by E R Eddison
‘Nay, but hangeth together. My wardship’s lost: so. Well, shift weight to the well-lodged foot then.’ He paused, sat back in his chair. Their eyes met. ‘I know not what this paper may say which you have in your purse, cousin; but would you’d a talked to me first ere talk to Zayana. You had not thought on this other way, ha? and yet opened fair before you: to use Derxis, I mean, as our instrument? And not too late now, neither, if rightly handled.’
‘What are you,’ said Lessingham, ‘but a bloody fool? Have I not told you long ago there’s no way but the straight cut? the Mezentian way, not these viperine crawlings: weld all fast under Barganax now, and crush this vermin, this of Akkama. Sweet Gods in heaven, cousin, is’t not your own kith and kin (in a distant way, I grant)? And as for use Derxis, I’d as soon the putrid skull of some invenomed serpent, and use’t for my wine-cup.’
‘Go,’ said the Vicar, and there was the look in his eyes as of one that weigheth pro and contra as he gazed on Lessingham: ‘here’s a talker.’
Lessingham took two parchments from his doublet: tossed them before the Vicar among the dishes. ‘Take it or no, ’tis you to choose, cousin: but if yes, today’s the last day: sign it or say good-bye. You may thank the kind Gods and me, that have hooked you out of this quagmire you have by your own curst mulish obstinacy rushed and stuck fast in. May be, since indeed I think you’re mad now, you’ll liefer choose your feast of tripes in Laimak home-mead a week hence; or t’other choice: that the Duke will give you, and please him best. Three livelong days I wrought for you, and little thanks I see for it, ere I won him to offer you this good bargain, ’stead as he would a had it: and that was, get you dead or alive, as in a month’s time or less no power on earth could a letted it: head you and side you, and nail the meat up so for crows to eat on Laimak walls.’
But the Vicar had snatched the parchment and was by now half-way through it, his great stubbed finger following the words as he read. When he came to the end, he read all again, this time the duplicate copy: then, without word spoken, reached pen and ink from the sideboard and signed and sealed. He then stood up: came to Lessingham beside the window, took him by both hands. ‘Think not I forget it, cousin, that this is by the great wit and prowess that is in you, the which I mind me well hath stood me in good stead many a time and yet shall do again.’
‘Good, then we’re friends,’ said Lessingham. ‘You have ta’en it well, cousin, as a wise prince should do. And the sixth day from today, as there writ down, your highness will come to him in Argyanna, enact that ceremony, your allegiance full and perfect?’
‘Ay, as a cat laps milk.’
‘You do well, cousin.’ He took up one copy of the concordat, scanning the hands and seals: the Duke’s, Beroald’s, Jeronimy’s, and now the Vicar’s. ‘This raiseth the siege today. I’ll begone with it, and we meet ’pon Wednesday in Argyanna. But remember, cousin,’ he said upon departing: ‘I look for deeds from you upon this: no more false closes designed to shun a final end.’
‘Go, you have read me a fair lecture,’ answered he. ‘Think not I’ll stumble at a straw now that I’ve leapt over a block. Fare you well.’
The twentieth day of June was appointed a great festival and holiday for ratifying of this peace whereby, Barganax being now in both Rerek and Meszria taken for King, the lords of those countries should in his service fare shortly with great armies north across the Wold, win back Rialmar, and so carrying the war through Akkama ravish and ruinate all the cities and people thereof and lay them under subjection, seizing above all King Derxis whom they meant to punish and kill not as befits a noble person.
Betimes that morning was the main army of the Chancellor, come down on purpose from Hornmere side and Ristby and those parts, besides the Duke’s two thousand that he how held in Argyanna and thereabouts, marched under banners and with singing of war-songs and music of trumpets and drums three times round the bluff without the moat. The Duke, with fifty red-bearded men of his bodyguard bearing their great two-handed swords, had place of honour before the drawbridge. He rode upon a fierce white stallion with sweeping mane and tail and with harness all black and trappings and saddlecloth of black sendaline. Of like sad hue were the Duke’s cloak and bonnet with black estridge-feathers and all his armour: black gloves upon his hands: the very ruff about his throat black, that should have been white: all this in formal sign of mourning and lamentation. The Lords Beroald and Jeronimy wore plumes of mournings in their hats and black mourning cloaks: the like tokens wore every one, high or low, man or woman, soldiers, townsfolk, that day; but the Duke alone, both for his royal estate and near kinship, that extremity of blackness.
