by E R Eddison
"And now?" said Supervius, when they were set. He brimmed his goblet with a rough tawny wine from the March lands and drank to her, pottle-deep.
"And now?" said she, pushing her cup towards him. "Well, pour me out to drink, then. Is these Rerek manners? a man to bib wine while's wife, out of a parched mouth, shall serve him up tittle-tattle?"
He filled. She swallowed it down at a single gulp, first savouring it curiously on her tongue. "To go to the heart of the matter," she said, "as touching mine own particular, I long since took a mislike to that Aktor. The Queen I love well, albeit but cousins by affinity (not german, as I was to the King). And in this pernicious pass, with the whole land in a turmoil, besides fury and sedition of the rude people grown in the late unhappy accident, methought it likely Aktor would use her for his fool: she being caught in a forked stick betwixt doting of him (as I, of my quick sense, have precisely long suspected) and fearing for her son, and thus uncapable of firm action; while this hot-backed devil, under colour of her authority, more and more carrieth the whole sway of the court. So, to cut the Gordian knot and do for her (no leave asked) what, might she but be unbesotted, she must know to be most needful, I fled with the King before a soul could note it, meaning to have him away with me hither into Rerek. But they caught me in two days: took the child back to Rialmar, and would-"
"A burning devil take you!" said Supervius, breaking in upon this: "what misty Tom-a-Bedlam talk have we here? of Aktor: and the Queen: and you ran with the King's highness to Rerek? are you out of your wits, woman? Are you drunk?"
Marescia stared as if stupefied at his amazement. Then, clapping down her hand on his where it grasped the table's edge, "Why, is't possible?" she said, her sight clearing. "I'm yet here faster than news can travel, then? Faith, I've lost all count of time i' this hugger-mugger, and know not what day it is. Hadn't you not heard, then, of King Mardanus's death: tenth day after our wedding?"
Supervius sat for a moment like a man stricken blind. "Dead? On what manner? By what means?"
"Good lack, they murdered him up. By a hired rascal from Akkama stol'n into Teremne. So at least 'twas given out. But (in your secret ear) I am apt to think 'twas Aktor did it. Or by Aktor's setting on."
The Lord Supervius drank deep. She watched him turn colour, pale then red again, and his brow became as a storm-cloud. She said, "I see't hath troubled you near. Say you: begin you now to think that was an ill cast you threw then, when you married with me?"
"O hold your tongue with such foolishness: I think no such matter."
"That's as well, then. I gave you credit for that."
Supervius, as brooding darkly on this new turn, ate and drank without more words said. The Princess followed suit, now and then casting a glance at him to see, if she might, what way the wind was shifting. After a long time he looked at her and their eyes met. Marescia said, "Yet I'm sorry they got the child Mezentius from me. Better he were here, for his and our most advantage, rather than with's mother, if Aktor must rule the roast there. And yet, 'tis a roast we may yet draw sustainment from, God turning all to the best."
Her lord looked still at her with an unmoved stare that, from a bullish sullenness, changed by little and little to the stare of a proud ambitious man at a looking-glass that glads him with the express counter-shape of his best-loved self. "Come sweet heart," he said then, "we will closely to these matters. And somewhat we'll presently devise, doubt it not, much to our good. But I'll take my brother Emmius with me, or I move one step on the road I seem to see before me."
He bade his steward, supper now being done, dismiss all the company. And so, private in that banquet-hall hour by hour, till the lamps began to flicker and go out and only the glow of embers on the hearth showed them each other's faces, he and she sat long into the night, talking and devising.
6 - Prospect North from Argyanna
EMMIUS PARRY had sat now more than four years in Argyanna, keeping house there in so high a style as not in all Rerek had its example, but yet to compare with Rialmar in the northlands or Zayana of the south it should have seemed no such great matter. It was thought that, need arising, he could at any time upon three days' notice set forth an army of a thousand men weaponed at all points and trained in all arts of war: this not to reckon two hundred picked men-at-arms whom he maintained under his hand at all seasons, for show of power and to keep order, and in readiness for any work he might assign them.
For three or four generations this lonely out-town, set in strength amid untranspassable fens, had been to the Parry in Laimak as a claw stretched forth southward upon the batable lands watered by the river Zenner: an armed camp, governed by the lords of Laimak through officers who were creatures of theirs and servants but never until now men of their own blood and line, in case, from the great strength of the place, it might grow to be a hand which someday, turning against the body it longed to, might break down the whole in ruin.
