by E R Eddison
My Lady Fiorinda wore, over all, a hooded mantle of smoke-black silk which, billowing as she walked, took to itself at each step new folds, new mysteries, fire-winged with beauties and graces that were themselves unseen. The Duke, as with every faculty strained up to this fugato, came a pace or so behind her. In the full pool of light before the doorway she stopped, not ten feet from where Rosma stood hid. ‘Well?’ she said, and her lily-honeyed voice, potent as some unavouched caress, roused whirlpools in the blood-warm lampless sources of sense and being. ‘Are you content, now that you have driven me like a tame beast as far as this empty banquet-hall and empty deserted gallery? We’re too early. What means your grace to do now?’
‘Look upon you,’ said Barganax laughing. ‘Talk to you. ’Tis the only place I shall get the chance in private.’
‘Well, here I am. And here are my ears to talk to.’ So saying, she threw back her hood, giving him, by turns of her head, the side-view, either way the same. Her hair was put up in like fashion as eleven months ago it had been, at Reisma: strained evenly back from the parting and from those border-line fledgings, finer than unspun silk, at the temples and at the smooth of her neck behind her ears. And at the back of her head the great tresses were gathered and bound down, doubled and folded in themselves like snakes lying together: a feelable stypticness of night: thunder unshapen to silence and, as by miracle, turned visible. These bewitchments, sitting close and exquisite in the nape of her white neck, she thus manifested: then gave him her eyes.
Surely, thus to mingle eyes with that lady was to be drowned under by a cataclysm that hurled out of their place the sea-gates which divide heaven from earth, flesh from spirit, and to be swept up so into Her oneness: into the storm and night of Her peace, who is mistress, deviser, giver of all. Who, all being given, gives yet the unfillable desire for more, and gives, too, eternally, that overplus to fill it: gives in that divine giving, infinite in contradiction and variety, Her many-coloured divine self, proud with his pride which, ever as brought down by Hers, is as everlastingly, through that unsatisfiable satiety of giving, re-estated. As a God might stand incarnate in fire-hot stone, so, while Barganax stared into those sea-strange intolerable Olympian eyes, the deep-throned majesty of his will rose and, as lode-stone points to lode-star, pointed out her. Like a man who gropes for words in a dream, he said: ‘And, under that cloak?’
The falcon-flight of her beauty, stooping earthwards again, answered from her mouth: ‘You are very inquisitive upon my affairs. See, then, how obliging I have been.’ She let fall her cloak and stood before him in skin-close bodice with skirt flowing wide from the hips down, of red corn-rose sendaline: the dress she had worn for him that first night in Reisma.
‘Then I am answered,’ he said, surveying her slowly down from throat to emerald-spangled shoe, and thence slowly up by the same road, and so once more to her face.
Fiorinda’s eyes, that were a-dance with the scents of earth again, came suddenly to rest, in a wide-open stillness of intention, on his. Her lips, bitter-sweet scarlet ministers of mockery, were grave now: lips of the Knidian Aphrodite. Then, some untameable star rising in her eyes, ‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘it hath a happy commodity, this gown: like as your grace’s jests. Remember you not so?’
‘As my jests?’
‘Come they not off, well and excellent?’
He bent down, one knee on the pavement, to pick up for her the fallen cloak. Being they were alone and unobserved, he locked suddenly his arms about her, his empery, his new-found-land, and for a minute abode so, crushing his shut eyes, that called in aid now a sense both more piercing and more fierier than their own particular of seeing, blindly into the pleats of her skirt. In this she remained motionless: only trembling a little, yielding a little. When the Duke was on his feet again, she had covered her face with her hands, leaving to be seen of her but these hands and arms in their immaculation of whiteness: the jet-black of her hair: this dress, sheathing her like a flame. ‘O madonna, why will you look at me through your fingers?’ he said, opening his arms.
