by E R Eddison
The Duke was silent. Then, 'Why have they taken him away?' he said. 'Fetch him back! Must I be betrayed by you too, to do my bidding when I'm beside myself?'
'No,' replied he, and gave him a look. 'I will keep my old bargain with your grace as for that.'
Barganax put off his helm and set it beside him on the table with his iron gloves. The leavings of storm yet darkened and flickered about his eyes and about the lines of his mouth under the curled mustachios; but no longer so as to deform that face and brow which, clear seen now in the upward beaming of the lamp, seemed to contain the united sweet of heaven's graces. He said under
his breath: In a dream I spake with Our Lady of Cyprus.'
When Amaury was come in again with Medor, 'You are a brave man, Amaury,' said the Duke; 'and that was to be looked for, since you serve a brave man; and he is a man to pick out men of strength and manliness to follow him, and men of his own bent of mind. And now lay open your former speeches, that I may understand your meaning.'
Amaury laid it all before him point by point.
'And now,' said the Duke then, 'I have bethought me of this matter betwixt me and your lord, what way it shall become. Here is a ring,' he said, and took it from his finger: 'the stone of it is called quandias: it is found in the vulture's head, and is man's friend, for it driveth from him all things that be hurtful. Give it him from me. Say to him, I will not be outdone by him in nobility: I'll meet with him, but not here. I'll meet him half way, at Ilkis in Rubalnardale. To-day 'tis Monday; let it be Wednesday at noon. Tis best we go weaponed, seeing the countryside may well be up in a tumult after these doings. But let there be twenty of either side, and no more. And let truce hold, howsoe'er things fadge, till Thursday midnight.'
Amaury kissed Barganax's hand and took the ring. ‘I am so far in my lord's counsels,' he said, 'that I can here confidently accept it all on his behalf, and say that your grace's noble dealing in this business hath opened an easy way unto honour and peace betwixt you.'
'Then fare you well, sir,' said the Duke. 'On Wednesday at noonday we shall confer in Ilkis. Soldiers, conduct him: a dozen torches down the Curtain.
'And now,' said he to Medor, when Amaury was gone: 'nor you nor no man speak to me. Lights and to bed.'
It was now about mid-day of Wednesday, that fourteenth day of June. In Acrozayana, in a jewelled shade of strawberry-trees, where the sun speckled the gravel path with moidores strewn upon a carpet of cool purple, the Lady Fiorinda rested as music rests when the lute is laid by. Her couch was cushions of wine-dark satin on a bench of porphyry. Her gown, very soft and fine, long-sleeved, close fitting, yellow of the pale cowslip petal and with narrow ruffs at throat and wrist, settled at every gently taken breath to some fresh perfection of her as she rested there, sweetly gathered up, upon her right side, her feet along the bench. A hood of black netted silk, rebated at the border with chrysoprases sewn upon cloth of gold, framed her face as with an aureole within which, betwixt white brow and jewelled tissue, her hair was like the mystery of night set betwixt bright sun and moon.
Below her to her left, on the step of the carved porphyry seat, sat Rosalura, her needlework fallen on the ground at her side, her hands clasped in her lap. Anthea, clothed in white, stood on the confines of the shade and the sunlight of the lawn without: the pupils of her eyes were slits against that brightness: there was in her bearing an alertness of expectancy: her hair, loosely gathered and knotted up in a disordered grace, was as fire burning. Bellafront, at the outer end of a low bench on the left, close to Anthea, caught the rays too on her coiled plaits of chestnut red. Pantasilea and Myrrha, Campaspe and Violante, reclined these upon this bench those upon that, of the two low benches to Fiorinda's left and right. All "were as if listening to something afar off, or, may be, to the humming of the bees only that droned on the summer air, now louder now more dim, but never silent; listening not as hearing but rather hoping to hear some expected thing.
Doctor Vandermast, in russet-coloured gaberdine, walked in his meditation. The little arrows of sunlight, piercing the leaves, rained upon him ceaselessly in his measured walking.
Fiorinda spoke: That was a strange freedom in so grave a scholar as you, sir, to say that I was, of myself, —but indeed now I have forgot what 'twas you said.'
