by E R Eddison
‘That is wisdom,’ said Barganax. ‘That is truth.’ He settled himself on the stone of the balcony that was warm yet after a day of unclouded sun, and, sitting there against the sky, said: ‘Our talk hath wandered somewhat beside my purpose, which concerned the making of worlds. Were I to tell you I saw one such devised and created, under my nose, a month ago, at supper-table, would you credit that?’
Doctor Vandermast paused. ‘As coming from your grace, known to me for a man of keen judgement and not given to profane jesting, I should impartially examine it.’
‘I have not told you I saw it. The more I consider of it, the less know I whether I truly beheld that marvel or ’twere but legerdemain.’
‘If it pleased your grace open it to me more at large—’
‘Better not. I have indeed almost clean forgotten it, save the circumstances. But this I will tell you, that I seemed, when ’twas over, to have lived myself (and yet something more than myself: mixed of myself and his serene highness my Father, and, in the mixture, may be a less than him and something less too than me, as impurer; like as orange-colour hath not the pureness of red neither of yellow, being compound of both) – in that mixed self, I seemed to have lived a life-time in that world. Well,’ he said, after a moment: ‘I sucked its orange. But a cheap frippery of a world it was, take it for all in all: made tolerable, as I bethink me now, but by rumours and fore-savourings of this. And I seemed, besides, to have looked on from without, while untold ages passed there: first the mere ball of incandescence: then the cooling: the millennial ages through which a kind of life was brewing, in enormous wastefulness and painfulness and ever-growing interweaving of tangle, until human kind began there: slow generations, ever changing and never (on the whole) bettering, of human kind, such as we be. Ay, and I was stood by, viewing it thus from withoutward, even at the golden moment for which that defaced, gelded, exiled creation, so like the real world, yet so unlike, had from its first beginnings waited and thirsted: its dissolution. And that was when she, to pleasure whose chanceable idle soon-changed fantasy it was made, took from the braided blackness of her hair a pin starred with anachite diamonds, and as idly with it touched the bubble. And at that prick – puff! ’twas gone: nought left but the little wet mark on the table to witness it ever existed.’
Vandermast said: ‘With one breath They create: with one breath uncreate.’
‘I have forgot, almost,’ said the Duke. Then, ‘Indeed since I spoke to you even this instant moment gone, old sir, all is fled from me, like as dreams are scattered and broken at the very words we wake with on our lips to recount them. This remains (O the unsounded seas of women’s bloods), that that night she wore glow-worms in her hair.’
‘There is danger for a man,’ said Vandermast, after a silence, ‘in knowing over-much.’
‘Or for a God?’
‘To be able to answer that with certainty,’ said Vandermast, ‘were, for a mortal, to know over-much.’
XXXV
DIET A CAUSE
EDDISON WROTE NO ARGUMENT FOR THIS CHAPTER, AND THERE ARE NO EXTANT DRAFTS FOR IT. HE DISCUSSES IT BRIEFLY IN ‘THE FISH DINNER AND ITS AFTERMATH’.
XXXVI
ROSA MUNDORUM
VELVRAZ Sebarm stands upon the lake, among orange trees and pomegranates and almonds and peaches of the south, a mile north-west over the water from Zayana town, and two miles by land: an old castle built of honey-coloured marble at the tip of a long sickle-shaped ness that sweeps round southwards, with wild gardens running down in the rocks to the water’s edge, and behind the castle a wood of holm-oaks making a windbreak against the north. Here my Lady Fiorinda was keeping household in June of that next year, some few months later than these things last told of, the Duke having put it at her disposition for such times as she should not be resident in Memison or his guest in Acrozayana.
