The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  BEROALD’S THOUGHTS HAD BEEN IN EDDISON’S IMAGINATION FOR MONTHS BECAUSE ON 13 FEBRUARY 1945, EDDISON JOTTED DOWN THIS NOTE:

  The Chancellor begins to incline to a connexion with the Parry – for political reasons: his thoughts turn to Morville.

  ON 30 APRIL AND 1 MAY 1945, EDDISON MADE MORE NOTES ABOUT BEROALD’S ATTITUDE TOWARD MORVILLE, STRESSING THAT BEROALD SEES MORVILLE AS A MORE ADVANTAGEOUS MATCH THAN DUKE BARGANAX FOR HIS SISTER, PARTLY BECAUSE OF THE DUCHESS’S ATTITUDE TOWARD FIORINDA:

  The Duchess is prejudiced against Fiorinda (on Lewisian and Geraldian grounds) at their first (and, until her appointment at the King’s instance, to be a lady of honour at Memison, only) meeting, scents the atmosphere affecting every conceivable outrageousness of opinion and behaviour.

  This interview confirms the Duchess in her feeling that Fiorinda is likely to bring disaster to any man that has to do with her, and finding the King shows signs of favouring Fiorinda as a wife for Barganax, makes it perfectly clear that she will have nothing to do with such a woman, much less accept her as a daughter-in-law. Beroald, learning (direct from the Duchess?) this attitude, dismisses any ambitions that may have formed in his mind in that direction.

  Beroald thinks Morville, as a kinsman of the Parry, may be useful to him: also thinks his sister had better be married (instead of a centre of such a buzz of flies and perhaps one day a cast-off mistress of the Duke’s): thus he urges the Morville connection.

  MORVILLE’S FIRST GLIMPSE OF FIORINDA OCCURS WHEN SHE GOES SWIMMING IN A SECLUDED LAKE WITH ANTHEA AND CAMPASPE:

  Bathing in a little mountain tarn they have just discovered: she does it rather to the scandalizing of Campaspe and enjoyment of Anthea. Morville, by chance, looks on undetected. Thinks he has, Actaeon like, surprised Artemis at her bath. [Anthea volunteers to slip into her lynx dress and deal with (Morville). Fiorinda decides, wait. After all, what harm?] He goes to Zemry Ashery (whither he is bound) and is introduced. Recognizes her at once and immediately falls in love.

  ON 29 AND 30 APRIL 1945, EDDISON WROTE THAT FIORINDA TAKES ZAPHELES WITH HER TO DINNER ON THE EVENING OF MORVILLE’S ARRIVAL IN ZEMRY ASHERY, AND, PRESUMABLY, THIS DINNER FOLLOWS HER SECRET BATHING WITH ANTHEA AND CAMPASPE:

  Takes him [Zapheles] with her to Zemry Ashery for dinner: there they find Morville, come on business to see the Chancellor. This is Morville’s first sight of Fiorinda: Morville secretly falls in love at first sight: (Zapheles’s presence gives Morville his first pangs of fatal disease – jealousy). She divines (as does Beroald too) that he has the same ‘bias’ – though a far different temperment and without the self-pleasing tyrannical violence and passion – as Baias.

  Fiorinda, though in no way moved by Morville as a wooer, is touched by the gentleness of his methods, by contrast with Baias. She is also amused by her brother’s subtle but (to her) transparent effort to steer this new boat of his into harbour. Half out of kindness, half for fun, and half because she is tired of the ‘buzz’ (and of the four or five with whom she has condescended to experiment up to the hilt but with small satisfaction though doubtless with great gain to her knowledge of masculine nature and her expertise and perfection in ars amoris), Fiorinda betrothes herself to Morville.

  AT THIS POINT, EDDISON’S DRAFTS AND NOTES CATCH UP TO THE ARGUMENT FOR CHAPTER XXX. FIORINDA AND MORVILLE MARRY ON 20 APRIL 775 AZC:

  In April, barely three months after the violent death of her first husband, she (once more, to please her brother) marries Morville, a distant cousin of the Parry. The King, seeing and talking to her for the first time in May and having Barganax in mind, confers on Morville the lieutenancy of Reisma and persuades the Duchess to give Fiorinda a place at court in Memison and, later, in June, to make her lady of the bedchamber.

  ON 25 MAY 1945, EDDISON WROTE A DRAFT NARRATING THE DUCHESS’S AND MEDOR’S REACTIONS TO THIS MARRIAGE AND THESE OFFICIAL APPOINTMENTS:

  When the Duchess heard of this wedding she said to Medor (dining with her upon his way to Mavia about some affairs of the Duke’s): ‘These news are altogether good; I shall send her as my wedding gift, in token of the joy they bring me, the best white mare I have in my stables. ’Tis a match will please Lord Beroald, who is a good friend of mine. I know nought of Morville but by repute: so if he be eat up in the fashion of the former one, I need waste no tears upon it. Best of all, she will away to Rerek: a joyful departure for all concerned.’