He came to a stop at her side, looking past Anthea to the smooth sunny spaces of lawn and flower-bed beyond and, over the parapet, to mountains dim in the summer haze. 'It is a principle infringible of divine philosophy,' he said, 'to seek an understanding of all things sub specie quadam ceternitatis: holding them up, as to a lamp, to eternity, wherefrom they take illumination. Myself too did spend whole thirty-seven years together in studying of the Physicals and Ultramundanes, proceeding therein by concatenation of axiom with proposition and so through demonstratio, scholium, corollarium, to the union of all in a perpetual and uniform law: that vertical point above the pyramids of knowledge where the intellects may in momentary contemplation seize the truth of things. Yet was it, when all came to all, but an empty truth: prater verbum nihil est, a vain breath. For it supposed further, if it must stand, a reason, understanding, and platform. But whensoever, leaving these toys, I have considered of your ladyship, then is all clear daylight; and whensoever I have been put to a stound, unable to understand of this or that in nature or in time, wherefore it should be thus and not thus, I need but view it under the light of your ladyship, and in an instant I see its very worth and its necessity.'
'As this late ruinous field of Lorkan?' said she, 'that hath cut the ground, from under his feet and sent him cap in hand to make peace with his great enemy?'
He replied: 'I behold it in your ladyship as in a glass. I embrace and accept it.'
'Mew!' said she, 'I would plague him. That is all.'
'I do discern you through a thicker cloud than that,' said Vandermast, meeting her eye.
'Do you so?' said she. ' 'Las! were I not somewhat high-hearted I should be scared out of my senses, as if with such a cockatrice stare the old man would unclothe me where I sit. Horror of Apollonius upon Lamia! are we safe indeed?'
'Apollonius', said Vandermast, 'was but a very false philosopher, and had but a very superficial and poor understanding. In sum, (and this was in my mind when by a trope or figure, madam, I permitted myself to liken you to eternity), I conclude that your ladyship is, of yourself, omnium rerum causa immanens: the sufficient explanation of the world.'
Fiorinda did not smile. 'But what needed it of explanations?' she said. 'Here it is. I like it.'
'Without you,' said that old man, 'it should fly in pieces and be gone. Like a drop of glass that I have seen, will crash instantly into dust if a man but nip its tail off.'
'And, sure, you will not say there ever lived a man so wicked', said she, 'as dream it could be otherwise? A world without me? or that hated me?'
'My Lady Fiorinda,' said he in a low voice: 'nemo potest Deum odio habere: no man is able to hate God. I speak not of time and place and outward habit. In Rialmar, no less constantly than in Acrozayana, you do have your siege and presence. There may be more of you, three, nine, nine thousand thousand: I know not: ex necessitate divince naturae infinita infinitis modis sequi debent: infinite shapes and ostentations. I know, in this world, but two. And you, albeit you change, yet change not.'
He fell silent. 'Nay, I would have you go on,' she said, in accents that seemed to draw a veil of mockery shot with starry sparkles across her thought, even as the long black lashes veiled her eyes. ' 'Tis very music to me, to smooth my ear: to listen to subtleties, fantastic queries, and speculations, discoursed so by so learn'd a doctor: like as the deceiving of the senses is one of the pleasures of the senses.'
Vandermast, immerst yet in his vision, and as if he had not heard her, said, 'It is an open-founded doctrine, which can scarce escape the notice even of the rudest; save that they note it and pass by, not knowing fully that which they noted. As they that go to and fro in the street behold a tower, and yet there be many steps and degrees to b
e ascended painfully, per scientiam, ere a man shall stand upon the top thereof and know the thing. And yet,' he said, 'this is to small purpose talking so, with laborious stumbling words, to your ladyship, as a child conning his lesson: to you that do know these things better than I and without all grammatication.'
'You may have a nose for metaphysicals,' said that lady; 'but here you cry out upon no trail. I know nothing. Only, I am.'
'Your ladyship doth play with me,' said Vandermast. 'I play with all things,' she said. It was as if that which dwelt in the corner of her mouth shot its arrow and then buried its face again for very sweetness of the place it dwelt in. Her right hand made a rest for her cheek; her. left arm was thrown back and fallen behind her, behind the proud arch of her hip, as in a carelessness and divine largesse of the treasure of her body, ethereal as the scented thought of a white rose, beautiful as golden flowers, the fairness of it and the Grecian pride. 'With all things,' she said.
