by E R Eddison
Fiorinda, in a statuesque immobility, followed him with her gaze. ‘What means your grace to do now?’ she asked. ‘Paint, and let the wide world wind?’
The Duke checked and swung round upon her as if bitten. Little comfort there was in that lady’s eye or in the stony curve of her lip. Yet as he looked upon her, meeting stare with outfacing stare, it was as if, like fiery molten metal in a furnace, his rage ran into some mould and cooling took shape and purpose. His jaw set. His eyes, leaving their flashes, burned steady into hers. Then there came upon all his pose and carriage that easy magnificence which best became him; and in his voice that was right antiphone for hers, bantering, careless, proud, ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said: ‘secret, within these walls,’ and he looked round upon Medor and Vandermast. ‘Within three days I’ll be man or mouse.’
With a feline elegance the Lady Fiorinda rose, gathering with one white hand, not to trail them on the floor, the black shimmering flounces of her skirt, and walked to the window. There she stood, one knee upon the window-seat, her back to the room; but the Duke’s eyes, as the mariner’s on the cynosure amid flying cloud-rack, were fixed on her.
‘Medor,’ he said, ‘you are both a count of Meszria and captain of my bodyguard. You must now for a while be my lieutenant and commissioner of my dukedom in the south here, to do all in my name: what, I shall speedily command you. Write out the commission, Vandermast: I’ll sign it. For you, Medor, you are to muster up an army suddenly: Melates, Zapheles, every lord i’ the south here. High master in Meszria I yet will be. But it must be suddener than move an army: take the prey with a jolly quickness, before, like water cut with a sword, they have time to join together again. Roder holds Kutarmish: by the carriage away of that, all the defenced places of Outer Meszria, and may be o’ the March too, will without resistance be yielded. This then sooner of my own self than by any other middlers. I’ll take with me Dioneo, Bernabo, Ansaldo, him o’ the wall-eye – Friscobaldo, Fontinell: choose me out the rest: twenty-five of the most outrageousest beseen and likely men we have in the guard. I’ll ride tomorrow.’
‘Twenty-five men?’ said Medor. ‘Are you out of your princely wits?’
‘If the gear cotton, I need no more men for this dust. If not, more were useless.’
Medor laughed bitterly. ‘Falleth not for me to question your grace’s orders. But if you are thus resolute to cast your life away, let mine be in the cast too; for indeed I care not for it a pudding-prick if you miscarry.’
‘No, Medor. If I must be had by the back, you shall avenge me. But I know at my fingers’ ends what kind of men are in that city. I do esteem this a sport.’ His eyes met Vandermast’s. Surely the eyes of that old man were become as the thin pure radiance that suffuses the starless heavens eastward before the sun-spring of a windless dawn. Fiorinda turned. She held her head high, like a leopardess that scents the wind. ‘I have been anvil long enough,’ said the Duke: ‘I will now be hammer. Let all be made ready; for I’ve bethought me, I’ll not stay for tomorrow: I’ll ride tonight.
‘And now, give us leave.’
When they were alone there fell a stillness. At last Barganax spoke: ‘So runneth the hare then. Well? And if it be farewell?’ She reached out a jewelled hand: he took it in his, bowed over it, raised it to his lips, then, as with a sudden flaming of the blood, began to run with hungry kisses from palm to wrist, from wrist upwards, pushing back the sleeve till he reached the tender inner bend of the elbow, then with a stride forward seized her to him. ‘No,’ she said, withholding her mouth. ‘When you come back.’
‘That may be never.’ He mastered her, but her lips were lifeless under his kisses: all her body stiff and hard and unkind. ‘Was there ever such a venomous tyrant?’ he said, letting her go at last. ‘All ice. And you have turned me to ice too.’