It was midsummer morning, at the half-light before the break of day. For the heat of the night, the curtains were left undrawn in the great bedchamber that looks three ways across the water: south, towards Zayana, whose towers, spires, and gables seemed in this twilight to be of no solider substance than the sky against which they rose, the reflections of them barely set moving by a ripple on the lake’s placid surface: west, to the isle of Ambremerine, wooded with oak and cedar and cypress and strawberry-tree, and all misted with the radiance behind it of the setting silver moon: east, across low vineyard-clad country, to the sea at Bishfirthhead. Within that chamber the colourless luminosity of the summer night, beginning to obey at this hour some influence of the unrisen sun, partly obscured, partly revealed, shapes and presences: lustrous balls of moon-stone and fire-opal like a valance of strange fruits fringing the canopy of the great bed, which was built to the Duke’s designing and by art of Doctor Vandermast, and with posts of solid gold: lamps and sconces and branched hanging candlesticks of gold and silver and crystal: pictures let into the panels of the doors of tall wardrobe presses: bookshelves filled with books between the windows: two scented lamps, filigree-work of orichalc, burning for night-lights at the bed’s head, one upon either side, whose beams dimly lighted a frieze, of eagles, phoenixes, chimaeras, satyrs, gorgons, winged bulls, sea-goats with fish-tailed bodies, water-horses, butterfly-ladies, carved out of rose-coloured marble in high relief on a background of peacock green. And with the incense of the lamps was mingled a perfume more elemental and of a sweeter and more disturbing luxury: of that lady’s breath and her sleeping presence.
She lay there prone, in an innocency of beauty asleep, face turned aside and pillowed in the curve of her right elbow, her left hand inshrining its smoothness between smooth right arm and cheek. All naked she slept, sheet and bed-clothes thrown off to lie in a heap upon the floor at the bedside for warmness of the night. Anthea, too, was asleep on the bed, curled up in her lynx shape at her mistress’s feet.
From the gardens below the western window, the first bird-song sounded: bodiless little madrigal of a peggy-whitethroat, ending upon that falling cadence. So, and again. A third time; and the dividing notes took to themselves the articulation of human speech: Campaspe singing her morning hymn to Her that is mistress both of night and of day:
‘Our Lady, awake!
Darkness is breaking.
Bat wings are folded:
Crop-full the owl.
Night-flowers close,
Their sweetness withhold:
The east pales and quickens to gold:
Night-raven and ghoul
Flee to their make.
A breath of morning stirs on the lake.
Colours disclose:
Carnation, rose.
The Worlds are waking—
Thou, Onemost, awake!’
At the sound of that singing and at a touch of the lynx’s cold nose against her foot, Fiorinda, with a little unarticulate slumbrous utterance still betwixt sleeping and waking, turned on her back. In a more slowed voluptuousness than of python uncoiling, she stretched her sleep-loosened limbs to the wide ambiency of self-oblation, and, with that, her whole body was become a source of light: sea-glitter between her opening eyelids: a Praxitelean purity, swan-white fined to tinctures of old ivory, in breast, throat, thigh, and in all the supple rondure of her hips: panther-black livery of the darkness that burned as consuming fires, blackness shining down blackness to the out-splendouring of all earthly suns. Her youth, with the lithe wild-beast strength and dove-like languor of these perfections, shadowless now, faintly incandescent, was transfigured to that ache and surquedry of beauty which great poets and great lovers, uncontented by earth’s counterfeits, have strained inward eye and sense to draw down from Olympus, those things’ true home; where they subsist unsmirched by times or allegiances unsubject to their sovereignty, and are not exiles bound servant to ends not theirs. Thus for a while (which whether it were of minutes or of ages, were a question barren of all result or answer) she lay: She of Herself: the verities of Her waking presence manifest, convenable to sight, touch, hearing, scent, and tast
e: here, in Velvraz Sebarm.
Rising at last from the golden bed, She stood to contemplate awhile, in the tall looking-glass by the growing light, the counter-image of Her own face and, at their plenilune upon which not even the eyes of a God can long bear to rest, Her ultimate beauties, from unbegun eternity lode-star, despair, and under-song, of all hearts’ desires. And now, with Her standing so in deific self-knowing, everything that was not Her went out like the flame of a blown-out candle: the room, the familiarities of that Meszrian countryside, the softness of velvet carpet under Her feet, fallen to the formless ruin of oblivion.