  Three weeks later, Medor bethought him of the Duchess’s words. For it was in every man’s mouth, and soon confirmed beyond question, that Morville was by royal letters patent appointed to the lieutenancy of Reisma, and would shortly move household and take up his abode there upon the lake, at but a short two miles distance from Memison Castle. This too, which made Medor laugh in himself: that the Duchess (yielding, it was thought, to repeated suasions from the King) had offered Fiorinda a place as one of her own ladies at the ducal court of Memison.

  High summer began to draw on now in Meszria, with a great settledness of warm sunshine weather, and all quiet. It went among those that lived in the court, and more able so to note the haviour of those nearest about the Duchess, that her grace seemed somewhat better content than at first she had been with the Lady Fiorinda; but many judged that she still regarded her not without afterings of aversion and distrust. The lady for her part bore herself very demure and very respective of her honest name, and (scenting, it was supposed, her grace’s mislike of any meeting or acquaintanceship prospective between her new lady of honour and Barganax) absented her always from Memison if the Duke were there or expected.

  IT IS FIORINDA’S ‘VERY DEMURE AND VERY RESPECTIVE’ BEHAVIOUR THAT CHANGES THE DUCHESS’S ATTITUDE TOWARD HER, AS THE ARGUMENT TELLS:

  Upon this nearer acquaintance the Duchess now changes her mind: thinks less about the reputation which, bruited by idle tongues, follows Fiorinda as a train of fire some red disastrous comet: in fine, surrenders wholly to the spell of this Dark Lady, in whose scintillating, unanalysable, and perilous perfections she seems to see (as a rose might see its own image mirrored but changed to incandescence in the surface of a pool of molten metal) a counter-image of her own inmost self: Rosa alba incarnata looking upon La Rose Noire.

  MEANWHILE, THE LOVE BETWEEN FIORINDA AND MORVILLE DOES NOT STAY SWEET FOR LONG. EDDISON ANALYSES THEIR PROBLEMS IN NOTES WRITTEN ON 30 APRIL, 1 MAY, AND 25 MAY 1945:

  Make it abundantly clear that she is honest and whole hearted in her efforts to make their marriage a ‘marriage of true minds’ (and bodies). She has, through experience and the maturity of her self knowledge, far greater power (and also, doubtless, far greater will) to do this than she had when Baias was the partner: but Morville’s selfishness (in its peculiar form of weakness, self-distrust, gratuitous jealousy, fear of her beauty, of her wit, of her incalculableness, and of her abandonments) defeats her power: even Hers.

  Baias had defeated her (and defeated his own ends) by selfishness in the shape of too unadulterated a masculinity: seeking to enslave her, crudely avid of his own greedy lusts, crudely obtuse to the instinctive subtleties of her innate and divine beauty, which offended Him – as pearls before a swine – the perfection and acme of all unspeakable excesses.

  Morville, to the contrary, defeats her by his unmanlike inability to take the lead: his timidity, self-pity, mistrustful puritanism, and self-absorption, and these at every return make him retire into his shell to brood and hatch out unworthy discontents and suspicions.

  Condense all this into one great scene between them—? al fresco, on a perfect summer’s evening (? 1st June) not far from Reisma.

  1st June (see last preceding sentence): Have in mind, in writing this, the ‘awakening’ scene between Barganax and Fiorinda (end of Chapter XXXIII and of Book VI); and point, by juxtaposition not by disquisition, the tragic contrast – tragic because this present scene (Chapter XXX) seals Morville’s fate. (It is at the end of this scene that, in fact, Fiorinda for the first time realized Morville’s inescapable ch
aracter and destiny that she had in mind later in Memison [A Fish Dinner in Memison, ‘Queen of Hearts and Queen of Spades’] when she said to the Duchess that Morville was ‘the kind of a bull-calf that is likely to sprout horns etc., within the first year.’)

  Fiorinda is, for the first time in her life, in that deep content and receptiveness that (had Morville been the man to divine it and make himself part of it) might have been the unshakeable foundation (as it was later, on July 22 in Reisma, between her and Barganax) of eternal true love. In an outward-seeming idleness, but inward contemplation, she exercises her divine power of (a) making the moment stand still and be sucked like an orange, and of (b) packing the moment full of pasts and futures which thereby become presents: i.e., of tasting eternity in the interludes of time. (Some faint foretaste or instinct of this was I think in HLE’s1 habit of living happy times and episodes over again in memory: treating her memories as present possession, for present enjoyment, the past not dead, but a thing to be preserved, watered, and treasured. This must surely be part of the nature of divine )

  Morville breaks the spell by some discordant remark, which reveals his ‘commonness’ and unworthiness and the impassable gulf of self-centred timorous doubts and discordants which divide him from his wife.