From Sleaby and Ketterby on the northern part and thence, west-about by the Scrowmire and cast-about by the Saylings, to Scruze and Scrightmirry on the south, Lows of Argyanna lie ten miles long and as many in breadth. In these Lows is going neither for man nor for beast (be it more than a water-rat or an otter): only the water-fowl inhabit upon that waste of quaking-bogs. The harrier-hawks share out their dominion there by day: the owl (which the house of Laimak have for their badge or cognizance) hunts there by night, when all feathered living beings else are at roost, except the night-jar who preys on night-flying moths that breed in the fen. And through the night hobby-lanterns flicker, hither and thither in the mist and the darkness, above scores of thousands of acres, unpathed, quicksandy, squeltering in moss and slub and sedge.
In the middle of this sea of quagmire is a lone single island of sure footing and solid ground, watered with streams that have their source in a tarn of which no plummet has found the bottom: an unfailing source that puts up pure, cold and sweet from the under-rocks, not surface water from the highlands of old Rerek such as feeds the marsh. The firm land stretches a five miles' length north-west to south-east, with a biggest width of about three and a half: all of rich well-husbanded grazings and ploughlands which train upwards towards the north, but nowhere to rise more than twenty foot at most above the marsh-level; except at the head of the land north-westward near the tarn where the northern scarp comes up gently to a flat of perhaps twice that height, to fall again abruptly in a low cliff on the west; and here, wholly ringed about with walls of great thickness and strength, lies Argyanna. The highway from the north, coming down by Hommere and Ristby and so south through Susdale, strikes the Lows two miles south of Sleaby, and is carried south across them, straight as a carpenter's rule, to Argyanna and so on south to Scrightmirry, by a ten-mile causeway of granite which rests upon oaken piles through mire and ooze to bed on the rock. This road, where it crosses the tongue of land that lies out westward from the fortress, runs along the moat for several hundred paces, and so close under the walls of the main keep that, granted good natural munition and aptitude and a favouring wind from the east, a man on the battlements might spit on a passer-by. The Lord Emmius, when after his father's death he moved household and came down hither from Sleaby, built gate-houses astride of this road: one where the road comes upon the tongue, and that almost within stone-cast of the town wall, and another somewhat farther off where the road leaves land again for the marsh: this the greater and stronger of the two as a hold against the south should occasion require it. In time of peace the gates stood open, and travellers whether rich or poor had free entertainment there and a night's lodging if they would, and all with the greatest openhandedness and largesse.
Upon the fifth of May, Supervius came with his lady to Argyanna about midday and there had good welcome. When they had eaten, Emmius took them to walk in the sunshine upon the wide paved walk that runs full circle round the top of the keep between the battlements and his private lodging which stood back, full circle, in the midst of it.
"You have a fair p
rospect southward, lord brother-in-law," said the Princess, shading her eyes with her hand to look across the Lows to where, between forty and fifty miles away and a little east of south, the Ruyar Pass cuts the mountain spine at the meeting of the Huron range with the peaks of Outer Meszria, carrying the great road over into Meszria itself. "Where your fancy dallies, they tell me."
"My wife's home. Should not that be commendation enouth?"
The Lady Dei'aneira smiled. She was tall: exquisite, whether in movement or at rest, as some fine-limbed shy creature of the woods: high-cheekboned, smooth-skinned and dark, and with eyes dark and lustrous that seemed as by native bent to return always, save when he was watching them, to her lord.
"And yet," said Marescia, "you had these tidings from the north, too, two days sooner than 1 could bring them."
"I have lived in this world, dear Princess," said Emmius lightly, "near five times seven years, and I have learnt the need to have eyes and ears to serve me. Give me, prethee, what you saw with your own eyes. One pinch of fact outweigheth a bushel of hearsay."
"Ay, tell it as you told it to me," said Supervius.
Marescia said, " 'Twas hear with mine ears first: a cry out of the King's bedchamber, made the gold cups ring on the shelf above my bed and the geese scream in the yard under my window."
"And that was, when?" said Emmius.
"About first light."
"Ay, and the day?"
