Mistress of mistresses

by E R Eddison

  And now while they walked, Lessingham, debating with himself of all these things, was ware that the Vicar talked now of women, and how unfit it was they should succeed to the government of states, where need was rather of princes that should be both venerable and terrible: and so forth of women in generality: Tn my conceit he understood it aright that said, "It is all but hogsflesh, varied by sauce." And I think you too are of that opinion, cousin?'

  'Yes,' said Lessingham out of the starlight, as a man might answer a child: ‘I am of that opinion.'

  'And, by that, the sured man for this further purpose. Cousin, it would comfort my hand mightily could I bring this pretty lady-bird and emblem of sovereignty to dwell here in Rerek. I do mistrust the folk about her in the north there. And remember, she's of manable age: wooers, I hear tell on: that Derxis for one, newly crowned in Akkama, a sweet young swanking: in Rialmar, I have't upon sure intelligence, this very instant. Phrut! the cat will after kind. Therefore, cousin, of this plain power I give you and make you commissionary: use what means you will, but bring her south to me in Laimak.'

  Lessingham studied a season and at last said: 'In plain terms, cousin: this is not an overture of marriage?' 'Footra! I ne'er dreamed on't.'

  "That is well; for 'pon first bruit of that, you should incur the hatred of them all, and all our work fly again in pieces. Well, I will undertake it, if your highness will wisely give me a large discretion: for it is a thing may seem mischievous or profitable, and whether of the two we know not till I be there to try.'

  'Enough: you know my mind,' said the Vicar. 'Try how she stands affected to me, and do what you may. And now,' he said, 'let us go down and drink with them. Cousin, I do love you, but by my soul you have this fault: you do drink commonly but to satisfy nature. Let's you and I this night drink 'em all speechless.'

  Lessingham said, 'Wine measurably drunken delighteth best. But to humour you to-night, cousin, I will drink immeasurably.'

  So came they again to the feast, in the hall of the great carven faces of black obsidian-stone whose eyes flung back the lamplight; and straightway there began to be poured forth by command of the Vicar cup upon cup, and as a man quaffed it down so in an instant was his cup brimmed a-fresh, and the Vicar shouted at every while that men should swiftly drink. And now he bade the cup-bearers mix the wines, and still the cups were brimmed, and swiftlier drank they, and great noise there was of the sucking down of wines and clatter of cups and singing and laughing and loud boastings each against each. And now were the wits of the more part of them bemused and altered with so much bibbing and quaffing as night wore, so that some wept, and some sang, and some embraced here his neighbour, there a cup-bearer, and some quarrelled, and some danced; some sat speechless in their chairs; some rolled beneath the table; and some upon it. The heat and sweat and the breath of furious drinking hung betwixt tables and rafters like the night mist above a mere in autumn. It was ever that the Vicar and Lessingham set the pace, carousing down goblet after goblet. But now the high windows, all wide open for air, began to pale, and the lamps to burn out one by one; and not a man remained now able to drink or speak or stand but all lay senseless among the rushes, or in their seats, or sprawled forward on the table: all save the Vicar and Lessingham alone.

  The Vicar now dismissed the cup-bearers,, and now they two fell again to their drinking, each against each, cup for cup. The Vicar's countenance showed scarlet in the uncertain light, and his eyes puffy like an owl's disturbed at noon; he spoke no more; his breath laboured; the sweat ran down his brow and down nose and cheeks in little runlets; his neck was bloated much beyond its common size, and of the hue of a beetroot. He drank slowlier now; Lessingham drank fair with him as before, cup against cup. All that night's quaffings had lighted but a moderate glow beneath the bronze on Lessingham's cheek, and his eyes were yet clear and sparkling, when the Vicar, lurching sideways and letting fall from nerveless fingers his half-drained cup, slid beneath the table and there lay like a hog, snoring and snouking with the rest.

  Two or three lamps yet burned on the walls, but with a light that weakened moment by moment before the opening dawn. Lessingham set cushions under his cousin's head and made his way to the door, picking his steps amongst bodies thus fallen ingloriously beneath the cup-din. In the darkness of the lobby a lady stood to face him, goblet in hand, quite still, clothed all in white. 'Morrow, my Lord Lessingham,' she said, and drank to him. 'So you go north, at last, to Rialmar?'

