The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  Vandermast said: ‘Shall Self see Self?’

  Antiope said: ‘You may better answer that: you that are a philosopher.’

  Vandermast said: ‘I can ask questions, but some I cannot answer.’

  Antiope said: ‘Has she seen me?’

  Vandermast said: ‘I have been told so.’

  Antiope said: ‘Who told you?’

  He answered: ‘My art.’

  Antiope said: ‘Does that speak sooth?’

  Vandermast said: ‘How can I tell? It flares a light. I follow that, a step at a time, and so watch and wait: remembering still that, in this supermundal science concerning the Gods, determination of what Is proceedeth inconfutably and only by argument from what Ought to be. Thus far I have not been bogued.’

  Antiope said: ‘How then should she see me, if I may not see her?’

  Vandermast held his peace. The words of her speech were like shadows falling. Her eyes, like a dove’s, now sought Lessingham, but his face was turned from her sunwards.

  Anthea said:

  ‘I am love:

  Loving my lover,

  Love mine own self:

  For that he loveth it,

  Make it my paramour,

  Laugh in the pride of it,

  Beat in his veins:

  So, by such sharing,

  Loving prevail

  Unto self-seeing.

  —Such-like is love.’

  Campaspe said:

  ‘I am love:

  Loving my lover,

  Love but his love:

  Love that arrayeth me,

  Beddeth me, wardeth me—

  Sunn’d in his noon,

  Safe under hand of him,

  Open my wild-rose

  Petals to him:

  Dance in his music.

  —Such-like is love.’

  Lessingham said: ‘You sit there, silent: I at the table’s head, you, Señorita Maria, at the side, as fits a guest of honour; but on my left, as fits you. For on that side my heart is. There is no more haste now. Peace now: requiescat in pace: the peace of the Gods that passeth all understanding. Some note or flavour of it I caught now and then even there, because of you, madonna mia. Do you remember?

  Mistress of my delights; and Mistress of Peace:

  O ever changing, never changing, You—

  ‘Do you remember? But the dream clouded it, and the illusion of change and—’

  ‘Hush!’ Mary said, and trembled. ‘Lastingest blessednesses are subject to end. Is this a dream? We may wake.’

  Lessingham said: ‘That was the dream. No waking again to that. For what was it but the marred reflection, prophetic or memorial, of this present? a wind-marred image of all these things: of you and me here alone, of those peaches, the dark wine and the golden, the Venetian finger-bowls: a simulacrum only but half apprehended of that Gloire de Dijon over the window, and of its perfume which is your breath, O reine des adorées, perfume of love. These, and the summer’s evening leaning, with long cool shadows on the lawn, as I towards you; and this sapphire, warm to my fingers where it sits softly here, in this place which is of itself benediction and promise of awakening night, and of the unveiling and the blinding and the lotus that floats on Lethe: in this dear valley of your breast.’

  ‘Wait,’ she said, scarce to be heard. ‘Wait. It is not time.’

  He sat back again in his chair. So sitting, he rested his eyes upon her in silence. Then: ‘Do you remember the Poetess, madonna?

  As if spell-bound, she listened, very still. Very still, and dreamily, and with so soft an intonation that the words seemed but to take voiceless shape on her ambrosial breath, she answered, like an echo:

  ‘Evening Star – gath’rer of all that the bright daybreak parted:

  You gather the sheep, the goat; you gather the child safe to the mother.’

  The low sunbeams touched their goblets, and the beaded streams of bubbles became as upstreaming fires.

  ‘It is things we counted most of substance,’ he said, after a minute, ‘it is those have fallen away. Those that, where all else was good, spoiled all.’

  ‘All,’ she said. ‘Even I,’ she said: ‘spoilt at last.’

  Lessingham started: sat rigid as if struck to stone. Then he laid out a hand palm upwards on the table: hers came, daintily under its shimmer of rings as a tame white egret to a proffered delicacy, touched with its middle finger the centre of his open palm, and escaped before it could be caught.

  ‘Well, it was a dream,’ she said. ‘And, for my part in it, I felt nothing. No pain. No time to be frighted. It was less than a dream. For of a dream we say, It was. But this, It was not nor it is not.’

  ‘A dream,’ said Lessingham. ‘Who dreamed it?’

  ‘I suppose, a fool.’

