by E R Eddison
Rosma silently put her arm in his and, with a dozen torches, behind and before, to light their footsteps, they took their way up the rock-hewn stairs: so to the keep and the King's privy lodging. "I am coming in," she said, as he paused in the entrance. The King shot a glance at her, then stepped back to let her pass. Without sound on the rich woven carpet she crossed the room and stopped, her back to him, surveying herself in the mirror by the light of two branched candlesticks that stood on the table at her either hand. "Tt is near suppertime," she said. "We must change our clothes;" and still abode there without, moving.
The King said, "We have understood each other. Twenty-five years, A demi-jubilee. Few wedded lovers can say that, as we can. Was it because we have wisely and frugally held to our alliance as princes, and not been lovers?"
Rosma, very still and proud in her posture before the looking-glass, answered in tones startlingly gentle: almost tender: "I do not think so."
"No?" He was seated in a chair now, behind her, taking off his boots.
"I", said she, "have been a lover."
"Well, Beltran you loved, I readily believe. None other, I think."
" "None other' is not true."
"Your first child by him," said the King, "was (to speak home) the child of your lust. The second, sixteen years later, child again of your lust, but also of your love. And, as that, the unsightable wonder of the world: of more worlds than this, could your wolf-eyes avail to look upon such glories."
The Queen bit her lip till it slowly began to bleed.
"And there was like a diversity of conception," he said, "between these two children of you and me."
With that, a great catch of her breath: then silence. The King looked up. But her back was towards him and, from where he sat, he could not see her face in the mirror. She said, in a choking voice, "Beltran loved me. That second time, I knew it. He loved me."
"Yes. Unluckily for him. For you devoured him. I am not for your devouring."
The Queen, turning without a word, was on that sudden on her knees at his feet, her face hidden in his lap. "I have loved you," she said, "immovable and unreachable, since that first hour of our meeting in Zayana: a more wasteful, more unfortunate, love than ever I had for Beltran. Why could you not have let me be? You ravished me of all: kingdom, freedom, Amalie, the one living being in all the world I tendered above myself. And this I have known: that Styllis was child of your policy, or call it your more hated pity: Antiope the child of your transitory, unaccountable, late-born, soon ended, love." She burst forth into a horrible tempestuous rage of weeping: terrible cries like a beast's, trapped and in mortal pain. The King sat like a stone, looking down upon her, there, under his hand; her bowed neck, still fair, still untouched with contagion of the hungry years: her hair still black above it as the night-raven, and throwing back gleaming lights from its heavy braided and deep-wound coils: the unwithered lovely strength of back and shoulders, strained now and shaken amid gusts of sobbing and crying. When he lifted his gaze to the spaces of the roof-timbers beyond reach of the candle-light, all the shadowy room seemed as filled with the flowering of her mind into thoughts not yet come to birth: thoughts shawled as yet, may be, from her own inmost knowledge by the unshaping shawl of doubt and terror.
She stood up: dried her eyes: with a touch or two before the mirror brought her hair to rights, then faced him. He was risen too, at his full stature (so tall she was) barely looking down into her eyes. "You have lied to me at last," he said. "How dare you speak so to me of love, who do discern your secret mind, know you far better than you do know yourself, and know that you are innocent of the great name of love as is an unweaned child of wine? Nay, Rosma, I do love and delight in you for what you abidingly are: not for farding of your face with confections of love: which, in you, is a thing that is not."
She replied upon him in a whisper scarce to be heard, as he, in then: old way as between friends and allies, took her by the hand: "I did not lie." Then, as if the quality of that touch thrilled some poison quite to her heart, she snatched away her hand and said violently: "And I will tell you, which you well know, that this bastard of yours is the only child of your lasting love. And for that, spite of my love and longing, which like some stinking weed spreads the ranker underground for all my digging of it up - for that, I hate and abominate you; and Amalie, your whore; and Barganax, that filthy spawn whom (to your shame and mine and hers) you regard far more than your own life and honour. My curse upon you for this. And upon her. And upon him."