'And rightly so,' said that ancient doctor, slowly, as if communing with his inward thought: 'seeing that it is for you that all things, omnia qua existunt, are kept and preserved by the sole power of God alone, a sola vi Dei conservantur.'
The bees' drowsy note conducted on the silence. Fio-rinda's voice came like honey dropping from the hive on some Elysian Hymettus, saying, as in a dream, 'It may be you said true. It may be I do know. The Poetess: She was charier of words than you, most reverend doctor, and yet said it all, I think:
thou, and My servant Love.'
The Countess Rosalura, remembering Ambremerine, leaned suddenly forward to lay her head against the sandals of gold which, with broidered straps of fair Lydian work, covered Fiorinda's feet.
Fiorinda, with a little movement of her head, beckoned the learned doctor to bend nearer. 'Will you credit that old tale,' she said in his ear, 'of their speaking with King Hakon Athelstane's-fosterling, to summon him home, when he sat there a-dying, on the bloody battle-field of Fitiar in Stord? When
Condul and Skogul the Goths'-God sent
To choose of the kings,
Which of Yngvi's line must with Odin fare,
In Valhall to won.
And was not the king glad then, when he heard the words of the noble Valkyries, where they sat there a-horseback, and bare themselves so fairly, and sat helmed and with shield and spear?'
'It is not past credit,' answered Vandermast. 'Deus ex solis suce naturce legibus, et a nemine coactus agit: God fareth according to the laws of His own nature, and under constraint of no man.'
She laughed and stood up. Surely the light of her beauty was upon that old man's face, to transfigure it, as sunlight the cold frosty season of December. Every line and thought-driven furrow, the wrinkled hollows of his eye-sockets, their bristling eaves, the lean beaked nose of him, and white beard, were as lighted with her beauty from within-ward; and the peace of her beauty lay upon the fragile, and vein-streaked smoothness of his brow, and all his countenance was made gracious with the holy spirit and power of that lady's beauty, which stirred now and glittered in the depths of his swift and piercing eyes.
'I will look on this meeting,' said she. 'A man shall not need be hurt to the death, as then at Fitiar, ere he may pluck the rose acceptable to the Gods and wear it: my roses of Pieria, reached tiptoe from the mere pinnacle of his hopes' defeat. Draw back the veil.'
There went with that word a shadow across the sunpath, and a coolness without wind was on the air. And now it was suddenly as if trees and flowers and daisied lawns, nay the very walls and solid ground here in Acrozayana, and the stablished mountains seen beyond the parapet, far off across the lake, were thinned to a tenuous immateriality, not wavering but steady in edge and texture, as if made all of clear livid-coloured glass of the thinness of thin parchment. Through this, as through a painted window, appeared now the naked anatomy of earth, blue and cold: cliffs which swept down to fearful silences, with the tide washing against the bases of the cliffs, and a welter of drowned treasure and sea-wrack and vast worms tearing at one another in the shallows of the sea. The air between the cliffs, ruffled in mists and rawky vapours, was troubled with iron wings of chimaeras that mounted ever upwards, as bubbles mount in wine, and vanished ever in the strip of sky high up between the lips of the precipices: night sky, for all that it was day here in the natural world; and in the night a blazing star with long hairs appeared. Vandermast and those ladies were becoming even as the things about them livid and translucent, like shadows in water or fetches of the dead. She alone, in that falling away of appearance from reality, retained yet the lovely hues of life and carnal substance.
So that to the Duke, facing Lessingham across the council table in Ilkis; it was in that moment as if he looked through layer upon layer of dream, as through veil behind veil: the thinnest veil, natural present: the next, as in a dumb-show strangely presented by art magic, the dappled path beneath the strawberry-trees in his own garden in Zayana and the company there gathered: and so, the firm frame of things and a jut of rock between the abysses, and, standing upon it, that woman, clothed upon with the fires of thunder and of night. From whose eyes as from starred heavens he took knowledge of the action he now went on; and, as through them, saw it; and was content
xi
Gabriel Flores
terms of the concordat the half-forgotten harmonies tidings brought to the vicar a great prince and his poor secretary a fury of dogs entry of lessingham into laimak the rider thrown.
