Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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Introduction © Paul Edmund Thomas 1992

Copyright © E.R. Eddison 1958, 1992

Jacket illustration by John Howe © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2014

E.R. Eddison asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007578177

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007578184

Version: 2014-09-16

Dedication

To you, madonna mia,

WINIFRED GRACE EDDISON

and to my mother,

HELEN LOUISA EDDISON

and to my friends,

JOHN AND ALICE REYNOLDS

and to

HARRY PIRIE-GORDON

a fellow explorer in whom (as in Lessingham)

I find that rare mixture of man of action and

connoisseur of strangeness and beauty in their

protean manifestations, who laughs where I laugh

and likes the salt that I like, and to whom I owe

my acquaintance (through the Orkneyinga Saga)

with the earthly ancestress

of my Lady Rosma Parry

I dedicate this book.

E. R. E.

Proper names the reader will no doubt pronounce as he chooses. But perhaps, to please me, he will keep the i’s short in Zimiamvia and accent the third syllable: accent the second syllable in Zayana, give it a broad a (as in ‘Guiana’), and pronouce the ay in the first syllable – and the ai in Laimak, Kaima, etc., and the ay in Krestenaya – like the ai in ‘aisle’; keep the g soft in Fingiswold: let Memison echo ‘denizen’ except for the m: accent the first syllable in Rerek and make it rhyme with ‘year’: pronounce the first syllable of Reisma ‘rays’; remember that Fiorinda is in origin an Italian name, Amaury, Amalie, and Beroald French, and Antiope, Zenianthe, and a good many others, Greek: last, regard the sz in Meszria as ornamental, and not be deterred from pronouncing it as plain ‘Mezria’.

Let me not to the marriage of true mindes

Admit impediments, love is not love

Which alters when it alteration findes,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no, it is an ever fixed marke

That lookes on tempests, and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandring barke,

Whose worths unknowns, although his higth be taken.

Love’s not Times foole, though rosie lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickles compasse come,

Love alters not with his breefe houres and weekes,

But beares it out even to the edge of doome:

If this be error, and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

SHAKESPEARE

And ride in triumph through Persepolis!

Is it not brave to be a King, Techelles?

Usumcasane and Theridamas,

Is it not passing brave to be a King,

And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

MARLOWE

I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart.

KEATS

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction by Paul Edmund Thomas

Prefatory Note by Colin Rücker Eddison

LETTER OF INTRODUCTION

PRAELUDIUM: LESSINGHAM ON THE RAFTSUND

BOOK ONE: FOUNDATIONS

I. Foundations in Rerek

II. Foundations in Fingiswold

III. Nigra Sylva, where the Devils Dance

IV. The Bolted Doors

V. Princess Marescia

VI. Prospect North from Argyanna

BOOK TWO: UPRISING OF KING MEZENTIUS

VII. Zeus Terpsikeraunos

VIII. The Prince Protector

IX. Lady Rosma in Acrozayana

X. Stirring of the Eumenides

XI. Commodity of Nephews

XII. Another Fair Moonshiny Night

BOOK THREE: THE AFFAIR OF REREK

XIII. The Devil’s Quilted Anvil

XIV. Lord Emmius Parry

BOOK FOUR: THE AFFAIR OF MESZRIA

XV. Queen Rosma

XVI. Lady of Presence

XVII. Akkama Brought into the Dowry

XVIII. The She-Wolf Tamed to Hand

XIX. The Duchess of Memison

BOOK FIVE: THE TRIPLE KINGDOM

XX. Dura Papilla Lupae

XXI. Anguring Combust

XXII. Pax Mezentiana

XXIII. The Two Dukes

XXIV. Prince Valero

XXV. Lornra Zombremar

XXVI. Rebellion in the Marches

XXVII. Third War with Akkama

BOOK SIX: LA ROSE NOIRE

XXVIII. Anadyomene

XXIX. Astarte

XXX. Laughter-loving Aphrodite

XXXI. The Beast of Laimak

XXXII. Then, Gentle Cheater

XXXIII. Aphrodite Helikoblepharos

The Fish Dinner: Transitional Note

BOOK SEVEN: TO KNOW OR NOT TO KNOW

XXXIV. The Fish Dinner: First Digestion

XXXV. Diet a Cause

XXXVI. Rosa Mundorum

XXXVII. Testament of Energeia

XXXVIII. Call of the Night-Raven

XXXIX. Omega and Alpha in Sestola

GENEALOGICAL TABLES

MAP OF THE THREE KINGDOMS

Footnote

Also by E. R. Eddison

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
BY PAUL EDMUND THOMAS

THE twelfth chapter of E. R. Eddison’s first novel, The Worm Ouroboros, contains a curious episode extraneous to the main plot. Having spent nearly all their strength in climbing Koshtra Pivrarcha, the highest mountain pinnacle on waterish Mercury, the Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha stand idly enjoying the glory of their singular achievement atop the frozen wind-whipped summit, and they gaze away southward into a mysterious land never before seen:

Juss looked southward where the blue land stretched in fold upon fold of rolling country, soft and misty, till it melted in the sky. ‘Thou and I,’ said he, ‘first of the children of men, now behold with living eyes the fabled land of Zimiamvia. Is that true, thinkest thou, which philosophers tell us of that fortunate land: that no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be departed, even they that were great upon earth and did great deeds when they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the glories thereof, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors?’

‘Who knoweth?’ said Brandoch Daha, resting his chin in his hand and gazing south as in a dream. ‘Who shall say he knoweth?’

The land of Zimiamvia probably held only a fleeting and evanescent place in the minds of Eddison’s readers in 1922, because this, the first and last mentioning of Zimiamvia in Ouroboros, flits quickly past the reader, and though it has a local habitation and a name, it does not have a place in the story. Yet in the author’s mind, the name rooted itself so deeply that its engendering and growth cannot be clearly traced. Where did this name and this land come from? How and when was Zimiamvia born? How, while writing Ouroboros in 1921, did Eddison come to think of including this extraneous description of a land inconsequential to the story? Why did he include it?

Who knows? Who shall say he knows? No living person can answer these questions with certainty. What is certain is that Zimiamvia existed in Eddison’s imagination for at least twenty-three years and that he spent much of the rare leisure time of his last fifteen years writing three novels to give tangible shape to that misty land whose existence the Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha ponder and question in those moments on the ice-clad jagged peak of Koshtra Pivrarcha.

When he finished Ouroboros in 1922, Eddison did not ride the hippogriff-chariot through the heavens to Zimiamvian shores directly. Instead he remained firmly earth-bound and wrote Styrbiorn the Strong, a historical romance based on the life of the Swedish prince Styrbiorn Starki, the son of King Olaf, who died in 983 in an attempt to usurp the kingdom from his uncle, King Eric the Victorious. Eddison finished this novel in December 1925, and on 3 January 1926, during a vacation to Devonshire, he found himself desiring to pay homage to the Icelandic sagas that had inspired so many aspects of Ouroboros and Styrbiorn the Strong: ‘Walking in a gale over High Peak Sidmouth … I thought suddenly that my next job should be a big saga translation, and that should be Egil.’ After noting his decision, he justified it: ‘This may pay back some of my debt to the sagas, to which I owe more than can ever be counted.’ Resolved on this project, he steeped himself for five years in the literary and historical scholarship requisite for translating a thirteenth-century Icelandic text into English. It was not until 1930, after Egil’s Saga had been finished and dispatched to the Cambridge University Press, that Eddison focused his attention on the new world that had lain nearly dormant in his mind since at least 1921. Eddison finished the first Zimiamvian novel, Mistress of Mistresses, in 1935. Faber & Faber published it in England; E. P. Dutton published it in America. Eddison says Mistress of Mistresses did not explore ‘the relations between that other world and our present here and now’, and so his ideas of those relations propelled him to write a second novel setting some scenes in Zimiamvia and others in modern Europe. Eddison finished this second novel, A Fish Dinner in Memison, in 1940, but the wartime paper shortage prevented Faber & Faber from publishing it, yet E. P. Dutton published it for American readers in 1941. Eddison says that writing this second novel made him ‘fall in love with Zimiamvia’, and since ‘love has a searching curiosity which can never be wholly satisfied’, the new ideas sprouting from his love grew into The Mezentian Gate.

Eddison never finished this third Zimiamvian novel, for he died from a massive stroke in 1945. He intended The Mezentian Gate to have thirty-nine chapters. Between 1941 and 1945, he wrote the first seven, the last four, and Chapters XXVIII and XXIX. Like many others, Eddison feared a German invasion of England, and he worried that events beyond his control would prevent his finishing The Mezentian Gate. So before November 1944, he wrote an Argument with Dates, a complete and detailed plot synopsis of all of the unwritten chapters. After completing the Argument and thus assuring himself that his novel’s story, at least, could be published as a whole even if something happened to him, Eddison went on to write drafts for several more chapters during his last year of life. In 1958 his brother Colin Eddison, his friend Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton and Sir Francis Meynell (the founder of the Nonesuch Press and son of the poet Alice Meynell) privately published this fragmentary novel at the Curwen Press in Plaistow, West Sussex. The Curwen edition included only the finished chapters and the Argument; it did not include the substantial number of preliminary drafts for unfinished chapters that Eddison composed between January and August 1945. These drafts, extant in handwritten leaves, have lain in the darkness of manuscript boxes in the underground stacks of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and they have been read by few since Eddison’s death.

In Dell’s 1992 edition, Eddison’s neglected manuscript drafts for The Mezentian Gate were finally brought into the light of print, and for the first time the three Zimiamvian novels were pressed within the covers of one volume and united under the title Zimiamvia.

The Writing of The Mezentian Gate

On 25 July 1941, E. R. Eddison wrote to George Rostrevor Hamilton and told of the birth of The Mezentian Gate: ‘After laborious lists of dates and episodes and so on, extending over many weeks, I really think the scheme for the new Zimiamvian book crystallized suddenly at 9 p.m. last night.’ On 2 September Eddison was still excited about his progress and wrote to Hamilton again: ‘You will be glad to know that about 1500 words of the (still nameless) new Zimiamvian book are already written.’ The opening sections, the Praeludium, which he first called ‘Praeludium in Excelsis’ (literally, ‘a preface set in a high place’), and ‘Foundations in Rerek’ alternately filled the sails of his imagination, but he decided to finish the voyage to Rerek before turning his prow toward Mount Olympus, the original setting for the Praeludium. Seven months later, on 2 April 1942, another letter to Hamilton shows that Eddison’s initial swift sailing had quickly carried his imagination into the doldrums:

I am still struggling with the opening of the new book. The ‘Praeludium in Excelsis’ which I had written dissatisfies me: seems to be ornamental rather than profound. So I’m changing the mise en scene from Olympus to Lofoten, and think it will create the atmosphere I’m sniffing for. But, Lord, it comes out unwillingly and painfully.

Evidently, Eddison abandoned his resolve to finish ‘Foundations in Rerek’ first, and his imagination tacked toward Rerek and Olympus in turns, but without gaining much momentum toward either destination. Eddison eventually completed the Praeludium in July and sent it to Hamilton for a critical reading with this qualifying statement attached: ‘it has given me infinite trouble.’ He did not complete ‘Foundations in Rerek’ until 1 October 1942, fourteen months after he began it.