"Fifth morning after my lord here was ridden south. Then a noise of doors flinging open, and the Queen's voice, dreadfully, "Marescia, Marescia." So, on with my nightgown and scarce get the door open but her highness's self meets me there into my arms, trembling like a frightened horse: in her hair: nought but her sage-green velvet nightgown upon her: moaneth out over and over, the King's name: bringeth me thither: he on the bed, dead as doornail, boiled up huge as a neat, blue and grey and liver-colour, his eyes sticking out like a crab's, and his hair and his beard and his nails all bursten off him."
Dei'aneira's lips pressed together till they whitened, but no sound escaped them.
The Lord Emmius had all this while of Marescia's speaking studied her face, with that gaze of his which commonly seemed, to those on whom it rested, strangely undisturbing; so free of concernment it seemed, effortless and intermittent as a star's among changing clouds, but yet as steadfast too, deep-searching, not to be eluded, and so, when they considered again of it, strangely disturbing, as able to touch and finger their privatest inward thought, He looked away now, past her, to that sun-veiled skyline in the south. "Tell me, sister-in-law, if you can: slept she by him that night?"
"Never. Not these two years." "But would your ladyship a known?" "If so they did, 'twas a thing without precedent since many months at least."
"Truth is, we know not. Who was in the chamber when you came in, besides the Queen?"
"Not a soul. O, a woman or two o' the bedchamber I think. Then more. And then Aktor."
"Who's that?"
"Yonder princox."
"I remember: I caught not the name as you said it. What made he there? Was he sent for?"
The Princess changed glances with Supervius. "I cannot tell," she answered. "Was in a pretty taking: weeping and lamenting: My dearest friend, my King (and so forth); author of all my good: murdered and dead."
"In those words? Murdered: said he so?"
"A dozen times."
"Well?"
"But at first sight of the handiwork, shouts out in a kind of fury or terror to the Queen: God grant you ha'nt touched him, madam? Go not you near, nor any person else, till leeches examine it. Here's the vile murderer's doing I sent last night to sup in Hell: woe that I should a squeezed the sting out of him but not afore he'd sown the poison."
"What meant that gibberish?"
"Telleth us how, afore supper, he'd caught this rascally instrument of the king of Akkama (had been in Rialmar, it seems, under pretext of service in the buttery or the black guard, quite unsuspected, and for weeks biding his happy chance): Aktor caught him skulking in the private room the King and he were wonted to play chess in-"
"Slip we not there into hearsay?"
"Twas out of Aktor's mouth, in my hearing. Tells us (still in tears) how a had wrung a true tale out of this devil's-bawd-"
Here Emmius looked round at her: a comical glint in his eye. "Is this still the Prince's words? or is't Princess's gloss?"
"Cry you mercy, 'twas my tongue slipt," said she. "Tells us the fellow confessed a was sent a purpose to murder the King's highness (and Aktor too if that might be compassed): says this threw him into so fierce a sweat of anger he killed the man out of hand and, not to mar our evening, huggled the dead carcase into a big box or coffer was there i' the room, to wait till morning. There was an act me thinks smelleth something oddly in this Aktor." "What next?"
"Next, Aktor (thinking, belike, enough made of weeping and blubbering) takes charge. Calleth for leeches: shows us the dead vermin stiff and be-bloodied in the box and with Aktor's own dagger sticking in his ribs: (a pretty property for such an interlude, that, me thought)." "Well?"
"Well, those learned men sat in inquest 'pon what was left: 'pon the dead poison-monger, 'pon the King's highness, and 'pon the chessmen. (Twas pity Aktor thought not sooner the night before, of those chessmen.)"
"That the King and he wont to play with? Had they played with 'em that night?"
"Yes. Nay, I know not for sure. We left them to it, being bedtime."
"And what found the leeches, then?" "Upshot was, some nasty pothecary stuff in the King's finger and thumb: had run all over his body: same stuff on one or two chessmen, but the most of 'em pure and harmless: some more of it on the man's knife: conclusion, knife was to do the business had the chess failed."
