10
The chastity of Brittulia, daughter of the philosopher Zahti, was by no means accidental. Zahti, after a brief plunge from ascetism which had resulted in his marriage to the frigid daughter of Pletis, Consul of the Fourth Province, had retired gratefully to his bare chamber and his philosophic treatises. It was rumored slyly that after six months of marriage he and his wife had agreed to absolute chastity. Whether the rumor was true or not, they had no more children after Brittulia, nor did the older Brittulia need resort to the clever physician Nulah, the helpful accomplice of all wealthy matrons desirous of avoiding maternity.
The senior Brittulia had died after four years of connubial continence amid whispers she had succumbed to madness begot by frustration. She left a sizable fortune to her only child and namesake. Zahti had little affection, obviously, for his daughter. He saw her upon few occasions and seemed to possess the same morbid aversion for women which she later professed for men. After his death, the girl was kept secluded in the care of her father’s sister, a frigid termagant. Taught from childhood that chastity was the only desirable condition for a woman, the girl had no male teachers, no male companions. She was closely veiled against men’s defiling glances. Even the household slaves were exclusively female.
Brittulia, now the age of Salustra, was beautiful with the small-breasted meager beauty of the overripe virgin. Despite some shortcomings, her frosty beauty intrigued many men who would have been pleased to relieve her unfortunate condition. Brittulia, like many virgins no longer in bloom, was concerned much with religion. She was devoted to the goddess of the arts and sciences and regularly paid homage to the High Priestess. Jupia yearly enriched her coffers with gold from Brittulia’s considerable store. As a noblewoman, she was obliged by tradition to visit the royal Palace once a year to pay her respects to the sovereign. After the brief formalities, she would leave with impassioned haste, as though she could not stand the perfumed pollution of Salustra’s presence.
“This woman will bite herself in frustrated passion one day,” wryly observed Salustra on one occasion.
In view of her attitude, it was not surprising that Brittulia was thrown into a panic when the Prefect of the Guards appeared at her secluded house and brusquely advised her that the Empress intended to visit her before sundown. The very appearance of the formidably masculine Creto was enough to cause her consternation. She had the overwrought imagination of the secluded, and fancied reasons for the unusual visit crowded her mind. Was there to be a casual suggestion that she commit suicide, a harsh demand for her fortune or a spiteful command to attend some super-orgy? She spent the hours before Salustra’s visit in a darkened chamber, silently praying to the goddesses she had supported so handsomely.
However, when the Empress, attended only by a small detachment of guards, finally appeared, Brittulia’s despair had turned to a cold resignation that gave her an outer appearance of composure. She perfunctorily kissed the Empress’ hand, as her eyes searched Salustra’s for a sign of her fate. She saw only a pale, rather grave Salustra, who looked about the house, which she had never before visited, with feminine curiosity.
“Thou hast a charming house, Brittulia. Why have I never been extended an invitation before?”
“I am delighted that you found your way here at last, Majesty.”
“Come, Brittulia,” rejoined the Empress, “I thought not to find thee a victim of the common malady, hypocrisy. Tell me, frankly, after I am gone wilt thou scour the very chairs in which I have sat, and fumigate the rooms? Tell me that thou dost consider my breath an abomination, my words brazen cymbals in a sacred tomb, my smiles degradation, my very presence anathema. I will not think less of thee for being honest.”
Brittulia shuddered slightly, her eyes shrinking yet proud, asking the reason for the visit. But Salustra was obviously in no hurry.
“One naked truth,” observed the Empress, indolently leaning back in a chair, “is worth a thousand gorgeously attired lies.” She looked directly at Brittulia, who this time did not flinch. “Even fools serve a purpose. They are the dull background against which the brilliant shine the more brightly.”
Salustra studied her hostess with drooping eyes. Yet even in her negligent attitude there was a suggestion of supine strength. Brittulia, with her acute sensitiveness, felt this, and her apprehension increased.
Suddenly Salustra’s casual manner vanished. She leaned forward in her chair, her hands gripping the arms. “I could spend hours with thee, Brittulia, exchanging polite inanities, but I have no time. Let me say directly I have a favor to ask of thee.”