  AS THE STAR OF MORVILLE WANES, THAT OF BARGANAX WAXES. THE ARGUMENT FOR CHAPTER XXX CLOSES WITH THIS SENTENCE:

  Fiorinda is passionately adored at first sight by Barganax on midsummer night, 775 [AZC], at a ball given by his mother in Memison.

  XXXI

  THE BEAST OF LAIMAK

  THIS CHAPTER ENVELOPS CHAPTERS II, V, AND VII OF A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON, AND IT SHOULD BE READ WITH THEM IN MIND. ON PAGE 33 THE KING SPEAKS OF VISITING THE VICAR IN LAIMAK TWO WEEKS BEFORE MIDSUMMER, AND EDDISON PLANNED FOR THIS CHAPTER TO BEGIN WITH THAT EPISODE. ON 27 JANUARY 1945 HE WROTE NOTES FOR THIS:

  THE King’s visit to the Vicar in Laimak – three nights (June 9–11, 775 [AZC]).

  The Vicar hastily makes Gabriel go and meet Gilmanes (who is expected to come for secret discussions on 8th) postponing his visit: he does not trust Gabriel to play a discreet part in the King’s presence, and fears his presence may be suspected too by the King.

  AFTER NARRATING THE EPISODE BETWEEN THE KING AND THE VICAR, EDDISON PLANNED TO TELL MORE OF THE KING’S ACTIVITIES DURING HIS DAYS IN MEMISON THAN HE TELLS IN CHAPTERS II AND V OF A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON. HOWEVER, EDDISON NEVER DRAFTED THESE NOTES, AND THE OUTLINE FOR THIS SECTION OF THE CHAPTER ONLY SAYS: ‘THE KING IN MEMISON.’ THE ARGUMENT FOR THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES THE GROWTH OF THE VICAR’S CONSPIRACY IN REREK AND TELLS THE KING’S RESPONSE TO IT:

  The Vicar (whose policy, as Beroald once said, ‘is that of the duck: above water, idle and scarce seen to stir; but under water, secretly and speedily swimming towards his purpose’) has ever since the rebellion been unobtrusively but with patience and thoroughness consolidating his power in Rerek. By firm government, lavishness in both promise and performance, good-fellowship, princely hospitality, a certain directness that tempts many to trust him where they had wiselier been ware of him, and by a set policy of fastening a private hold on each man worthy his attention (laying men under obligations to his person, or holding over them his knowledge of some secret misdoing which they would least of all wish to see brought to light), he has in the four years of his vicariate used the royal commission (as Beroald said) ‘to grapple to his private allegiance the whole mid kingdom ’twixt Megra and the Zenner’.

  The King, who has for years understood, as from inside, this ‘most wolvy and most foxy sergeant major general of all the Devil’s engineers,’ and loves him dearly, partly for the very danger of him and for the zest of feeling his own powers stretched to their uttermost in controlling himn, is well alive to these proceedings, but cannot be moved by those nearest in his counsel (Beroald, Jeronimy, Roder, Barganax) to take overt action to coerce him.

  At last, this summer of 775, the King has secret intelligence (which he partly discloses to the Chancellor and to the Duchess but to no person else) of a conspiracy to seize Rerek and set it up as a realm to itself, with the Vicar for king. The conspirators have appointed to meet one night in Middlemead, a lonely ruined farmstead on the upper waters of the Zenner; and here the King means to surprise them in person: ‘wherein if I bring not the rest to destruction and him to his obedience, at least I’ll die attempting it.’ At the last moment he makes the Chancellor wait behind, a few miles short of Middlemead, and himself goes on, completely alone.

  This incredible act of daring succeeds. The Parry, already misdoubting him of the sufficiency of these men he has assembled to be his instruments, and (which the King had with unerring insight gambled upon) coming himself to heel when faced with the King in person, accepts the King’s whispered diagnosis of the situation: namely, that the Vicar has lighted by chance upon a wasps’ nest which the King has come himself to take. The five rebel lords, suddenly surprised, are overcome by the King and the Vicar after a bloody fight, and their three survivors (Gilmanes, Arquez, and Clavius) are, upon the King’s direction, then and there beheaded by Gabriel Flores.

