The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  ‘All will lament your highness’s departure.’

  ‘Not all. Myself, I shall be glad on’t. I envy no man that must inhabit in Meszria these days: least of all, foreign-born. Too many hates and cloaked rivalries.’

  ‘Home is good,’ he said in his simplicity. ‘But duty is best.’

  Rosma’s regard wandered from his face to rest on that Lady Fiorinda, so that the Admiral had freedom for a minute to study her countenance, himself unobserved. Viewing her thus, a man might have supposed twenty years had been lifted from her natural burden: as though the safe candlelight held an alchemy, transforming as lovers’ eyes, to charm away and make effectless that false time which heretofore had carried her past the age of loving and being beloved. ‘I laugh sometimes,’ she said, an unwonted tender sadness stirring in her voice, ‘to think on these turnagains we live in. Born and nursed in Sleaby: Argyanna for my salad-days: then queened here in Zayana, and for so long time wielding powers of life and death here as to mix blood with it. And yet now, no sooner come back hither, but homesick in turn for where’s least my home: Rialmar.’

  ‘’Tis there your highness’s state and stead. Little marvel you should desire it.’

  The Queen took a sip from her goblet, set it down and sat silent a minute, gazing into the blood-dark darkness of the wine as though memories floated there; or foreshadowings. Then, turning to him with a smile: ‘I think you are homesick too, for the north.’

  He made no reply, toying with the dish of prawns before him.

  She laid down her fork and looked at him. ‘It is not hid from his serene highness nor from me,’ she said, leaning sideways over the arm of her great chair, a little nearer him, to speak more privately, ‘the weight of the charge we do lay on you three who now have the vogue here. To you yourself, albeit so many years set in government here in Meszria, the land’s but a step-dance, and hard it is for you to contend against the jealousies that beset you.’

  The Admiral shook his head thoughtfully, then looked in the Queen’s face. ‘Live and let live. The only way.’

  ‘This late-discovered conspiracy against your own person, for example. We are not ignorant whence such mischiefs draw their sustainment.’

  ‘Nay,’ said the Admiral, lowering his eyes under her look, ‘if your highness aim at last week’s chance, of this rakehelly dissembling scrub who, being brought to my presence, would a sticked me with a dagger, ’twas no conspiracy there. No great hand behind that.’

  ‘Judge you so indeed? I hope you are not miscast in your arithmetic.’

  ‘Only the private discontent of a certain lord who shall be nameless. We shall make friends with him too, ere long. Mean time, the instrument i’ the attempt was took and hanged.’

  ‘Well, so far,’ said the Queen, ‘But you are to remember, my lord High Commissioner, there’s hands behind hands in all these things. I that do, from long use, almost to the manner born know the ways of this land, would wish you have an eye to a person I bear ever in mind but will not name. Who (in your ear) may justly think a hath cause (not from you, but from your near friends),’ here she cast a covert look, not unnoted by the Admiral, on Earl Roder, ‘to fear a knife or a Spanish fig from near about you.’

  ‘In humble honesty,’ said he slowly, after a pause, ‘I am troubled at your highness’s gracious words. And the more, in a manner, that I take not their meaning.’

  Without looking at him, but speaking low beside his ear: ‘Come to me ere we depart tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and I’ll speak more openly than here were convenient. I have observed in you three, whiles I have sojourned here, a strange carelessness touching ever-present threats to your proper safety, and these from a high quarter not ten miles from here I think you do least suspect. The King’s highness would not for all sakes, as I would not, see aught ill befall you. Enough. Let’s be merry. But,’ said she, looking past the King to Duke Barganax and quickly, as from some undecent sight, withdrawing her gaze to meet the troubled eyes of Jeronimy fixed questioningly upon her: ‘come to me tomorrow.’

  Madam Anthea, using that lingua franca which half-gods and nymphs have amongst themselves, but to human kind it is unlearnable and unintelligible, like the crackling of ice, or soughing of wind among leaves, or cat-talk or bird-talk or all voices else of wood and water and mountain solitudes, spoke saying: ‘She is ill at ease, behind all this outward talk, when she looks on my Lady.’