Beneath Her, presently, some unfading dawn uncovered itself: morning of life, ancienter than worlds: saffron-hued, touching cliff and glacier to pale gold, and throwing into gullies and across snow-fields shadows of an azured transparency, chill as the winds that sprang up with day. From behind Her mountain-top where She stood, the sun lept up, throwing the shadow of the mountain mile upon mile across lesser heights to the westward that were gilded with the first beams, their nearer summits bathing in primrose radiancy, their more distant in more paler, more air-softened, hues; range succeeding range to where, over the furthermost crest, day was breaking on the sea-strand and sea-foams of Paphos. Long and level in the mid distance far below Her, grey-houndish clouds drove past, trailing ever-changing shadows across the landscape of ridges and hill-tops and deep-cleft dales. Against that dawn-illumined background the great cast shadow of Olympus rested, a wide-flung wine-dark mantle of obscurity, wearing on its outermost edge a smoulder of crimson fire. Anthea and Campaspe, in their nymphish true outwards, knelt at Her feet in virgin snow. In the depths, but far above the habitations of men (if men were yet, or yet continued), a gyr-falcon, queen of the air, took her morning flight.
But She, eternal Aphrodite of the flickering eyelids and the violet-sweet breast, laughter-loving, honey-sweet, child of Zeus, She for whom all is made, spoke and said:
‘Rise you worlds, made and unmade, and worship Me.
‘Worship Me, women of all worlds, dresses of mine, shadows of Me in turbid water. I am the truth of you. Without those glints or keepsakes that are in you of Me, you are nothing.
‘O men, kings and lords of the ages, heroes, lovers of wisdom, great strikers, adventurers upon perilous seas, makers and doers, minds and bodies framed in His image that made you, and made Himself, and because without Me Godhead were but a trash-name, therefore, to have Me beside Him from the beginning, made Me: Rise, and worship Me. Rise and, who dares, love Me. But he that would love Me, be it God Himself, shall first kiss My feet.’
Unnumbered as motes in a sunbeam, or as the unnumbered laughter of the waves of ocean, eyes were upon Her from all remoteness of earth and sky and sea, and the rumour of them was as the rumour and rustle of starlings’ wings flying in flocks of unnumbered thousands.
She said: ‘Look (if your sight can face the nakedness of your hidden mind) into the sea-fire of My eyes. Look: My lips, blood-red, that can at one imperial kiss drain out the rendered soul from your body, and give it back so dyed with the taste of Me as from that now unto your death you shall seek Me ever, never finding yet never altogether losing. These jewels for snares in My hair’s darkness are sleet and scourge of wild-fire. The moth-like bare touch of My hand can do away worlds or raise up the dead. In Me is the Bitter-sweet; grave, cradle, and marriage-bed of all contrairs: Rose of the Worlds: Black Lily, Black Flame, that but with the glance do stab, sear, and violently stir to one essence, spirit and sense. In all noble enterprise, in all your most fantastical desires, behold here your cynosure: this centre where all lines meet. I am She that changeth, yet changeth not. Many countenances I have, many dresses, bringing to My lover the black or the red, spade or heart, or pureness of golden flowers or a gold of waning moons at morning; and maidenhead always new. Of all that was, is, or is to come, I, even I of Myself, am end, reason, last elixir. He that loveth, and he love not Me, loveth Death. Love Me who dares. He shall be Mine, I his, for ever; and if it were possible for more than ever, then for ever more.’
She ended: terrible, lifted up above all worlds, shining down all other lights, even to the sun’s.
From behind Her, eastwards, the other side from Paphos, came a roaring of avalanche and rockfall. Mists blowing upwards swallowed the mountain-top in a freezing tempest of sleet and lightnings and thundering darkness. In that void where duration can have no hour-glass, time stood still, or ceased.
Then the mists, falling apart, opened a sudden window upon Ambremerine and clear morning. Fiorinda had taken about Her lovely shoulders a robe of diaphanous black silk figured with-flower-work of gold and crimson and margery-pearls. Beside her the two nymphs, looking upon her in fearful adoration, were still kneeling.
Some three hours later, about seven o’clock, the Chancellor, riding up the Memison road a mile or so north from Zayana, had sight of her above him in the high open downland: white jennet, french hood, grass-green riding-habit, merlin on fist. She saw him and began to come down leisurely by the directest way, a steep rocky slope, slacking rein for the little mare, clever as a cat, to choose her steps amid the tangle of creeping rhododendron and daphne with boulders and stumps and old scree hidden beneath it. ‘Blessings of the morning upon you, my lady sister,’ said he, when they were within talking-distance. ‘I am from Sestola: a message from the King’s highness (Gods send he live for ever), for the Duke. You and he are commanded to supper tonight, at Sestola.’
‘Excellent. Have you told his grace?’
‘Not yet. I intended for Velvraz Sebarm, supposing to find him there.’