As a lily leans to its reflection in still water, she came nearer: an opening of the windows of heaven to pour down blessings: nearer, till her breasts touched him about the heart, and her face was hidden on his shoulder. ‘Are you still to learn that I never promise? Most of all, never to you. And this, I suppose,’ she said between his kisses on her neck and hair, ‘for two very ridiculous reasons: ten times more ridiculous and unreasonable when taken together. The first, because I do know you, within and without. And the second,’ here, with a sudden intake of her breath, turning her head on his shoulder she gave him her lips, nectar-tongued: not without letting him taste in the end, upon a more melting, then more impetuous, closeness of insinuation of her immortal sweet body to his, a light remembrancer, between play and fierceness, of her teeth: ‘And the second, because I am sometimes almost persuaded there may be no help, but you shall begin, someday, in very truth, to make me in love with you.’
Rosma, having employed her advantage to hear and narrowly observe these two lovers, and what way in their loveship they went to work, said in herself: ‘So you never promise? But I promise. And most of all, to him.’ With slow unsteady gait she returned privately to her chamber.
A hundred feet in length is that banquet-room in Sestola, by forty wide, and the height of it twenty foot good to the cornice and, from thence to the huge ridge-beams of the roof, of oak curiously carved and blackened with age, twenty-five foot more. Upon the walls of old red sandstone, rough-hewn, gritty to the touch, and of the deep cold purple colour of leaf-shadows on brick in hot sunshine, hung all kind of war-gear: spears and swords and daggers and twirl-spears, maces, battleaxes, morning-stars: byrnies of linked mail, helms and shields, corslets and iron gloves: some from the antique time, some new: all of them pieces of proof wrought by noted armourers, and graved or damascened with gold and silver. From the western end, under the music gallery, lofty doors open south upon the portico. These, and the tall windows spaced six foot apart along the south wall, stood wide now to the June night. Under that gallery lesser doors lead to kitchens, buttery, stillroom, larders and sculleries, and the servants’ quarters. The dais, at the eastern end, was carpeted with a weave of mixed wool and silk, having a glitter of silver threads in web and woof. From the middle of it two high-seats faced down the hall, having each a table before it for eating and drinking; and outward from these in a half circle, five to the right, five to the left, stood lesser chairs of state with their tables before them. On the rush-strewn pavement of the floor below the dais a dozen long tables were set lengthways in two double rows of three and three, leaving a broad space up the body of the hall between the double rows. At the higher tables (save upon the dais, where the seats yet stood empty) the company were already assembled, lords, ladies, and gentlemen, all in holiday attire: they of most account at the four tables next below the dais and, at the next four, gentry and officers of lower estate. At the lowest tables, nearest the doors, were places set for the remainder: here (the better to assure decorum) the men on the outward, southward, side, and womenkind on the northward.
Great was the sparkle of jewels and great the splendour of rich silks and velvets of many colours under a hundred hanging lamps which, depending in four rows by long chains of bronze from the high timbers of the roof, wove with their beams between the upward gaze and those high dark empty spaces a tented canopy of air, radiant, demi-translucent, beneath which all was light and clarity of vision. These lamps, shining downward, mixed their rays with the nearer, warmer and more tendering glow of hundreds of candles set orderly in branched candlesticks of cut and polished crystal, eight candlesticks on every table.
The musicians tuned their instruments, preluded and, when the murmur of talk was stilled and the guests rising in their places turned all to face westward toward the doors, struck up a cavatina of old Meszria. A lovely, houseless, land-remembering air was this: rising, falling, returning on itself as loth to depart: even
just as a linnet’s child, perched with its mother on a fence, quivers its wings to be fed, then leaps fluttering over her head to perch at her other side and in quivering eagerness creeps near to her again, and so and again continually. And ever as that air hovered to full close, always it by some exquisite involution refused and rose circling again, as if end were but foil or frame to some never-ending being and unfolding, of which even the beginning was impregnate with a prophetic sadness of farewells, and the expected end held ever, and at every approach and putting-off, the more of earth-deep promise in it of renewal and spring to be. This music, bodied forth on the plangorous caressful singing of the viols, smoothed the sense of Anthea’s and Campaspe’s nymphish ears, as they stood listening near the head of that high table under the window close below the dais, with echoes and overtones of a more diviner music: of my Lady Fiorinda’s remembered voice, Olympian, all-beguiling, beyond all passion appassionate, yet immaculate, yet fancy-free. And beneath the ever-changing flow and wonder of that melody, plucked notes throbbed, of bass viol and theorbo, in an unchanging rhythm: deep under-march of eternity.