The two opening sections add up to about ten thousand words, and Eddison spent about 420 days composing them. On a strictly mathematical level, Eddison’s average daily rate of composition was about twenty-five words. Surely a turtle’s pace across the page. Such meticulous slowness seems to mark Eddison’s composition: he once told Edward Abbe Niles, his consulting lawyer in America, that the ten thousand words of the thickly philosophical Chapters XV and XVI of A Fish Dinner in Memison took him ten months of 1937.Yet in 1937, Eddison had little free time for writing because he was fully occupied with civil service as the Head of Empire Trades and Head of the Economic Division in the Department of Overseas Trade. One would expect that in 1942, three years into retired life, Eddison would be composing at a faster rate than during his working life, simply because he had more time for writing, but that is not the case. The explanation lies in our understanding the intrusion of World War II upon Eddison’s life and the response of his dutiful nature to the home effort in the war.

On 10 September 1939, one week after Britain and France had declared war on Germany, Eddison speaks of his domestic preparations for wartime:

ARP curtains, ‘Nox’ lights, and so on have occupied most of my waking hours since the trouble began. We are well blacked out – but what a bore it is, night and morning.’

The annoyed tone of the last sentence is notable. Eddison’s ‘motto’ as he declared it in one letter, was ‘anything for a quiet life.’ After spending most of his years in London, Eddison moved to the countryside near Marlborough to live this desired quiet life in which the breezy hours of sunshine and birdsong could be devoted to writing and reading and happy companionship with his wife and family. To have the bright hope for this life, in its first months, tangibly darkened by blackout curtains, and intangibly darkened by the fear of bombing or invasion, must have been bitterly discouraging. Time was out of joint for Eddison’s retired life.

Some people in Eddison’s position would have ignored the home effort in the war. Eddison could not do this: his long career in government, his interest in history and politics, his patriotism, and his keen sense of responsibility would not allow this in him. In the same letter in which he speaks of hanging the blackout curtains, Eddison tells Hamilton of his volunteering for war service:

I’ve offered my services in general for any local work here that I can tackle: nothing doing so far, but that is hardly surprising. I was going to stage a ‘comeback’ in Whitehall if war burst out a year ago; but fear it would quickly end me were I to attempt it, and that would help nobody. So, I propose to carry on to the best of my ability till a bomb drops on me, or some other form of destruction overtakes me, or till the war comes to an end.

Here is a man fifty-seven and well beyond the age parameters of active military duty, a man recently retired from public life and settled into a new house, a man who retired to devote himself to his personal literary goals, a man not in his best state of health: this man volunteers for war service during the first days of the war. Surely his action reveals a mind instinct with duty.

Only those who lived through the war years in England can truly speak about the anxieties and frustrations of carrying on daily life under the constant danger of the air raids. Living in London, Hamilton felt the German threat closely. On September 13, 1940, he wrote to say that his wife’s mother had come to live at his house, for bombs had fallen perilously near to hers. Plus, Hamilton had gone to work that morning and found the floor of his office covered with shards of window glass shattered by a bomb’s concussion during the previous night. Because he and his family lived in Wiltshire, Eddison did not feel the threat so imminently, and he told Hamilton on September 15, 1940, that although several bombs had fallen in the countryside and one in Marlborough itself, the ‘total casualties and material damage is so far precisely three rabbits!’

Even though the danger was not as grave in Marlborough as it was in London, Eddison’s work as an air raid patrol warden continually interrupted his consciously regular life, a retired life that nevertheless maintained the structure of his working life. On 27 October 1940, Eddison told Hamilton of one incident that exemplifies these interruptions:

I had a complete nuit blanche last Sunday: siren went off and woke me from my first sleep [at] 11.15 p.m.: dressed in five minutes, got here 11.25, and here we were stuck – 3 men and two girls – till 5.50 a.m. Monday, when the siren sounded ‘raiders passed’. No incidents for us to deal with, but they had it in Swindon I gather. Home to bed for ¼ hour, and up, as usual, at 6.30. But, by 9.30 a.m. I was so dead stupid I went to bed and slept till 12.00 and even so pretty washed out for the rest of the day. I don’t know how you folks stick it night after night: I suppose the adaptability of the human frame comes blessedly into play.

Eddison’s coming home to sleep for fifteen minutes and then rising ‘as usual’ at 6.30 seems silly. He was living in retirement without professional responsibilities, and the scheduled hour of his rising from sleep was a demand self-imposed. The consequence of maintaining such rigid regularity on this occasion produced only weariness and inefficiency in the morning. And yet the disciplined Eddison surrendered to the needs of his body reluctantly, for he did not return to bed until three hours later.

Eddison’s ARP work affected the whole of his six years of retired life, but although it was wearying and annoying to him, the ARP work was not the most demanding of the daily tasks that kept him from his writing desk. He begins the 27 October ‘nuit blanche’ letter with a paragraph about gardening:

I’m writing this in the ARP control room: my Sunday morning turn of duty. I boil my egg and have my breakfast about 7 a.m., and get down here by 7.45 and take charge until 11. I like it, because after that my day is free to garden; which at the moment, is a pressing occupation. I’m cleaning the herbaceous border of bindweed, a most pernicious and elusive pest: it takes about 2 hours of hard digging and sorting to do a one foot run, and there are sixty feet to do. And the things are heeled in elsewhere and waiting to be planted when my deinfestation is complete.

For Eddison, gardening was not welcome physical exercise after stiff-backed hours of concentration at the writing table. Rather, gardening was his major occupation during these years; it was the work of duty that had to be done before the work of his heart’s desire. Gardening is, of course, a seasonal work, and the hours Eddison spent at it surely fluctuated, but during the autumnal harvest it took up many hours every day. Eddison told Gerald Hayes in the autumn of 1943 that gardening took 42 hours per week, ARP work took 10 or 11 hours, and that he was also trying to work on The Mezentian Gate every day even if he could only give it one half-hour.

Eddison devoted himself to gardening because the wartime food rationing in England created discomforting shortages, and Eddison wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible so that the rations could be supplemented without having to be relied on. Gardening became more important after the birth of Eddison’s granddaughter Anne in November 1940, because then Eddison had another person to feed besides his wife, Winifred, his daughter Jean, his mother, Helen, when she came to visit, and himself. For Christmas in 1941, Edward Abbe Niles sent the Eddisons food parcels from New York, and on 18 December, Eddison thanked him in a letter: ‘On the whole we don’t do too badly for food … One gets used (though I won’t say reconciled) to short commons in things like bacon and sugar: eggs would be a severe deprivation if one had to depend on a ration, but we have six hens who keep us going with their contributions, and very lucky we are, and wise, to have started keeping them last summer.’ Eddison’s strenuous efforts in the garden, and the clucking efforts of the hens, seem to have been successful in allowing the family to live comfortably. However, Eddison’s daughter Jean says that it was eventually necessary to eat all of the hens, even the ones they had become attached to as household pets.

Although Eddison’s many hours of gardening and ARP work filled his days and sometimes his nights, his letters from the first year and a half of the war do not have a strong tone of frustration over his lack of time for writing. Perhaps the reason is that he was between books during these months. He was busy with matters relating to A Fish Dinner in Memison: rewriting the cricket scene in Chapter III for an American audience unfamiliar with the game, and sending many letters to Niles in regard to the contract with Dutton. These things occupied his writing hours well into the first months of 1941. Also, perhaps he was not frustrated because he was enjoying the sweetness of having finished a work that pleased him well, and he was happily anticipating the publication of A Fish Dinner in Memison in May 1941.

But Eddison was never a dawdler, especially when new ideas arose like breezes to fill the sails of his imagination: only three months after A Fish Dinner in Memison was published, he began working on The Mezentian Gate. A cluster of letters from late in 1941, the period in which Eddison was working on the opening sections, shows his careworn tone and his frustration with the ability of these mundane tasks to balk his efforts to have time for writing. The two most potent letters are enough to show this wearied tone. On 27 November 1941, Eddison wrote to his Welsh friend Lewellyn Griffith:

I too am the sport and shuttlecock of potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, turnips, and – for weeks on end – after these are laid to rest – of autumn diggings and sudden arithmetical calculations aiming at a three year rotation of crops scheme for our kitchen garden, to enable me to get on with these jobs without further thought, and learn perhaps to garden as an automaton while my mind works on the tortuous politics of the three kingdoms and the inward beings and outward actors in that play, over a period of eighty years.

The second letter is to Eddison’s American friend Professor Henry Lappin and was written one month after the first:

Forgive a brief letter. I have no leisure for writing – either my next book or the letters I badly owe. For I am already whole time kitchen gardener, coal heaver, and so on, and look likely to become part time cook and housemaid into the bargain, this in addition to my part-time war work; and these daily jobs connected with keeping oneself and family clean, warm, and nourished, leave little enough time for the higher activities. Perhaps this is good for one, for a time; anyway it is part of the price we all have to pay if we want to win this war.

Eddison is tired of his domestic tasks, and in both letters he stresses the time they take up. He also makes a clear separation between these chores and his writing by calling his writing a ‘higher activity’ in the second letter and by stating his mental detachment from gardening in the first letter.

Part of Eddison’s frustration must have stemmed from the sheer size of The Mezentian Gate. The plot of Mistress of Mistresses covers fifteen months; that of A Fish Dinner in Memison, one month. Had he completed the sagalike Mezentian Gate, the plot would have extended over seventy-two years. Considering the number of episodes alone, Eddison’s working on the ‘tortuous politics of the three kingdoms’ over a period of seven decades was the most ambitious goal of imaginative contriving he ever attempted.

Eddison’s progress on The Mezentian Gate crawled doggedly through 1942 and through most of 1943. On 6 November 1943, Eddison wrote to his new friend C. S. Lewis and said that he was feeling joyful about the new progress he was making on the novel. This letter signals the beginning of a nine-month period of fruitful productivity. Though he had been at work on Chapter II, ‘Foundations in Fingiswold’, since he had finished ‘Foundations in Rerek’ in October 1942, Eddison completed Chapters II–VI between December 1943 and 14 February 1944.

Eddison’s constant rule of composition was that he worked on whatever part of the novel made his imagination sail most confidently; he did not hold himself to a course bearing determined by the plot’s chronology. In early 1944, Eddison decided to work on the end of the novel, and he wrote to Gerald Hayes on 22 February about his intention:

I am getting on with The Mezentian Gate, being now about to write the last five chapters which in the last two weeks I have roughed out on paper in scenario form, or synopsis, or by whatever absurd name it should be called. When they are written there will be in existence at least the head and tail. That is a stage I shall be glad to have reached and passed; not only because there will then be cardinal points fixed, by which to build the body of the book, but also because if I were then to be snuffed out there would remain a publishable fragment able to convey some suggestion of what the finished opus was to have been.

The clause ‘because if I were then to be snuffed out’ is a curious one because it most obviously refers to the threat of the German bombings, but it could also refer to the questionable state of Eddison’s health, a matter that he held in close privacy. In any case, the sentence helps to explain why Eddison, several months later, composed such a meticulously complete synopsis of the middle twenty-six chapters.

Writing steadily over the spring and summer of 1944, Eddison completed the four final chapters and Chapter XXXIV, nearly 31,000 words, in six months. He was especially proud of the climactic chapter, ‘Omega and Alpha in Sestola.’ Eddison told Hamilton that he had spent 290 hours upon the chapter, and that it had cost him more energy than anything he had written previously. By late January 1945, Eddison had completed Chapters XXVIII and XXIX, which concern Fiorinda’s first appearance on the Zimiamvian stage and her ill-fated marriage to Baias. Then Eddison worked extensively on Chapter XXX, which he designed to show Fiorinda’s entrance into society after the death of Baias, and especially to show the responses of the other characters to her and her somewhat tainted reputation. Many of Eddison’s unfinished pieces for the chapter have a light-hearted humorous tone which is refreshing after so much Zimiamvian solemnity. The chapter’s best scene shows Zapheles falling in adoration at Fiorinda’s feet only to become a plaything for her amusement. In Beroald’s words: ‘it is but one more pair of wings at the candle flame: they come and go till they be singed’. Eddison never completed the chapter, and it is the last part of the book that he worked on. It is a sad thing to read the unfinished pieces of this chapter, for they are confidently and sometimes exquisitely written, yet some of them date to within two weeks of his sudden death.