39 - Omega and Alpha in Sestola
NIGHT was up now over Sestola: midsummer night, but estranged with a sensible power ominously surpassing that July night's of last year, when the Duchess had entertained with a fish dinner in Memison guests select and few. The stars, by two hours further advanced than then, shone with a wind-troubled radiance dimmed by the spreading upwards of veiling obscurities between it and middle earth. The moon, riding at her full in the eastern sky, gave forth spent, doubtful, and waterish rays. On the lower air hung a gathering of laid-up thunder.
Queen Rostna, being come to her own chamber, made her women bestir them to such purpose that she was dressed and waiting some while before the due time appointed for supper. Her lodgings opened upon the westernmost end of the portico which ranges, a hundred and fifty paces and more in length, above the sheer face of the fortress on its southern, oceanward, side. She dismissed her girls and the Countess Heterasmene (now lady of the bedchamber), and, hankering perhaps for fresh air after the closeness of her room and of the King's, went forth to take a turn or two on the paven way under the portico. Square pillars bear up the roof of it on either hand, both against the inner wall and upon the seaward side: at every third pace a pillar. This western half was lit only by the lamps which, hanging betwixt each pair of outer pillars, gave barely sufficient light for a man to pick his steps by. But midway along, from the open doors of the banqueting-chamber, there spread outwards like a fan a brilliant patch of light, and beyond it the uncurtained windows of the hall shed on the pavement bands of brightness, evenly spaced with darkness. With moody, deliberate tread the Queen came towards the light, sometimes halting, then moving onwards again. She was come within a few paces of the doors when, at sound of footsteps approaching from the farther end, she withdrew herself under thick shadow between wall and pillar and there waited. The Duke of Zayana and his lady, new landed and in a readiness for supper together in Sestola, were walking from the east, now in full illumination, now lost again in shadow between windows.
My Lady Fiorinda wore, over all, a hooded mantle of smoke-black silk which, billowing as she walked, took to itself at each step new folds, new mysteries, fire-winged with beauties and graces that were themselves unseen. The Duke, as with every faculty strained up to this fugato, came a pace or so behind her. In the full pool of light before the doorway she stopped, not ten feet from where Rosma stood hid. "Well?" she said, and her lily-honeyed voice, potent as some unavouched caress, roused whirlpools in the blood-warm lampless sources of sense and being. "Are you content, now that you have driven me like a tame beast as far as this empty banquet-hall and empty deserted gallery? We're too early. What means your grace to do now?"
"Look upon you," said Barganax laughing. "Talk to you. Tis the only place I shall get the chance in private."
"Well, here I am. And here are my ears to talk to." So saying, she threw back her hood, giving him, by turns of her head, the side-view, either way the same. Her hair was put up in like fashion as eleven months ago it had been, at Reisma: strained evenly back from the parting and from those border-line fledgings, finer than unspun silk, at the temples and at the smooth of her neck behind her ears. And at the back of her head the great tresses were gathered and bound down, doubled and folded in themselves like snakes lying together: a feelable styptic-ness of night: thunder unshapen to silence and, as by miracle, turned visible. These bewitchments, sitting close and exquisite in the nape of her white neck, she thus manifested: then gave
him her eyes.
Surely, thus to mingle eyes with that lady was to be drowned under by a cataclysm that hurled out of their place the sea-gates which divide heaven from earth, flesh from spirit, and to be swept up so into Her oneness: into the storm and night of Her peace, who is mistress, deviser, giver of all. Who, all being given, gives yet the unfillable desire for more, and gives, too, eternally, that overplus to fill it: gives in that divine giving, infinite in contradiction and variety, Her many-coloured divine self, proud with his pride which, ever as brought down by Hers, is as everlastingly, through that unsatisfiable satiety of giving, reestated. As a God might stand incarnate in fire-hot stone, so, while Barganax stared into those sea-strange intolerable Olympian eyes, the deep-throned majesty of his will rose and, as lobe-stone points to lobe-star, pointed out her. Like a man who gropes for words in a dream, he said: "And, under that cloak?"