  There was a quality in her voice that swept memory like harp-strings within him: a quality like the unsheathing of claws. His eyes could not pierce the shadow more than to know her hair, which seemed to have of itself some luminosity that showed through darkness: her eyes, like a beast's eyes lit from within: a glint of teeth. 'What, dear mistress of the snows?' he said, and caught her. 'Under your servant's lips? Ha, under your servant's lips! And what wind blew you to Laimak?'

  'Fie!' said she. 'Will the man smother me, with a great beard? I'll bite it off, then. Nay and indeed, my lord,' she said, as he kissed her in the mouth, 'there's no such haste: I have my lodging here in the castle. And truly I'm tired, awaiting of you all night long. I was on my way to bed now.'

  He suffered her to go, upon her telling him her lodging, in the half-moon tower on the west wall, and giving him besides, from a sprig she had in her bosom, a little leaf like to that which Vandermast had given him in the boat upon Zayana mere, that month of May. 'And it is by leaves like this', said she, 'that we have freedom of all strong holds and secret places to come and go as we list and accompany with this person or that; but wherefore, and by Whose bidding, and how passing to and fro from distant places of the earth in no more time than needeth a thought to pass: these are things, dear my lord, not to be understood by such as you.'

  Lessingham came out now into the great court, with broadened breast, sniffing the air. In all the hold of Laimak none else was abroad, save here and there soldiers of the night-watch. Below the walls of the banquet-chamber he walked, and so past the guard-house and Hagsby's Entry and the keep, and so across to the tennis-court and beyond that to the northern rampire where they had had their meeting in June. Lessingham paced the rampart with head high. Not Maddalena treading the turfy uplands in the spring of the year went with a firmer nor a lighter step. The breeze, that had sprung up with the opening of day, played about him, stirring the short thick and wavy black hair about his brow and temples.

  He stood looking north. It was a little past four o'clock, and the lovely face of heaven was lit with the first beams thrown upward from behind the Forn. The floor of the dale lay yet under the coverlet of night, but the mountains at the head of it caught the day. Lessingham said in himself: 'His Fiorinda. What was it she said to me? "I think you will find there that which you seek. North, in Rialmar."

  'Rialmar.' A long time he stood there, staring north.

  Then, drawing from the bosom of his doublet the leaf of sferra cavallo: 'And meanwhile not to neglect present gladness—' he said in himself; and so turned, smiling with himself, towards the half-moon tower where, as she had kindly let him know, Anthea had her lodging.

  xiii

  Queen Antiope

  another kind of cousins a royal wooer misery of princes happy diversion the queen and her captain-generaL but lookt to neare a king in waiting princess zenianthe uses of friendship the hall of the sea-horses qualities and conditions of derxis campaspe lifts A curtain the queen in presence anthea: derxis: the pavane vertigo the seahorse staircase.

  Through the wide-flung casements of the Queen's bedchamber in the Teremnene palace in Rialmar came the fifteenth day of August, new born. Over a bowl of white roses it stepped, that stood on the windowsill with dew-drops on their petals, and so into the room, touching with pale fingers the roof-beams; the milk-white figured hangings; the bottles on the white onyx table: angelica water, attar of roses, Brentheian unguent made from the honey of Hyperborean flowers; the jewels laid out beside them; the mirrors framed in filigree work
of silver and white coral; gowns and farthingales of rich taffety and chamblet and cloth of silver that lay tumbled on chairs and on the deep soft white velvet carpet; all these it touched, so that they took form, but as yet not colour. And now it touched Zenianthe's bed, which was made crossways at the foot of the Queen's, betwixt it and the windows; and her hair it touched, but not her eyes, for she was turned on her side away from the light, and slept on. But now the day, momently gathering strength, fluttered its mayfly wings about the Queen's face. And now colour came: the damask warmth of sleep on her face; her hair the colour of the young moon half an hour after sunset when the pale radiance has as yet but the faintest tinge of gold. With a little comfortable assenting sleepy noise she stirred, turning on her back. The day kissed her beneath the eyelids, a morning kiss, as a child might kiss awake its sleeping sister.