Another sad thing is that just before his death, Eddison was discovering a basis for a new Zimiamvian book. ‘I foresee the 4th beginning to shape itself,’ he wrote to his friend Christopher Sandford in May 1945. ‘I think if it materializes it will really be the fourth – an exception to my habit of writing history backwards.’ But the book would never get its chance, for the end came quickly and unexpectedly on 18 August. Winifred Eddison tells the story to George Hamilton:

I cannot be anything but thankful that he went so quickly. He and I had been sitting outside after tea last Friday, talking most happily. I felt so strongly at the time how happy he seemed. We fed the hens together and those of our neighbours, who are away. At about 6:30 I came in to prepare supper and at 7:00 p.m. gave the usual whistle that all was ready. There was no answer, but often the whistle didn’t carry. On searching for him, I found him lying unconscious and breathing heavily-Jean came almost at once and has been the greatest help and support. The doctor said it was ‘a sudden and complete blackout’ for him. He could have felt nothing and that is what makes me so glad. He never regained consciousness.

The suddenness of the fatal stroke makes me wonder whether it was caused by a gradual period of declining health or by the strenuous work impressed upon Eddison by the war. If his war work brought him to his unfortunate and untimely end, he would not have changed events if he could have. He declared his views on his war service on 24 November 1942, in a letter to an American writer named William Hurd Hillyer:

When the civilized world is agonized by a Ragnarok struggle between good and evil; when everything that can be shaken is shaken, and the only comfort for wise men is in the certitude that the things that cannot be shaken will stand; poets and artists are faced squarely with the question whether they are doing any good producing works of art: whether they had not better put it by and get on with something more useful. That is not a question that can with any honour be evaded. Nor can any man answer it for others.

This philosophically minded man was dutiful and responsible; he placed the interests of his family and his community above his own. Eddison exhausted himself in the garden to ensure that his family had enough to eat. In doing this, one could say, Eddison was doing only what was necessary and what he was obliged to do as the head of the household. True, and yet the ARP work was neither necessary nor obligatory: he volunteered for it, it seems, as an alternative form of service when his doctor forbade his joining the Home Guard. His sense of duty made the service obligatory.

Looking at the whole of his retired years, I wonder whether Eddison took too much upon himself. He viewed his wartime tasks as work that could not be evaded without dishonour. But writing was his real work. He would have written more, and he would have lived less strenuously had there been no national crisis impinging on his retired life. Perhaps he would have lived longer, too. Part of me wants to see him as a victim, but I know that he would not want to be thought of in that way; his Scandinavian heritage was too ingrained in him for that. I think he would rather it be said that he thought of death as did Prince Styrbiorn, the hero of his historical novel Styrbiorn the Strong: when the Earl Strut-Harald predicts that Styrbiorn will live a short life, Styrbiorn replies, ‘I reck not the number of my days, so they be good.’

PAUL EDMUND THOMAS

July 1991

PREFATORY NOTE
BY COLIN RÜCKER EDDISON

MY brother Eric died on 18 August 1945. He had written the following note in November 1944:

Of this book, The Mezentian Gate, the opening chapters (including the Praeludium) and the final hundred pages or so which form the climax are now completed. Two thirds of it are yet to write. The following ‘Argument with Dates’ summarizes in broad outline the subject matter of these unwritten chapters. The dates are ‘Anno Zayanae Conditae’: from the founding of the city of Zayana.

The book at this stage is thus a full-length portrait in oils of which the face has been painted in but the rest of the picture no more than roughly sketched in charcoal, As such, it has enough unity and finality to stand as something more than a fragment. Indeed it seems to me, even in its present state, to contain my best work.

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 there 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?’

‘I will enter into no guesses as to how you may know. For my own part, my assurance rests on direct knowledge of the senses: eye, ear, nostrils, tongue, hand, the ultimate carnal knowing.’

‘As it should rightly be always, I suppose; seeing that, with lovers, the senses are the organs of the spirit. And yet – I am a woman. There is no part in me, no breath, gait, turn, or motion, but flatters your eye with beauty. With my voice, with the mere rustle of my skirt, I can wake you wild musics potent in your mind and blood. I am sweet to smell, sweet to taste. Between my breasts you have in imagination voyaged to Kythera, or even to that herdsman’s hut upon many-fountained Ida where Anchises, by will and ordainment of the Gods, lay (as Homer says) with an immortal Goddess: a mortal, not clearly knowing. But under my skin, what am I? A memento mori too horrible for the slab in a butcher’s shop; or the floor of a slaughter-house; a clockwork of muscle; and sinew, vein and nerve and membrane, shining – blue, grey, scarlet – to all colours of corruption; a sack of offals, to make you stop your nose at it. And underneath (when you have purged away these loathsomeness of the flesh) – the scrannel piteous residue: the stripped bone, grinning, hairless, and sexless, which even the digestions of worms and devouring fire rebel against: the dumb argument that puts to silence all were’s, maybe’s, and might-have-beens.’

His face, listening, was that of a man who holds a wolf by the ears; but motionless: the poise of his head Olympian, a head of Zeus carved in stone. ‘What name did you give when you announced yourself to my servants yesterday evening?’

‘Indeed,’ she answered, ‘I have given so many. Can you remember what name they used to you, announcing my arrival?’

‘The Señorita del Rio Amargo.’

‘Yes. I remember now. It was that.’

‘“Of the Bitter River.” As though you had known my decisions in advance. Perhaps you did?’

‘How could I?’

‘It is my belief,’ he said, ‘that you know more than I know. I think you know too, in advance, my answer to this discourse with which you were just now exploring me as a surgeon explores a wound.’

She shook her head. ‘If I knew your answer before you gave it, that would make it not your answer but mine.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you shall be answered. I have lived upon this earth far into the third generation. Through a long life, you have been my book (poison one way, pleasure another), reading in which I have learnt all I know: and this principally, to distinguish in this world’s welter the abiding from the fading, real things from phantoms.’

‘Real things or phantoms? And you can credit seeing, hearing, handling, to resolve you which is which?’

‘So the spirit be on its throne, I can; and answer you so out of your own mouth, madonna. But I grant you, that twirk in the corner of your lips casts all in doubt again and shatters to confusion all answers. I have named you, last night, Goddess, Paphian Aphrodite. Was that a figure of speech? a cheap poetaster’s compliment to his mistress in bed? or was it plain daylight, as I discern it? Come, what do you think? Did I ever call you that before?’

‘Never in so many words,’ she said, very low. ‘But I sometimes scented in you, great man of action you are in the world’s eyes, a strange capacity to incredibilities.’

‘Let me remind you, then, of facts you seem to affect have forgotten. You came to me – once in my youth, once in my middle age – in Verona. In the interval, I lived with you, in our own house of Nether Wastdale, lifted up and down the world, fifteen years, flesh of my heart, heart of my heart. To end that, I saw you dead in the Morgue at Paris: a sight beside which your dissecting-table villainy a few minutes since is innocent nursery prattle. That was fifty years ago, next October. And now you are come again, but in your black dress, as in Verona. For the good-bye.’ She averted her face, not to be seen. ‘This is wild unsizeable talk. Fifty years!’

‘Whether it be good sense or madhouse talk I am likely to know,’ he said, ‘before tomorrow night; or, in the alternative, to know nothing and to be nothing. If that be the alternative, so be it. But I hold it an alternative little worthy to be believed.’

They were walking again, and came to a bench of stone. ‘O, you have your dresses,’ he said, taking his seat beside her. His voice had the notes the deeps and the power of a man’s in the acme of his days. ‘You have your dresses: Red Queen, Queen of Hearts, rosa mundi; here and now, Black Queen of the sweet deep-curled lily-flower, and winged wind-rushing darknesses of hearts’ desires. I envy both. Being myself, to my great inconvenience, two men in a single skin instead of (as should be) one in two. Call them rather two Devils in a bag, when they pull against one another or bite one other. Nor can I ever even incline to take sides with either, without I begin to wish t’other may win.’

‘The fighter and the dreamer,’ she said: ‘the doer, the enjoyer.’ Then, with new under-songs of an appassionate tenderness in her voice: ‘What gift would you have me give you, O my friend, were I in sober truth what you named me? What heaven or Elysium, what persons and shapes, would we choose to live in, beyond the hateful River?’

His gaze rested on her a minute in silence, as if to take a fresh draft of her: the beauty that pierced her dress as the lantern-light the doors of a lantern: the parting of her hair, not crimped but drawn in its native habit of soft lazy waves, as of some unlighted sea, graciously back on either side over the tips of her ears: the windy light in her eyes. ‘This is the old story over again,’ he said. ‘There is but one condition for all the infinity of possible heavens: that you should give me yourself, and a world that is wholly of itself a dress of yours.’

‘This world again, then, that we live in? Is that not mine?’

‘In some ways it is. In many ways. In every respect, up to a point. But damnably, when that point is reached, always and in every respect this world fails of you. Soon as a bud is ready to open, we find the canker has crept in. Is it yours, all of it, even to this? I think it is. Otherwise, why have I sucked the orange of this world all my life with so much satisfaction, savoured it in every caprice of fortune, waded waist-deep in this world’s violences, groped in its clueless labyrinths of darkness, fought it, made treaty with it, played with it, scorned it, pitied it, laughed with it, been fawned on by it and tricked by it and be-laurelled by it; and all with so much zest? And now at last, brought to bay by it; and, even so, constrained by something in my very veins and heart-roots to a kind of love for it? For all that, it is not a world I would have you in again, if I have any finger in the plan. It is no fit habit for you, when not the evening star, unnailed and fetched down from heaven, were fair enough jewel for your neck. If this is, as I am apt to suspect, a world of yours, I cannot wholly commend your handiwork.’

‘Handiwork? Will you think I am the Demiurge: builder of worlds?’

‘I think you are not. But chooser, and giver of worlds: that I am well able to believe. And I think you were in a bad mood when you commissioned this one. The best I can suppose of it is that it may be some good as training-ground for our next. And for our next, I hope you will think of a real one.’

While they talked she had made no sign, except that some scarce discernible relaxing of the poise of her sitting there brought her a little closer. Then in the silence, his right hand palm upwards lightly brushing her knee, her own hand caught it into her lap, and there, compulsive as a brooding bird, pressed it blindly down.

Very still they sat, without speaking, without stirring: ten minutes perhaps. When at length she turned to look at him with eyes which (whether for some trick of light or for some less acceptable but more groundable reason) seemed now to be the eyes of a person not of this earth, his lids were closed as in sleep. Not far otherwise might the Father of Gods and men appear, sleeping between the Worlds.

Suddenly, even while she looked, he had ceased breathing. She moved his hand, softly laying it to rest beside him on the bench. ‘These counterfeit worlds!’ she said. ‘They stick sometimes, like a plaster, past use and past convenience. Wait for me, in that real one, also of Your making, which, in this world here, You but part remembered, I think, and will there no doubt mainly forget this; as I, in my other dress, part remembered and part forgot. For forgetfulness is both a sink for worthless things and a storeroom for those which are good, to renew their morning freshness when, with the secular processions of sleeping and waking, We bring them out as new. And indeed, shall not all things in their turn be forgotten, but the things of You and Me?’

BOOK ONE

I
FOUNDATIONS IN REREK

PERTISCUS Parry dwelt in the great moated house beside Thundermere in Latterdale. Mynius Parry, his twin brother, was lord of Laimak. Sidonius Parry, the youngest of them, dwelt at Upmire under the Forn.