Brittulia stared at the Empress fearfully, her face paling still more. She had not erred, then, in her apprehensions.
Salustra saw her fear, and her lip curled, but she betrayed no emotion. “In all Lamora, with the exception of Mahius, I can trust neither man nor woman in this matter but thee. Thy virtue has kept thee free of treachery. Swear now that what I say to thee will go no further.”
Brittulia put a trembling hand to her modest breast. “Illustrious one, death would not wring one word of thine from me.”
Salustra studied her with narrowed eyes. “I will come to the point. My sister, the Princess Tyrhia, I intend to betroth to the Emperor Signar of Althrustri, who is presently at our gates.”
Brittulia uttered a faint cry of surprise.
“Tyrhia,” continued the Empress in her sharp, direct manner, “is a child. I have kept her secluded, because I did not wish her to be contaminated. I could consign her to the care of a hundred matrons in this city. I could surround her with the fawning daughters of noble families. I want none of these. Signar will demand the most snowy innocence in his bride, worthy in every way to be his consort. Tyrhia is both chaste and innocent, but she is very naive. Knowledge had no easy path through that pretty and unsophisticated little head. I am not especially concerned with that at this time. But I do wish that she could have with her a noble lady of unquestioned virtue. I wish that lady to be in constant attendance, be guardian, teacher and friend.” She gave the dumbstruck Brittulia a penetrating look. “Thou are that lady, Brittulia.”
An involuntary groan passed Brittulia’s lips.
“Thou hast till tomorrow to consider it,” said Salustra. “Tomorrow, thou wilt appear at the Palace with thy answer. I trust it will be affirmative.”
Before the Empress’ regard, Brittulia felt hopelessly trapped. “And must I live at the Palace, noble Salustra?” she murmured. “And for how long?”
“Only until such time as my sister is married. Thou shalt spend every moment with that child who has the body and tastes of a woman. Thou shalt let her be approached by no man or woman. Heretofore, she has been almost as secluded as thou. I wish her now to see the world, to see Lamora, so that she will become familiar with life. But not life as I know it, more as thou wouldst have it be.”
“And if I should refuse?” whispered the stricken Brittulia.
Salustra shrugged and spread out her hands. “Thou art a free woman, Brittulia.”
Brittulia wet her lips, and her famished soul looked hungrily into a forbidden world that she could safely enter under the guise of helping her country. Salustra clearly understood what was passing in the other woman’s mind. She made a gesture to Creto and he handed her a small gemmed casket. Salustra drew forth a magnificent necklace of opals. She held them delicately on the end of a finger, and surveyed them with critical pleasure. Then she carelessly tossed the necklace into the other’s lap. “This puts thee under no obligation, Brittulia,” she said, watching the other woman languidly. “Accept this merely as a token of the new direction thy life may henceforth take.”
Brittulia’s pale face flushed. She clasped the opals about her neck, and looked involuntarily at the Empress for her reaction.
“They suit thee marvelously, Brittulia,” said Salustra with a friendly manner. But her lips curled with a secret smile, and her eyes were faintly contemptuous. “They are as chaste as thou, yet under their mod
est opacity glows a smoldering fire. Who knows but that they resemble thee in this also?”
“Thou art too charitable, Majesty,” said a quivering Brittulia.
Salustra nodded carelessly. “I hope thy decision will be favorable, Brittulia. But that thou must decide thyself. Have I not told thee that thou art a free woman?” She looked about her benignly. “Oft have I heard my father speak of thy learned sire, Zahti. He spoke with great enthusiasm of Zahti as a logician and philosopher. I am interested in both logic and metaphysical philosophy. May I see his famed library?”
Brittulia bowed low. “My poor library is honored,” she said. She led the way to her father’s library. In the displaying of Zahti’s literary treasures, Brittulia regained a measure of composure. She knew logic almost as well as her father had known it. She could prattle of universals and particulars, syllogisms, deduction, induction and chain analogy. But though she had the volubility of a parrot, she could parrot only what she had so often heard, without any real understanding.