The falcon-flight of her beauty, stooping earthwards again, answered from her mouth: "You are very inquisitive upon my affairs. See, then, how obliging I have been." She let fall her cloak and stood before him in skin-close bodice with skirt flowing wide from the hips down, of red corn-rose sendaline: the dress she had worn for him that first night in Reisma.
"Then I am answered," he said, surveying her slowly down from throat to emerald-spangled shoe, and thence slowly up by the same road, and so once more to her face.
Fiorinda's eyes, that were a-dance with the scents of earth again, came suddenly to rest, in a wide-open stillness of intention, on his. Her lips, bitter-sweet scarlet ministers of mockery, were grave now: lips of the Knidian Aphrodite. Then, some untameable star rising in her eyes, "Indeed," she said, "it hath a happy commodity, this gown: like as your grace's jests. Remember you not so?"
"As my jests?"
"Come they not off, well and excellent?"
He bent down, one knee on the pavement, to pick up for her the fallen cloak. Being they were alone and unobserved, he locked suddenly his arms about her, his empery, his new-found-land, and for a minute abode so, crushing his shut eyes, that called in aid now a sense both more piercing and more fierier than their own particular of seeing, blindly into the pleats of her skirt. In this she remained motionless: only trembling a little, yielding a little. When the Duke was on his feet again, she had covered her face with her hands, leaving to be seen of her but these hands and arms in their immaculation of whiteness: the jet-black of her hair: this dress, sheathing her like a flame. "O madonna, why will you look at me through your fingers?" he said, opening his arms.
As a lily leans to its reflection in still water, she came nearer: an opening of the windows of heaven to pour down blessings: nearer, till her breasts touched him about the heart, and her face was hidden on his shoulder. "Are you still to learn that I never promise? Most of all, never to you. And this, I suppose," she said between his kisses on her neck and hair, "for two very ridiculous reasons: ten times more ridiculous and unreasonable when taken together. The first, because I do know you, within and without. And the second," here, with a sudden intake of her breath, turning her head on his shoulder she gave him her lips, nectar-tongued: not without letting him taste in the end, upon a more melting, then more impetuous, closeness of insinuation of her immortal sweet body to his, a light remembrancer, between play and fierceness, of her teeth: "And the second, because I am sometimes almost persuaded there may be no help, but you shall begin, someday, in very truth, to make me in love with you."
Rosma, having employed her advantage to hear and narrowly observe these two lovers, and what way in their loveship they went to work, said in herself: "So you never promise? But I promise. And most of all, to him." With slow unsteady gait she returned privately to her chamber.
A hundred feet in length is that banquet-room in Sestola, by forty wide, and the height of it twenty foot good to the cornice and, from thence to the huge ridge-beams of the roof, of oak curiously carved and blackened with age, twenty-five foot more. Upon the walls of old red sandstone, rough-hewn, gritty to the touch, and of the deep cold purple colour of leaf-shadows on brick in hot sunshine, hung all kind of war-gear: spears and swords and daggers and twirl-spears, maces, battleaxes, morning-stars: byrnies of linked mail, helms and shields, corslets and iron gloves: some from the antique time, some new: all of them pieces of proof wrought by noted armourers, and graved or damascened with gold and silver. From the western end, under the music gallery, lofty doors open south upon the portico. These, and the tall windows spaced six foot apart along the south wall, stood wide now to the June night. Under that gallery lesser doors lead to kitchens, buttery, stillroom, larders and sculleries, and the servants' quarters. The dais, at the eastern end, was carpeted with a weave of mixed wool and silk, having a glitter of silver threads in web and woof. From the middle of it two high-seats faced down the hall, having each a table before it for eating and drinking; and outward from these in a half circle, five to the right, five to the left, stood lesser chairs of state with their tables before them. On the rush-strewn pavement of the floor below the dais a dozen long tables were set lengthways in two double rows of three and three, leaving a broad space up the body of the hall between the double rows. At the higher tables (save upon the dais, where the seats yet stood empty) the company were already assembled, lords, ladies, and gentlemen, all in holiday attire: they of most account at the four tables next below the dais and, at the next four, gentry and officers of lower estate. At the lowest tables, nearest the doors, were places set for the remainder: here (the better to assure decorum) the men on the outward, southward, side, and womenkind on the northward.