To Pertiscus it had long seemed against reason, and a thing not forever to be endured, that not he but his brother Mynius must have Laimak; which, seated upon a rock by strength inexpugnable, had through more than twenty-five generations been to that family the fulcrum of their power, making men regard them, and not lightly undertake anything that ran not with their policy. In those days, as from of old, no private man might live quiet in Rerek, for the envies, counterplottings, and open furies of the great houses, each against each: the house of Parry, sometimes by plain violence, other times using under show of comity and friendship a more mole-like policy, working ever to new handholds, new stances, on the way up towards absolute dominion; while, upon the adverse side, the princely lines of Eldir and Kaima and Bagort in the north laboured by all means, even to the sinking now and then of their mutual jealousies, to defeat these threats to their safeties and very continuance. Discontents in the Zenner marches: emulations among lesser lords, and soldiers of fortune: growing-pains of the free towns, principally in the northern parts: all these were wound by one party and the other to their turn. And always, north and south, wings shadowed these things from the outlands: eagles in the air, whose stoops none might securely foretell: Meszria in the south, and (of nearer menace, because action is of the north but the south apter to love ease and to repose upon its own) the great uneasy power of the King of Fingiswold.

So it was that the Lord Pertiscus Parry, upon the thirty-eighth birthday of him and Mynius, which fell about winter-nights, took at last this way to amend his matter: bade his brother to a birthday feast at Thundermere, and the same night, when men were bemused with wine and Mynius by furious drinking quite bereft of his senses, put him to bed to a bear brought thither on purpose, and left this to work till morning. Himself, up betimes, and making haste with a good guard to Laimak swiftlier than tidings could overtake him, was let in by Mynius’s men unsuspecting; and so, without inconvenience or shedding of blood made himself master of the place. He put it about that it was the Devil had eat his brother’s head off, coming in the likeness of a red bear with wings. Simple men believed it. They that thought they knew better, held their tongues.

After this, Pertiscus Parry took power in Laimak. His wife was a lady from the Zenner; their children were Emmius, Gargarus, Lugia, Lupescus, and Supervius.

Emmius, being come of age, he set in lordship at Sleaby in Susdale. Lugia he gave in marriage to Count Yelen of Leveringay in north Rerek. Gargarus, for his part simple and of small understanding, grew to be a man of such unthrifty lewd and abominable living that he made it not scrupulous to lay hand on men’s daughters and lawful wives, keep them so long as suited the palate of his appetite, then pack them home again. Because of these villainies, to break his gall and in hope to soften the spite of those that had suffered by him, his father forced him to pine and rot for a year in the dungeons under Laimak. But there was no mending of his fault: within a month after his letting out of prison he was killed in a duello with the husband of a lady he had took by force in the highway between Swinedale and Mornagay. Lupescus grew up a very silent man. He lived much shut up from the world at Thundermere.

Of all Pertiscus’s children the youngest, Supervius, was most to his mind, and he kept him still at his side in Laimak.

He kept there also for years, under his hand, his nephew Rasmus Parry, Mynius’s only son. Rasmus had been already full grown to manhood when he had sight of his father’s corpse, headless and its bowels ploughed up and the bear dead of her wounds beside it (for Mynius was a man of huge bodily strength) in that inhospitable guest-chamber at Thundermere; yet these horrid objects so much inflamed his mind that nought would he do thenceforth, day or night, save rail and lament, wishing a curse to his soul, and drink drunk. Pertiscus scorned him for a milksop, but let him be, whether out of pity or for fear lest his taking off might be thought to argue too un-manlike a cruelty. In the end, he found him house and land at Lonewood in Bardardale, and there, no great while afterwards, Rasmus, being in his drunken stupor, fell into a great vat of mead and thus, drowned like a mouse, ended his life-days.

Seventeen years Pertiscus sat secure in Laimak, begraced and belorded. Few loved him. Far fewer were those, how high soever their estate, that stood not in prudent awe of him. He became in his older years monstrously corpulent, out-bellied and bulked like a toad. This men laid to the reproach of his gluttony and gormandizing, which indeed turned at last to his undoing; for, upon a night when he was now in his fifty-sixth year, after a surfeit he had taken of a great haggis garnished with that fish called the sea-grape putrefied in wine, a greasy meat and perilous to man’s body, which yet he affected beyond all other, he fell down upon the table and was suddenly dead. This was in the seven hundred and twenty-first year after the founding of the city of Zayana. In the same year died King Harpagus in Rialmar of Fingiswold, to whom succeeded his son Mardanus; and it was two years before the birth of Mezentius, son of King Mardanus, in Fingiswold.

Supervius was at this time twenty-five years of age: in common esteem a right Parry, favouring his father in cast of feature and frame of mind, but taller and without superfluity of flesh: all hardness and sinew. Save that his ears stood out like two funguses, he was a man fair to look upon: piercing pale eyes set near together, like a gannet’s: red hair, early bald in front: great of jaw, and with a fiery red beard thick and curly, which he oiled and perfumed, reaching to his belt. He was of a most haughty overweeningness of bearing: hard-necked and unswayable in policy, albeit he could look and speak full smoothly: of a sure memory for things misdone against him, but as well too for benefits received. He was held for a just man where his proper interest was not too nearly engaged, and a protector of little men: open-handed, and a great waster in spending: by vulgar repute a lycanthrope: an uneasy friend, undivinable, not always to be trusted; but as unfriend, always to be feared. He took to wife, about this time, his cousin Rhodanthe of Upmire, daughter of Sidonius Parry.

Men judged it a strange thing that Supervius, being that he was the youngest born, should now sit himself down in his father’s seat as though head of that house unquestioned. Prince Keriones of Eldir, who at this time had to wife Mynius’s daughter Morsilla, and had therefore small cause to love Pertiscus and was glad of any disagreeings in that branch of the family, wrote to Emmius to condole his loss, styling him in the superscription Lord of Laimak, as with intent by that to stir up his bile against his young brother that had baulked him of his inheritance. Emmius returned a cold answer, paying no regard to this, save that he dated his letter from Argyanna. The Prince, noting it, smelt in it (what soon became generally opinioned and believed) that Supervius had prudently beforehand hatched up an agreement with his eldest brother about the heirship, and that Emmius’s price for waiving his right to Laimak had been that strong key to the Meszrian marchlands: according to the old Rerek saying:

A brace of buttocks in Argyanna

Can swing the scales upon the Zenner.

This Lord Emmius Parry, six years older than Supervius, was of all that family likest to his mother: handsomer and finelier-moulded of feature than any else of his kindred: lean, loose-limbed, big-boned, black of hair, palish of skin, and melancholic: wanting their fire and bestial itch to action, but not therefore a man with impunity to be plucked by the beard. He was taciturn, with an ordered tongue, not a swearer nor an unreverent user of his mouth: men learned to weigh his words, but none found a lamp to pierce the profoundness of his spirit. He was a shrewd ensearcher of the minds and intents of other men: of a saturnine ironic humour that judged by deed sooner than by speech, not pondering great all that may be estimate great: saw where the factions drew, and kept himself unconcerned. No hovering temporizer, nor one that will strain out a gnat and swallow a camel, neither yet, save upon carefully weighed necessity, a meddler in such designs as can hale men on to bloody stratagems: but a patient long-sighted politician with his mind where (as men judged) his heart was, namely south in Meszria. His wife, the Lady Deïaneira, was Meszrian born, daughter to Mesanges of Daish. He loved her well, and was faithful to her, and had by her two children: Rosma the first-born, at that time a little maid seven winters old, and a son aged four, Hybrastus. Emmius Parry lived, both before at Sleaby and henceforward in Argyanna, in the greatest splendour of any nobleman in Rerek. He was good to artists of all kind, poets, painters, workers in bronze and marble and precious stones, and all manner of learned men, and would have them ever about him and pleasure himself with their works and with their discourse, whereas the most of his kin set not by such things one bean. There was good friendship between him and his brother Supervius so long as they were both alive. Men thought it beyond imagination strange how the Lord Emmius quietly put up his brother’s injuries against him, even to the usurping of his place in Laimak: things which, enterprised by any other man bom, he would have paid home, and with interest.

For a pair of years after Supervius’s taking of heirship, nought befell to mind men of the change. Then the lord of Kessarey died heirless, and Supervius, claiming succession for himself upon some patched-up rotten arguments with more trickery than law in them, when the fruit did not fall immediately into his mouth appeared suddenly with a strength of armed men before the place and began to lay siege to it. They within (masterless, their lord being dead and all affairs in commission), were cowed by the mere name of Parry. After a day or two, they gave over all resistance and yielded up to him Kessarey, tower, town, harbour and all; being the strongest place of a coast-town between Kaima and the Zenner. Thus did he pay himself back somewhat for loss of Argyanna that he had perforce given away to his brother.

Next he drew under him Telia, a strong town in the batable lands where the territories of Kaima marched upon those subject to Prince Keriones: this professedly by free election of a creature of his as captal of Telia, but it raised a wind that blew in Eldir and in Kaima: made those two princes lay heads together. Howsoever, to consort them in one, it needed a solider danger than this of Telia which, after a few months, came to seem no great matter and was as good as forgot until, the next year, the affair of Lailma, being added to it, brought them together in good earnest.

Lailma was then but a small town, as it yet remains, but strongly seated and walled. Caunas has formerly been lord of it, holding it to the interest of Mynius Parry whose daughter Morsilla he had to wife: but some five years before the death of Pertiscus Parry, they of Lailma rose against Caunas and slew him: proclaimed themselves a free city: then, afraid of what they had done, sought protection of Eldir. Keriones made answer, he would protect them as a free commonalty: let them choose them a captain. So all of one accord assembled together and put it to voices, and their voices rested on Keriones; and so, year by year, for eight years. The Lady Morsilla, Caunas’s widow, was shortly after the uproar matched to Prince Keriones; but the son of her and Caunas, Mereus by name, being at Upmire with his great-uncle Sidonius Parry and then about twelve years of age, Pertiscus got into his claws and kept him in Laimak treating him kindly and making much of him, as a young hound that he might someday find a use for. This Mereus, being grown to manhood, Supervius (practising with the electors in Lailma) now at length in the ninth year suborned as competitor of Keriones to the captainship. Faction ran high in the town, and with some blood-letting. In the end, the voices went on the side of Mereus. Thereupon the hubble-bubble began anew, and many light and unstable persons of the Parry faction running together to the signiory forced the door, came riotously into the council chamber, and there encountering three of the prince’s officers, with saucy words and revilings bade them void the chamber; who standing their ground and answering threat for threat, were first jostled, next struck, next overpowered, seized, their breeches torn off, and in that pickle beaten soundly and thrown out of the window.

Keriones, upon news of this outrage, sent speedy word to his neighbour princes, Alvard of Kaima and Kresander of Bagort. The three of them, after council taken in Eldir, sent envoys to both Laimak and Argyanna, to make known that they counted the election void because of intermeddling by paid agents of Supervius Parry (acting, the princes doubted not, beyond their commission). In measured terms the envoys rehearsed the facts, and prayed the Lords Emmius and Supervius, for keeping of the peace, to join with the princes in sending of sufficient soldiers into Lailma to secure the holding of new elections soberly, so as folk might quietly and without fear of duress exercise their choice of a captain.

In both places the envoys got noble entertainment and good words; but as for satisfaction, they came bare and were sent bare away. Supervius rejected, as a just man wrongfully accused, the charges of coercion. As touching their particularities of violence done by fools, frantics and so forth, if Prince Keriones misliked it, so too did he. But ’twas no new or unheard of thing. He could rake up a dozen injuries to match it, suffered by his friends in the same town within these nine years, and upon smaller provocation; they must have respect also that many still believed (as he had heard tell) that it was not without pulling of strings from Eldir that Caunas, his kinsman-in-law, got his death. But all such things, for peace sake, it were now unproper and unprofitable to pursue, and he had very charitably passed them by. For his own part (stroking his beard), enough to say that he upheld free institutions in the free cities of the north: would uphold them by force, too, if need were.

