The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  There was hardly a bush by the roadway but concealed, until you had come to it, a meddlesome sorcerer, or a dragon unamiably prepared to have lunch with you, or a metallically clothed gentleman, with his visor down and his lance ready, politely desirous of a combat to support the contention that his lady in domnei was the most fair and worshipful of this world’s ladies. Nor was it only in the meadows and the lowlands that adventure prospered, because upon at least one hill out of every three hills stood a castle which either diffused, or else was beset by, this or the other kind of enchantment.

  Of these castles some were square-shaped, gray stone fortresses, having at each corner a round tower capped with a shining, steeply pointed lead roof; and about such castles were moats filled with clear water in which swam red fish and white fish. Yet other castles, builded throughout of marble, arose to a superb flowering into pinnacles and into vaporous looking domes, which seemed like huge bubbles moored overhead; and these castles stood among very broad terraces of marble which were guarded only by large lions carved variously in the old purple porphyry of Egypt and in the green porphyry of Greece. Still other castles, erected by architects more ambiguous, were to the eye of the traveller just shining black precipices, with remote clouds floating—in an indescribably sinister manner—about and into their lower windows. But in each castle lived wonder and beauty and danger.

  And about the highways also roved these three, so that at every bend of his road the glories and the prettiness and the quaint horrors of myth now jostled Elair’s passing. To begin with, from a broad clump of elder-bushes, a centaur arose, tilted back rather remarkably until his hind legs were up, to grin at Elair in pleased surprise. Then witches, bloated with dropsy, croaked to him like foul frogs, telling about the worshipped joys of their wickedness. And a golden cat sang to Elair the strange tale of this cat’s love for a wood nymph and of her partial response to this love.

  To Elair came Luridan, in the likeness of a slim boy who was rather unpleasantly beautiful. His eyes sparkled under delicate arched brows; his lips were like coral. He chaunted those fatal songs which, under the name of Behelah, he had made very long ago in Jerusalem, in the days of Solomon; and Luridan chaunted also the poems and the false prophecies which he made in Cymry, where he was called Wadd. All these were most poisonous songs which tempted their hearer to follow after Luridan to a foreknown but delicious destruction. But after Luridan now followed, instead, a great tawny man, having the thighs and the legs of a goat; and this Balkin, who was Lord of the Northern Mountains, made safe the road of Elair, with a large flaming broom, which swept away Luridan and destroyed his bad loveliness, for that while.

  A young emperor, in a purple robe embroidered in scarlet with the twelve signs of the Zodiac, each displayed upside down, whispered to Elair about that desire which had drawn down this lost whisperer into the Place of the Crocodiles, and about how that desire had been satiated in a musk-smelling twilight. In a pavilion of shining stone, having a cupola of alabaster, and containing a pillar of fretted gold upon which stood the figure of a golden bird with a diamond serpent in its beak, a naked dark woman, who was wholly beautiful except for the fact that her feet were affixed backwards, clung to Elair’s elbow in the while that she lamented the ill bargain which had procured for her an immortal soul. And a crowned maiden came to him in such royal robes as were once worn in Babylon, carrying a cushion of green velvet. On it lay a stone which shone with a great light. Behind her walked six maidens in white robes, who carried torches of transparent glass in which burned balsam. They told him of the stone’s virtues, offering it to Elair at a price which he declined to pay.

  And in Nettan, Elair rode for some while with a company of such beings as hunted the unicorns of Nettan. All these, of course, were deaf-mutes, with long yellow hair; and they wore, as was customary, their mantles of green and bright silver shoes. They carried bows made from the rib-bones of their mortal enemies; their arrows were of bog-wood tipped with white flint and dipped in the dew of hemlock; their quivers were fashioned of snake-skin. Such was the appearance and the gear of these deaf-mutes; but of their needs and of their doings, among the rose-colored cliffs of Nettan, perhaps the less said, the better.

  Moreover, with the affairs of one or another royal family—families which to a noteworthy degree inclined to consist of a golden-haired princess, of three princes, of two brunette step-sisters, of an industriously abominable stepmother, and of a king with a weakness for asking riddles—the incidents of travel involved Elair time and again.