And now, well upon the hour appointed, marching from the north down the granite-paven causeway that in a ten-mile span, laid on a foundation of thousands upon thousands of strong oaken piles, bridges the quaking-bogs in the midst of which is Argyanna, came the Vicar and his following. Twenty trumpeters on horseback headed the march: great was the flashing of their helms and trumpets, all of silver: their kirtles and hose were dyed with saffron: they had black mourning saddle-cloths and black cloaks: at every twenty paces they sounded upon their trumpets the owl-call of the house of Parry. Behind them, guarded by two score of Lessingham’s black riders, went the royal banner of Fingiswold, by him brought victorious from the northland through many deadly chances and the bloody battles at Ridinghead and Leveringay. The owl of Laimak, sable, armed and beaked gules upon a field or, followed after: its motto, Noctu noxiis noceo, ‘Nightly I prey upon vermin.’ There went a company of veteran spearmen of Rerek four by four behind it, helmed and byrnied and with great oblong shields. The Vicar himself rode with Lessingham a score of paces behind these footsoldiery, and a score of paces before the rest of their following: Amaury, Brandremart, Bezardes, Thrasiline, Daiman, and so horse and foot to the number of five hundred or more bringing up the rear.
Now when they were come close under Argyanna before the gates and the drawbridge, the Count Rossilion bearing the Vicar’s banner rode forth with two trumpeters that blew a fanfare. And Rossilion, doffing cap to the Duke and reading from a writing in his hand, cried out with a loud voice that all might hear: ‘For behalf of his most excellent lordship Horius Parry I do salute the Lord Barganax, Duke of Zayana, and do receive and acknowledge him the said Duke to be great King of Fingiswold and of all states and dominions appertaining thereto, and in particular of all Meszria and the Marches and of all this territory or land of Rerek and places situate therewithin, being especially the fortresses or strong holds of Laimak, Kessarey, Megra, Kaima, and Argyanna, and of this March of Ulba. And thus saith the Lord Horius Parry: I hereby give, O King, into the hands of your princely highness all those estates and powers whatsoever which, whether as private-vassal and subject, whether as Vicar of the Queen, whether as Lord Protector, I herebefore have held under kingdom of Queen Antiope of glorious memory (upon whom be peace), hoping that your serenity may adjudge them to have been truly and diligently by me administrated and used, in the behoof of the weal public and the great glory of the crown of the three kingdoms. Humbled on my knee I now kiss your grace’s hand, tendering my love and service true and perfect, and fearfully expecting your royal commands.’
The Vicar meanwhile, being dismounted from his horse, and standing ten paces or so behind Rossilion, looked on and listened with no outward sign save the great puffing out and great redness of his neck. He was all armed, with a byrny of polished iron edged at throat and wrists and skirt with links of gold; thigh-pieces and greaves and toe-pieces and golden spurs. No weapon he bore, only in his right hand his staff vicarial. Two boys, dressed in the russet and purple livery of his bodyguard, bare up behind him the train of his great black cloak.
‘But look upon him,’ said Zapheles in the Chancellor’s ear. ‘What charter of peace can you contrive, my lord, but this great devil will break it?’
Beroald shrugged his shoulders.
‘Well, now a hath put his head in the lion’s mouth,’ said Melate
s, as Rossilion ended, ‘cannot some contrive to set the King in a fume against him? Bite it off, and all were well.’
‘’Tis but yonder Lessingham standeth ’twixt this and that,’ said Barrian. ‘A thing past man’s understanding.’
‘That he so stands? Or that his grace should heed him?’
‘Both,’ said the Chancellor with a tart smile.
Lessingham said in the Vicar’s ear, ‘Your highness would be well advised, put off your bonnet: he did the like for you, if I am told aright, in the Salimat last autumn. Besides there is about your bonnet the diadem, which you must assume again but at his bidding.’
‘Let be. I’m afeared of this sun. Shall not fry my brains, concordat or no concordat.’
Men noted that in the very act of homage the Parry wore still his crown vice-royal with rich stones and orient pearl beset. Some murmured at it: the Duke, whose eye no littlest thing might ever escape, could not but note it, but yet let it go unremarked. Upon kissing of hands, the trumpets of either side blew a fanfare. The Vicar upon that, taking from off his head the coronal, presented it to the Duke, who straightway raised it on high that all should see, then set it again upon the head of the Vicar, saying, for all to hear: ‘Be witness whom it may concern, and the blessed Gods Who keep the wide heaven, that, upon homage thus made to me in my estate as high master of these kingdoms and agreeably to articles of peace late sealed and made betwixt us, I do hereby assign unto you, Horius Parry, the strong holds and demesnes of Laimak, Kaima, and Kessarey, and all the country and principality of old Rerek, but not Megra nor the lands north of Swaleback, and not Argyanna nor the Ulba March, to hold as my vicar or vicegerent, answerable to no man save to me, but to me to be answerable with your head. In witness whereof, receive this coronal and name of Vicar of Rerek.’