Emmius, standing firm and unaffable in support of his brother, left the envoys in no doubt that, in case attempt were made to meddle with Lailma, he would immediately aid Mereus by force of arms. So far in audience; and this upon taking leave: ‘If the princes desire peace and amity, as I think they do and as we do, let’s meet in some place convenient, not under either side’s dominion, and hammer the thing to agreement. Tell them, if they will, I’ll come and see them in Mornagay.’ With that, he gave them a letter to Supervius, that in their way home they might deliver it to him and (if he were of like mind) join him in this offer.

The princes sat in Eldir, last week of June, to consider of their envoys’ report. Judging the business, upon examination, to be a chestnut not easy to unhusk, or with unpricked fingers, they thought fittest to accept the proffer of parley. Accordingly, after delays which all had show of reason but had origin, most of them, in Argyanna or Laimak, upon the twenty-fifth of August, in the wayside inn at Mornagay, both sides met.

The Lord Emmius Parry, arm in arm with his brother upon the stairs in their way up to the chamber where their conference should be, stayed him a moment (the others being gone before). ‘You took all means that the answer, on that matter of yours, should be brought hither? Not miss you by going past us to Laimak?’

‘All means. I am not a fool.’

‘I like it not, seeing, by our last intelligence ’twas directly said the letter but waited signature and should be sent you by speedy hand within twenty-four hours from them. This, in Laimak yesterday afore breakfast. A master card to deal unto them today, held we but that in our hand.’

‘I’ve plied every mean to hasten it, this two months past,’ said Supervius. ‘Much against my own nature, too: Satan sain them, sire and filly both. Ay, and I do begin to think I did ill to follow your counsel there, brother.’

Emmius laughed. ‘I may come upon you for this hereafter.’

‘To cap and knee them, like some rascally suitor for a chipping; and so be thus trained. Even to putting away of my wife, too, not to miss of this golden chance, and she at the long last with child; and nought but black looks so from my uncle Sidonius, for that slight upon his daughter. ’Twas ill done. Would it were undone.’

‘Go, I would have you resolute and patient: not as thus, full of vertibility. Nothing was lost for asking, and this an addition most worth your waiting for.’

Being set, they now fell to business. The princes, using mediocrity and eschewing all kind of provocation, first argued their case. Supervius, in answer, spoke much, full of compliment indeed but with small show of compliancy: later, when, leaving generalities, they fell to disputing of particular facts, he spoke little: Emmius, here a word and there a word. When they had thus spent near two hours but to tiffle about the matter, Prince Keriones, as a man wearied past bearing of these jugglings and equivocations, laid the question plump and fair: Were the Parry resolved to content them with nought less than leave things where they stood: Mereus in Lailma?

There was no answer. Supervius looked at the ceiling. ‘You are a harsh stepfather, when his own people would have him back, to wish to put him out again; and with our help, God save the mark!’ Emmius raised an eyebrow, then fell to tracing with his pen-point little jags and stars on the paper before him. Keriones repeated his question. ‘Briefly so,’ said Supervius, and thrust out his jaw.

‘Will you stand upon that, my Lord Emmius Parry?’ said the prince. And, upon Emmius’s shrugging his shoulders and saying, ‘At least it conveniently brings us back to a base on which we can, maybe, by further debate frame some mean toward agreement’, ‘Then,’ said the prince, gathering up his papers, ‘our work is but waste work, for we will not for our part any longer endure this thing.’

Supervius opened his mouth for some damageful rejoinder, but his brother, checking him with a hand upon his arm, made for both: ‘I pray you yet have patience awhile. Nor I nor my brother desire troubles in the land. But if, spite of that, troubles be raised, we are not unprepared; men may wisely beware how they stamp upon our peaceful stockinged feet, be it in the north there or nigher home.’

‘You think to cow us,’ said Keriones violently, ‘with threats of war? seeing that by fraud, art and guile you can no further? But you shall find that neither are we unprepared. Neither are we without friends to fight beside us, if needs must, in our just quarrel. Yea, friends right high and doubtable: out of Fingiswold, if you goad us to that. We will call in King Mardanus to aid us.’

There was a silence. One or two startled as if a rock had fallen from the sky. The Lord Emmius smiled, drumming delicately on the table with his fingers. ‘Our words, of both sides,’ he said at last, ‘out-gallop our thoughts: sign we are hungry. These be not matters to be swept up in a rage, as boys end a game of marbles. Let’s dine and forget ’em awhile. Then, with minds refreshed, chance our invention may devise a picture shall please us all.’

Kresander said beneath his breath, but Supervius, as catching the sense of it, reddened to the ears, ‘He that shaketh hands with a Parry, let him count the fingers a receiveth back again.’

But Keriones, his brow clearing (as though that rude discourtesy, contrariwise to its sense and purpose, wrought in him but to second Emmius’s pleasant words and with potenter force than theirs), said to Emmius, ‘You have counselled well, my lord. Truly, he that will argue matters of state on an empty belly hath his guts in his brains.’

While they waited for dinner, there were brought in spice-plates and wines. Emmius said, ‘I pray you do me that favour as to taste this wine. I brought it north on purpose for our entertainment. It is of Meszria, of their famousest vintage: a golden wine of Armash.’ With his own hand he filled round the goblets from the jewelled silver flagon. ‘Prince Kresander, I’ll pledge you first: I know not why, unless ’tis because you and I have, of all of us, journeyed farthest to this meeting-place.’ With that, he drained his cup: ‘To our soon agreement.’ Kresander, flushing in the face with an awkward look, drained his. And now, carousing deep healths, the whole company pledged one another.

They dined lightly on what the inn afforded: capon, neats’ tongues, bacon pies, sallets, and round white cheeses pressed in the hill-farms above Killary. These things, with much quaffing down of wine, soon warmed them to quips and merriment, so that, dinner being done, they came again, with minds cleared and blood cooled, to their chief matter subject.

‘Ere we begin,’ said Emmius, ‘I would say but this. With what intent came we to this place, if not to seek agreement? Yet we spent the morning upon a dozen prickly questions, most of them not worth the reward paid to a courtesan for a night’s lodging, and yet each enough by itself to stir up the gall of some or other of us and set us by the ears. How were it now if we set about it another way: talk first on those matters whereon we are at one? And, most worth of all, this: that we will have no foreign hand meddling in Rerek. That is an old tried maxim, profitably observed by us in all our private differences whatsoever, and by our fathers, and fathers’ fathers.’

‘Your lordship has well and truly said,’ said Kresander; ‘as myself, most of all, should feel the mischief, were outlanders to come in upon us from that quarter. So much the more, then, behoveth some not to bring things to that pass that others may think it a less evil to fetch in help from without than to abide the injustices put upon them within the land.’

Emmius said, ‘Our private differences it is for us to untangle and set in order as we have had wont to: not by war, nor by threat of war, but by wise policy, giving a little back when need be, between ourselves. They cannot, unless we have ta’en leave of our sober wits, to be let hunt counter to that cardinal trending of our politic.’

‘What of Kessarey?’ said Keriones. ‘Was not that by war-stirring or war-threat? What of Telia? Nay, I cry you mercy, finish your say, my lord. I desire our agreement as much as you desire it.’

‘As much as that?’ Alvard said, behind his hand. ‘Mich ’em God dich ’em! Fine agreement there, then!’

‘Kessarey,’ replied Emmius Parry, ‘was anciently of Laimak; we but fetched it back where it belonged. Telia, by full franchise and liberties, chose their governor. We are here not to treat of things over and done with, but of this late unhappy accident in Lailma.’

‘Good,’ said Prince Keriones. ‘There’s yet comfort, if you say that. Afore dinner, it seemed you would have but one way in Lailma, and that your own way.’

‘No, no. I never said so. I never thought so.’

‘My Lord Supervius said it.’

Supervius shook his head. ‘I would not be taken altogether thus. Some way, there’s ne’er a doubt, we shall patch matters together.’

‘As for Lailma,’ said Emmius, ‘we shall be easily set at one, so we but hold by that overruling maxim of no foreign finger. If we are to treat, it must be upon that as our platform. We can affirm that, my lords? that, come what may, we will have no foreign finger in Rerek?’

‘I have been waiting these many minutes,’ said Supervius, looking across the table with a cold outfacing stare, ‘to hear Prince Keriones say yea to that principle.’

The prince frowned: first time since dinner. ‘It is a principle I have resolutely stood upon,’ he said, ‘since first I had say in the affairs of this land. And that’s since I first had a beard to my chin; at which time my Lord Supervius Parry was but a year or two out of’s swaddling-clothes. And will you thus ridiculously pretend that I and my friends would go about to undo this wholesome rule and practice? When in truth it is you who, seeking to perturbate these towns in our detriment and to undercreep my might and title in Lailma, hope so to drive us into a corner where we have the choice but of two things: either to give way to you at every turn and so be made at last your under-men in Rerek, either else (if we will maintain our right) to take a course which you may cry out against as violating the very principle we ourselves have made our policy and have urged upon you.’

Emmius said, ‘Nay, pray you, my lords, let’s stick to our tacklings. Mutual imputations of working underhand do but put true matters aback. Let’s pledge ourselves to Prince Keriones’s policy: this knotty question of Lailma we shall then easily undo. Are we accorded so far?’

‘No,’ answered Keriones. ‘And, in frank plainness, for this reason. You have levies of armed men (we know this by our espials) in a readiness to march north and set upon us. I say not we are afeared of what you may do to us, but we mean not to tie our own hands and so fall in your hazard. Let’s talk, if you please, of Lailma. But if in that obstinacy my Lord Supervius remains, then we sit out. And then will we assuredly bring in Fingiswold to help us, and the rebuke and damage of that will be yours, not ours.’

‘It will be your very deed,’ said Supervius, ‘sprung from your own fury, howsoever you colour it.’

‘O, no hot respectless speeches, brother,’ said Emmius. ‘These matters must be handled with clear eyes, not in a swimming of the brain.

‘Prince Keriones,’ he said then, sharpening his eyes upon him, ‘this is a very peremptory sentence plumped down of you. Well, I also will speak plain, and without offence. We have offered to treat with you upon your own avouched basis of no foreign finger. You will not engage yourselves so far. Upon this, then, we set up our rest, I and my brother. We accept that basis. More, we are minded to enforce it. The fortress of Megra, lying upon your (and our) northern border, and longing to Fingiswold, is threat enough. It is (with all humility) for you princes to govern well your realms and give example to the cities upon your confines: so do we with ours. I have friends and affines in the southland, but I would think scorn to call upon King Kallias to prop me. If you call upon King Mardanus, I will march with my brother to defend that northern frontier thus betrayed by you. And I think we can be upon you, and deal with you, before you have time to bring in your foreign succours; as in common prudence indeed we must, since you have so threatened us, unless you give us security of peace. That is to say, material pledges: fair words, spoken or written, can by no means suffice us now.

‘So much, since I would be honest, you left me no choice but to say. But surely it is not a thing unpossible or unlikely, that’—

Here Kresander could contain no longer. ‘We had better never have come hither,’ he shouted, and smote the table with his fist. ‘This meeting was but to mock us and dally the matter off while they sharpened their swords against us. I’m for home.’ He pushed back his chair and was half risen, but Kariones pulled him down again, saying, ‘Wait. We will hear this out.’