  And Elair the Song-Maker liked it all. Elair entered with such wholeheartedness into the traditionary avocations of a young champion embarked on a quest that, were his combats, his imbroglios, his temptations (all which he resisted nobly), his traffic with supernatural creatures, his destructions of monsters, his rescues of harried innocence, and his unimaginative displays of the more superb virtues in general, all written down in this tale, the depressing result would be one of the longest books to be found anywhere in the libraries of an already sufficiently afflicted world. For great-thewed Elair had every heroic attribute, such as altruism, and bravery, and courtesy, and dulness, and earnestness, and fidelity—and so on, down through the entire alphabet, to and including zeal. Each one of these attributes he displayed, over arid yet over again, in the while that he quested after a magic which would make steadfast the youth of Fergail.

  Well, and he inherited, now and then, from the depraved ogres and tyrants and sorcerers whom at odd, times he killed, a number of wonder-working trinkets. But no one of these charms, it so happened, served to secure youth’s eternalness. Elair the Song-Maker got only a resistless sword, and a talking harp, and a blue pigeon which at its owner’s request would lay instead of eggs three large pigeon-blood rubies; and he got also an ever-filled purse (which was made from the skin of a mantichora), and one or two other marvels.

  But each one of these marvels Elair the Song-Maker left punctiliously beside the corpse of its late owner.

  “The son of sublime Smirt should rely on his own worth and his own powers,” said Elair. “As Smirt’s son, I may not becomingly depend on such cheating kickshaws to make my way in the world. Yet as a lover, I have sore need of that magic which will make steadfast the youth of Fergail, and so win for me the beauty of Fergail, to whom I have sworn eternal fidelity.”

  XXI. WOMEN BY THE WAY

  At one time Elair came to a thick hedge of fire-thorn bushes, which was so tall that it reached up high above his rowan-crowned black head as he rode toward this hedge; and there was a mistiness all about the place. But he found an opening, and he got through it into an open space that was overgrown with ferfis and small purple flowers, and in this meadow he saw a tent of red satin. Beside the open door of this tent stood a pear-tree in full blossom—which did not seem reasonable at this time of the year,—and on a branch of this pear-tree was hung a hunting-horn of silver.

  Elair sounded this horn defiantly. Out of the tent came at once a great black man. He had bright yellow hair and sparkling red eyes, and he carried a large iron club studded with nails. So Elair had drawn one of his pistols when a sweet voice spoke, from inside the tent, saying,—

  “Do you go away, Gabron!”

  And with that, the black giant grinned. He panted seven or eight times, like a very friendly and much magnified dog, in the while that he turned himself into a black cloud; and he so vanished.

  Then Elair put up the pistol, which was not the weapon one needed. He went laughingly into the red tent; and he stayed in that place all night, among great pillows of swans’ down, in a broad bed made out of yew-wood and ivory, with an immortal woman, who was called, as she told him, Morgaine la Fée.

  And another time, after Elair had come to Abradas, the old Emperor Basil and the young Empress Eudocia asked for one of those songs which had brought famousness to Elair the Song-Maker in all the lands beyond common-sense.

  “Hearing,” remarked Elair, tolerantly, “is obedience. But about
what shall I sing, O sublimities and twin radiances of the age?”

  “The theme does not matter,” said the old Emperor, whose views as to art were, of course, of an old-fashioned and frivolous type. “The treatment alone matters. Do you sing at your own will, Elair, about anything under the sun, so that you favor us with a fair taste of your quality.”

  “Before any audience so exalted,” replied Elair, with continued politeness, as he took up his fine harp of maple-wood, “I may not rationally stoop thus low for my subject matter. It follows that I must sing about the sun’s self.”

  And he did. In fact, before a king and a queen, Elair almost always sang this song about the sun, because it was so easily altered to fit any royal couple as to make them think this song an impromptu inspired in that very moment by their own excellence.