  She threw back the clothes and leapt from the bed and, in her night-gown of fine lawn, stood in the window, looking out. Seventy feet beneath her the wall had its foundations in native rock, and the cliff, greatly undercut, fell away unseen. The drop from that window-sill was clear eight hundred feet to the sea of cloud, dusky, fluffed like carded wool, that overspread the river-valley of Revarm. North-westward, to her left where she stood, the walls and roofs swept down to Mesokerasin, where, in the dip between this horn Teremne and the lower horn Mehisbon, is the main of Rialmar town; horns which overhang the precipitous fece north-westward, so that both the royal Teremnene palace and the houses and temples upon Mehisbon are held out over the valley dizzily in air. To her right, south-eastward, the blanket of mist hid the harbour and the river and the Midland Sea. Overhead, in a stainless sky, night still trailed a deeper intensity of blue westwards towards the zenith. The whole half circle of the horizon was filled with the forms, diamond-clear against the saffron of the dawn, of those mountains Hyperborean that are higher than all mountains else in the stablished earth. Upon all these things the Queen looked: beholding in them (but knew it not) her own image in a mirror. A lark singing mounted from height to height of air till it was level now with her window.

  After a little, 'Cousin,' she said, without turning: 'are you awake?'

  *No,' answered she. 'Are you asleep?' 'No.'

  'Get up,' said the Queen.

  'No,' she said, and snuggled down a little more, so that the sheet was nicely arranged to cover her mouth but not her nose.

  The Queen came and stood over her. 'We will wake her up ourselves, then,' said she, picking up from the foot of her own bed a little white cat, very hairy, with blue eyes, and dangling it so that its paws were on the sheets above Zenianthe's chin. 'Now she is at our mercy. Wake up, cousin. Talk to me.'

  Zenianthe took the little cat into her arms. 'Well, I am talking. What about?'

  'You must think of something,' said the Queen. 'Something useful. "How best to rid away an unwelcome guest": a lesson on that would be good now.'

  'You have nothing to learn from me there, cousin,' said Zenianthe.

  Antiope's face was serious. ‘I have flaunted flags enough,' she said, 'to show what way the wind blows. A year ago it should not have been so.'

  'Perhaps,' said Zenianthe, 'a man might think it fit to stay till he had the Lord Protector's word to bid him be gone. But you might try with your own word. And yet some would like well to hold a king, and so goodly a young gentleman besides, at their apron-strings.'

  'You can have him for me,' said the Queen.

  'I am humbly beholden to your highness; but I think he is not a man to take the sorb-apple and leave the peach on the dish.'

  Antiope said, 'You are both naughty and dull this morning. I think I'll send you away like the rest.' She surveyed her cousin's supine form, brown hair spread in sweet tangled confusion on the pillow, and morning face. 'No, you're not good,' she said, sitting down on the bed's edge. 'And you will not help me.'

  'Do your hair in some nasty fashion. That may disgust him.'

  'Well, give me a scissors,' said the Queen: 'I'll cut it off, if that might serve. But no. Not that: not even for that.'

  'Might fetch you a back-handed stroke too, reverse the thing you played for. High squeaking voice: if he be but half a man (as you said t'other day), half a woman should be nicer to his liking than the whole.'

  Antiope said, 'You shall not talk to me of his likings. Bad enough to go through with it; no need to think on't and talk on't: to be gazed on like a sweetmeat or a dish of caviare. Not all men, Zenianthe, fall sick of this distemper.'

  'But all sorts,' said Zenianthe.

  'As a good horse may be took with the staggers. Yes, there was—', she thought a minute. 'But not all our friends go bad. Venton, Tyarchus, Orvald, Peropeutes, why, a dozen others, can ride, be merry at table, go a-hunting, lead a coranto, and ne'er spoil friendship with this moping eat-me-up folly: talk as good sense as you, cousin: better. Zenianthe,' she said after a pause, *why might we not stay children? Or if not, why could I not be my own mistress, next month when I shall be of age eighteen, as my brother was? What's a Protector, that sits in Rerek two weeks' journey from us? And these great ones here, old Bodenay and the rest: nought but for their own ends: they but play chess: if they have a Queen, exchange her for a pair of castles and a pawn soon as they see their vantage.' She fell silent, stroking the cat's cheeks and putting its little ears together. Then, ‘I believe they are playing this king against the Vicar,' she said. 'Do you not think so, cousin?'