Supervius, while his brother had been speaking, had broke the seal of a letter brought hastily in by his secretary. Keriones and Alvard watched him read it, as if themselves would read in his face something of its purport. But his face, haughty and imperturbable, showed not so much as a hairsbreadth movement of nostril or eyelid as he scanned the letter, neither at Kresander’s outburst.

‘Tongues can outbrawl swords,’ said Emmius, chilling cold of voice; ‘but that is for rude beasts, not for men that be reasonable. I pray you, let me finish my say. And first, by your leave,’ as Supervius put the letter into his hands. He read it, folded it again thoughtfully, gave it back: his face like his brother’s, not to be unciphered. ‘Let us,’ he said, ‘as great statesmen, hold fast by our common good, of all of us, which is peace in Rerek. History hath remembered the ruins of many estates and powers which have gone down in civil strife or, albeit victorious, got in the end but a handful of smoke to the bargain. Let us live as friends. I unfeignedly wish it: so do my brothers and all that adhere to our interest. But others must do their part. This is my counsel: that we, of both sides, agree to go home, keep truce for a month, then meet again and, as I hope, determine of some new assured basis for our unluckily shaken friendship. Where shall we meet?’ he said, turning to his brother.

‘Why, if it shall please your excellencies to kill two birds with one stone and add merry-making to crown our peace-making,’ said Supervius, ‘what happier meeting-place than Megra? upon the twentieth day of September, which is appointed there for the feast of my betrothal’ – he paused, gathering their eyes – ‘to the Princess Marescia of Fingiswold. Nay, read it if you please: I had it but five minutes since.’ And with a wolvish look he tossed the letter upon the table.

II
FOUNDATIONS IN FINGISWOLD

IT was eight months after that meeting in Mornagay: mid-March, and mid-afternoon. Over-early spring was busy upon all that grew or breathed in the lower reaches of the Revarm. Both banks, where the river winds wide between water-meadows, were edged with daffodils; and every fold of the rising ground, where there was shelter from north and east for the airs to dally in and take warmth from the sunshine, held a mistiness of faint rose-colour: crimp-petalled blossoms, with the leaf-buds scarcely as yet beginning to open, of the early northern plum. Higher in the hillsides pasque-flowers spread their tracery of soft purple petal and golden centre. A little downstream, on a stretch of shingle that lay out from this right bank into the river, a merganser drake and his wife stood preening themselves, beautiful in their whites and bays and iridescent greens. It was here about the high limit of the tides, and from all the marshland with its slowly emptying creeks and slowly enlarging flats (for the ebb was well on its way) of mud and ooze, came the bubbling cascade of notes as curlew answered curlew amid cries innumerable of lesser shore-birds; plover and sandpiper, turnstone and spoonbill and knot and fussy redshank, fainter and fainter down the meanderings of the river to where, high upon crags which rose sudden from water-level to shut out the prospect southwards, two-horned Rialmar sat throned.

Anthea spoke: ‘I have examined it, honoured sir: scented it, as you bade me, from every airt.’

Doctor Vandermast was sat a little above her on the rib of rock which, grown over with close-lying twigs and leaf-whorls of the evergreen creeping daphne, made for these two a dry and a cushioned resting-place. His left hand, palm-upward in white beard, propped his chin. His gaze was south, in a contemplation which seemed to look through and behind the immediate things of earth and sky, as through windows giving upon less alterable matters. Nothing moved, save when here and there, in a sparkle of black and white, a flock of shy golden-eye took wing, upstream or downstream, or a butterfly flight of terns rose and fell, drifting on air toward the unseen headwaters of the Midland Sea.

‘Rialmar town?’ said the doctor, at last, without shifting his gaze.

‘No. This whole new world. I have quartered it over, pole to pole, so as I could (if you desired me) give you an inventory. And all since day dawning.’

‘What make you of it? In a word?’

‘Something fair and free,’ she answered. ‘Something immeasurably old. As old as myself.’

‘Or as young?’

‘Or as young.’

‘But a minute ago you called it new?’ He looked down now, into this girl’s staring yellow eyes: eyes whose pupils were upright slits that opened upon some inward quivering of incandescence, as of iron fired beyond redness; and his gaze grew gentle. ‘And you are becharmed by it: like a bee of the new brood come out to dance before the hive on a still sunshiny evening and taste open air for the first time and find your landmarks.’

Anthea laughed: a momentary disclosing of pointed teeth that transshaped, as with leap and vanishing again of lightning, the classic quietude of her features. ‘I knew it all before,’ she said. ‘Yet for all that, it is as new and unexperimented as last night’s snowfall on my high glaciers of Ramosh Arkab. A newness that makes my heckles rise. Does it not yours?’

He shook his head: ‘I am not a beast of prey.’

‘What are you, then?’ she said, but without waiting for an answer. ‘There is a biting taste to it: a scent, a stirring: and up there, especially. In the Teremnene palace.’ She lifted her nose towards the royal seat-town upon its solitary heights, as if even down wind her eager sense tasted its quality.

Vandermast said, ‘There is a child there. You saw it no doubt? A boy.’

‘Yes. But no past ordinary novelty in that. Unless perhaps that when, changing my smooth skin for my furred, I slunk in and made teeth at it behind the nurse’s back, it was not scared but gave me a look, so that I went out and glad to be gone. And, now I think on it, ’twas that first set me scenting this newness at every corner. Beyond all, in the Queen.’ She looked at him, paused, then asked suddenly. ‘This Queen. Who in truth is she?’

He made no reply.

‘Tell me, dear master,’ she said, drawing herself closer by a most unhuman self-elongating of body and limbs and rubbing her cheek, as might some cattish creature, against his knee.

He said, ‘You must not ask questions when you know the answer.’

Anthea sat back on her heels and laughed. Upon the motion, her hair, loosely bound up with a string of clouded zircon stones of that translucent blue which is in the lip of an ice-cave looked up to from within, fell, in tumbled cataracts as of very sunlight, down about her shoulders and, in one of its uncoiling fulvid streams, over her breast. ‘She Herself does not know the answer. I suppose, in this present dress of Hers, She is asleep?’

‘In this present dress,’ said the ancient doctor, ‘She is turned outward from Herself. You may, if you choose, conceive it as a kind of sleep: a kind of forgetting. As the sunshine were to forget itself in the thing it shines on.’

‘In that lion-cub of hers? I cannot understand such a forgetting in Her.’

‘No, my oread. Nor I would not wish you able to understand it, for that were to maculate the purity of your own proper nature.’

‘And you would wish me be as I am?’

‘Yes,’ answered he. ‘You, and all true beings else.’

The girl, silent, putting up her hair, met his look unsmilingly with her unquiet, feline, burning eyes.

‘We will go on,’ said the doctor, rising from his seat.

Anthea with a lithe and sinuous grace rose to follow him.

‘Whither?’ she asked as they came southward.

‘Up to Teremne. We will look upon these festivities.’

In the old Teremnene palace which, like an eagle’s nest, crowns the summit ridge of the south-eastern and loftier of the twin steep rock bastions called Teremne and Mehisbon, on and about which has grown up as by accretion of ages Rialmar town, is a little secret garden pleasaunce. It lies square between walls and the living rock, in good shelter from the unkinder winds but open to the sun, this side or that, from fore-noon till late evening. No prying windows overlook it: no intrusive noises visit it of the world’s stir without: a very formal garden artificially devised with paved walks of granite trod smooth by the use of centuries, and with flights of steps going down at either side and at either end to an oval pond in the midst, and upon a pedestal in the midst of that pond a chryselephantine statue of Aphrodite as rising from the sea. At set paces there were parterres of tiny mountain plants: stonecrop, houseleek, rock madwort, mountain dryas, trefoils, and the little yellow mountain poppy; and with these that creeping evening primrose, which lifts up wavy-edged four-lobed saucers of a spectral whiteness, new every night at night-fall, to bloom through the hours of dark and fill the garden with an overmastering sharp sweetness. And at full morning they droop and begin to furl their petals, suffused now with pink colour which were white as a snowdrop’s, and lose all their scent, and the thing waits lifeless and inert till night shall return again and wake it to virgin-new delicacy and deliciousness. This was Queen Stateira’s garden, furnished out anew for her sake seven years ago by Mardanus her lord, who in those days made little store of gardens, but much of his young new-wedded wife.

Shadows were lengthening now, as afternoon drew towards evening. In one of the deep embrasures of the east wall which look down the precipice sheer eight hundred feet, to the river mouth and the harbour and so through skyey distances to the great mountain chains, so blanketed at this hour with cloud that hard it was to discern snowfield from cloudbank, leaned King Mardanus in close talk with two or three about him. No wind stirred in the garden, and the spring sunshine rested warm on their shoulders.

Away from them at some twenty yards’ remove, by the waterside, upon a bench of lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl, sat the Queen. The brightness of the sun shining from behind her obscured her features under a veiling mystery, but not to conceal an ambiency of beauty that lived in her whole frame and posture, an easefulness and reposefulness of unselfregarding grace. The light kindled to flame the native fire-colours in her hair, and the thrown shadow of that statue touched the furred hem of her skirt and the gold-woven lace-work on her shoe.

Over against her on the same bench the Lady Marescia Parry, only child of Prince Garman of Fingiswold, and so cousin german to the King, faced the sun. She was at this time in the twenty-fourth year of her age: of a dazzling whiteness of skin: her eyes, busy, bold and eager, of a hot chestnut brown: her nose a falcon’s, her yellow hair, strained back from her high forehead by a thin silver circlet garnished with stone and pearls, fell loose and untressed about her back and powerful shoulders, in fashion of a bride’s.

The Queen spoke: ‘Well, cousin, you are wedded.’

‘Well wedded, but not yet bedded.’

‘’Las, when mean you to give over that ill custom of yours?’

‘Ill custom?’

‘Ever to speak broad.’

‘O, between kinsfolk. Tell me unfeignedly, what thinks your highness of my Supervius? Is a not a proper man?’

‘He belieth not his picture. And since ’twas his picture you fell in love with, and he with yours, I dare say you have gotten the husband of your choice.’

The Princess smiled with her lips: cherry-red lips, lickerous, and masterful. ‘And by right of conquest,’ she said. ‘That sauceth my dish: most prickingly.’

‘Yet remember,’ said the Queen, ‘we wives are seldom conquerors beyond first se’nnight.’

‘I’ll talk to your highness of that hereafter. But I spake not of conquest upon him. My blood tells me there’s fire enough in the pair of us to outburn such cold-hearth rivalries as that. Dear Gods forfend I should e’er yield myself chattel to the man I wed: but neither could I be fool enough to wed with such a man as I could bring down to be chattel of mine. Nay, I spoke of my parents; ay, and (with respect) of yourself, and of the King.’

‘Your conquest there,’ replied the Queen, ‘is measure of our love of you.’

‘Doubtless. But measure, besides, of mine own self will. Without that,’ here she glanced over her shoulder and leaned a little nearer, ‘I am apt to think your love of me (the King’s, at least) had played second fiddle to more deeper policies.’

The Queen said, ‘Well, fret not for that. You have had your way.’

Marescia lifted her superb white chin and her mouth smiled. ‘Truly, cousin,’ she said, managing her voice almost to a whisper, ‘I think you are to thank me, all of you. Put case I had fallen in with your fine design to match me to yonder outed Prince of Akkama. The man is well enough: personable, I grant: qualified out of all ho, I’d swear, to please a woman: but of what avail? With’s father dead, and himself, driven away by the usurper, a landless exile still sitting on your door-step here. How shall such an one be ever a king, or lord of aught save’s own empty imaginings and discontents? I swear the King (Gods send he live for ever) may get better purchase by this that, following my own natural lust o’ the eye, I have brought him, than by Aktor, be he ten times prince indeed. And Rerek, far nearer us in blood and custom. Wed with yonder foreign lick-dish! God’s dignity, I’d sleep in the byre sooner and breed minotaurs.’