  A trick of the low sunlight in that panelled room seemed to darken the red gold of her hair even to blackness. A Medusaean glint, diamond-hard, came and went at her mouth’s corner.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘we talk dream and truth till each swallow other, like as the two pythons, and nothing left. But as for that old world: it was you, Mary, said it to me in the old time, that it was as if One should have sat down alone with the chessmen and said to them, “Live: and now see whether they can teach themselves the game.” And so wait, and watch. Time enough, in eternity. But needeth patience. More patience than for manning of a haggard, madonna. More patience than mine, by heavens!’

  ‘The patience of the Gods,’ said she.

  ‘An experiment of Hers? for the mere pleasure of it, will you think? to while away a morning, as fly at the heron?’ He sat silent a minute, gazing at her. Then, ‘I think,’ he said: ‘another painting.’

  ‘Painting? A barrenness of One? Or dry-point, that shall give you, as you say, a bodiless thin Many?’ They waited, as if each had heard or seen somewhat that was here and was gone. The alexandrite stone was upon her finger, water green in this light of evening, yet with a stir as of embers below the green ready to flare red when lamps should be lit.

  ‘An experiment,’ said Lessingham, taking up his thread. ‘A breath: then no more to touch: no more but sit down and see if the meanest rude nothingness, once it be raised to being, shall not of itself in the end become the thing She chooseth. Infinite patience of the Gods. Slow perfection. The refining and refining of the Vision. – You said it, Mary. Do you remember?’

  ‘Why will you say “of Hers”?’

  Lessingham smiled. ‘Why will you, “His”?’

  ‘Well, if it pleases me?’

  They looked at one another, each with that scarcely perceptible half-mocking challenge of the head: a grace of the antlered deer. ‘A very good answer,’ said Lessingham. ‘I cannot better it. Unless,’ he said suddenly, and his voice died away as he leaned nearer, his right elbow on the table, his left arm resting, but not to touch her, on the back of her chair. It was as if from without-doors a distant music, as once upon Ambremerine, made a thin obbligato to the accents of his speech that came like the roll of muffled thunder: ‘unless indeed it has been with me, from the beginning, as with Anchises it was: a mortal man: not once, but many times: but many times:

  ‘—with an immortal Goddess: not clearly knowing.’

  The deep tones of Lessingham’s voice, so speaking, were hushed to the quivering superfices of silence, beneath which the darkness stirred as with a rushing of arpeggios upon muted strings. Mary nodded twice, thrice, very gently, looking down. The line of her throat and chin seen sideways was of a purity passing all purity of flowers or wind-sculptured mountain snows. ‘Not clearly knowing,’ she said; and in the corner of her mouth the minor dia-bolus, dainty and seductive, seemed to turn and stretch in its sleep. They sat silent. By some trick of the light, the colour of her hair seemed to change: to a gold-drained pale glory of moonlight, instead of, as her dress, red of the bog-asphodel in seed. And her eyes that had been green seemed grey now, like far sea horizons. Lessingham felt the peace of her mind enfold him like the peace of great fl
ats of tidal bird-haunted marsh-land in a June morning looked on with the sun behind the looker: no shadows: the sky grey of the dove’s breast, toning to soft blues with faint clouds blurred and indefinite: the landscape all greens and warm greys, as if it held within it a twilight which, under the growing splendour of the sun, dilutes that splendour and tames it to its own gentleness: here and there a slice of blue where the water in the creeks between wide mud-banks mirrors the sky: mirrors also boats, which, corn-yellow, white, chocolate-brown, show (and their masts) clear against sky in those reflections but less clear, against land, in nature: so, and all the air filled, as with delicate thoughts, with the voices of larks and the brilliant white and black of martins skimming, and white butterflies: drifts of horses and sheep and cattle, littler and littler in the distance, peopling the richer pastures on the right where buttercups turn the green to gold: all in a brooding loveliness, as if it could hurt nothing, and as if it scarce dared breathe for fear of waking something that sleeps and should be left to sleep because it is kind and good and deserves to be left so.

  Campaspe said, at the clavichord: ‘You will have more?’ The bodiless tinkle of the preluding blades of sound drew like streaked clouds across the face of the stillness: then, ‘What shall I sing to you?’ she said: ‘another of my Lady Fiorinda’s songs?’ And her naiad voice, effortless, passionless, bodiless, perfect on the note, began to sing:

  ‘Se j’avoie ameit un jor,

  je diroie a tons:

  bones sont amors.’

