by E R Eddison
If through misfortune I were to be prevented from finishing this book, I should wish it to be published as it stands, together with the ‘Argument’ to represent the unwritten parts.
E. R. E.
7th November, 1944
Between November 1943 and August 1945 two further chapters, XXVIII and XXIX, were completed in draft and take their place in the text.
A letter written in January 1945 indicates that in the writing of Books Two to Five my brother might perhaps have ‘unloaded’ some of the detail comprised in the Argument with Dates. In substance, however, there can be no doubt that he would have followed the argument closely.
My brother had it in mind to use a photograph of the El Greco painting of which he writes at the end of his letter of introduction. I am sure that he would have preferred and welcomed the drawing by Keith Henderson which appears as a frontispiece. The photograph has been used, by courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, as a basis for the drawing.
We are deeply grateful to my brother’s old friend Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton for his unstinted help and counsel in the preparation of The Mezentian Gate for publication. We also warmly appreciate the generous assistance given by Sir Francis Meynell in designing the form and typographical layout for the book. The maps were originally prepared by the late Gerald Hayes for the other volumes of the trilogy of which The Mezentian Gate is a part.
COLIN RÜCKER EDDISON
1958
LETTER OF INTRODUCTION
TO MY BROTHER COLIN
DEAR Brother:
Not by design, but because it so developed, my Zimiamvian trilogy has been written backwards. Mistress of Mistresses, the first of these books, deals with the two years beginning ‘ten months after the death, in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in his island fortress of Sestola in Meszria, of the great King Mezentius, tyrant of Fingiswold, Meszria, and Rerek’. A Fish Dinner in Memison, the second book, belongs in its Zimiamvian parts to a period of five weeks ending nearly a year before the King’s death. This third book, The Mezentian Gate, begins twenty years before the King was born, and ends with his death. Each of the three is a drama complete in itself; but, read together (beginning with The Mezentian Gate, and ending with Mistress of Mistresses), they give a consecutive history, covering more than seventy years in a special world devised for Her Lover by Aphrodite, for whom (as the reader must suspend unbelief and suppose) all worlds are made.
The trilogy will, as I now foresee, turn to a tetralogy; and the tetralogy probably then (as an oak puts on girth and height with the years) lead to further growth. For, certain as it is that the treatment of the theme comes short of what I would, the theme itself is inexhaustible. Clearly so, if we sum it in the words of a philosopher who is besides (as few philosophers are) a poet in bent of mind and a master of art, George Santayana: ‘The divine beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in a world of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished: for it visits time and belongs to eternity.’ Those words I chanced upon while I was writing the Fish Dinner, and liked the more because they came as a catalyst to crystallize thoughts that had long been in suspension in my mind.
In this world of Zimiamvia, Aphrodite puts on, as though they were dresses, separate and simultaneous incarnations, with a different personality, a different soul, for each dress. As the Duchess of Memison, for example, She walks as it were in Her sleep, humble, innocent, forgetful of Her Olympian home; and in that dress She can (little guessing the extraordinary truth) see and speak with her own Self that, awake and aware and well able to enjoy and use Her divine prerogatives, stands beside Her in the person of her lady of the bedchamber.
A very unearthly character of Zimiamvia lies in the fact that nobody wants to change it. Nobody, that is to say, apart from a few weak natures who fail on their probation and (as, in your belief and mine, all ultimate evil must) put off at last even their illusory semblance of being, and fall away to the limbo of nothingness. Zimiamvia is, in this, like the saga-time; there is no malaise of the soul. In that world, well fitted to their faculties and dispositions, men and women of all estates enjoy beatitude in the Aristotelian sense of (activity according to their highest virtue). Gabriel Flores, for instance, has no ambition to be Vicar of Rerek: it suffices his lust for power that he serves a master who commands his dog-like devotion.