Queen Stateira laughed: honest lovely laughter, bred of sweet blood and the life-breath fancy free; ‘Come, you’re too bitter.’

‘Aktor is in your highness’s books, I think.’

‘Why think that?’

‘Strange else, professing so much cousinly love to me, you should a wished me give my hand there.’

The Queen looked away. ‘To tell you true, dear Marescia, ’twas the King’s wish, and but therefore mine, as being my duty.’

‘Duty?’ said the Princess: ‘to be led blindfold by your husband? Go, they’ll ne’er call me perfect wife a those terms.’

There was a pause. Then Marescia, sitting back again, her voice now at its ordinary strength and pitch: ‘What is this prognosticator by the stars, this soothsayer, your highness keeps i’ the palace?’

‘What do you mean? I keep none such.’

‘O yes: a greybeard signior: long gaberdine, and capped magister artium: some compliment-monger, I would wager. Comes to me as I passed among the throng of guests not half an hour since on my Lord Supervius’s arm, gives me a stare o’ the eye turned all my backside to gooseflesh, and crieth out that I shall bear Supervius a son shall be greater than his father.’

‘Heaven hold fast the omen,’

‘And then to my Lord Emmius, whom I must now call brother-in-law: crieth out and saith that of the seed of Emmius Parry shall come both a queen of earth and a queen of heaven.’

‘And what will he cry out at me, think you?’ said the Queen.

‘Please you enter the hall of the Sea Horses, I can show him to you, and you may examine him.’

‘Dear my Lord,’ said Stateira, as the King and those about him, their business being it seemed concluded, approached her, ‘here’s diversion for you,’ and told him what Marescia had said. The King bluffly humouring it as child’s talk, assented.

‘Yonder standeth the old man: there, that tall, lanky one,’ Marescia said in the Queen’s ear, from behind, as they descended the great staircase into that vast hall and paused upon the last steps between the two sea-horses of dark blue rock-crystal well the height of a man’s shoulder, there to take their stand and survey the company that, upon sounding of trumpets to a sennet to proclaim the King’s presence, abode all motionless now and with all faces turned that way: ‘and the girl with beastly eyes,’ she said, ‘who is, I suppose his granddaughter. Or, may hap, his bona roba, if such a jack pudding have use or custom of such commodities.’

Supervius eyed his princess with the deepening satisfaction of a skilled rider who begins to know the paces of a new high-blooded but untried mare. ‘Speak within door, Marescia,’ said her father. The King sent a little page of his of six year old that was named Jeronimy, to bring the doctor before him.

When that was done, and Vandermast made his obeisance, the King surveyed him a while in silence: then said, ‘Who are you, old sir? Of my folk or an outlander?’

‘I am,’ answered he, ‘your serene highness’s life-long loyal faithful subject: my habitation many journeys from this, south on the Wold: my practice, that of a doctor in philosophy.’

‘And what make you here i’ the court?’

‘To pay my humble duty where most I do owe it, and to behold with mine eyes at last this place and the glory thereof.’

‘And to seek a pension?’

‘No, Lord. Being entered now upon my ninth ten years I do find my lean patrimony sufficient to my livelihood, and in meditation of the metaphysicals food sufficient to sustain my mind. Over and above these things, I have no needs.’

‘A wise man,’ gently said the Queen, ‘by what he saith. For, to speak true, here is freedom indeed.’

‘I ne’er heard philosophy filled a man’s belly,’ said the King, with a piercing look still regarding him. ‘You are bruited to me, you, to have uttered here, this instant afternoon, prognosticks and probabilities (some would call ’em improbabilities, but let that pass) touching certain noble persons, guests at our wedding feast.’

Vandermast said, ‘I did so, my Lord and King, but in answer to interrogatives proposed to me by the persons in question.’

The King raised an eyebrow at Marescia. ‘O yes,’ said she: ‘we did ask him.’

‘I gave but voice to my thoughts that came me in mind,’ said Vandermast. ‘Neither spake I unconsiderately, but such things only as upon examination with mine inward judgement seemed likely and reasonable.’

The King was fallen silent a minute, glaring with his eyes into the eyes, steadfast and tranquil, of that learned doctor beneath their snow-thatched eaves, as though he would plumb some unsoundable darkness that underlay their shining and candid outward. Shifting his gaze at last, ‘You shall not be blamed for that,’ he said: then privately, to Prince Aktor, who was stood close on his right, ‘Here is a man I like: is able to look me in the eye without brave nor slavishness. Kings seldom have to deal but with the one or t’other.’

‘Your serene highness hath never, I think,’ replied Aktor, ‘had to deal with the first.’ He glanced across to Queen Stateira who, upon the King’s left hand, wide-eyed and with lovely lips half parted, was watching Doctor Vandermast with the intent and pleasure and wonder of a child. She caught the glance and looked away.

‘You have answered well,’ said the King to Vandermast. ‘These be days of mirth and rejoicing, and fitting it is folk show themselves open-handed on high holiday, to give somewhat of alms to poor needy persons, most of all when such do utter good words or in what other way soever do seem to merit it. Wear this from me,’ he said, taking a ring from his finger. ‘My grandfather’s it was, King Anthyllus’s upon whom be peace. ’Tis thought there be virtue in the stone, and I would not bestow it save on one in whom I seemed to smell some deserts answerable to its worth. But forget not, the law lieth very deadly against whoso shall make bold to prophesy concerning the King’s person. Aim not therefore at me in your conjectures, old man, bode they good or ill, lest a worse thing overtake you.’

‘My Lord the King,’ said Vandermast, ‘you have commanded, and your command shall with exactness be obeyed. I have told your serenity that few and little are my possessions, and yet that there is nought whereof I do stand in want, nor will I be a taker of rewards. For it is a property universal of rewards that they can corrupt action, propounding to the actor (if the action be bad) a reason beyond the action’s self, without which reason the action must have remained unacted. Because badness of itself is no reason. Contrariwise, be the action good, then the mere fact that it was acted for sake of reward can beget this bad habit in a man: to have respect to cheap, decaying, extern rewards; which enureth in the end so to debauch his inmost understanding that he becometh unable to taste or to desire the true only costly everlasting and ever satisfying reward, which hath its seat in the good action itself. But this,’ he said, drawing onto his finger the King’s ring, ‘cometh not as a reward but as a gift royal, even as great Kings have from the antique times been renowned and honoured as ring-scatterers: a noble example which I find your serene highness do make your own.’

‘Be such as I think you to be,’ said the King, ‘and my friendship followeth the gift.’

The doctor, that audience being done, came and went for a while his leisurely to and fro, within door and without, and always upon the fringes of the company, not as member thereof so much as looker on rather and listener, remarking whatsoever in any person appeared of remarkable: carriages, aspects, moods, manners, silences, little subtleties of eye, nostril, lip. And about and above him, at every succeeding step of his progress through this palace upon the southern horn of Rialmar, the greatness and the ancientness of the place hung heavier. Even as, to a climber, the mere vastness of the mountain becomes, as he goes higher, a presence, unite and palpable, built up of successive vastness of slabbed rock-face, vertiginous ice-cliff, eye-dazzling expanse of snow-field, up-soaring ultimate cornice chiselled by the wind to a sculptured perfection of line, sun-bright and remote against an infinite remoteness of blue heaven above it, so here was all gathered to an immobility of time-worn and storied magnificence: cyclopaean walls and gateways; flights of stairs six riders abreast might ride down on horseback and not touch knees; galleries, alcoves and clerestories cut from the rock; perspectives flattening the eye down distances of corbel and frieze and deep-mullioned windows six times the height of a man; colonnades with doric capitals curiously carved, supporting huge-timbered vaulted roofs; and domed roofs that seemed wide as the arch of day. All of which, apprehended in its wholeness, might cast a wise mind into oblivion not of its own self only and of all mankind but even of the everlasting mountains themselves; in the sudden apprehension that this Rialmar might be the nursery or breeding-place of a majesty and a loneliness older-rooted than theirs.

Closed in these meditations, he came once more into that presence-chamber, with its sea-horse staircase, and here was one of the Queen’s chamberlains with her highness’s bidding that Doctor Vandermast should attend her in the privy garden. The doctor followed him; and, passing on their way through a vaulted corridor hewn in the rock and brightly lighted with hanging lamps, they were met with a nurse leading in her hand a child yet in his side-coats, of two or three years old. The doctor viewed the boy narrowly, and the boy him. ‘What child was that?’ he asked, when they were gone by. The chamberlain, with a skewing of his eye at him as of one smally trusting old vagrant men that were likely sprung of a stone and certainly best told nothing, as soonest mended, answered that it was one of the children of the palace, he knew not for sure which. Which answer the learned doctor let go without further remark.

‘It is her highness’s pleasure,’ said the chamberlain, at the garden gate, ‘to receive you in private. Be pleased to walk on’: so Vandermast entered in alone and stood before Queen Stateira.

She was sitting sideways now on the jewelled bench, her feet up, sewing a kirtle of white satin embroidered with flowers of silver. Upon the doctor’s coming she but glanced up and so back to her needlework. It was yet bright sunshine, but with the wearing of the afternoon the shadow of that gold and ivory statue of our Lady of Paphos no longer touched the Queen where she sat. The air was colder, and she had a high-collared cloak about her shoulders of rich brown velvet, coloured of the pine-marten’s skin in summer and lined with vair. He waited, watching her, while she with down-bended eyes plied her needle. Nought else stirred, except now and then a blazing of hot colour where her hair caught the sun, and except, where the pleated neck-ruff of her gown ran lowest, the gentle fall and swell of her breathing. After a little, she raised her eyes. ‘Can you guess, reverend sir, why I have sent for you?’ The sun was behind her, and her countenance not to be read.

He answered, ‘I will not guess, for I know.’

‘Then tell me. For, in good sadness, I know not why I did it. Answer freely: you see we are alone.’

‘Because,’ answered he, after a moment’s silence, ‘your highness is fugitive and homeless, therefore you did do it; vainly expecting that the will-o’-the-wisp of an old man’s fallible counsel should be a lamp to light you home.’

‘These are strange unlikely words,’ she said. ‘I know not how to take them.’

‘Truth,’ said Vandermast gently, ‘was ever a strange wild-fowl.’

‘Truth! I that was born and bred in Rialmar, where else then shall I be at home? I that am your Queen, how should I be a fugitive, and from what?’

‘To be here before your time is to be homeless. And the necessity you flee from is necessity by this cause only, that yourself (albeit I think you have forgotten) did choose it to make it so.’

The violent blood suffused all her face and neck, and with the suddenness of her half-rising from her seat the rich and costly embroidery slid from her lap and lay crumpled on the ground. She sat back again: ‘I see you are but some phantastical sophister who with speaking paradoxically will gain the reputation of wisdom and reach. I’ll listen to no more.’

‘I am nought else,’ answered that aged man, painfully upon one knee retrieving the fallen satins, ‘than your highness’s creature and servant. You do misprize, moreover, the words I spake, referring unto one particular accident what was meant in a generality more loftily inclusive.’ Then, standing again in respectful reverence before her, ‘And yet, it fits,’ he said, under his breath as to himself only; but the Queen, with head bowed as before over her needlework, seemed to shrink, as though the words touched her on a wound.

‘I have lost my needle,’ she said. ‘No. Here it is.’ Then, after a long pause, still sewing, and as out of a deep unhappiness: ‘Will the gull choose to dash herself against the Pharos light? Will a seaman, where the tide runs in the wind’s teeth between skerry and skerry, choose to be there in a boat without a rudder? Why should I?’

