by E R Eddison
The Chancellor broadened his chest and looked with resolute eye from the King to his colleagues, then again to the King. "With deep humility," he said, "and I think I speak for these lords as well as for myself: your highness hath told us no new thing, but all lendeth force to the argument that 'twere prudent something be done to contain the power of the Vicar. If (which God forbid) it should someday fall to us, bereft of your serene highness, to shoulder this sackful of contending interests, that were a heavy task indeed, yet not so heavy as we should shrink from, nor doubt our ability (under heaven) to perform it as your highness would have desired and expected of us. But if the Vicar must sit by in embattled strength straddling over the middle kingdom, aspying when we were deepliest otherwhere embroiled and ready then to take us, then were we as good as - " He broke off, meeting the King's eye, keen, weighing, meditative, upon him: lifted his head like a war-horse, and set his jaw. "What skills it to reason further?" he said, in his most chilling iron-hard voice. "I have followed your serene highness into the mouth of destruction too many tunes to boggle at this."
The King, listening, tranquil and remote, utterly at ease, made no sign. Only when his speckled grey eyes, as though by chance, came back to Beroald's, their glance was friendly.
"If it be permissible to ask," said the Admiral; "hath all this that your highness hath been pleased to express to us as touching his grace of Zayana been made plain to Duke Styllis?"
The King answered, "Yes. And he is content. Hath moreover sworn oath to me to respect his brother's rights, and my will and policy."
"Did the Duke of Zayana," asked Roder, "swear too?"
"It did not need."
The commissioners began to gather up their papers. "And we are to understand it is your highness's considered decision," said Beroald, "to move in no way against Rerek?"
"He keeps his vicariate," replied the King. "No more. No less. I may need to handle him myself in this manner of his maintaining of an army afoot by secret means. My lords Jeronimy and Roder, prepare me proposals tomorrow (and be ready to put 'em in act 'pon shortest notice) for making some show of power about Kessarey and the Marches."
With that, he rose, liker to a man in the high summer of his youth than to one in his fifty-fourth year: "On the far view," he said, turning to dismiss them, "I mean, when my day shall be over, I see no deadly danger from him, so but North and South stand firm in support of the succession. If they stand not so, that will not be my affair; but the affair of him that shall be man enough to deal with it. And now, you to your charge, I to mine."
"What think you of this, my lord Chancellor?" said the Admiral, as they took their way across the great open quadrangel of the fortress.
Lord Beroald answered: "I think the tide is now at high flood that began to run a year ago. And were it an ordinary man, and not our Lord the King, I should think he was fey."
"We have entered with him between the clashing rocks ere now," said the Admiral, "and at every tack found his dangerous courses safer than our own fears. I see no wisdom but to do so again."
"There is no choice. And you, my Lord Roder?"
"We have no choice," answered he in a sullen growl. "But there's nought but ill to come of it."
38 - Call of the Night-Raven
QUEEN ROSMA, observing from her window the occasion of those lords coming from the council, went to find the King. She found him alone in the empty council-chamber, seated not in his chair of state but sideways on the stone of the window-seat, seemingly wrapped in his thoughts. He showed neither by movement nor by look that he heard the opening or shutting of the door, or was aware of her waiting presence. After a while she came nearer: "Lord, if it be your will, I would desire to speak with you in privity between us two. If this be not a fit time, I pray you appoint another."
King Mezentius turned his eyes upon her and regarded her for a minute as a man lost in the profundities of his meditation might regard some object, table or chair or shadow thrown by the sun, which should chance within his vision.
"Let it be for another time," she said, "if that be better. I had thought your highness's mind being full with matters of the council, which this concerns, the occasion might be good. The thing can wait. Only I hope it must not wait too long."
Still gazing upon her, he seemed to come back to earth. His brows cleared. "Let it be now, madam. I am, to times, as a barber's chair that fits all buttocks. Albeit," and he gave her a laughing look, yet as out of a louring heart, "I think I am for the while unfit company for honest civil ladies." He stood up and with a scenical, histrionical, elegance of courtliness, kissed her hand. "But not here. I'll breathe fresh air 'twixt this and supper or burst else. Come, I'll row you on the firth: seek variety i' the open face of the sea, since pinched earth affordeth none. Get on your cloak, dear faithful help-fellow of an outworn office. When we be launched on the deep, and but the sea-larks to overhear us, speak your fill: I shall not drown you. I see you are come prepared. Nay, not for drowning: I mean for plain speech. You're painted against betrayals."