This done, amid great noise of trumpets and drums and shouting of all the soldiers and people there assembled, this solemnity had its end. But first the Duke let proclaim silence, and bade the Lord Beroald say forth on his behalf this, in a great voice, that all might know: ‘Thus saith the most renowned and most mighty prince and lord, Barganax, great Duke of Zayana, our sovereign master and King: that it is his pleasure, even as he will change not these mourning colours till he shall have beat the outborn usurper from the land and with the Gods’ help punished him with death, so will he think it scorn, and not suitable with his princely dignity, to take yet the King’s name, but will first, like as all other Kings of Fingiswold, be crowned in Rialmar. At his command publish it so accordingly. God save his serene and most excellent highness, Barganax, Duke of Zayana, of the three kingdoms our sovereign lord.’
They rode now in a progress once about the hold with their bodyguards, the Vicar and Barganax riding in the midst somewhat apart, jointly taking the salute from those on the walls and those in the field and all the army drawn up beside the way in double line, so as men should perceive with their eyes this new condition of peace and friendship, and the conclusion of the war and hate there had been so long betwixt them.
‘This is a great pride in you, my lord Duke,’ the Vicar said, ‘not to take the style of King.’
Barganax smiled. ‘I had thought it a great modesty.’
‘It was to shame me,’ said the Vicar. ‘Not clip the wings only of my vicariate, a thing I honourably endured, but make me do homage but to a ducal cap.’
‘’Las,’ said the Duke: ‘I fear I was thinking of my own affair, and not at all of you, my lord.’
‘I was gulled in it,’ said the Vicar. There shone in his eyes, the Duke’s head being for the moment turned away to acknowledge acclamations upon his right, a most cruel, mortal, and inexorable hatred.
‘Give credit, the thing ne’er entered my head,’ said the Duke. ‘But indeed,’ he said, ‘now I think on’t, I can but praise your courteous carriage and affability; for indeed, God knoweth well enough without remembrancer, myself did bow as low, and to a like necessity, not a year since, i’ the Salimat.’
‘’Tis of no moment,’ said the Vicar. ‘Only for this I thought fit to speak on’t to your grace, considering we shall wisely avoid now whatsoever might diminish my estimation and authority, and so tie me shorter when we should work together for common ends.’
The Duke said, ‘I’ll not forget it. I have bespoke a banquet about noon, which I hope your highness and whom you will of your following will honour me to share with us. After that, hold council of war. Midsummer already, and much to do ere we may march in full force. And it were folly think to lead a great army over the Wold once it be turned September.’
The same night, when save for the sentinels upon the walls and at the gates none was astir, Barganax and Lessingham went forth alone together to take the air and so came slowly a mile or more down the causeway from Argyanna southwards, walking and talking. The leavings of sunset, dusky orange-tawny on the horizon, crept slowly round towards the north. Bats skimmed overhead.
‘A month today, then,’ said Lessingham: ‘that’s the twentieth. In Mornagay.’
‘In Mornagay,’ said the Duke. ‘What shall we be? Seven thousand?’
‘That’s not to count the princes and the free towns.’ ‘We shall be too many.’
‘A stroke that shall not miss,’ Lessingham said, and they fell silent.
After half an hour they came to a stand. Barganax picked up a stone and tossed it in a reed-bed to wake the reed warblers that forthwith began their chattering. He said, ‘What make you of that light, there in the darkest bit among the moss-hags? A pool? A broken goblet throwing back the sky? A broken sword? A whole nation of glow-worms gone astray? A chink in the saucepan lid to let us see ’tis here they brew the marsh-fires?’
‘I think you shall find it but stagnant water if you go to it,’ said Lessingham. ‘Here, it might be all those things.’
‘A light asleep in the dark,’ said the Duke. ‘I should like to paint this night,’ he said, after a little. ‘The past: all gone. The thing to come, crouching in those obscurities of ooze and reed-bed, ready to spring. The thing present: you and me. And that is strangest of all: unpaintable, too, like as are most things worth painting.’
Lessingham was silent.
