The Tale of Gold and Silence

by Gustave Kahn

  “And will those be resuscitated who made themselves of their moment, their hour amid the world? What will become of them? It is really the same faith, the new and the old, with the same uncertainties—and you, Dares, what will become of you?”

  “I scarcely expect to survive you,” the slave replied. “Oh, if one could choose....”

  “And what would you choose?”

  “I would like to be born knowing all the songs, and understanding them all.”

  “Perhaps that will be your lot,” said Balthazar. “Fill three cups for us.”

  Dares filled them—but because he was weary after the long day, his movements were slower, as if imprinted with the distant fatigue that had now returned to the face of the King.

  “I drink,” said the latter, “to the unknown of eternal force, to the power, determined in advance, of their will, to the new forces that might be born of the necessities of destiny.”

  Suddenly, a profound and soft voice was heard, which said: “Joseph, Joseph.”

  And Joseph of Arimathea replied: “Here I am.”

  “Come, and bring with you the wooden vessel that you brought.”

  Joseph went away to look for it.

  The night had become clear and milky; they could make out a ship at the bottom of the stairway, and a bright white form at the prow.

  “Mobed, of the ruins of the city of the past!” murmured Balthazar. “Can you see, Dares?”

  But Dares replied: “I see nothing but a broad reflection of moonlight on the ship.” Then, however, he cried: “Oh! It’s the ship of King Solomon, come to seek the Elect!”

  Joseph had come back on to the terrace. The voice continued: “Joseph and King Balthazar must both come aboard the ship, which will take them where destiny must take them. Obey the divine voice immediately.”

  Balthazar replied: “May I not bring my faithful Dares?”

  “No.”

  And Balthazar said to Dares: “It’s necessary that someone waits for me in this castle, where I have spent my entire life, and to which I shall return to die. Wait for me, my brother.”

  They both embraced Dares, and then went down. Immediately, the ship shot out to sea. A large white form was still at the prow—the one that Balthazar had recognized—but at that moment Balthazar was gazing exclusively at the feebly-lit castle, in order that he might still see his faithful servant, and Joseph prostrated himself before the wooden vessel, which was glowing beneath a beacon.

  The ship continued on its way.

  When Dares was alone, he took one of the lamps and went, as he did every evening, to consider the image of the goddess Mobed.

  His lips were already mumbling a prayer when he suddenly saw her glowing, as if with an interior fire. She seemed splendid and dazzling for a moment, and then the fire abruptly went out, crackling, and the stones of the mosaics fell apart, as if rebounding.

  Dares fell backwards and died, while the little lamp shattered.

  And the night became blacker and deeper, thickening around the castle as if it were invading it and burying it.

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  MASTER EZRA

  The great city extends its low houses along the river. There are numerous boats beside the stone quay. The tortuous network of streets winds around the cathedral, whose granite, as pink as the living flesh of a salmon, reaches up toward the sky. Good people are talking outside its doors. Hoofbeats ring out. Children run toward the snow. In the square, a harper comes forward and sings, and nearby, a strolling player in Arab dress leads a bear walking on its hind legs.

  The great city with the bright face is mirrored in the great river that descends from the mountains and soon, as if having finished its work, which is to bathe the great city, it will spread out into the fields in a thousand small rivulets and steams, which flow to the sea. The red-legged storks perch on the rooftops, and the wool-clad citizens go past a leather-belted almoner. They are cheerful, although of stern appearance, for the valor of the new emperor has dissipated the perils of war—and it has cost them so much to fund wars! And the other enemy, disease, has also been repelled; it had rendered the entire province, and the narrow streets of the city, livid. If the arms of the young men struggled against the enemy, the arms of the old men served to carry stretchers.

  The province and the great city are breathing again; the mule-trains laden with bales are coming back on market-days, the gold of men of war clinks in the taverns, and in the pure air, from which the miasmas of the plague have been exiled by the long prayers of clergymen, the cathedral bells sound as cheerful as windfalls of silver, joyful and liberated. The interregnum of evil is past, and here comes the dawn of the kingdom of God.