It may be thought that such dark and predatory personages as the Vicar, or his uncle Lord Emmius Parry, or Emmius’s daughter Rosma, are strangely accommodated in these meads of asphodel where Beauty’s self, in warm actuality of flesh and blood, reigns as Mistress. But the answer surely is (and it is an old answer) that ‘God’s adversaries are some way his owne’. This ownness is easier to accept and credit in an ideal world like Zimiamvia than in our training-ground or testing-place where womanish and fearful mankind, individually so often gallant and lovable, in the mass so foolish and unremarkable, mysteriously inhabit, labouring through bog that takes us to the knees, yet sometimes momentarily giving an eye to the lone splendour of the stars. When lions, eagles, and she-wolves are let loose among such weak sheep as for the most part we be, we rightly, for sake of our continuance, attend rather to their claws, maws, and talons than stay to contemplate their magnificences. We forget, in our necessity lest our flesh become their meat, that they too, ideally and sub specie aeternitatis, have their places (higher or lower in proportion to their integrity and to the mere consciencelessness and purity of their mischief) in the hierarchy of true values. This world of ours, we may reasonably hold, is no place for them, and they no fit citizens for it; but a tedious life, surely, in the heavenly mansions, and small scope for Omnipotence to stretch its powers, were all such great eminent self-pleasuring tyrants to be banned from ‘yonder starry gallery’ and lodged in ‘the cursed dungeon’.
The Mezentian Gate, last in order of composition, is by that very fact first in order of ripeness. It in no respect supersedes or amends the earlier books, but does I think illuminate them. Mistress of Mistresses, leaving unexplored the relations between that other world and our present here and now, led to the writing of the Fish Dinner; which book in turn, at its climax, raised the question whether what took place at that singular supper party may not have had yet vaster and more cosmic reactions, quite overshadowing those affecting the fate of this planet. I was besides, by then, fallen in love with Zimiamvia and my persons; and love has a searching curiosity which can never be wholly satisfied (and well that it cannot, or mankind might die of boredom). Also I wanted to find out how it came that the great King, while still at the height of his powers, met his death in Sestola; and why, so leaving the Three Kingdoms, he left them in a mess. These riddles begot The Mezentian Gate.
With our current distractions, political, social and economic, this story (in common with its predecessors) is as utterly unconcerned as it is with Stock Exchange procedure, the technicalities of aerodynamics, or the Theory of Vectors. Nor is it an allegory. Allegory, if its persons have life, is a prostitution of their personalities, forcing them for an end other than their own. If they have not life, it is but a dressing up of argument in a puppetry of frigid make-believe. To me, the persons are the argument. And for the argument I am not fool enough to claim responsibility; for, stripped to its essentials, it is a great eternal commonplace, beside which, I am sometimes apt to think, nothing else really matters.
The book, then, is a serious book: not a fairy-story, and not a book for babes and sucklings; but (it needs not to tell you, who know my temper) not solemn. For is not Aphrodite – ‘laughter-loving’? But She is also – ‘an awful’ Goddess. And She is – ‘with flickering eyelids’, and – ‘honey-sweet’; and She is Goddess of Love, which itself is – ‘Bitter-sweet, an unmanageable Laidly Worm’: as Barganax knows. These attributes are no modern inventions of mine: they stand on evidence of Homer and of Sappho, great poets. And in what great poets tell us about the Gods the
re is always a vein of truth. There is an aphorism of my learned Doctor Vandermast’s (a particular friend of yours), which he took from Spinoza: Per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo: ‘By Reality and Perfection I understand the same thing.’ And Keats says, in a letter: ‘Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.’
Fiorinda I met, and studied, more than fifteen years ago: not by any means her entire self, but a good enough shadow to help me to set down, in Mistress of Mistresses and these two later books, the quality and play of her features, her voice, and her bearing. The miniature, a photograph of which appears as frontispiece, belongs to the Hispanic Society of America, New York: it was painted circa 1596 by El Greco, from a sitter who has not, so far as I know, been identified. But I think it was painted also in Memison: early July, A.Z.C. 775, of Fiorinda (aet. 19), in her state, as lady of honour: the first of Barganax’s many portraits of her. A comparison with Mistress of Mistresses (Chapter II especially, and – for the eyes – last paragraph but one in Chapter VIII) shows close correspondence between this El Greco miniature and descriptions of Fiorinda written and published more than ten years before I first became acquainted with it (which was late in 1944): so close as to make me hope the photograph may quicken the reader’s imagination as it does mine. I record here my acknowledgements and thanks to the Hispanic Society of America for generously giving me permission to reproduce the photograph now used, by courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, as a basis for the drawing which appears as a frontispiece.