"Truly, dear my Lord, I know not what you mean. Betrayals of what?"
"Of another kind of red very good for the cheeks. Of blushing."
When they were come down to the water-gate, the firth lay under the cool of the evening at the slack-water of full sea, smooth and still as a duck-pool. Eastward and south-eastward the cliffs of the many isles and skerries, and of the headlands that reach down into Sestola Firth from the low-ranging jagged hills in the Neck of Bish, were walls of gold facing the splendour of the declining sun; and upon every sand-spit of the shore-line of Daish, under an immense peacefulness of unclouded heaven, thousands of gulls and curlew and sea-larks and sea-pies with scarlet bills awaited the turn of the tide. The King's boatmen held the boat against the jetty while the Queen took her place in the stern upon a cushion of cloth of silver. The King, facing her on the thwart amidships, took the oars, pushed off, and with a few powerful strokes was clear of the great shadow of the fortress. Presently, warmed with the exercise, he put off his doublet, threw it in the bows behind him, tucked up his shirt-sleeves of white cambric, and, settling to a slow steady stroke, held southwards down the firth. His eyes were on Rosrna, hers on him.
For a long time neither uttered word. Then the Queen broke silence: "Why must your highness stare upon me so strangely?"
He pulled his right, so that the sun shone full in her eyes, then, resting on his oars, leaned forward to watch her, a kind of mockery on his face. The water talked under the bows: a silvery babble, voluble at first from the way given by that stroke, then dying down to silence as the last water-drops fell from his oar-blades. "I was wishing," he said, "that you were capable to do something of your own motion, undirected and uncontrolled by me: something I had not foreseen in you."
"I think," she said, "there is some distemper working in your highness of late; making you brood vanities: making you, when I ask you any question, answer without sense or reason."
"Perhaps I am thought-sick. Who knows? But are you indeed so ignorant as know not that you are my thing, my poppet, my creature? Whatsoever you do or enterprise, it is because I will it. You act and think because I cause you so to do: not because you wish to. Tell me," he said, after a pause, "do you not find it tedious?"
"Tedious indeed, this manner of speech of your highness's which I suppose proceeded from melancholy and filthy blood. No answer upon any matter, but only put-offs."
"Try, dear Rosma, to do something. I care not what, so but it be something that shall surprise me: hurt me or pleasure me, 'tis all a matter: do something of your own. To open my heart to you, as wedded lovers ought to do, I am sick unto weariness of for ever climbing mountains safed with a dozen ropes held by a dozen safe men: sick and weary of the remembrance that, venture how I may, I can never fall."
He pulled a stroke or two: then let her drift. The sun was now touching the hill-tops in the north-west, a flattened red ball of incandescence. The tide had turned, and from every shore
came faintly the noise of birds quarrelling and feeding on the ebb. A cool wind sprang up to blow down the firth. The Queen muffled her cormorant-feather cloak about her. She spoke: "Was this the language your highness held to the lords in council this afternoon? Must a troubled them as it troubleth me."
"A foolish question," he replied, backing water, turning, and beginning to pull slowly home against wind and tide. "I told you beforehand of my decision. And 1 told it to them in the like terms."
"Comfortable words indeed. This blind drifting on the rocks in the matter of Rerek: this devilish folly in the treatment of your son." "My son? Which one?"
"Your son, I said. There are other names for bastards."
"I have always admired the refinedness of your language," said the King. " Tis a great charm in you. Pity, though, that you are so prone to repeating of yourself. You never give me the pleasures of disappointment: even as, set a fowl's egg under a goose or a turkey, the same chick hatcheth out. Will you not modulate, merely for change sake? find some new word of opprobriousness for (shall I say?) your stepson?"