She ceased speaking; and Lord Emmius Parry, a cloud on his brow, looked at her in silence for almost a minute. She, with cool smile and hot chestnut eyes, met his gaze steadily as if minded to out-stare him. But as well should a printed page hope to out-stare the reader, as out-stare that eye that looked forth, cold, meditative, ambiguous, and undisturbed, from the iron yet subtle face of the Parry, and rested without distinction of kind, alike upon the landscape, or upon the stone coping of the wall, or (as for this, to her, uneasy minute) upon the challenging eye of this woman, young, fierce-blooded, masterful, who, come to a halt close under him where he halted, set the air about him afire with the agitation of all senses mixed and stirred up in the goblet of her bodily nearness and her domineering will, bent to some end as yet unrevealed.
Even just as a reader, having read, looks up from his book to ruminate the matter he has read there, Lord Emmius turned now from her and, standing a little apart by the battlements, in the same remote meditation remained awhile, looking south. The Princess, left so, albeit scarcely victorious, in possession of the field, said apart to her lord, the hot blood suffusing all her fair face and brow even to the roots of the shining yellow hair that was drawn with a smaragdine fillet sleekly up from it and from behind her ears, "Was it fitly spoken, think you?"
"Beyond admiration well," he answered, taking his arm about her.
"No case argued, as yet."
"'No, no. It needs not."
"He is a man I'd rather have before me than against me: your brother," she said, and let her voluptuous weight settle closelier in the assurance of Supervius's strong encircling arm, while still she watched the Lord Emmius. Deianeira, with a look in her sweet secret Meszrian eyes more deeplier composed, more akin to his, watched him too. A man worth their eyes be seemed, standing there: towering above them in bodily height, save Supervius, and above him for settled majesty of bearing: loose-limbed and of so much reposement of easy power, his left hand, a true Parry hand, beyond the ordinary in breadth and strength and with broad spatula-shaped fingers, yet long-fingered as a woman's, resting on the stone battlement, his right crooked in his jewelled belt. His bonnet of black velvet sat tilted across his brow: there was a set lift and downward trend of his eyebrow
s, betokening thought, and a breadth and heaviness in the upper lids. His nose, great, high-bridged and (like the fox's) scenting to all airts, wore a pride and a keenness of discrimination on every fine-carved surface of it: so too the lean flats of his cheekbones and the sternness and strength of his mouth, partly veiled by a melancholy downward sweep of dark mustachios. His beard, sedulously brushed and tended, thinned to a certain sparseness of growth betwixt the mouth's corners and the chin, undiscovering so a taint of heaviness and hard implacability in his under lip.
He turned to face them now, his back against the battlement and the light behind him. "But why, dear sister-in-law, will you think Prince Aktor the author of that deed?"
"I never said I thought so," replied she.
"No. But it peeped from behind most every word you said."
"Well, truly, I think it not unlikely."
"Why disbelieve his story?" said Emmius. "Doth anyone else? What avail to him, thus to bite the hand that fed him?"
Marescia laughed. "Best avail of all, seeing a loveth the Queen's person to distraction. And she him."
Emmius paused: raised an eyebrow. "Be not discontent with me," he said, "if I question your ladyship somewhat sharply. The matter is of highest moment. Mean you that he acquainted himself over familiarly and unhonestly with the King's wife?"
"At a word, I do."
"And that he and she had nothing more in their vows than his serene highness's ruin?"
"O you miss my sense abominably!" she said. "Kill me dead at your feet if I'd e'er credit Stateira with any such wicked purpose. Him, yes."
"Then why not her?"
" 'Cause I have known her since children, like a book. 'Cause it lies not in her good nature."
"I praise your trusting affection," said Emmius with a crooked smile. "But remember, good qualities are easier spoilt than bad ones."
They began to walk again, in silence till they were come more than full circle round the battlements of the great keep: Emmius with long deliberate stride, hands clasped behind him, eyes moody and lightless under half-lowered moody lids: Supervius (as if policy, counselling attend and wait, strove within him against a wolfish impatience that ill can stomach delays) opening once and again his mouth to speak, and as swiftly shutting it after a sidelong glance at his brother: the Lady De'ianeira walking as some mislaid remnant of a perfumed summer night might miraculously walk here in the face of day, between this rockish imperturbability upon her one side and that hunger for action upon the other: the Lady Marescia tasting and managing, with her bare hand linked in his, Supervius's chafing, the while she studied, all uncertainly as she must and with jealous despiteful eye, weather-signs in Emmius.