  As the setting Sun shines at the level of the hills, the great globe of fire is surrounded by long scarlet veils; magnificent angels seem still to be holding it in their hands of flame. A human would not be able to look the Heavens in the face if they were not veiled by all the pale distance of the horizon. They are headed for the distant portals where guards equipped with living and rippling golden shields await them, guards clad in scarlet like the kings of the Earth, placed there to form an escort for the star returning to its divine palaces.

  The hill that the Sun has gilded retains the blessing of fertility, and above it, the sky dresses once again in a tender and profound blue, with pale tints, like an immaterial lake full of smiles, which pipes dreams, and whose waves are still warmed by the thousand gleams of all treasures. Cherubs in golden robes still streak across it, holding at bay the monsters of dream impatient to reign in their turn and to veil the avenues of the stars from humankind.

  In the streets of the great city, a kind of profound peace has spread. See how the smoke of hearth-fires and cooking-fires is emerging from a thousand chimneys, and the lamps shine orange, reddened in the dying daylight! They will scintillate, serenely golden yellow, gilded like power, to protect calm and repose behind firmly-closed doors against the uncertainty and anxiety of the dusk.

  Meanwhile, the everyday festival of the evening meal is renewing human strength everywhere, the beverage of labor, the bread of becoming, the gold of time, the flesh of thought. And immense lines of gold still divide up the sky, like bridges over the abyss for the messengers of infinity, before the night triumphs over the entire Earth.

  Here is night over the great city. The river almost falls silent, save for a melancholy hum like a turning wheel near the pillars of the bridges that incessantly and indifferently divide the flow. The lantern of some heavy barge keeps watch motionlessly, like a cat’s eye.

  The light of the Moon is reflected from the water like a broken white staff. Amid the celestial solitude one might think it a long shape scattered in the still-virgin night, and its fingers, more beautiful for being free of the rings of the world and the day, playing with the clouds. The imponderable ocean of ether rolls its transparent waves; the stars are grains of sand in that sea, where black and blue ravines yawn, as profound as the total shadow of silence.

  The Face of solitude and necessity appears pale and indistinct in the mediocre fires of the Moon, and its body stretches as if to bar all hope. The sky is a bottomless sea beyond its appearance of a closed wall, and here come clouds, troubled as on days of whit hail, and clouds blacker than the enigmas of destiny, and the entire face of the sphinx smiles amid the ballets of the gems of tiny scattered worlds, and the Milky Way, a happy and illusory valley, brightens like the return from a festival, with joyous lights in the hands of enigmatic passers-by, going who knows where, if not beyond and higher.

  The houses around the cathedral are asleep behind their iron chains; a ray of moonlight slides over the Saint George in the doorway. The houses on the river’s edge are asleep; lapping waves come to break against their leafy storage-sheds, whose steps bathe in the river near the market. The houses in the main square are asleep; gilded statues, the emblems of their façades, the decorative ships of the roofs and the eagles of the imperial house are
bathed by the same diffuse shadow as the colossal bell-tower where the bronze copper with the crimson loincloth comes mechanically to strike the hour on the pure silver bell; and in the pools of water in the inlets of the promenade, the swans, their heads tucked under their wings—pale ashen veils in that shroud of delicate mystery—are asleep, like the great city, its towers, its river and its people.

  In a small square, where the solemn tranquility seems to bear down even more on two cedars doubtless brought back from the crusades, a tranquility further enhanced by the slow trickle of a fountain into its marble basin—a trickle so slow that it seems to be counting the minutes of eternity—a ray of moonlight prolongs its vigil, as thin as a line. Rapid footsteps traverse the square toward that house, and the metal knocker sounds against the door, continued by a raucous, forceful barking, growling like a threat and a lamentation.

  A window opens, and a man advances on to the wooden balcony, who demands: “What do you want with me?”

  “It’s me, Seigneur Ezra—my son’s illness is worse.”

  “I’m coming—wait there.”