‘You are rightly served,’ replied she, ‘for being a glutton. The fuller fed, the greedier. This livelong morning: then more this afternoon. Well, marry Myrrha, then, or Pantasilea: some obedient commodity to all your bidding. Me you shall not have o’ these terms.’ Leaning against the door-jamb, her hand upon the crystal knob, she watched him from under a drooped curtain of long black eyelashes while, like summer lightnings, there played about the dear beauties of hand and neck and cheek, and about the sweep of frills and ruffles and many-pleated gauzinesses of her skirt, glints of fang or claw. ‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘I know not why my girdle should still be at your command. Unless if it be that in you too,’ she said, ‘for all your idle plaguy ways, there is no sit still, no rest, nothing predicable. And because of that:’ she suddenly paused upon a miraculous softening of every line and contour; a breath, like the sudden filling of a sail, lifting the Grecian curve of her breasts; a slowing, as if it were honey with the bee’s sting lost in it, of her voice; a quivering of eyelids; an exhalation of intoxicating sweets, zephyr-like, like dark roses, in all the air about her: ‘because of that – I love you.’
Upon which most heavenly farewell, eluding a kiss or any touch or caress, she was gone.
Barganax rode that same night. He sent up word to his mother in Memison castle as he passed next day that he intended a week’s hunting of oryx and bears in the Huruns. So fast he rode that by Saturday midnight he was come up to Rumala. Here he rested horses and men till late evening of Sunday, and so at dusk came down the Curtain. They rode all night, avoiding the highway, and a mile or so south of Kutarmish, in a beech-wood of the spreading hills, waited for dawn. Twenty men, by driblets of twos and threes, he sent ahead to be ready outside the gates. At dawn the gates were opened, and there began to be coming and going of the day’s traffic. The Duke with his five rode up openly; they had blue osset cloaks and common country bonnets to dissemble their warlike gear and quality. As they drew near the gates, those twenty joined them. In a moment they killed the guards and rode briskly into the town to Roder’s house. Roder was upon coming forth with some men, and had but at the very instant swung himself into the saddle. Few folk were abroad, it being thus early, and the Duke and his fared swiftlier than the hue and cry at their heels. He took Roder by the hand: ‘How fares it this morning with your excellence?’ In his left hand he held a dagger, well placed, to let Roder’s bare skin feel the prick of it through his doublet, while the Duke might feel through the pommel in his hand the leaping of Roder’s heart. The face of Roder turned dark as blood, then grey like well-thumbed parchment. His jaw fell, and he sat still as a mouse, with dull blood-shotten bull’s eyes staring at the Duke. About the two of them the Duke’s men, swiftly casting off their cloaks, had made a circle, facing outwards with drawn swords. People now ran together from the houses, these in the street screeching out to those within who burst forth in heaps. ‘If you love your heal, be sudden,’ said the Duke, ‘and proclaim me. Here is your argument: hath a sharp point and a tart. If ’tis die and go to hell now, be certain you, my lord, shall in the entrance of this massacre be murdered: I’ll send you first, show me the path. If not, sudden, while you may.’
‘I am your grace’s man,’ said the Earl then out of a dry throat, ‘whatsoe’er my mouth have jangled. Aware, fellows,’ he shouted, ‘and stand a-room: blow up your trumpets that every man of good will shall stand ’pon his allegiance to the lord Duke of Zayana, for whose behalf I have hold this city and do him right so.’
The Duke commanded him, ‘Proclaim me Vicar of the Queen in Meszria.’ They blew up the trumpets and so proclaimed him.
By evening was all quiet in the town, and the Duke’s power well seated. For they of his faction, that had fared this while with hidden head while Roder held it for the Vicar, came forth upon his proclamation and set upon those of the other party. These turmoils the Duke put down with a heavy hand without fear or favour, using the soldiers, to the number of four or five hundred, that Roder held the town with: not of his own private following, but of the royal army established in the south these many years, from whom the Duke took oath of allegiance now in the Queen’s name, they accepting him sooner than
accept the Vicar, after this autumn’s doings, as upholder of the house of Fingiswold. But the Vicar was proclaimed by trumpet up and down the town as traitor, usurper, and king-killer, that every loyal subject should refuse and reject him and receive instead, as Lord Protector and Vicegerent for the Queen, the Duke of Zayana. And now as the day wore, and men grew bolder, they of the town began to come with whole cart-loads of complaints and grievances against Roder, petitioning the Duke to deliver him up, either else punish him himself. Barganax, finding that Roder could not bungle up but a very poor answer to these complaints; finding besides, upon seizure of the Earl’s papers, plain proofs of wicked devices devised by him with the Vicar, upon price of Kutarmish, for invasion of Meszria contrary to the Concordat, and a plot drawn to murder the Duke; considering too how (and that by proof of documents) they had hatched up such bloody practices since October even and that meeting in the Salimat; accordingly next morning let lead out Roder into the market-place and there, with these proofs exposed and a man to cry them, take off his head. By which example of severity, as well as by his yesterday’s insulting wild fierce and unaffrighted quick seizing of the town with so little a band of high-resolved men, men’s minds were wonderfully sobered, to beware how they should make themselves as of a faction or party against him, or think to play bobfool with him.