‘Were you a tenderer of your own safety, you’d now leave me,’ said the Duke. ‘Espousing my cause thus wholly, and enforcing this last settlement of peace upo’n him, you now go naked to his claws. No argument remains of self-interest, as before most strongly served, why he should not destroy you.’
‘I have now a kind of freedom,’ said Lessingham. ‘I’ll not give up you; nor I’ll not give up him.’
‘Pity that savage mare of yours, who biteth and striketh all men else, will not content you.’
‘Would she content your grace, and you stood where I stand?’
They began to walk slowly, in their companionship of silence, back again towards Argyanna that stood squat, square, and black, against the sky to the north. They were half-way home when the Duke began to say, under his breath, as if the words had been not words but echoes only, answering the measured tread of his musing footsteps along the causeway.
‘Earth I will have, and the deep sky’s ornament:
Lordship, and hardship, and peril by land and sea—
And still, about cock-shut time, to pay for my banishment,
Safe in the lowe of the firelight I will have Thee.’
Lessingham, who had listened with breath held back lest a word should be lost, suddenly, when the stave was ended, checked in his stride. They halted and faced one another in the stillness. ‘Who are you?’ Lessingham said at last, staring through the soft darkness into Barganax’s face: so like to his sister’s, save for the varying characters of he and she, that Lessingham’s very being was, for that likeness, confounded within him. Barganax made no answer. The silence was full of bird-voices afar on marshes that never go quite to sleep: now a redshank’s cry, now some little plover. Lessingham said, ‘Who made that stave?’
‘That? I made it.’
‘You?’ In the stillness a curlew whistled far away, awake in the night.
‘I like it,’ Barganax said, ‘if for its very vanity.’
‘Its vanity!’ said Lessingham, and they stood silent.
‘Why did you bid me,’ he said then, ‘to your love-feast upon Ambremerine? Why that night did she draw me through doors? What changed then in your throne-room? Why did she send me to Rialmar? Who is she?’ he said, last of all.
Barganax shook his head. ‘’Las,’ he said, ‘I can answer none of these riddles.’ He met Lessingham’s eyes through the dark. Inch for inch he and Lessingham stood of a height. It was as if he could not easily resolve to let loose that which was upon his tongue. At last he spoke: ‘Lessingham, I can, as I said, answer none of your riddles. But I will tell you this: upon Michaelmas night, taking my ease in a certain house of Vandermast’s, I looked in a mirror and I beheld there not my own face, but yours.’
Lessingham neither spoke nor moved.
‘Well,’ Barganax said. ‘What was it? Know you such a house?’
‘And I beheld,’ said Lessingham, stare for stare, ‘your face, not mine. In that house. Upon Michaelmas night.’
He swung round: began walking again homeward. Barganax, at his elbow, heard the gritting of his teeth upon a smothered groan, as a man might grit them with the turning of the blade in a wound. But in time, as they walked on in that commerce of mind with mind in which speech were but a troubling of the stream that else runs crystal clear, Lessingham tasted again, as upon Ambremerine, the leaning of Barganax’s spirit towards that seeming woman of his; and strangely in the tasting took balm to his own mortal hurt, until his own spirit within him was borne up on high like a great violent flame of fire, as for the grand last act indeed.
The Duke wrote that night, and sent it south by safe hand betimes the next morning:
‘Righte Expectable and Noble Lady, these to kiss your hands and informe you that matters occurent must hold me in the north now well till autumne. I would be sured therefore that your Ladyship will keep my private lodging as your own upon Akrozayana till these inconveniences be over past. I have todaye with the Parry sealed againe the infringible band of faith, but fear I shall never love him, nor would you, not for the honesty of his conversation neither nice in bodie but grossly sett and thick. And kinde will creep where it may not go, hee is enemy I think to all men save to such as will subject themselves to him. As for L. I doo think your Ladyship knoweth more than I of his affair, I mean not my Sisters parte which was with so much wisedome kept close as never a whisper went on it, I mean things deeper farre than that. My thoughts growe busy that some way there bee IV of us but some way II only. O beguiler of guiles, opening of your garments, sudden flashing of your Beauty, what webs are these. But no more, it is coriander in swete wine. I shall never have done when I am once in, and never settle my self for want of lipwork in stead of penwork. O Blacke Lily one and onemost, disdainer, and hallower, of all things, blinder of sight, bedde of the dragon and the dove, robe state and crowne imperiall of my desire, in daylight acte my Cynosura, wanting you here, in my dreames I taste you, and wanting wordes to endear you, call you but Mine, me, Yours.’