  Ezra the physician emerges from his house. A large gray dog squeezes past his legs and bounds into the square, then turns to look at its master, ears pricked, unsure which way to go. It comes back to sniff the woman who is standing nearby. A servant emerges in his turn carrying a lantern, and the door closes with a grave bronze sound that stirs up echoes—and Ezra follows the woman, the dog sniffing the walls. The servant, informed of the route in advance, precedes them.

  They go along winding streets. A tiny light vacillates beneath a pious image; a rat makes off; beneath a windshield, a resinous torch held in an iron bracket finally goes out, casting twisted shadows over the wall. A square opens up, enormous and black, and they go along the wall of the imperial palace; in front of the first portico, at intervals, eight metal horses rear up, lifting bronze warriors with javelins in hand very high. A guard, with an axe over his shoulder, approaches them in order to recognize them and let them pass. They fall back into the network of streets, traversing the great empty bridge in the middle of which beggars are asleep at the foot of a tall calvary, and then they go through narrower streets with harsh cobbles, of small and meager houses, until the woman has them enter an exceedingly poor dwelling.

  A tiny light was burning there. A young man was lying on a low bed; a tall and slender young brunette girl got up and said to the woman: “He hasn’t budged.”

  Ezra went to him; the women lit another, brighter lamp.

  Ezra made him swallow brown drops of a liquid he had brought, and said to the women: “I’ll wait.”

  “Go to bed, Rizpah,” said the woman to the girl. “I’ll help Seigneur Ezra, if he needs anything.”

  Ezra sat down in an oak armchair next to the bed. The woman sat on a stool nearby.

  Long dolor had hollowed out the surrounds of her eyelids, and they seemed like shells for the dull and weary eyes. Unkempt grey hair emerged from a black headscarf. Her parchment-like cheeks, her retracted lips, her forehead—in the idle of which a vein protruded—her long black dress, her fleshless hands, and her upper body, attentively titled forward on the lookout for any word from the invalid or the physician, dressed her with a tragic appearance of anticipation; every minute at that bedside seemed decisive to her, and perhaps irreparable. She was small and she was old, and infirmity, pain and extreme fatigue seemed to be her clothing and her flesh. The poverty of her abode was as evident as its antiquity and related to its antiquity; from the low gray joists of the ceiling hung dried herbs and a few copper jars; the sole fireplace was empty and there were only two stools in addition to her own.

  The gray dog lay down at its master’s feet, and Ezra asked: “What was he doing when the fever took hold of him again?”

  “He was reading,” the old woman replied.

  “What?”

  “This,” she said. “He often reads it.” She held out an old leather-bound book with copper-clad corners to the physician.

  Ezra started reading it.

  THE BOOK OF LANCELOT

  The castle of the Lady of the Lake was hidden among the trees of the forest of Briosque. In front of the forest a great lake barred the way; as marvelous as it was profound, and mortal to any enemy, it drew away from those who were expected at the manor and allowed them to reach the high, strong door.

  There lived young Lancelot,17 whose mother, the pious Hélène, of the family of Joseph of Arimathea, had grown up amid the great disasters of her husband Ban, king of Benoïc, vanquished by King Claudas. Forced out of all his castles, King Ban, having no one to attend to him, his queen and his son but a single groom, had stopped at the extreme limit of the forest; the torpor of death had taken hold of him and his heart broke.

  Queen Hélène had despaired to such an extent over his poor body that she had momentarily forgotten her infant son Lancelot, whom she had left with the horses a short distance away. The faithful groom, haggard with grief, had knelt down not far from his master’s body and the unfortunate mother came back to find her son in the arms of a beautiful damsel who, as she approached, sank silently with the child into the waters of the lake, which became a closed mirror and an insurmountable barrier to the queen’s dolor. Then she fainted, only to wake in a cloister, where the abbess begged her, since she was quite alone and had endured so much, to remain. She it is whom the histories name the Queen of Great Sorrows, and every day she went to pray beside the lake where her son had been stolen from her.