  Lessingham leaned forward on the table, his fists to his temples. He raised his head suddenly, staring. ‘I have forgotten,’ he said. ‘What is this I have forgotten?’

  After a minute, he sprang up. ‘Let us go into the garden,’ he said to Antiope: ‘settle it there. I must south. I would have you return no more to Rialmar until this tempest be overblown. You can be safe here, and my mind at ease so.’

  Anthea exchanged glances with Campaspe, and laughed a laugh like the crash of spears.

  Lessingham followed the Queen to the door which that unnamed disciple now opened for them. They stepped out, not into that wayside garden of Vandermast’s, but now, strangely, into an appearance of that Teremnene garden: the statue gracious above floating lily-leaves: terraced granite walks and steps going up from the pond: flowers asleep in the borders: the path where Derxis had thrown his stone: over all the star-dim spring night. The door shut behind them, shutting them out from the glow and the candlebeams. Antiope put a hand in his.

  ‘Why do you tremble?’ said Lessingham. ‘Be safe, you are now free from him.’

  Antiope said: ‘There is nought to bind you in your choice. But neither is there to bind me. Different ways you and I cannot choose. If yours to walk through dangerous and high places and to approach near steep downfalls, so mine. Or if you the safe way, so then I. And so, if you will abide by your saying and go south, then must I queen it out in Rialmar.’

  They looked each at other. Lessingham took a great breath. He turned to Aphrodite’s statua in its cold high beauty, netted and held in the loneliness of starlight. ‘Let Her,’ he said, ‘choose for us.’

  ‘Be it so,’ said Antiope. ‘There is no other way of wise choosing.’

  ‘Let me look at your face,’ he said. She raised it to his under the stars.

  After a while, he spoke in a whisper. ‘What mystery was this? Looking but now in your face, I have been my own love: seen myself: loved myself, being myself you for that instant, madonna: chosen for you, and for me, with your love as from withinwards. Been your love. Been—’ he caught his breath: ‘Was that the threshold? Upon Ambremerine, with glow-worms in her hair?’

  ‘I do not know,’ Antiope said, her face hidden now against his shoulder. ‘But what you have seen I have seen too: I too have chosen: been you for that instant, loving me. For a pang, and away.’

  For a minute they abode so, as one, motionless: then stood back and joined hands as might two brothers before battle. ‘Then, this being our choice,’ he said, ‘better it is, madonna, that you remain in Rialmar rather than come south with me. For all Rerek and Meszria are up in war now, and my going is to put all in hazard that must us save or spill. And well as I can answer for my cousin while I sit in the saddle, I would not, were I to fall, leave him executor of my trusts toward you; nor with the means to come at you. I leave you a great army here, and the lord knight marshal: a general expert and to trust. I take but my own eight hundred horse, and may be three hundred more. And Rialmar is by nature inexpugnable. By heavens, they shall see lightning out of Fingiswold, and the thunder of it shall shake Meszria and Rerek ere they shall have reckoned with me.’

  Antiope said, as he kissed her hand under starlight: ‘We have chosen, my friend –

  He raised his head again, her hand still in his. It was as if the stars and the huge darknesses without remembered again for their own that saying of the Lycian king to his loved kinsman, standing forth under windly Ilios:

  Ah, lad, and were’t but so: and, from this war fleeing,

  We twain, thou and I, for ever ageless and deathless

  Might endure: not then would I in the van do battle.

  Neither send forth thee to battle which maketh glorious.

  —But now, – since thus serried the fates of death come nigh us:

  Thousands, nor is’t in mortal to flee such, neither elude them –

  On! be it praise we become for another, or, haply, reap it.

  Lessingham’s nostrils were like a war-horse’s that hears the trumpets. Then on the sudden, in that questionable garden under stars, he seemed to see how a change, as with eclipse or deep clouding of the moon, overcame the beautiful face of this Queen of his, as if night should suddenly have clothed her with the mantle, inexorable, stony, archaic, of Astarte or if there be any crueller dethroned divinity of ages outworn: Terror Antiquus, treading the dead mouldered faces and unfleshed skeletons of nameless forgotten men. Then, as the silver moon with the passing of that red shadow, her beauty shone fair.

  The awe of that sight darkened his voice as he spoke: ‘Who are you?’