So here is my book: call it novel if you like; poem if you prefer. Under whatever label—
I limb’d this night-peece and it was my best.
Your loving brother,
E. R. E.
Dark Lane,
Marlborough,
Wiltshire.
PRAELUDIUM
LESSINGHAM ON THE RAFTSUND
IT was mid July, and three o’clock in the morning. The sun, which at this time of year in Lofoten never stays more than an hour or two below the horizon, was well up, fingering to gold with the unbelievably slowed deliberation of an Arctic dawn first the two-eared peak itself and then, in a gradual creeping downward, the enormous up-thrusts of precipice that underpin that weight and bulk, of Rulten across the Raftsund. Out of the waters of that sea-strait upon its westerly side the mountains of naked stone stood up like a wall, Rulten and his cubs and, more to the north, the Troldtinder which began now, with the swinging round of the sun, to take the gold in the jags of their violent sky-line. The waters mirrored them as in a floor of smoke-coloured crystal: quiet waters, running still, running deep, and having the shadow of night yet upon them, like something irremeable, like the waters of Styx.
That shadow lingered (even, as the sun drew round, seemed to brood heavier) upon this hither shore, where Digermulen castle, high in the cliffs, faced towards Rulten and the Troldfjord. The castle was of the stone of the crags on whose knees it rested, like-hued, like-framed, in its stretches of blind wall and megalithic gauntnesses of glacis and tower and long outer parapet overhanging the sea. To and fro, the full length of the parapet, a man was walking: as for his body, always in that remaining and untimely thickening dusk of night, yet, whenever he turned at this end and that, looking across the sound to morning.
It would have been a hard guess to tell the age of him. Now and again, under certain effects of the light, deep old age seemed suddenly to glance out of his swift eagly eyes: a thing incongruous with that elasticity of youth which lived in his every movement as he paced, turned, or paused: incongruous with his thick black hair, clipped short but not so short as to hide the curliness of it which goes most with a gay superfluity of vigour of both body and mind that seldom outlasts the prime, and great coal-black beard. Next instant, what had shown as the ravages of the years, would seem but traces of wind and tempest, as in a man customed all his life to open weather at sea or on mountain ridges and all desolate sun-smitten places about the world. He was taller than most tall men: patently an Englishman, yet with that facial angle that belongs to old Greece. There was in him a magnificence not kingly as in ordinary experience that term fits, but deeper in grain, ignoring itself, as common men their natural motions of breathing or heart-beat: some inward integrity emerging in outward shape and action, as when a solitary oak takes the storm, or as the lion walks in grandeur not from study nor as concerned to command eyes, but from ancestral use and because he can no other.
He said, to himself: ‘Checkmate. And by a bunch of pawns. Well, there’s some comfort in that: not to be beaten by men, but the dead weight of the machine. I can rule men: have, all my life ruled them: seen true ends, and had the knack to make them see my ends as their own. Look at them here: a generation bred up in these five-and-twenty years like-minded with me as if I had spit ’em. Liker minded than if they had been sprung from my loins. And now?—
the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.
What can a few thousand, against millions? Even if the millions are fools. It is the old drift of the world, to drabness and sameness: water, always tending by its very nature to a dead level.’ He folded his arms and stood looking seaward over the parapet. So, perhaps, Leonidas stood for a minute when the Persians began to close in upon the Pass.
Then he turned: at a known step, perhaps: at a known perfume, like the delicate scent of the black magnolia, sharpened with spindrift and sea-foam and wafted on some air far unlike this cool northern breath of the Raftsund. He greeted her with a kind of laugh of the eyes.