Now, in one tenor with that slow-throbbing plucking of strings, came a clanking of iron-shod boots from without the great doors, and a company of the King’s bodyguard marched two by two up the hall. Picked men they were, deep-chested, hard, fierce of aspect, veterans of the wars in Akkama: helmed and byrnied with black iron, and in their plated gorgets and their sword-belts of black bulls-hide were studs and rivets of flashing brass. They halted in two lines, spears at salute, their backs to the tables, leaving wide clear passage-way between the lines, through which ten trumpeters resplendent in cloth of silver, each man of them with his shining trumpet at his hip, passed up now in single file and, mounting the dais, took station, five upon this side, five upon that, against the walls north and south of the great seats. Following the trumpeters came a score of waiting-maids, all in white and garlanded on their unbound hair some with bryony, some with ivyberries, some with flower of honeysuckle. Of these, some strewed roseleaves on the scented rushes of the pavement: the rest, bearing each her little silver basin, dipped their fingers as they walked and, at every step, sprinkled on this side and on that sweet-smelling perfumes. The rose-leaf-scatterers when they were come up upon the dais shed petals no more, but disposed themselves orderly along either wall, their faces to the tables, their backs to the trumpeters. The sprinklers of perfume, ere joining their fellows, went twice about the whole floor of the dais, meeting and crossing, back and forth, in a sway and intricacy of movement that took time from the interlacing notes of the viols, until all the woven carpet, and, most of all, that which lay in the half-moon space before the tables, exhaled sweetness, as beds of thyme or camomile, being trod upon, send up wafts of their sharp delicate scent. And now, as the King entered in his majesty, those trumpets of silver, pointing upward to the unseen spaces of the roof, sent flight after flight of silver notes showering like meteors, riding like valkyries of the Father of Ages, through over beneath and amidst of the fine-drawn moon-stilled cloud-processions of the cavatina, which by these fanfares was neither interrupted, out-moded, nor cast in shade but, taking them into itself, was by them hardened, masculated, made to tower in climax.
His doublet was of a rich velvet of a most fine texture, revealing, as it had been his very skin, the ripple and play of the great muscles as he moved: the hue of it, warm brown of peat-water where it runs deepest between moss-hags in full sun: slashed with blue satin (wave-reflections of blue heaven on such waters), and the lips of the slashes close-broidered with wire of silver. The ruff about his neck and the lesser ruffs at his wrists were stiffened with saffron: his shoes of velveted brown leather overwrought with gold and silver thread, and their buckles set with yellow diamonds. The linked collar which he wore between neck and shoulder had every link broad as a man’s hand, all in filigree of pure gold and ablaze with precious stones: sapphire and topaz, smaragd and ruby and opal, diamond and orient pearl. The belt about his middle was of black cobra-skin, studded with great diamonds in figure of stars and thunderbolts, and fastened by a clasp of pale gold carved in the image of two hippogriffs, nose to nose, wings erect, cabochon rubies for the eyes of them, and hundreds of tiny stones, topaz and burnt topaz and brown zircon and every kind of tourmaline, tracing the convolutions of their manes. Upon his head shone the crown of old Meszria, wrought with artificial semblances, in gold and jasper and pink quartz and sardonyx and jet, of poppies, flower and seed-cod of dittany, mandrake leaves, strawberry leaves, and the thorn-apple’s prickled fruit.
For all this array, it was the majesty of the King’s countenance and of his bearing that went to the marrow of folks’ backbones, of those lords and ladies as they beheld him come up the hall: a majesty that seemed, tonight, no longer of this earth: holding its seat and glory chiefliest in his eyes, that showed hollow now like the eyes of lions, and terrible more for the calm that underlay the glare of them than for that all-mastering glare itself: more, even, than for the slow and consuming heat that seared the eyeballs of each person meeting his regard, as though the glance of this King were able to unclothe the soul of man or woman looked upon: have it out, stripped and freezing, for him to examine, before, behind, above, below, between, in the cold betwixt the worlds.