  Zenianthe laughed. ‘I should be sorry you should wed the Vicar.'

  'Hark to the silly talk!' said the Queen, rolling the cat on its back, this way that way with her hand, till it kicked and fought with little velvet hind-paws and made pretence to bite her. 'You at least, cousin, might keep your senses, and not think but and talk but of wed, wed, wed, like a popinjay. Get up!' and she suddenly pulled the bed-clothes and the princess with them onto the floor.

  The sun was high and the hour but an hour short of noon when the king of Akkama, having broken his fast on a dish of lobsters washed down with yellow wine, walked with two or three of his gentlemen out by the back stair from his lodgings in the southern wing of the palace of Teremne and so by paths he knew of round to the Queen's garden, into which he entered by a way well chosen as not observable from the windows. The garden was designed so as none should overlook it; facing eastwards and westwards, and with a great blind wall to shelter it from the north. Walls of hewn granite six cubits high shut it in, with deep wide embrasures at every few paces on the east side and on the west, to look, those upon the valley over the precipice brink and upon the great mountains afar, these upon the main garden pleasance with its silver birch-trees and .fish-ponds and walks and bowers, and beyond it hills again and circling mountains, far beyond which lies Akkama. An oval pond gleamed in the midst of that little garden, with a paved walk about it of granite, and steps of granite going down to the walk from a double flight of terraces. Late-flowering lilies, creamy white and with red anthers and speckled with brown and dust of gold, filled the beds upon the terraces; there were sunflowers a-row along the northern side, lifting their faces to the noon, and little northern mountain plants, stone-crops and houseleeks and matted pinks, were in the joints of the walls and between the paving-stones; and under the east wall were chairs set out with cushions of silk, and an ivory chair for the Queen; and upon a carven pedestal rising from the middle of the water, a chryselephantine statue of Aphrodite Anadyomene.

  'The presence 'gins to fill,' said the Lord Alquemen,

  throwing open the gate they entered by at the north-west corner and standing clumsily aside for the king to go in; ‘yet the goddess tarries.'

  Derxis walked moodily into the empty garden, flicking off a lily-head with his walking-stick as he passed. He was something above the middle height, well shapen and slender. His hair was straight, brushed back from the forehead, of the colour of mud: his eyes small and hard, like pebbles, set near together: his face a lean sneak-bill chitty-face, shaved smooth as a woman's, thin-lipped and with li
ttle colour about the lips, the nose straight and narrow. For all his youth (but three-and-twenty years of age), there was a deep furrow driven upright betwixt his brows. He wore a light cloak, and doublet with puffed sleeves after the Akkama fashion: loose breeches buckled below the knee: all of a sober brownish colour. There were bracelets of gold cut-work on his wrists and a linked collar of gold, broad and set with rubies between the links, hung on his chest.

  Twice round that garden the king paced idly, with his gentlemen at his elbow mum as he, as if they durst not speak unbidden. 'You,' he said at length. 'Was it not you told me this was the place?'

  ‘I pray your highness have but a little patience,' said Alquemen. ‘I had it by surest ways (why, 'twas from you, my Lord Esperveris?) she cometh to this place four times out of five a-mornings 'bout this hour.'

  'You were best get your intelligence more precise ere you serve it up to me,' said Derxis. His voice was soft, too high of pitch for a man's voice, effeminate. Yet Alquemen and those other lords, hard heavy and brutal to look upon, seemed to cringe together under the reproof of that voice as boys might cringe, lighting suddenly upon some deadly poisoned serpent.

  The king walked on, whistling an air under his breath. 'Well,' he said, after a while, 'you're tedious company. Tell me some merry tale to pass away the time.'

  Alquemen recounted the tale of the cook that turned fisherman: a tale of a nastiness to infect the sweet garden scents and taint the lilies' petals. The king laughed. They, as if suddenly the air were freer, laughed loudlier with him.