  From the castle, so near and yet so far away, on the side opposite the one defended by the lake, the forest and heath extended marvelously, and the orchards were rich in the fruits of the Fortunate Isles, like those of Bretagne and Boulogne. There the young Lancelot grew up, amid the games and the amiable advice of damsels, without any man intervening except to reach him to bend a bow, mount a horse and handle double-edged and pointed swords. No one told him his name, his rank or his native land.

  Alone, the Lady of the Lake educated him accorded to her science. She had been loved by the prophet Merlin, when the seer already sensed the veils of old age extending occasionally before his eyes. She had extracted his science from him, and, as everyone knows, by the malice of clumped bushes and errant honeysuckle, rose-bushes with a hundred scarlet roses, and all the capricious creepers, encircled the resting-place from which Merlin could no longer escape, nor want to, for all those flowers were the beauties of his beloved, and the braches her gestures, and the garlanded creepers, which grew all the way from the earth to the treetops in order to dart a floret against the glass roof of his pavilion, her ruses.

  Merlin had said to her: “Lady, it is perhaps as well, and my old age is the cause of my accepting gladly to live between your fingers. Far from taking pleasure, as before, in astonishing people with my rapid voyages and meriting their credence with my true prophecies, I would prefer, as you know, to grow old with my head on your knees, and I thank you for this curtain of nature that hides me, since it is yours and your true semblance, natural ribbons of magnificent cunning.

  “Lady Viviane, you have only slightly anticipated my great desire to live some indefinite dream, amid repose and perfumes, for my task is done. I have no more messages for kings, since Artus is enthroned in glory. But do what I have told you; when the child of the Queen of Great Sorrows is strong and comes of age, send him to King Artus, and by his side he will find his life mapped out. In the meantime, teach him strength and grace, and see that every morning he finds a crown of fresh roses on his pillow, without ever knowing where they come from, in order that his mind does not close to the simple comprehension of marvels that so many men have lost. That will permit him, later, to follow his predestination, which would be effaced if his first steps brought him into collision with reason.”

  Lady Viviane obeyed. Gradually, she accustomed herself to thinking that, by giving the young man the best upbringing in the world, and adorning him with virtues, she would atone for a little of the wrong
that she had done to humans by removing their prophet Merlin from them, and that the child would be the pledge of her redemption.

  As soon as he was grown up, before the first fevers of love had varied his blood, she sent him forth to the court of Artus—and not without chagrin, for Lancelot was exceedingly handsome: long-haired, with large eyes as green as the marine expanse and the expanse of the new leaves of spring and incarnadine lips, tall and well-built, with a supple and strong tread. She loved him otherwise than one loves a child, but she was afraid that his taste for adventure might take him far away from her, leaving her with bad memories. She preferred lowering the barriers herself to letting him break them, and Merlin’s obscure words regarding Lancelot’s predestination had troubled her. Then again, she would have suffered if the young man, after an intoxication of years, had looked at her one morning with the surprise of having seen her thus for such a long time. The enchantress Viviane therefore let him go, and watched over him in his perils.

  Ezra read the pages of the familiar old romance, and there were fine weapons, valiant deeds, heartbroken knights, well-fought tourneys and dances…and Lancelot saw Queen Genièvre.

  Ezra leaned over his patient, whose heavy sleep was agitated by dreams...

  When he saw Queen Genièvre, the varlet Lancelot lost his breath, and something akin to pain pierced his heart. She was tall and pale. She was the first beautiful woman that Lancelot admired, for his eyes had seen the enchantress Viviane and her companions while too young, and had become too accustomed to them. He found nothing in their faces but a courteous welcome without complaint, and the generosity that warms the heart, but nothing that surprised him.

  He knew of what combats Genièvre had been the prize, and why her father Leodagan had fêted her savior Artus. For Rion of Norway, the monarch of the frosts, who dragged captive kings toward his indented coasts and held them in snowy regions to decorate his drinking-bouts and coarse feasts in his wooden palace, had wanted to curb Leodagan’s pride, and the old lord had only been saved by Artus and Merlin.