‘How shall any earthly being but your highness’s self answer that? Perhaps ’twas in the idle desire to feel your power.’

With that, the Queen’s hand stopped dead. ‘And you are he they tell me can read a man’s destiny in his eyes? Can you not read in mine,’ and she raised her head to meet his gaze, ‘that I have no power? that I am utterly alone?’

‘The King’s power is your power.’

She said, resuming her sewing, ‘I begin to dread it is not even his.’

‘It is yours, will you but use it.’

She said, bending her white neck yet more to hide her face, ‘I begin to think I have lost the knack to use it.’ Then, scarce to be heard: ‘Perhaps even the wish.’

Doctor Vandermast held his peace. His eyes were busied between this woman and this statue: this, more like in its outward, may be, to the unfacing reality, but of itself unreal, a mere mathematic, a superficies: that other real, but yet, save for an inner and outer loveliness, unlike, because wanting self-knowledge; and yet putting on, by virtue of that very privation, a perfection unique and sufficient unto itself albeit not belonging to the divine prototype at the fulness of Her actual; even as the great lamp of day has at sunrise and at sunset perfections of uncompleteness of transience which are consumed or blotted out in the white flame of noon.

‘You are a strange secret man,’ she said presently, still without looking up, ‘that I should have spoke to you thus: things I’d a spoken to no creature else in the world. And, until today, ne’er so much as set eyes on you.’ Then, suddenly gathering up her needlework, ‘But you give me no help. No more than the other standers by or hinderers.’

He said, ‘There is none hath the ability to help your highness, except only your highness’s self alone.’

‘Here’s cold comfort, then. Yet against burning, I suppose, there may be some good in coldness.’

She rose now and walked a turn or two in silence, coming to a stand at last under the statue; looking up at which, and with a face averted from that aged doctor, she said to him, ‘True it is, I did send for you in a more weightier matter than this of me. I have a son.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you read stars and significations in the heaven?’

‘Be it indeed,’ he replied, ‘that in the university of Miphraz I did seven years apply my youth to study in the Ultramundanes and the Physicals, I have long since learnt that there is no answer in the mouth of these. My study is now of the darkness rather which is hid in the secret places of the heart of man: my office but only to understand, and to watch, and to wait.’

‘Well, have you seen the child? What find you in him? Give me in a word your very thought. I must have the truth.’ She turned and faced him. ‘Even and the truth be evil.’

‘If it be truth,’ said the doctor, ‘it can in no hand be evil; according to the principle of theoric, Quanta est, tanto bonum, which is as much as to say that completeness of reality and completeness of goodness are, sub specie aeternitatis, the same. I have beheld this child like as were I to behold some small scarce discernible first paling of the skies to tomorrow’s dawn, and I say to you: Here is day.’

‘To be King in his time?’

‘So please the Gods.’

‘In Fingiswold, after his father?’

‘So, and more. To be the stay of the whole world.’

‘This is heavenly music. Shall’t be by power, or but by fortune?’

‘By power,’ answered Vandermast. ‘And by worth.’

The Queen caught a deep breath. ‘O, you have shown me a sweet morn after terrible dreams. But also a strange noise in my head, makes stale the morning: by what warrant must I believe you?’

‘By none. You must believe not me, but the truth. I am but a finger pointing. And the nearest way for your highness (being a mortal) to believe that truth, and the sole only way for it to take body and effect in this world, is that you should act and make it so.’

‘You are dark to me as yet.’

‘I say that whether this greatness shall be or not be, resteth on your highness alone.’

She turned away and hid her face. When, after a minute, she looked around at him again, she reached out her hand for him to kiss. ‘I am not offended with you,’ she said. ‘There was an instant, in that wild talk of ours, I could have cut your throat. Be my friend. God knows, in the path I tread, uneven, stony, and full of bogs, I need one.’

Vandermast answered her, ‘Madam and sweet Mistress, I say to you again, I am yours in all things. And I say but again that your highness’s self hath the only power able to help you. Rest faithful to that perfectness which dwelleth within you, and be safe in that.’

III
NIGRA SYLVA, WHERE THE DEVILS DANCE

THAT night Prince Aktor startled out of his first sleep from an evil dream that had in it nought of reasonable correspondence with things of daily life but, in an immediacy of pure undeterminable fear, horror and loss that beat down all his sense to deadness, as with a thunder of monstrous wings, hurled him from sleep to waking with teeth a-chatter, limbs trembling, and the breath choking in his throat. Soon as his hand would obey him, he struck a light and lay sweating with the bedclothes huddled about his ears, while he watched the candle-flame burn down almost to blueness then up again, and the slow strokes of midnight told twelve. After a tittle, he blew it out and disposed himself to sleep; but sleep, standing iron-eyed in the darkness beside his bed, withstood all wooing. At length he lighted the candle once more; rose; lighted the lamps on their pedestals of steatite and porphyry; and stood for a minute, naked as he was from bed, before the great mirror that was on the wall between the lamps, as if to sure himself of his continuing bodily presence and verity. Nor was there any unsufficientness apparent in the looking-glass image: of a man in his twenty-third year, slender and sinewy of build, well strengthened and of noble bearing, dark-brown hair, somewhat swart of skin, his face well featured, smooth shaved in the Akkama fashion, big-nosed, lips full and pleasant, and having a delicateness and a certain proudness and a certain want of resolution in their curves, well-set ears, bushy eyebrows, blue eyes with dark lashes of an almost feminine curve and longness.

Getting on his nightgown he brimmed himself a goblet of red wine from the flagon on the table at the bed-head, drank it, filled again, and this time drained the cup at one draught. ‘Pah!’ he said. ‘In sleep a man’s reason lieth drugged, and these womanish fears and scruples, that our complete mind would laugh and away with, unman us at their pleasure.’ He went to the window and threw back the curtains: stood looking out a minute: then, as if night had too many eyes, extinguished the lamps and dressed hastily by moonlight, and so to the window again, pausing in the way to pour out a third cup of wine and, that being quaffed down, a fourth, which being but two parts filled left the flagon empty. Round and above him, as he leaned out now on the sill of the open window, the night listened, warm and still; wall, gable and buttress silver and black under the moonshine, and the sky about the moon suffused with a radiancy of violet light that misted the stars. Aktor said in himself, ‘Desire without action is poison. Who said that, he was a wise man.’ As though the unseasonable mildness of this calm, unclouded March midnight had breathed suddenly a frozen air about him, he shivered, and in the same instant there dropped into that pool of silence the marvel of a woman’s voice singing, light and bodiless, with a wildness in its rhythms and with every syllable clean and sharp like the tinkle of broken icicles falling:

‘Where, without the region earth,

Glacier and icefall take their birth,

Where dead cold congeals at night

The wind-carv’d cornices diamond-white,

Till those unnumbered streams whose flood

To the mountain is instead of blood

Seal’d in icy bed do lie,

And still’d is day’s artillery,

Near the frost-star’d midnight’s dome

The oread keeps her untim’d home.

From which high if she down stray,

On th’ world’s great stage to sport and play,

There most she maketh her game and glee

To harry mankind’s obliquity.’

So singing, she passed directly below him, in the inky shadow of the wall. A lilting, scorning voice it was, with overtones in it of a tragical music as from muted strings, stone-moving but as out of a stone-cold heart: a voice to send tricklings down the spine as when the night-raven calls, or the whistler shrill, whose call is a fore-tasting of doom. And now, coming out into clear moonlight, she turned about and looked up at his window. He saw her eyes, like an animal’s eyes, throw back the glitter of the moon. Then she resumed her way, still singing, toward the northerly corner of the courtyard where an archway led to a cloistered walk which went to the Queen’s garden. Aktor stood for a short moment as if in doubt; then, his heart beating thicker, undid his door, fumbled his way down the stone staircase swift as he might in the dark, and so out and followed her.

The garden gate stood open, and a few steps within it he overtook her. ‘You are a night-walker, it would seem, and in strange places.’

‘So much is plain,’ said she, and her lynx-like eyes looked at him.

‘Know you who this is that do speak to you?’

‘O yes. Prince by right in your own land, till your own land put you out; and thereafter prince here, and but by courtesy. Which is much like egg without the meat: fair outsides, but small weight and smaller profit. I’ve heard some unbitted tongues say: “princox”.’

‘You are a bold little she-cat,’ he said. Again a shivering took him, bred of some bite in the air. ‘There is frost in this garden.’

‘Is there? Your honour were wiser leave it and go to bed, then.’

‘You must first do me this kindness, mistress. Bring me to the old man your grandsire.’

‘At this time of night?’

‘There is a thing I must ask him.’

‘You are a great asker.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said, as might a boy caught unawares by some uncloaking of his mind he had safely supposed well hid.

Anthea bared her teeth. ‘Do you not wish you had my art, to see in the dark?’ Then, with a shrug: ‘I heard him tell you, this afternoon, he had no answer to questions of yours.’

‘I cannot sleep,’ said Aktor, ‘for want of his answer.’

‘There is always the choice to stay awake.’

‘Will you bring me to him.’

‘No.’

‘Tell me where he sleeps, then, and I will seek him out.’

Anthea laughed at the moon. ‘Hearken how these mortals will ask and ask! But I am not your nurse, to weary myself with parroting of No, no, no, when a pettish child screams for the nightshade-berry. You shall have it, though it poison you. Wait here till I inform him, if so he may deign to come to you.’

The prince saw her depart. As a silver birch-tree of the mountains, if it might, should walk, so walked she under the moon. And the moon, or she so walking, or the wine that was in his veins, or the thunder of his inward thought, wrought in him to think: ‘Why blame myself? Am I untrue to my friend and well-doer and dispenser of all my good, if I seek unturningly the good that seems to my incensed brain main good indeed? She is to him but an engine to breed kings to follow him. With this son bred, why, it hath long been apparent and manifest he is through with her: the pure unadulterate high perfection of all that is or ever shall be, is to him but a commodity unheeded hath served his turn. By God, what cares he for me either? That have held her today, thank the Gods (if any Gods there were, save the grand Devil perhaps in Hell that now, if flesh were or spirit were, which is in great doubt, riveth and rendeth my flesh and spirit), in my arms, albeit but for an instant only, albeit she renegued and rejected me, to know that, flesh by flesh, she must be mine to eternity? God! No, but to necessity: eternity is a trash-name. But this is now; and until my death or hers. And what of him? That, by my soul (damn my soul: for there is no soul, but only the animal spirits; and they unknown, save as the brief substance of a dream or a candle burning, that lives but and dies but in her): what surety have I (God damn me) that he meaneth not to sell me to the supplanter (I loathe him to the gallows) sits in my father’s seat? Smooth words and sweet predicaments: I am in a mist. Come sight but for a lightning-flash, ’tis folly and madness to trust aught but sight. Seeing’s believing. God or Hell, both unbelievable, ’tis time to believe whichever will show me firm ground indeed.’ He was in a muck sweat. And now, looking at that statue as an enemy, and in the ineluctable grip of indignation and love, each with the frenzy of other doubled upon it by desire, he began to say within himself: ‘Female Beast! Wisely was that done of men’s folly, to fain you a goddess. You, who devour their brains: who ganch them on your hook by their dearest flesh till they are ready to do the abominablest treasons so only they may come at the filthy anodyne you offer them, that is a lesser death in the tasting, that breaks their will and their manhood and, being tasted, leaves them sucked dry of all save shame and emptiness only and sickness of heart. Come to life, now. Move. Turn your false lightless lustful eyes here, that you may see how your method works with me. Would they were right cockatrice’s eyes, should look me dead, turn me to a stone, as you are stone: to nothing, as you are nothing.’

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