‘That was a strange unlikely guess. Dwells he not in Zayana?’
‘A new custom, then, when your ladyship lies in Velvraz Sebarm.’
‘Have you breakfasted?’
‘A bite and a sup.’
‘I too. Let us breakfast together ere you go back to Acrozayana.’
They turned off from the road at a walking-pace by the path that goes to Velvraz Sebarm. Their morning shadows, still long, went before them. A heat-mist was rising from Zayana lake, and all the soft landscape westward was golden with morning. ‘I would counsel you, brother,’ she said, ‘to stick to your politics: not pry into my domestical affairs. I too have my policies: have long ago learned, like as my Lord Barganax (as you, I thought, had likely observed), that prime article of wisdom of the learned doctor: nothing over-much.’
They rode awhile in silence.
‘How like you of my little falcon? Is she not a jewel?’
The Lord Beroald perfunctorily gave it a look. ‘Good for flying at vermin.’
Upon that, sourly said, she glanced sidelong at him out of her slanting green eyes. ‘Clouds in your face? And so fair a morning?’
‘Clouds from Rerek, may be.’
‘Are but smoke-balls. Blow them away.’
‘The council will sit today. By latest secret advertisements I have had, he still draweth forces to Laimak.’
‘And what else indeed, then, would you look for?’
‘Nought else; save now for the sequel. ’Tis time to end it.’
A satirical sumptuosity of suppressed laughter stirred at the corners of that lady’s mouth. ‘Heaven shield me from a condition where you and your friends swayed all. I think you would leave us no great eminent thing extant might you but avail to end it, lest by some far-fetched possibility it grow to danger perhaps your little finger.’
‘I am a man of common prudence.’
‘God for witness, were you that and no more, I think I’d hate you for it.’
‘A quality uncommon in some quarters today.’
‘Some quarters? O lawyers’ equivocations! Which then?’
‘Even the highest.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said she. ‘Some safety there for unsafety, by favour of heaven.’
‘Trouble not your sweet perverse heart as for that. The wolf will run: you shall see.’
‘I shall see good sport, then.’
The C
hancellor eyed her with a sardonic smile. ‘Your ladyship was not always so chary in ending an inconvenience.’
‘You think not?’
‘What of your first husband? What of your second?’
‘Foh!’ she said. ‘That was far another matter, and where there was cause why. Small nastiness, of a sort as plenty as blackberries, and thus rightly (with help of your gentle kindness, dear brother) made away.’
He laughed. ‘Praise where praise is due, madam. You asked no help from me when you did up Morville.’
They were come now to the gardens, where the path leads round by the waterside to the castle gate between drifts of stately golden-eyed daisies with black-curling petals of a deep wine-purple and, at their feet, pink-coloured stonecrops on whose platter-like heads scores of butterflies sipped honey and sunned their wings. Fiorinda said, ‘Because a dog grins his teeth, that means not necessarily he means to bite his master, I have known my ban-dog growl at things I could not myself neither see nor hear, much less smell. And, ’cause my dog’s a good dog, and I a good mistress, let him growl. Like enough, hath his reasons.’
‘Very well argued. But when, being bid stop growling, yet he growleth, that is not so good.’
‘O,’ said she, with a little scornful backward movement of her head, ‘I follow not these subtleties. Why be so unlike your most deep discerning self, brother? When have you known the King miss in aught he set out to perform? Am I to tell you he hath power to crush him we speak on, soon as crush an importunate flea, were he so minded?’
‘I dearly wish he would do it,’ said the Chancellor.
‘Go then, tell him to. I think you shall have the flea in your ear for your pains. As good crush me!’
As they rode up, they beheld now before them Duke Barganax, upon a marble bench without the gate under an arbour of climbing roses. The involutions of their petals held every indeterminate fair colour that lies between primrose and incarnadine: the scent of them, the mere perfume of love. He sat there like a man altogether given over to the influences of the time and the place, fondling the lynx beneath the chin and sipping hippocras from a goblet of silver. There was a merry glow in his eyes as he stood up, unbonneting, to bid her good-morrow. Helping her down from the saddle he seized occasion to salute her with a kiss, which she, as in a studied provokement and naughtiness, took upon a cold cheek and, when at second attempt he would have had her lips, dexterously withheld them.