‘You slept?’
‘At last, yes. I slept. And you, mon ami?’
‘No. And yet, as good as slept: looking at you, feeding on you, reliving you. Who are you, I wonder, that it is the mere patent of immortality, after such a night, only to gaze upon your dear beauties asleep? And that all wisdom since life came up upon earth, and all the treasure of old time past and of eternity to come, can lie charmed within the curve of each particular hair?’ Then, like the crack of a whip: ‘I shall send them no answer.’
Something moved in her green eyes that was like the light beyond the sound ‘No? What will you do, then?’
‘Nothing. For the first time in my life I am come to this, that there is nothing I can do.’
‘That,’ said she, ‘is the impassable which little men are faced with, every day of their lives. It awaits even the greatest at last. You are above other men in this age of the world as men are above monkeys, and have so acted; but circumstance weighs at last too heavy even for you. You are trapped. In the tiger-hunts in old Java, the tiger has no choice left at last but to leap upon the spears.’
‘I could have told you last night,’ he said ‘(but we were engrossed with things worthier our attention), I’ve everything ready here: for that leap.’ After a pause: ‘They will not move till time’s up: noon tomorrow. After that, with this new Government, bombers no doubt. I have made up my mind to meet them in the air: give them a keepsake to remember me by. I will have you go today. The yacht’s ready. She can take you to England, or wherever you wish. You must take her as a good-bye gift from me: until we meet – at Philippi.’
She made no sign of assent or dissent, only stood still as death beside him, looking across at Rulten. Presently his hand found hers where it hung at her side: lifted it and studied it a minute in silence. It lay warm in his, motionless, relaxed, abandoned, uncommunicative, like a hand asleep. ‘Better this way than the world’s way, the way of that yonder,’ he said, looking now where she looked; ‘which is dying by inches. A pretty irony, when you think of it: lifted out of primaeval seas not a mountain but a ‘considerable protuberance’; then the frosts and the rains, all the infinitely slow, infinitely repeated, influences of innumerable little things, getting to work on it, chiselling it to this perfection of its maturity: better than I could have done it, or Michael Angelo, or Pheidias. And to what end? Not to stay perfect: no, for the chisel that brought it to this will bring it down again,
to the degradation of a second childhood. And after that? What matter, after that? Unless indeed, the chisel gets tired of it.’ Looking suddenly in her eyes again: ‘As I am tired of it,’ he said.
‘Of life?’
He laughed. ‘Good heavens, no! Tired of death.’
They walked a turn or two. After a while, she spoke again. ‘I was thinking of Brachiano:
On paine of death, let no man name death to me,
It is a word infinitely terrible—’
‘I cannot remember,’ he said in a detached thoughtful simplicity, ‘ever to have been afraid of death. I can’t honestly remember, for that matter, being actually afraid of anything.’
‘That is true, I am very well certain. But in this you are singular, as in other things besides.’
‘Death, at any rate,’ he said, ‘is nothing: nil, an estate of not-being. Or else, new beginning. Whichever way, what is there to fear?’
‘Unless this, perhaps?—
Save that to dye, I leave my love alone.’
‘The last bait on the Devil’s hook. I’ll not entertain it.’
‘Yet it should be the king of terrors.’
‘I’ll not entertain it,’ he said. ‘I admit, though,’ – they had stopped. She was standing a pace or two away from him, dark against the dawn-light on mountain and tide-way, questionable, maybe as the Sphinx is questionable. As with a faint perfume of dittany afloat in some English garden at evening, the air about her seemed to shudder into images of heat and darkness: up-curved delicate tendrils exhaling an elusive sweetness: milk-smooth petals that disclosed and enfolded a secret heart of night, pantherine, furred in mystery. – ‘I admit this: suppose I could entertain it, that might terrify me.’
‘How can we know?’ she said. ‘What firm assurance have we against that everlasting loneliness?’