroidered snake.
"I didn't know you were invited to this party, Crowley."
"I never am," Crowley said, sipping a glass of wine with the grace of a nobleman and the carelessness of a peasant. "It isn't fair, I don't think, that you're always invited to these soirees, and I'm always the one who actually wants to go to them."
"They're your sort of crowd, my dear," Aziraphale said, walking along the edge of the ballroom, where wallflowers blossomed miserably and elderly women gossiped of dresses and jewels and bedrooms while their elderly male counterparts spoke to one another of battlefields and stately rumors and the vintage of that night's wine. Crowley followed him, winding through the crowd with the ease of one well accustomed to such crafty mobility. He, like every snake in the grass, was at home with his body, and that agility was enviable, splendid, catching to the sort of eye which wished to follow all that it did not yet possess.
"I'm offended that you'd make such general assumptions, angel," Crowley said, rustling by a particularly attractive young thing and giving her such a smoldering look it was a miracle indeed she didn't faint on the spot.
"I mean," Aziraphale clarified, "that you fraternize much better than I myself do."
"No," Crowley said firmly, "you meant that I like to have my cake, and eat it, too, as do a few unnamed members of royalty here at this tremendous gathering tonight."
"Perhaps."
Marie was splendid on this night. Her silk was so soft, so incomparable, her velvet crushed and of a midnight blue, the lace on the edges of her sleeves more than most country house cost, and it was the deep wine red of blood. At her ears were opals, black opals, sparkling all the colors of the women's dresses, in a setting of gold. Funny they were called black, when they were a mixture of all colors, dancing vividly as they caught the light.
Her hair was done up in a tower of white, soft curls framing her laughing, carefree face. Diamonds and flecks of gold adorned each curl, pinned into the wig to follow a perfectly precise design.
Her eyes were dark with what might have been kohl, the only suggestion that she could have been portraying an exotic Egyptian princess, Cleopatra perhaps, and had not come to her own masquerade ball dressed merely as herself.
She held in one hand a glass of wine that she drank from continuously and, as if she had Dionysus under her power, or a few cherubs at the very least, it never lost an inch of the glimmering drink inside it. In her other hand she held a white glove, and it looked soft, like a downtrodden dove still pure and chaste against the splendor of her baroque display.
"Isn't she lovely?"
"Hm?" Aziraphale turned back to Crowley. They had stopped moving, now, watching the queen through the blush of dancers, across the dance floor.
"The queen. The perfect example of a Bosch."
Aziraphale could not disagree.
From beneath the hem of her embroidered skirt, one could harbor the impression they saw the hands of all spoilers-of-the-land, the teeth of all drunkards and the tongues of all gluttons licking out at her finely stockinged ankles.
"What do you say, angel?"
"Mm?" Again, Aziraphale had lost concentration. He got this way always before something big happened, as if he were listening to nothing but the twang of foreboding that hovered just above his head in the air.
"I said, shall we dancssse?" That sibilant whisper, inviting, daring him, or turning him, to temptation's enticing path. It was a time for a king to fall, a time for thrones to be overturned, and in such times Up became Down and Down became Up, as if the very fiber of all that was Common Sense was suddenly frayed. "Really, angel, if you don't dance at least once, there's no point at all for you to make your appearance at these sort of evenings." Crowley licked his lips and tasted wine upon them. The Gavotte had ended and the partners were bowing to each other, women little curtsies and men stiff half-bows.
"Delighted," Aziraphale murmured, offering out his hand.
It was the Saraband, next, a slower dance, music lilting with their bodies and humming in their veins. If they had any at all.
"Truly," Crowley said from behind his mask, lips brushing over the side of Aziraphale's cheek, "they are fools. They think because they play this loud music that knock will not come to their door. They think if they cannot hear it, it has not come."
"It will make things more pleasant, at least," Aziraphale murmured, feeling drowsy deep down to his feet. The music was like a lullaby, Crowley's body like a cradle.
"Blood will run like wine on this floor soon enough," Crowley sighed, "and no music will be loud enough to block out the cries that will fill this hall. Whether they are of triumph, or of pain, or perhaps of something else entirely."
"Why are you here?" Aziraphale asked, after paying proper respect to the prediction they both knew would prove true soon enough. Perhaps in a week, perhaps in a month, perhaps even in a year, but it was coming.
The People had no bread.
The Nobles complained of too much cake.
God's will be done, Aziraphale thought.
"There is sin here," Crowley replied, and Aziraphale did not know whether he carried sin with him like a rat carried plague, or whether he drank it up like children did spilt rivers of wine in the city streets.
Outside the tall, curtained windows with their spotless glass panes, the dark night looked over a city that had no dance left in it, no music left for dance, no heart left for music.