"Why would you not suffer Styllis come south with us, 'stead of leave him mewed up in Rialnar? Would a been the fitting, kingly, natural course: most of all in these days when my bloody cousin do threaten, and ('cause of your strange enduring of his packing underboard) scarce troubleth to hide the threat. You forbade me the council: shameful usage of me that am yet, by mine own right, Queen in Meszria. And that was 'cause you were stubborn-set to hold by your pernicious purpose and cram it down their throats who durst not dispute with you to question it; for you knew, had I been there, I'd not a swallowed it thus tamely. Have your heir at your side, one would a thought, ready to take the reins if by evil hap (which kind Heaven pray forfend) aught untoward should befall your highness's person."
The King, while she so spoke, seemed sunk again into his study, watching while he rowed, as a God might watch from remote heaven, the red glory overspread the spaces of the sky from the going down of the sun. Coming now out of that contemplation, he said in mockery: "This is your country. If there should need a successor to my throne, why might it not be you? You are hampered by no sexly weakness: as fit as any man living to undertake it. Think you not so? Better than any man, I think: except perhaps - "
As if in that unfinished sentence her mind had supplied a loathed name, the features of Rosma's face, channelled and passion-worn with the years but yet wearing uncorroded their harsh Tartarean beauty, took on now, in the red sunset light, a menace and a malevolence as it had been the face of the Queen of hell.
"Styllis," said King Mezentius, still playing with her, idly, as a man might with some splendid and dangerous beast over whom he delights to feel his mastery: "Styllis (I will say crudely to you, in case you be a little blinded by your motherly affections towards him) is as yet somewhat raw. It is a great spot to his good estimation (and I think you taught him this trick) to despise and scorn any man other than himself: an unhappy habit of mind in a king. Your Meszrian lords are proud: jealous upholders of privilege. Set him, unfledged and unexperienced, amongst 'em, and - "
Here she broke in upon him, her accents cold and level. "Well, why delay to cut him off from the succession? One more ill deed would scarcely be noted, I should think."
"How if I postpone his succession till he be come of years twenty-five? Make you, in that interim, Queen. Regent? All's one to me. As for the world, Post me diluvium."
"I know," said the Queen, "what underlieth this mockery and mummery. You are resolved in very deed, though you dare not do it by open means, to leave all to your bastard. But," she said, the voice of her speech quivering now as with slow-burning anger, "beware of me. Twenty-five years you have used me for your tool and chattel. But of all things there cometh an end at last."
The King laughed in his beard. "An end? That is vulgar, but questionable, doctrine. Howsoever," he said, suddenly serious, so that Rosma's baleful eyes lowered their lashes and she turned aside her face. "I will promise you this. When I die, the best man shall have the Kingdom. If that be Styllis, by proof of his abilities, good. But upon no other condition. I made this Triple Kingdom: alone, I made it: and out of worse confusion and unhandsomeness than of civil wars. It is mine to order and to dispose of how I will. And I will dispose of it into the hand of no man save into his only who shall be able to take it, and wield it, and govern it."
"I marvel what madness or devil hath so distract your mind," she said, slowly, looking him in the face again. "You are likely to do a thing the whole world must weep for."
"Care not you for that, madam. It sits awkwardly on you (I could a said unbecomingly) to pretend tenderness for the misfortunes of others. You have acted too many murders in your day, for that to ring true. And devised as many more that I have prevented your performing. Better than you, I know what I am about."
"And I know what your bastard is about: the sole occupation he is fit for. Wallowing in his strumpet's bed in Velvraz Sebarm."
"His private concerns are his own. Not yours. Not mine, even," replied the King, narrowing his eyes upon her. "But if it shall comfort you to know, I heartily commend all that he is doing. In truth, as a good Father ought, I prepared the opportunity for him myself." He added, after a pause: "Tonight he and my Lady Fiorinda are to sup with us in Sestola."
Rosma drew back her head with the indignation of an adder about to strike. "Then I keep my chamber. I have an objection to sitting at table with a whore."
He rowed on in silence. On his left, and behind him over Sestola, night was rising fast. To larboard the sun had set in an up-piled magnificence of blood-red and iron clouds. Astern, above the Queen's head as she sat facing the rise of night, her face no longer to be discerned in this growing dusk, Antares began to open a red eye flashing with green sparkles in a rift of clear sky in the south. The wind was fallen again. The King, with eyes on that star of bale, rested on his oars: seemed to listen to the stillness.