He sent now, by chosen safe hands of men that rode with him from Zayana, to the princes in the north, Ercles and Aramond, requiring them of aid and upholding. Letters he likewise sent to Jeronimy and Beroald, in measured terms blaming them for friends unfast, and counselling them now repent and back him, rather than, for one high act by him upon bitter provocation done, forswear themselves and, to such scorned purpose, be tools for the Vicar.
And now was he within a little, while he hoped to catch a gudgeon, to have drawn up a pike. For upon the twentieth of December, being but the second day after that thunder-bounce in Kutarmish, the Vicar himself chanced to come down thither with two companies of horse, having there his secret war-chest and much treasure and muniments both of weapons and horses and other things necessary for his design of Zayana; and was come well nigh within hail of the town, having, as was oft his manner because men should not have notice of his coming, fared across country to shun highways and haunts of men. But here, as the Gods would have it, was word brought him of rebellion afoot and Kutarmish lost, into which he had else entered all unknowing: wolf into trap. Nor was there given him bare five minutes law betwixt safety and undoing, for Barganax, understanding who was here, galloped out with a hundred horse to fetch him in and chased him twenty mile to the very gates of Argyanna where, in the nick of time, he went to earth, with his horses nigh foundered and himself nigh bursten with rage and furious riding. The next day, not willing, belike, to be closed within a fortress whereof, in the windings of his policy, he had lately appointed governor a creature of Beroald’s, since now and amid these stounds himself and Beroald might begin, belike, to stand in very doubtful terms, he betook himself north again to Owldale. It began to be seen how, with this sudden attempt of war, the Duke was likely to make a shrewd adventure to have taken Outer Meszria from him and the March besides; for they of the Queen’s upholding in the March of Ulba who had some months since begun to doubt the Vicar as the more dangerous usurper, began now openly to affect Barganax.
In a week came Melates and Barrian through the Ruyar pass with near a thousand men, to join hand with the Duke. Neither from the Admiral nor from the Chancellor had the Duke any reply as yet. But a little past the turn of the year came tidings that the Chancellor was moved eastwards in strength and sat down in Argyanna; where, because the place is both impregnable and overhangs the road that leads north from Meszria, he like a waiting hawk might cower those partridges of the march-lands and quiet their flutterings, giving Barganax besides reason of prudence not lightly to advance far out of his bridgehead beyond Kutarmish. The Duke indeed stood shortly between this and a new danger, when the regent Jeronimy, marching with an army through the Meszrian borders from the west along the Zenner, seemed to offer him battle, or if not, to menace his communications southwards. But it was as if Jeronimy, with the plain choice at last before him, yea or nay, this coming day-dawn before Kutarmish, could not find it in his heart to draw sword against a prince of King Mezentius’s blood. He sent in word to the Duke, and they made peace together.
So, while the Vicar gathered force in Rerek, and while all Meszria (even such as Zapheles, who had in a discontent been used to lean towards the Vicar) rallied to Barganax as to their native lord, only Beroald waited inscrutable in Argyanna. Most men thought that he saw in this fresh war-rush of the Duke’s the old danger come again that he had feared aforetime. They thought, too, that this, may be, held his hand: the opinion (that he had from the first inclined to) that in law the Vicar’s claims were hardly to be assailed.