  ‘Will you think,’ said Campaspe, in the same safe tongue, ‘it cometh her in mind of the nestling she spurned out of the nest for dead and you bore it hither to the southlands in your mouth; by her reckonings, twenty years ago?’

  ‘You can read as well as I.’

  ‘But I cannot endure to look upon her. Or if I look, thought quite forsakes me. Lynx eyes are searchinger too, than water-rats’.’

  Anthea drew back her lips, in a stealth watching the Queen. Her left hand, slipping privily down from Campaspe’s flower-soft waist, gave her a nip where least, may be, such liberties were looked for: made her shut together her knees with a little smothered scream. ‘She knows in her bones,’ Anthea said, ‘that ’tis here the very child of her body she looks upon. Which knowledge is wormwood to her, beholding in Her her own lost (nay, never had) youth as might have been; but she, of her own excess, fooled away the winning hand fortune and her father dealt her, and, having misplayed all, is left naked now and penniless, save for her hate against everyone. Seeth my Lady’s beauty: the height, the might, and the glory of it, fed to its starriest with desire. Tasteth my Lady: almost even as he tasteth, beside whom much better men than yonder o’er-petted swaggering Styllis of hers should suffer eclipse, meteors beside the sun. And for that eclipse, and because of his blessed condition, as being love-drunk – from my Lady’s nice teasing and wantoning and prouding of him up this morning – and as having (as I smell this Queen do foggily sense in their eye-casts and in the under-music of their voices tonight) the world, all worlds, all Olympus, in his having of Her: because of these things, she sits crammed with stinking hellebore. Mark you, my flindermouse: we shall see the vomit ere supper well done.’

  So sped the time with eating and drinking, gross meats first and finer meats afterward, and with discourse grave and gay. Bekmar, cheered by good wine and by his exalted place at table, which was above both Chancellor and Earl (this as well for respect of his white hairs as out of policy, the Queen being present, to honour especially the ancient houses of Meszria), was full of instances and remembrances of forty or fifty years’ standing: better banquets then in Sestola, when Kallias was King: not a woman let come into the hall here then, save the dancing-girls. As though the memory fanned dead embers within him, a kind of corpse-light stirred in his pale eyes. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘other times, other manners: King Haliartes put an end to those spectacles when he took kingdom in Zayana. ’Twas thought,’ he said mournfully, ‘that was by the Queen’s setting on.’

  ‘In that,’ coldly said the Chancellor, ‘I have ever thought her highness showed herself more Meszrian than our own folk of those times, Meszrians by birth. ’Tis symptom of decay in a great people nursed in civility and high gifts of learning, when they begin to make so much vulgarness of mankind’s noblest pleasure as to have their courtesans dance before them stript to the buff, and so glutton on all in public.’

  ‘I am an old man,’ Bekmar replied, ‘I account old things best.’

  ‘Measure is best, my lord: ruleth all in the end.’ The Chancellor, as if his own word spoken had minded him where his disquiet lay, turned his eyes, uneasy behind their mask of steely irony, on the King. In him, as he talked now with his son, burned (yet hotter and gayer than then, a year ago) that same recklessness and superfluity which, when he sent Beroald back and went on, alone with his self-sufficiency, into known instant peril of death at Middlemead, had outcountenanced the great lamp of heaven. The Lord Jeronimy, watching him, too, was remembered, like enough, of that all-mastering mood the King had set out in, rashly through mountainous seas in th
e dead of winter, to put down Akkama. And, soon as put down, had, against all prudence and human reason, set it up again.

  As the waiting storm-gatherer should speak to the lightning pent up and struggling for birth, so spoke the King now to Rosma, under his breath: ‘Remember you my word. Do something. What, I care not, so it be your own.’

  She became ghastly white: then red again: then, slowly turning her eyes to meet his, lowered her gaze: answered slowly in a whisper: ‘Is it not a prayer commonly made to God; Tempt me not who am mortal?’

  ‘But what God were that?’ replied the King deep and low, as it had been the houseless mockery of old Night speaking not in her ear but unescapably in her soul: ‘What God were that, that should hearken to any prayer of yours?’

  The Queen put her hands under the table, in her lap, out of sight. She said, calm and equable again and with a gentleness in her voice: ‘Beseech you, dear Lord, spoil not this last night’s pleasure for me in mine own land. Suffer me to have good memories to carry north. Torment me no more with riddles I can neither answer nor see the sense of. Remember, if you can, that I love you.’