  Now in this song Elair duly applauded the sun, as a ruddy and all-domineering overlord, ruling everywhere under the permission of his betters in Abradas; as a power of supreme majesty and stateliness, affable and benign and very famous in the myths of all nations; as a fine mathematician, who figured out the Solstice and the Equinox and the Sidereal Year without ever making an error; and yet as a most dreadful adversary, who faithfully smote his unfriends (so said all learned astrologists) with pimples, with palpitations of the heart, with cramps, with infirmities of the brain, with catarrhs, and with putrid fevers, in the while that the sun invaded each earthly kingdom every day, in search of no man might say what, like a gold: armored and all-terrible emperor, whose abilities were but slightly inferior to those of the great Emperor Basil.

  In reply to this adroit compliment the old Emperor bowed gravely his white head, upon which was a shining crown with ten rubies in it.

  Thus (continued Elair) thus intrepidly fared the sun, that all but omnipotent sun, whose self-complacency was yet checked by the glory of Basil, and whose splendors became mere futilities before the bright face of Eudocia, inasmuch as this Empress outshone the sun in beauty and in all other supremacies such as quickened holiness and high thoughts, where the sun (a mere market gardener, in comparison) thrilled seeds toward vegetating or, like the pursuer of a trade far more unmentionable, nudged the beasts and birds and insects—oh, but even the cold-blooded fish—into beginning a fresh love-affair every spring, at or about (through a coincidence oddly appropriate) the advent of All Fools’ day.

  The Empress had blushed; but she smiled also, as she looked down modestly at the point of her little green and white shoe.

  Hey, but beside Basil was not this Phoebus a snuffed candle! Elair jeered, in his peroration. Alas, the speckled, the gross, the lechery—whelping Phoebus! the lumbering, lewd, gaudy pander to all zoology! tickling no less the huge elephant and the oily whale than the light gnat and the timid, tipped-tailed wren with his all-embracing lubricities! Into what shielding eclipse, or what bolster-thick snow clouds, might this round-faced and tawdry and tinselled vagabond vanish when the chaste and all-holy Eudocia appeared?

  Their majesties both applauded.

  Well, and after that, the young Empress Eudocia took a fancy to Elair; and she carried this fancy to such an extent that Elair himself noticed it, rather unavoidably. She coaxed him to sit upon her husband’s throne; upon Elair’s black head, over the wreath of rowan berries which he wore on account of his obligation, she put her husband’s gold crown with the ten big rubies in it; and in the hand of Elair she put her husband’s sceptre.

  “For you, my dearest,” said the fair Empress, “are the best song-maker in the whole world.”

  “Come, woman of the sweet lips, but let us not exaggerate, because even though I have not met him anywhere, still it may be that my equal does exist,” replied Elair, modestly, as he removed her from his lap.

  He then looked, with some little embarrassment, about the vast lonely throne room. This hall was barbarically painted everywhere with tall savage saints, each having the wounds and the blood of his martyrdom yet on him, but each wearing a breastplate or a necklace inset with precious stones; and the look of this holy company in general was of a character to chill the more tender emotions.

  But Eudocia did not mind any mere saints. She continued, fondly embracing him,—

  “Yes, and you are likewise the joy of my eyes and the flower of all beauty and the large consoler of my soul.”

  “Hah, but you are a crowned empress; and such talk does not befit your present station, madame,” Elair replied, severely. “These remarks are much better suited to your bedchamber.”

  “I agree with you, desire of my heart,” the Empress answered, with a becoming humility; and she at once led him thither.

  Yet the very next afternoon Elair parted from her, in unconcealed disapproval, because she had hired three able-bodied clergymen to drown the old Emperor Basil in his bathroom, so that Elair might become her second husband.

  “The amenities of social life, the license of a poet, and that politeness which every young gentleman owes to all personable and inadequately married young gentlewomen,” remarked Elair, “are one thing. But murder, madame, a prosaic murder in the purely utilitarian atmosphere of a bathroom, is quite another thing. No, you sad, silly, and too impetuous fond darling, I have no least desire to be an emperor. No, I have but one desire in this world: and the name of that desire is Fergail.”