The men of his bodyguard, two by two as he passed them, fell in and followed him with spears at salute. Upon the dais he halted and turned to overlook the hall, while these soldiers, doing obeisance before him two by two upon the steps, divided and went up past him, these to the left, those to the right, to take their stand along the east wall behind the high-seats. Earl Roder, as captain of the guard, armoured to the throat and with the ties of his sword-hilt hanging loose from the scabbard, took his stand behind the King.
Next entered the Queen, crowned and wearing a robe of black figured satin purfled with gold and lined with watermails, the train of it borne by four little blackamoors in green caps and long coats of cloth of silver. The King took her by the hand: set her in the high-seat upon his left; while two by two the guests of honour came up the mid hall, mounted the dais, did their obeisance, and took their seats in order.
The Duke sat at the King’s right hand. In him, when he spoke or when he smiled, the conscience-born gaiety of a bridegroom stirred darkly tonight, fire shut in fickle-force; infusing with a kind of morning splendour both his countenance and his lithe body’s strength, lovely, whether at rest or in motion, as the Hermes of Praxiteles. Next to him was that old Lord Bekmar, white-haired, twi-bearded, each half of his beard falling in a diminishing spiral of twisted curls: on Bekmar’s right, my lord Chancellor Beroald: then Count Medor: then, at the last of the tables on this side, the Lord Perantor. Upon him as often as Rosma’s eye fell and met his gaze constant on her as on some anchorage of his prime, she looked hastily away, as from an unseasonable memento of time’s iniquity gravid upon her: that this man, grown fat now, and bald, and with dewlaps on the jawy part of his face, should be, by mockery, that self-same smooth courtier and oiled-tongued suing servant whom, in the latter years of her lone queenship, by this twenty-five, thirty, years ago, she had had for lord chamberlain in Zayana.
Anthea and Campaspe, oread arm wreathed in a most unwonted protective assurance about dryad waist, watched the proceedings from their places at the highest table on the Queen’s side below the dais.
‘Sister, quiet this leaping thing I find here, under your left breast. Else I’ll be sadly tempted to eat you up.’
‘It will not quiet, sister, when changes are toward.’
‘Little fool. Great and small can alter and change: come and go. But we alter not. Neither can any of these shakings, that shake nations, shake us.’
Campaspe huggled herself closer, her eyes fixed, as by fascination, upon the Queen. ‘I do abhor her from my heart,’ she said in a whisper. ‘As if my flesh were her meat.’
‘It is her day: day of darkness and shrouded dawn. Are you afeared, little mouse, little sparrow? We have know
n such days ere now.’
‘Yes. Many time, since the beginning. I fear not, dear sister. ’Tis but only that I cannot but puff up my weak furs and feathers and quake with the cold a little, these nights of dread.’
‘They are of our Mother’s milk, I think,’ said that oread lady, and snarled with her teeth. ‘Fix your eye, here, where it belongeth: upon Our Lady. Doth not She fill heaven and earth?’ Their pure eyes (hunting-beast eyes of the oread: eyes of the dryad wide and soft as a startled hind’s) turned from Rosma, as from void darkness, to that thunder-laced windrush of darkness which is the heat and unpicturable secret centre of light’s and beauty’s self, the rending of heavens, the coming down: where that Dark Lady sat, last but one on the Queen’s side, between Roder and Selmanes of Bish; and in the trust of Her presence found their unrestful rest.
Upon the Earl’s right the Countess Heterasmene had her place: upon her right, next to the Queen, the lord Admiral Jeronimy.
With the first service brought in, and all kind of wine in great flagons and gallipots of silver and crystal and gold, merry waxed the talk both upon the dais and in the body of the hall. Queen Rosma, strangely affable and amiable, said: ‘You have not been to see me of late, lord Admiral. I miss your company. And now, tomorrow, we must bid you farewell: progress towards the north.’