Great was the sparkle of jewels and great the splendour of rich silks and velvets of many colours under a hundred hanging lamps which, depending in four rows by long chains of bronze from the high timbers of the roof, wove with their beams between the upward gaze and those high dark empty spaces a tented canopy of air, radiant, demi-translucent, beneath which all was light and clarity of vision. These lamps, shining downward, mixed their rays with the nearer, warmer and more tendering glow of hundreds of candles set orderly in branched candlesticks of cut and polished crystal, eight candlesticks on every table.
The musicians tuned their instruments, preluded and, when the murmur of talk was stilled and the guests rising in their places turned all to face westward toward the doors, struck up a cavatina of old Meszria. A lovely, houseless, land-remembering air was this: rising, falling, returning on itself as loth to depart: even just as a linnet's child, perched with its mother on a fence, quivers its wings to be fed, then leaps fluttering over her head to perch at her other side and in quivering eagerness creeps near to her again, and so and again continually. And ever as that air hovered to full close, always it by some exquisite involution refused and rose circling again, as if end were but foil or frame to some never-ending being and unfolding, of which even the beginning was impregnate with a prophetic sadness of farewells, and the expected end held ever, and at every approach and putting-off, the more of earth-deep promise in it of renewal and spring to be. This music, bodied forth on the plangorous caressful singing of the viols, smoothed the sense of Anthea's and Campaspe's nymphish ears, as they stood listening near the head of that high table under the window close below the dais, with echoes and overtones of a more diviner music: of my Lady Fiorinda's remembered voice, Olympian, all-beguiling, beyond all passion appassionate, yet immaculate, yet fancy-free. And beneath the ever-changing flow and wonder of that melody, plucked notes throbbed, of bass viol and theorbo, in an unchanging rhythm: deep under-march of eternity.
Now, in one tenor with that slow-throbbing plucking of strings, came a clanking of iron-shod boots from without the great doors, and a company of the King's bodyguard marched two by two up the hall. Picked men they were, deep-chested, hard, fierce of aspect, veterans of the wars in Akkama: helmed and byrnied with black iron, and in their plated gorgets and their sword-belts of black bulls-hide were studs and rivets of flashing brass. They halted in two lines, spears at salute, thei
r backs to the tables, leaving wide clear passage-way between the lines, through which ten trumpeters resplendent in cloth of silver, each man of them with his shining trumpet at his hip, passed up now in single file and, mounting the dais, took station, five upon this side, five upon that, against the walls north and south of the great seats. Following the trumpeters came a score of waiting-maids, all in white and garlanded on their unbound hair some with bryony, some with ivy, berries, some with flower of honeysuckle. Of these, some strewed roseleaves on the scented rushes of the pavement: the rest, bearing each her little silver basin, dipped their fingers as they walked and, at every step, sprinkled on this side and on that sweet-smelling perfumes. The rose-leaf-scatterers when they were come up upon the dais shed petals no more, but disposed themselves orderly along either wall, their faces to the tables, their backs to the trumpeters. The sprinklers of perfume, ere joining their fellows, went twice about the whole floor of the dais, meeting and crossing, back and forth, in a sway and intricacy of movement that took time from the interlacing notes of the viols, until all the woven carpet, and, most of all, that which lay in the half-moon space before the tables, exhaled sweetness, as beds of thyme or camomile, being trod upon, send up wafts of their sharp delicate scent. And now, as the King entered in his majesty, those trumpets of silver, pointing upward to the unseen spaces of the roof, sent flight after flight of silver notes showering like meteors, riding like valkyries of the Father of Ages, through over beneath and amidst of the fine-drawn moon-stilled cloud-processions of the cavatina, which by these fanfares was neither interrupted, out-moded, nor cast in shade but, taking them into itself, was by them hardened, masculated, made to tower in climax.