“My father,” said Brittulia, “dreamed of perfection; he thought that every true argument could be reduced to a valid syllogism. If it could not be so reduced, it was not truth.”
“There is no naïveté as complete as the naïveté of the savant,” said Salustra. “I was about to say the wise. But the wise are seldom pedants. Perhaps their wisdom prevents them from so becoming.”
Brittulia felt vaguely confused. “My father said that nothing in this world was worth the having but wisdom, and no pursuit satisfying but that of truth.”
The Empress smiled. “He gave his life to the pursuit of a shadow. Truth means something eternally true, an immutable fact. There are no eternal, fixed or immutable facts; therefore, there is no truth. What may be true today may be false tomorrow. However, that it is false tomorrow does not mean that it is not true today. Therefore, he who speaks of the immutability of truth knows not whereof he speaks. He who speaks of a present truth, knowing the future may make it a lie, is a wise man. Few philosophers are wise.”
Without meaning to, Salustra had allowed her own inclination to philosophize to extend the meeting beyond what she had intended. But she felt an inexplicable affinity for this woman so different from herself. Or was she really that much different?
Brittulia was bewildered. Few philosophers are wise—that was absurd. Had not her father been the wisest of men? The whole world had acknowledged that.
“Philosophers play with fantasies, suppositions and theories,” said the Empress. “They spend their lives among shadows and obscure hypotheses. They quarrel with each other’s armchair theories until they become ridiculous. They contribute nothing to the happiness of men. They advise tranquility. What they mean is death in life, for life is not tranquil, and he who is tranquil is not alive. Some advise love for humanity. They say, ‘Love thy neighbor.’ Bah! Know thy neighbor, and refrain from hating him if thou canst! Philosophers are the most slothful of men. When one has neither the desire for life nor courage nor health nor virility, he becomes a philosopher, and deals in dead things! I believe in thought; one would not wish to emulate the beasts. But I only believe in the thought which has a direct bearing on immediate life and its problems. It should teach us how to derive the utmost pleasure from daily existence, the least pain, the greatest comfort. The philosopher does not deal in life. He is a dull bystander, taking the crumbs that fall from the banquet table of the active and the virile.”
Brittulia was horrified by such sacrilege. “But some philosophers have been martyred for speaking great truths.”
“Those men were not philosophers,” said the Empress, smiling. “They acted.”
So offended was Brittulia, she dared not speak without deliberately framing her thoughts.
“A true philosopher is a parasite,” went on Salustra. “He spends his life trying to fit together haphazard parts of a meaningless puzzle. Some speak of good and evil, especially those who are pious. As if there are such things as good and evil! Nothing is fixed or stable, not even virtue, not even the gods. Philosophy is a frustrating plaything.”
“Thy Majesty must pardon me for differing,” said Brittulia, with a light of fanatical determination in her eyes, “but virtue is unchangeable. It is a fact. Virtue is life, and vice, death.”
“And of what does virtue consist?” asked Salustra. “Certainly not a sterile, fruitless, frustrated virginity.”
Brittulia hesitated for a moment. “Virtue,” she said thoughtfully, “is humility, penitence, chastity, mercy, honor, charity, honesty.”
Salustra laughed. “How hagridden thou art with the morals of an antique order, Brittulia. Dost thou not know that virtue, as thou dost express it, was imposed by the strong upon the weak? The strong are few in number; the weak many. The strong, to maintain their supremacy, invented virtue. Not for their own use, however. The strong have no need of virtue. But imposing it upon the credulous, who are many, they rob them of thought, courage and ambition.”
She laid her hand kindly upon Brittulia’s shoulder, smiling grimly at the virgin’s involuntary shrinking, as though at the touch of a serpent. “Thou art too strong, Brittulia,” she said, “to be virtuous, too noble to be humble, too honest to need a conscience, too clean to wallow in remorse. Only the feeble, the incompetent, the subjected have need of virtue.”