  And yet another time, as Elair rode along by the broad bay of Meroe, he found four girls dancing there mother-naked on the smooth sand, and beside them lay five jackets made out of white feathers. When the girls saw Elair they screeched and they twittered, like frightened birds, in the while that they hastily put on these feather jackets. In this way they were all four changed into sea-gulls, and they flew away hurriedly. Now but one feather jacket remained; and Elair hid it in the tall beach-grass.

  He saw then where a fifth girl lay asleep and unclothed in the sunlight. He awakened her amorously. She was much surprised; but matters had already gone so far that she amiably aided their conclusion before asking who Elair might be.

  He told her his name and his parentage. When the proprieties had been thus observed, she began to display a naturally affectionate disposition. And it was a happy day of which Elair spent the sunlit remainder with this girl, who proved to be a daughter of King Morskoi.

  “Now do you come with me, dear lover,” said the girl Astrild, toward evening, “into my father’s kingdom in the far isles of the ocean. For there is nothing of sorrow or of evil in that place, and all its colors are shining. Age will not ever take away your comeliness in the land of the Water Tzar, and his glittering people live safe beyond the gaunt reach of death.”

  “No,” said Elair; “ah, no, my dear, but I was not meant for this paradise.”

  “Yet in my father’s kingdom, O man of boldness, there is no care and no sorrow. All persons remain young there; the color of the wild rose is in their lips and in their cheeks. Gray hair does not chill their imaginings. A small wrinkle or a loose tooth would be a thing to be wondered over in that place forever. Yes, and among this beautiful people without any blemish we may retain for all time the fond joy of our love. For the ways of the Water Tzar and of his fine kingdom are not the ways of this gross earth. Love also keeps love’s youth in that kingdom. But in your mortal world, Elair, love turns into a disliking as ruinous as flame; or love vanishes like a bad-smelling smoke; or, at best, love can but smoulder out into the ugly and dusty ashes, the gray cinders, of a nodded-over hearth-fire.”

  “That is not true about the love of a poet,” replied Elair, as he yet again embraced the girl ardently, “because in the love of a poet there is no varying whatever; and neither time nor chance will ever shake my fixed love for Queen Fergail. For this reason I cannot go with you, core of my soul, to become forever happy and forever immortal. O woman of soft words and of fair breasts, you are the delight of my body. My eyes worship you. But my faith and my heart aim otherwhither.”

  Weeping a little, the gentle, very lovely, golden-haired daughter of Morskoi kissed Elair for th
e last time, saying,—

  “Farewell, dear mortal lover, whose equal at love-making, and at pig-headedness also, I have not ever found!”

  After that, Astrild put on her charmed jacket of white feathers; she too became a sea-gull; and she flew away eastward across the broad tumbling waters.

  Though indeed (as Elair reflected, with a poet’s concern for such trivialities) “tumbling” was hardly the word; nor were there any words in which you could speak with adequacy of the sea’s heart-stirring multitudinous movements and of the color and of the glow and of the unexplained beauty of this moment, which for no very plain reason was a sad moment.

  From behind him the low sun cast Elair’s long slanting shadow across the brown sands so far that the last turbid scrabbling of the waves now caught and now released the head of this shadow. The incredible deep blue of the sea was becoming green. It was taking on the color of the dear eyes of Fergail. The great waves arose without any hurry, in very long obscure straight lines that moved implacably shoreward; and then curdled and, with a majestic sportiveness, half lazily, tumbled over into white foam which was made radiant, and was made almost pink, by the low sun. The sunset in the same way made radiant and made almost pink the white body of the departing sea-gull, which but an instant ago had been the fair body of Astrild,—although her slow-moving wings, when you saw them thus, from below, seemed to be dark gray.

  These things alone Elair noticed; there was no sadness in these things; and yet to see them made sad his young heart, he did not know why.

  Well, and at yet other times Elair met with yet other women; and he treated all of them civilly, as became a fine lusty poet in the pride of his youth. But at no moment did the heart of Elair waver in its unalterably fixed love for Fergail; and in his thoughts stayed always the sea-green color of her eyes and the red color of her curved lips and the clear gold of her hair, because in all this world Queen Fergail had not anywhere her twin for loveliness.