  TO THIS POINT, THE ARGUMENT HAS NOT REALLY EXPRESSED ANYTHING THAT HAS NOT ALREADY BEEN NARRATED IN A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON, BUT THE CONCLUDING SECTION SHOWS HOW EDDISON PLANNED TO GIVE NEW TREATMENT TO THE EPISODE OF MIDDLEMEAD:

  This episode, treated in detail in A Fish Dinner in Memison, is in this present book not narrated directly but disclosed in a private and secret conversation, after the event, between the Vicar and his mother Marescia, now aged seventy-three. He has always been her favourite child, and so far as he ever opens his mind to anybody it is to her. But even from her sympathetic ear the greater part (for example, the true extent of his implication in this conspiracy) is forever hidden.

  The Vicar’s personal attachment to the King not even this treason can break: in fact the outcome is an immeasurable strengthening of it. The savage dog has, for the first time, snapped at his master. But he knows he ought not to have done it, and is sorry. He will never snap at King Mezentius again; but all the more is he inwardly resolved to brook no overlordship in Rerek (were the King to die) from a young quat such as Styllis, or, for that matter, from Barganax.

  Bad feeling has been growing between the Vicar and Styllis to an extent that gives Rosma real anxiety. For the first time she comes to be ranged in a definite hostility against her cousin the Vicar, and tries, in sober earnest not in half earnest as of old, to set the King against him. But her efforts merely harden the King in his curious affection for this untameable unforeseeable ravening wild beast of his, grown now so big that by no power on earth can he be safely handled but by the King’s personal ascendancy alone.

  IN JANUARY 1945, EDDISON DRAFTED NOTES FOR THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE VICAR AND HIS MOTHER, AND THESE NOTES FOCUS UPON ROSMA’S ENMITY TOWARD THE VICAR:

  The Vicar and Marescia. Bring out in this conversation that fact – shrewdly suspected, and (?) revealed by some indiscretion of the questions which has come to his ear, by the Vicar – that Rosma is now definitely his enemy on account of the bad blood between him and Styllis. Also bring out fact that the Vicar (before Middlemead) began to believe that Rosma’s influences had in fact turned the King against him, but the episode had now convinced him he was mistaken, and his whole mind is now cleared of that suspicion and concentrated on effecting a long-term reinsurance policy against the event of Styllis’s succession to the throne.

  ON MAY 25, 1945, EDDISON WROTE MORE NOTES FOR THIS CONVERSATION:

  Laimak: the Vicar and Marescia.

  Steer round the rocks by

  a) making the Vicar not reveal too much and

  b) making it clear (and this can partly be done in the earlier chapters) that his relationship with his mother is strangely confidential, and that is why he can say as much as he does. Make clear at end of scene that he has not told the whole truth – not even to her (and the reader ought to realise what the whole truth is: also that the King had astu
tely guessed true).

  XXXII

  THEN, GENTLE CHEATER

  THE ARGUMENT FOR THIS CHAPTER BEGINS THUS:

  THE STROKE at Middlemead (publicly understood, with the King’s connivance, to have been a signal service to the crown on the part of the Vicar) was on 26 June 775 [AZC]. During the following few weeks, Barganax’s frequenting of Fiorinda’s company has become matter for every scandalous breath in both Memison and Zayana.

  ON 27 JANUARY 1945, EDDISON MADE NOTES FOR THE EARLY DAYS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BARGANAX AND FIORINDA:

  Barganax, except for purposes of his weekly presences in Zayana, is now always in Memison. On polite (but never friendly) terms with Morville: paints Fiorinda’s portrait (the El Greco). This arranged on the Thursday, June 25 – first sitting to be Sunday, June 28. This portrait painting is his very transparent stalking-horse. Morville is generally present and conversation is discreet.

  June 28 – Barganax begins by talking about the portrait and the difficulties. Fiorinda is very knowledgeable about this, which delights him. She also talks about his management of his dukedom, and is in her turn delighted: he is evidently not disposed to let any affair interfere with that (or with his art).

  After a few days Barganax gets a private interview – in Memison, on the out-terraces, in the heat of the day (Date: Wednesday July 1st) Fiorinda very subtly and delicately begins asking him about his views on love. This talk is interrupted by Morville. He is correct in his behavior but clearly angry to find them together.

  ON THE SAME DAY THAT HE MADE THE NOTES ABOVE, EDDISON DRAFTED A WORKING VERSION FOR THE PRIVATE INTERVIEW OF WEDNESDAY 1 JULY 775 AZC ON THE OUT-TERRACES:

  Barganax: The art of love is the art of pleasing women.

  Fiorinda: But your grace has never been married.

  Barganax: That is true, but true also, what I said.

  Fiorinda: I daresay it is true. Does it mean we are harder to please?