XVIII
RIALMAR IN STARLIGHT
THE MANTICHORE GALLERY • DESIGN AGAINST AKKAMA • STIFF NEWS FROM REREK • THAT ‘MORE PRIVATER COUNCIL-CHAMBER’ • ANTIOPE: THE GODDESS STIRS • TWO WAYS OF LOVE • WASTDALE DISTILLED IN ZIMIAMVIA • CHOOSING UNDER STARS • TERROR ANTIQUUS • PARTING AT MORNING.
QUEEN Antiope decreed a high banquet in her royal palace of Teremne, upon the night of the equinox, for the turn of spring. In the Mantichore gallery was the banquet set: in the ancientest part of that palace, built when the old kings first raised walls upon two-horned Rialmar to make it a nursery of their tyranny and a place of strength: hundreds of years gone, before ever they issued from their watered valleys betwixt twin desolations of desert southward and eagle-baffling frozen mountains on the north, or turned eyes towards the southlands of Rerek and Meszria. Lofty was that gallery, built all of a warm grey stone having a dusky sheen like marble and beset with black spots or strikes. The long tables and the chairs besides were of the like stone, with silken cushions, for feasters to sit and feast. Forty-and-four lamps wrought in silver and copper and orichalc, and hanging by chains from the vaulted roof, went in two rows endlong of that great gallery. Beneath, upon the tables, candles of green wax burned in candlesticks of gold, a candle to every feaster. To the careless eye, roof and wall alike seemed plain and without all ornament; but looked to near, they were seen to be drawn upon with narrow channelled lines as of burin or chisel. Employing which property of shining superficies and elusive graven outline, he that in former days made that gallery had by curious art brought it about so as whosoever should remain there awhile should, little by little with the altering aspects of those drawings upon the walls, seem to be ware of shadowy presences of the beast called mantichora: here a leonine paw or leonine shaggy mane, there a porcupine’s quilly rump, a scorpion’s tail, a manlike horrible face fanged and with goggling great eyes: and that is a kind of monstrous beast reputed anciently found in sandy places and gravelled in the borders of the Wold, next against the hills hitherward of Akkama.
The Queen, in a dress netted and laced with gold upon a groundwork of silk, sombre orange-scarlet of bog-asphodel in seeding time, and in her hair a high comb of tortoise-shell edged with balls of yellow sapphire, and about her throat a delicate cream-white ruff with setting-sticks of silver, sat in the high-seat: Lessingham upon her right as representing the Lord Protector and upon her left the old knight marshal. Beyond Lessingham the Princess Zenianthe had place, and beyond Bodenay the Countess of Tasmar: these and a few more only in place of honour upon the cross-bench and the rest of the company at the long tables, facing inwards with their backs to the walls. All the space between tables was kept clear for service of the banquet.
‘Two weeks’ time or three, then, Captain-General,’ said the Queen, ‘and you mean to fare south?’
‘Two weeks come tomorrow, with your serene highness’ leave,’ answered Lessingham. ‘My Lord Bodenay and I,’ he said, leaning a little forward to include the knight marshal and speaking low, not to reach the general ear, ‘have baked so well as we shall ask you, madam, summon a meeting tomorrow of your
inner council upon the whole matter to condescend.’
‘And what within the pie, then, when we shall cut it?’
‘A journey for me south and then, say in a three months’ time, north again, upon your highness’s business.’ He glanced carelessly about him to make sure of no eavesdropping. ‘In a word, madam, we shall advise you that he whose insolencies you so wittily and wisely bore with last summer is rope-ripe: so—’
‘O if little cur-dogs must be whipped,’ said the Queen, ‘I whipped him last September.’
Bodenay shook his head. ‘Ah, madam, not the boy only, but that land and folk he standeth for. There is danger thence. And my Lord Lessingham will tell your serenity ’tis a maxim of great captains and men of charge: best defence is strike first.’
‘We will take your highness’ pleasure tomorrow,’ said Lessingham. ‘I hope you will let the thing go forward. A people that have so soon forgot their lesson, and of an old enmity towards us, kinged by a scorpion, unquiet as locusts: ’tis but plain prudence, outwar and subdue them this summer and lay them to your dominion. And my mission now to raise and bring you great armies from the south, and the Lord Protector’s self (that were good if I can compass it) to command them.’