Queen Rosma began to speak again: soberly, reining up her displeasure. "You are wrong in many matters besides this. For example (to go back to that immediate matter which, from what you have said to me, you so lightly and so headily disposed of at the council this evening), you are deadly wrong about Rerek."
She paused, waiting. The King made no reply, sitting motionless watching the raging lights of the Scorpion's heart.
"But sure, all's effectless when I speak to you of this," she said. "You never heed me."
He began to row: meditatively, a stroke or two, to keep a little way on her against the strengthening ebbtide: then rest on the oars again: then another few strokes, and so on. They were by this time but a mile short of Sestola. "But I am all ears," he said, again in his baiting, scorning, humour. "This is a business you have at least some knowledge of. He is your cousin german, and you have, in the days before I took you in hand, shown a pretty thoroughness in dealing with your kinsfolk: Lebedes: Beltran. 'Tis confessed, they were but nephews by affinity, and he of your own blood, a Parry: not a mere instrument of yours, a lover, as they were. Come, speak freely: you would have me murder him? Or, better, commission you for the kindly office? But I am not minded to let him go the way of your lesser ruffians. Me he will never bite at again. And I enjoy him. Much as, dear Rosma, I enjoy you. Or have enjoyed," he added, with a strange unaccustomed note of sadness or longing in his voice.
"But you are mortal," said Rosma. "And when you shall be dead, he will bite at Styllis."
"We are all mortal. A most profound and novel maxim."
"I think," she replied quietly, "your highness is perhaps an exception. Were you of right flesh and blood, you would take some respect to the welfare or illfare of your son."
"Do not trouble your head with the business. All is provided."
"You are unsupportable," she said, her anger again bursting its bonds. "You are took with my father's disease: Meszria."
"Well? And was it not you, madam, brought me that rich dowry?"
"Yes. But hardly f
oreseeing you would bestow it, and all besides, upon your bastard."
"It was got by you with blood and horror," said the King. "Be reasonable. I have kept my bargain with you. I have set you in a state and in a majesty you had not before dreamed of, upon the throne of the Three Kingdoms in Rialmar. Do not fall into ingratitude."
"O monstrous perversion. You have made me your instrument, your commodity, your beast. What profit to me though my chains be of gold, when I am kept kennelled and tied like a ban-dog?"
"You forget the benefits I have done you. I have kept your hands, these twenty-one years now, clean of blood: ever since your slaying of your lover Beltran, who begat two children upon you. This also you shall know: that them, too, I saved alive, when, being an unmerciless dam, you would a devoured them at birth."
This he said resting on his oars. In the hush, Rosma caught her breath: then, in a shaken voice, "You never told me this. It is a lie. They are dead."
"They are alive, my Queen. And famous. You have spoke with them. But, like the unnatural mother you are, you know not your own whelps."
"It is a lie."
"When did I ever lie to you?" said the King. "And, my dearly loved she-wolf, you have (to do you plain justice) never in all your life lied to me."
As by tacit consent, no further word went betwixt them till they were come to land. It was almost night now. A row of cressets burning on the edge of the jetty threw a smoky glare over the welter of restless waters and up the dark face of the sea-wall of Sestola, against whose cyclopean foundations those waters, piling up with the down-come of the tide, swarmed and gurgled, surged and fell, without violence on this calm summer night, but as if in tranquil rumination of what, and they please, seas can do and wall and rock stand against. The King leapt ashore: his men steadied the boat while he reached hand to the Queen. The uncertain and palpitating glare, save where its constant shooting forth and retracting again of tongues of light touched face or form or stone or black gleaming water, made trebly dark the darkness. She stepped lightly and easily up, and stood for a minute statue-like and remote, gazing seaward, not at her Lord. Whether for the altering light, or for some cause within herself, she seemed strangely moved, for all she stood so calm and majestical: seemed, almost, a little softened of mood: as it were Persephone in dark contemplation, without regrets or hopes, overlooking her sad domain and that bitter tree of hell. The King might see, in her eye, as he came closer and stood unnoted at her side, something very like the leavings of tears. "The setting is a good foil for the jewel," he said in her ear. "Is this the hithermore bank of Styx? Or stand we already o' the farther side?"