  King Mezentius looked in her black eyes: almost a lover’s look, with shadows of laughter in it but purged of all mockery: almost as a God should look, contented, upon the creature of His mind. With grave eyes she met it: then bent her head. In full view of that great company assembled, he kissed her on the forehead. ‘I have told him,’ he said to her, pointing, by a backward, sideways motion of his head, to Barganax, ‘that I am content with him. Content that he is learning to walk without me behind him to direct his steps. I find in him wisdom.’

  ‘I am glad,’ said she, her hands still beneath the table. ‘Forget, dear my Lord, what I mis-said, afore supper. I think I was sea-sick. In truth I know not what snappish devil drew out my tongue. There was no truth in it.’

  ‘I will forget it all, my Rosma. Have forgot already. Come, now: to make game: let’s read thoughts, you and I. Begin with his,’ and he looked round upon Barganax, whose face was at this moment partly turned from them in courteous attention to Bekmar telling his tedious old dotterels’ tales. ‘Where be his thoughts tonight, think you?’

  The Queen looked too, this time schooling herself not to look away: saw the Duke, while he listened, change a merry feasting glance with Fiorinda: answered, with a curl of her lip: ‘Upon Monte Nero.’

  Fruit was borne in now on golden dishes: peaches, dates, raisins of the sun, pomegranates, orange-apples of Zayana, and, in great bowls of gold, little wood-strawberries mixed with cream-cheeses and smothered in cream. The King spoke: ‘What sweet voice have we to sing to us, for crowning of the feast? Mistress Campaspe, will you do us that delight, if madam give you leave?’

  My Lady Fiorinda, the imperial lazy echoes in whose voice trained on the air perfume-laden leavings of a breeze strayed from Paphos, answered and said: ‘Your serene highness’s will, in little things as in great, is ours. And indeed I take a delicate pleasure to hear my gentlewoman sing.’

  ‘What song then? You shall choose it.’

  ‘By your serenity’s gracious leave, I would have the Duke of Zayana be chooser for me tonight.’

  ‘Then sing us,’ said the Duke to Campaspe, but his eyes, darkly bright, were on her they belonged to, ‘that song of Deare love, for nothing lesse than thee. Be it mine to choose, I’ll have none other tonight.’

  Campaspe, standing up in her place now like some little fieldish creature that is here and, whip, gone again in the twilight of nightfall or of dawn, but very lovely and sylph-like of posture in the faintly-moving upward glow of the candles, took her lute and began to sing. Light and immaterial was her singing as the last breath falling asleep with the falling shadows of a May evening without cloud. As the colour of red roses folding their petals as sunset ends, was the colour that softly mounted to her cheek while she sang:

  ‘Deare love, for nothing lesse than thee

  Would I have broke this happy dreame,

  It was a theame

  For reason, much too strong for phantasie.

  Therefore thou wakd’st me wisely; yet

  My Dreame thou brok’st not, but continued’st it,

  Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice

  To make dreames truths; and fables histories;

  Enter these armes, for since thou thought’st it best,

  Not to dreame all my dreame, let’s act the rest.

  As lightning, or a Taper’s light,

  Thine eyes and not thy noise wak’d mee;

  Yet I thought thee

  (For thou lovest truth) an Angell, at first sight,

  But when I saw thou sawest my heart,

  And knew’st my thoughts, beyond an Angel’s art,

  When thou knew’st what I dreamt, when thou knew’st when

  Excesse of joy would wake me, and cam’st then,

  I must confesse, it could not chuse but bee

  Prophane, to thinke thee any thing but thee.

  Comming and staying show’d thee, thee,

  But rising makes me doubt, that now,

  Thou art not thou.

  That love is weake, where feare’s as strong as hee;

  ’Tis not all spirit, pure, and brave,

  If mixture it of Feare, Shame, Honor, have.

  Perchance as torches which must ready bee,

  Men light and put out, so thou deal’st with mee,

  Thou cam’st to kindle, goest to come; Then I

  Will dreame that hope againe, but else would die.’