They went out into the gardens, which, though smaller, were not surpassed by the luxurious gardens of the Palace. Salustra, with a passion for roses, was delighted at the many rare varieties. Brittulia, preening with a collector’s pleasure, cut a particularly large rose for Salustra. The Empress inhaled the scent with gratification. “Thank you,” she said. “This I call a virtue.”
Tears of relief filled Brittulia’s eyes when the Empress took her departure. Brittulia went back into her garden, alone.
On a graveled path lay the dying rose, which had fallen from Salustra’s hand. Brittulia shuddered, stepped aside as though a serpent had risen in her path.
“Loti has been here,” she said aloud. She began to think. I saw a threat in her eyes, she thought. She smiled, but under that smile her words were flavored with gall and poison. She tells me that I am a free woman; free now, but how free for the future?
She put her hand to her throat; her fingers closed about the opal necklace, and for a moment her muscles tensed as though she contemplated wrenching the Empress’ gift from her flesh. She moved to a mirror and stared at herself intently. She saw a pale, tight-lipped woman, small-breasted, too thin perhaps, but there was a hint of beauty in the wide blue eyes and the thick bronze hair. Her neck was a downy white, the rainbowed opals blending with the warm ivory of her skin. She touched the gems again, but this time her touch was gently appraising, soft, tender.
She again relapsed into thought. If she consented to Salustra’s request, she would be forced into a world she loathed, a world of cynicism, impiety, incontinence, lust, greed, indecency, luxury. She recoiled at the thought, even though her slumbering blood tingled with a terrible and secret desire.
However, she was too repressed to acknowledge the rising clamor of natural desires. She was struck only with her own burning virtue. She knew that Tyrhia was still innocent; it would be her duty to preserve that virtue even while she guided Tyrhia through the contamination of the city. Was it not a task worthy of a dedicated virgin? Sati would never forgive her if she refused. What, turn an innocent girl over to dissolute companions, when she, Brittulia, could save her? What folly, what cruelty, what wickedness! She began to long for the morrow feverishly.
The vision of the Empress rose before her mind’s eye.
She remembered, now, the weariness of that haggard face, the beautiful eyes so tragic and bitter behind that mocking smile. A rare emotion befell Brittulia. A wave of pity swept over that frozen heart, and its locked gates stirred, moved ajar. The Empress, in her wisdom, had recognized virtue for the mutable thing it was.
11
Tyrhia found the Empress and Mahius waiting in the dimnes
s of Salustra’s apartment. A breeze blew in from the sea, carrying with it the ceaseless murmur of the breaking tide and eddies of mist.
Salustra smiled cheerfully at her sister and made her comfortable. “Dost thou have any inkling why I have called thee here, Tyrhia?” she asked.
“None, Salustra,” answered the girl, revealing in that instant how totally insulated she was from the flood of state affairs. A sense of uneasiness took possession of her, and her eyes wavered uncertainly.
Salustra held her sister’s hand between hers. “I have told thee from childhood, Tyrhia, that we do not live for ourselves but for Atlantis, and that when it was politic I would give thee in marriage to one worthy of thee.” She paused dramatically. “I have found that one.”
Tyrhia stared stonily at the Empress, and her jaw tightened. “And suppose I should refuse?”
Salustra laughed involuntarily. “Refuse? Thou? Poor child, what hast thou to say about what I decide for thee?
But, come, thou hast not yet asked me for whom I destine thee?”
Her expression was so kind, so gentle, that Tyrhia was suddenly suffused with a wild and delirious hope. She well knew that little escaped that keen eye. Could it be possible that the Empress had guessed her secret?
“In two days the Emperor Signar will be in Lamora,” said Salustra. “And to him I shall betroth thee. What aileth thee, girl?”
For Tyrhia had leapt to her feet, her face white and convulsed. She stretched out trembling hands to Salustra. “No, no, not he, Salustra!” she cried. “I cannot leave Lamora, I cannot go into that frozen wilderness. Wouldst send me away friendless, alone, at the mercy of a barbarian? Oh, Salustra, if thou didst ever love me …” She faltered, and began to sob silently.
The Romance of Atlantis Page 9