  Antiope trembled. ‘Sometimes, in such places as this,’ she said, ‘I scarcely know.’

  It was morning now in Doctor Vandermast’s wayside house. Lessingham, booted and spurred ready for setting forth, stood beside her pillow, as debating whether to wake her or let this, awake and asleep, be the last before their returning again to action and that banquet-table. Antiope lay asleep on her side, back towards him where he stood, so that he saw, partly from behind, the line of her cheek and brow and the rose of sleep that warmed it. Lessingham said in himself: ‘Forgetfulness. What does it matter? Belike the old man spoke aright: that it is a precious gift of Her lap, this forgetting; in order that She may give all again, morning-new. Every momentary glimpse: every half-heard overtone in her voice: the sheet drawn so, as it always is, nicely across that mouth of mine: eyelid, virginal quiet line and long drooped lashes, closed asleep: pale dawn-like gold of that hair of mine tied back with those ribbons: I have forgotten, and even these shall be forgotten. Well: so She give it anew. Well: so that She have said: “They are Mine: I keep them: I store them up. In time they are gone for ever, but they are Mine unto all eternity.”’

  He tucked the sheet gently in behind her shoulders. She turned at the touch with a contented inarticulate little murmur and, between half-opened eyelids, as only half waking, looked up at him. ‘Those two songs,’ she said after a moment, her voice soft with the down of sleep.

  ‘Did the little water-swallow say hers for you?’ said Lessingham.

  Antiope said, ‘Say it for me again.’

  Lessingham said:

  ‘I am love:

  Loving my lover,

  Love but his love:

  Love that arrayeth me,

  Beddeth me, wardeth me—

  Sunn’d in his noon,

  Safe under hand of him,

  Open my wild-rose

  Petals to him:
>
  Dance in his music.

  —Such-like is love.’

  Antiope said, ‘I like it better than that other. Say you like it better too.’

  ‘I like it best.’

  ‘Why?’

  His mustachios stirred with the flicker of a smile. He paused, thoughtful, stroking his black beard. ‘As not my way,’ he said, ‘could I by some magic be turned to a— As not known from within. I am not Barganax.’

  ‘My brother,’ she said. ‘I have never seen him. Have you seen: that lady?’

  ‘So far as any but he may see,’ answered Lessingham, ‘I have seen her.’

  ‘How far was that?’

  He said, as if searching for words, ‘May be, so far as— But no: you have never seen him. What are brothers and sisters? In the main, so. But once, until I beheld nothing. Then once, until I beheld you.’

  ‘Say it again, that you like Campaspe’s best.’

  Lessingham said again, ‘I like it best.’

  ‘I am glad.’ It was as if on her breath two shadows crossed, of laughter and tears. ‘I cannot, that other way.’

  ‘Because it is your way, I like it,’ he said. ‘I love you,’ he said, ‘beyond time and circumstance.’

  She put out an arm, and with that about his neck drew his face down to hers, warm with sleep, upon the pillow.

  XIX

  LIGHTNING OUT OF FINGISWOLD

  THE FIRST FLASH • QUELLING OF THE FREE TOWNS • LESSINGHAM BETWEEN PINCERS • BATTLE BEFORE LEVERINGAY • MARCH OF THE LORD JERONIMY • BATTLE OF RIDINGHEAD • PEACE GIVEN TO THE ADMIRAL • STORM AND TEMPEST AT RIVERSHAWS • THE SECOND FLASH • ECLIPSE AND DARKNESS.

  LESSINGHAM came south over the Wold by great journeys and on the fifth day of April passed by the land-march into Rerek. He had with him barely a thousand horse, but not a man of them that was not proven in war, headstrong, bloody, and violent, and of long custom bound to his obedience, not as water-spaniels but as the hand is stirred to obey the mind: of his own following, the most of them, six and seven years gone, when the great King warred down Akkama. Of like temper were his captains of troops: Brandremart, Gayllard, Hortensius, Bezardes: all, like as the Captain-General’s self, in the lusty flower of their youth, and such as would set no more by the life of a man, nor have no more pity thereof, than of the lives of partridges or quails which be taken in season to eat. Amaury he left in Rialmar, to be eye, ear, and hand for him in those northern parts. Gabriel Flores had set forth alone (supposed for Laimak) in advance, the very morrow of that banquet. So now Lessingham halted in the fortress of Megra, and held counsel of war.