  There was no sound besides in that great hall while she sang. Eyes for the most part, rested not on the singer but on the lights, or in high dusky spaces beyond those lights, where nought was to see but moth-winged memories or wishes, conjured up in myriads by that unworldly singing: moments uncatchable as the beetle’s droning on the air at the half-light, or as dart of a fieldmouse amid tufted grass: now here, now gone: lift of skirt above a known ankle, comfort of known hand, rustle of silks under the promise-laden starriness of a summer’s night, or sound of a known breath taken gently in sleep: for each listener his own, her own. And each several one of these innumerable, infinitely little, treasures of hearts’ desire, in this coming and departing and changing as smoke-wreaths change or eddies in water, seemed yet, at every come and go, contented: save perhaps for a fear, abysmal under all, lest such deep-contenting changes should, by some mischieving power beyond them, ever have end. The Duke, listening, had eyes for none of these shadows: only for Her, in whom all that beauty comes home.

  She, listening, was leant now a little forward over her table, her right hand propping her chin. Her left arm rested in a largesse of lazy grace across the table sideways, its hand playing with her untasted goblet of golden wine, and on its ring-finger the great eye-refecting alexandrite-stone that changes colour from light to light, of Barganax’s ring winking and blazing. Very still was her face: the sheen on her hair a tremble of stars on black sea at midnight. The low-cut bosom of her dress partly gave forth to view, as she so leaned forward, globed twin moons, plenilune at half eclipse, lovelier in their high Grecian pride than the moon of heaven, and holding in their warmed interspace (by patent of every Olympian untamed contour in her countenance above them) all sweets, all stings, all terrors, sense-furying over-weenings, doves, fire-worms, blindings, mandragoras, velvet-sheathed claws, lionesses’ teeth: all beguilings: all incorruptibles: all keepings and waterings, returnings and reconcilements, performance and renewal of strength: all raging powers, from everlasting, of beauty and passion of love. And, for seeing eyes to see, between Her brows was the morning star.

  Her gaze was, for this while, not upon Her lover but upon the great King, and His on Hers: an eye-parley swift beyond stretch of mortal sense, as though, accommodating Their large leisure to a brief moment of time, as the wide landscape and vault of the sky will lie mirrored in a dewdrop, God should speak with God. As if He should say: Daughter and Sister and Mother and Lover of Mine: Kythereia,
brought up with Me from everlasting in the beginning of My way before My works of old: what is this You have done, almost a year ago? Why did you beguile Me to make You that false world?

  And awful, gold-crowned, beautiful Aphrodite, answered and said: Because it flattered My mood that night. But I changed My mind. Give it not a thought, My Father. It is abolished: forgot: no, lost beyond forgetting: for how forget what never indeed existed?

  He said: It is not the thing create was the mischief, but My creating of it. In that creation I came to know what theretofore I had blessedly (here at least, where to be is to do) not known. What profit to be Me, when action and the springs and issues of action, in Me, in You, in this wide world We live in, are tainted: known and foreknown to last tittle? This world, this heavenly mansion, is wasted and spoilt.

  She said: Not for Me. I am well served. For I (through You, there where, in what I begin to think a more wiser dress of Yours, You do sit at Your own right hand) still find this true world a world apt to My nature. And to Yours.

  The ‘Why?’ in his eyes was a doubt more freezing cold than the grave.

  She said, to answer it: Because, I suppose, I can be content to embrace this world’s all: can contemplate all; desire all; possess and receive into My being, all; and see that it is good. For I (even when I pleasure Myself to behold Myself in the mirror of My Lover’s eyes, and so behold that which is without spot, without bridle, and without bourne) do still, in that all-seeing, limit Me to perfection: to the perfect sum of all perfects which in Me do have their eternity. I limit Me so to All which Is. Eschewing so (through Our common wisdom, which do not You and I possess from the beginning?) that More than all: which is Not; and which (seeing that all which Is, is Good; and all which is Good, Is) is therefore Not Good.

  He said: But We went down, into that misconceived misfortuned world of Your passing fantasy. For a moment. To know.

  She said: For a life-time’s moment. Yes. It was enough.

  He said: Since that night in Memison when first I tasted Mine own infinite power: since that unchaining then in Me of this unextinguishable lust of knowing: ‘enough’ is become to Me a noise without meaning.