Lessingham said, 'I have now laid the whole matter before your grace. I hide it not, it goes better with my purpose to gather the apples this battle's lucky cast hath brought down for me and enjoy them with your grace's friendship, sooner than climb higher for more and may be break my neck. Nor can any say, who hath any forehead left, that you did draw sword and get nought by it; when you are, upon sheathing of it, seized again of your whole appanage as sovereign indefeasible, and regent besides of all Meszria, save Outer Meszria only.'
'Regent,' said Barganax: 'and in that quality his man, vassal, and subject. Leaveth a tang upon the tongue.'
'What man is not spoken of in this sense?' said Lessingham. 'All are subject to the Queen of Fingiswold.'
'And she', said Barganax, 'to this tutor. But losers must not be choosers; and I never reared a pig but that I was ready to eat his bacon.'
'My lord Duke,' said Lessingham, 'we have looked each other in the eye ere this. That I treat o' the Vicar's behalf, regard it not: 'tis me, not him, you deal withal. That I o'erthrew Roder in the ings of Lorkan, I have forgot it and do you, my lord, forget it. From the sweep of eagles' wings it becometh us overview the matter, and what's just and allowable of our greatness, choose that, suffering nought else in the world 'twixt that and our clear judgement.'
The Duke was sat forward in his chair, his chin thrust forward a little, right elbow on the table, forearm upright, hand propping his chin; his left arm akimbo, hand upon hip with fingers spread: all with a cattish reposeful elegance. His eyes, that seemed now hawk's eyes, now a deer's, all pupil, liquid and unfathomable, now again proud, serene and relentless, like a lion's, gazed not upon Lessingham but over Lessingham's shoulder. Lessingham, sitting back, watched them in their mutations, until, with their turning at last to engage his own, it was as if from those eyes his own secret spirit faced and regarded him from without.
The Duke spoke. 'Item, I subscribe my brother's testament (upon whom be peace); and sith the Admiral resigned it in my favour, take up the regency of South Meszria, doing homage therefor to my royal sister through person, during her minority, of the Lord Protector. Item, he, both for himself and for behalf of the Queen, receives me as lord of Zayana and of that whole duchy and dominion as in that testament set forth, without all suzerainty. To these I add two things further, my Lord Lessingham: first, that the Admiral is confirmed regent of Outer Meszria, 'cause 'tis in the testament so, and I'll be secured 'gainst strange fingers meddling in that pie upon my border; and secondly, the Vicar must give full amnesty to all to
ok up weapons against him for sake of me, and especially I mean to Earl Roder and to the Chancellor.'
'Let them go,' said Lessingham. 'They have stood your grace in little stead. 'Tis well if your dealing should measure their deserving.'
'It shall rather hold measure with my own mind,' replied he. 'I'll not forsake them.'
Then goeth the matter out of all measure, if our agreement fall to the ground for sake of men that, with bunglings and delays,—'
'My Lord Lessingham,' said the Duke, 'you may spare your argument. Be it the wasting and last downthrow of all my fortune, I'll not agree without this.'
Then said Gabriel Flores in Lessingham's ear, from a stool at his left elbow, a little behind him, 'My lord, 'twere not fit to concede this. His highness will never stand for't.'
'Nature, my lord Duke, stood ever on this point,' said Lessingham without heeding him: ' "Kae me, I'll kae thee." The cushion of my cousin's throne is stuffed with thorns, and the stiffest are of your grace's stuffing in: Ercles and Aramond. He will give peace to Beroald, Roder, and Jeronimy, and all them of their following,' here Gabriel put a hand upon his sleeve, but withdrew it under swift terror of Lessingham's eye-flash, 'and confirm besides Jeronimy, upon homage done therefor unto his highness, in Outer Meszria, upon condition you do call off those princes from practice 'gainst him in the north there; for the world knoweth 'tis your hand works 'em, and at your bidding they can be made to do or to forbear.'
'Put it in,' said the Duke then: "tis a bargain. But you must not set me down for more than I can perform. That I will be neither aiding nor comforting and so forth: good; and that I will use all suasions: good. But if. they lay deaf ear to my counselling—'
Lessingham threw out his hands. 'Shall I expect your grace then with armed hand to enter their dominions? I thought of no such thing. Countenance is enough: 'tis matter of course with them, as eat and drink, meditating how they may with favour benefit you, or be wary how to offend you. Let's set down largely that you will not lend your shadow for these contrivings. Where the stream is clear, not too much scriveners' preciseness: vomit up ink to trouble the waters.'