Mistress of mistresses

by E R Eddison

  'But now to the point of action; for 'tis needful you should know, since we must move north by great marches, and that this very night. My noble cousin these three weeks past hath, whiles he amused the King with's chaffer-talk of how and wherefore, opened unseen a dozen sluices to let flow to him in Owldale men and instruments of war, armed with which strong arguments (I have it by sure intelligence but last night) he means to-morrow to obey the King's summons beside Hornmere. And, for a last point of logic, in case there be falling out between the great men and work no more for learned doctors but for bloody martialists, I am to seize the coast-way 'twixt the Swaleback fells and Arrowfirth and deny 'em the road home to Fingiswold.'

  'Deny him the road home?' said Amaury. ‘Tis war, then, and flat rebellion?'

  "That's as the King shall choose. And so, Amaury, about it straight. We must saddle an hour before midnight.'

  Amaury drew in his breath and straightened his back. 'An hour to pack the stuff and set all in marching trim: and an hour before midnight your horse is at the door.' With that, he was gone.

  Lessingham scanned the map for yet a little while, then let it roll itself up. He went to the window and threw it open. There was the breath of spring in the air and daffodil scents: Sirius hung low in the south-west.

  'Order is ta'en according to your command,' said Amaury suddenly at his side. 'And now, while yet is time to talk and consider, will you give me leave to speak?'

  'I thought you had spoke already,' said Lessingham, still at the window, looking round at him. 'Was all that but the theme given out, and I must now hear point counterpoint?'

  'Give me your sober ear, my lord, but for two minutes together. You know I am yours, were you bound for the slimy strand of Acheron. Do but consider; I think you are in some bad ecstasy. This is worse than all: cut the lines of the King's communications northward, in the post of main danger, with so little a force, and Ercles on your flank ready to stoop at us from his high castle of Eldir and fling us into the sea.'

  'That's provided for,' said Lessingham: 'he's made friends with as for this time. Besides, he and Aramond are the Duke's dogs, not the King's; 'tis Meszria, Zayana, all their strings hold unto; north winds bring 'em the cough o' the lungs. Fear not them.'

  Amaury came and leaned himself too on the window-sill, his left elbow touching Lessingham's. After a while he said, low and as if the words were stones loosed up one by one with difficulty from a stiff clay soil, ' 'Fore heaven, I must love you; and it is a thing not to be borne that your greatness should be made but this man's cat's-paw.'

  Sirius, swinging lower, touched the highest tracery of a tall ash-tree, went out like a blown-out candle behind a branch, and next instant blazed again, a quintessential point of diamond and sapphire and emerald and amethyst and dazzling whiteness. Lessingham answered in a like low tone, meditatively, but his words came light on an easy breath: 'My cousin. He is meat and drink to me. I must have danger.'

  They abode silent at that window, drinking those airs more potent than wine, and watching, with a deep compulsive sense of essence drawn to essence, that star's shimmer of many-coloured fires against the velvet bosom of the dark; which things drew and compelled their beings, as might the sweet breathing nearness of a woman lovely beyond perfection and deeply beyond all soundings desired. Lessingham began to say slowly, 'That was a strange trick of thought when I forgot you but now, and forgot my own self too, in those bubbles which in their flying upward signify not as the sparks, but that man is born for gladness. For I thought there was a voice spake in my ear in that moment and I thought it said, I have promised and I will perform. And I thought it was familiar to me beyond all familiar dear lost things. And yet 'tis a voice I swear I never heard before. And like a star-gleam, it was gone.'

  The gentle night seemed to turn in her sleep. A faint drumming, as. of horse-hooves far away, came from the south. Amaury stood up, walked over to the table, and fell to looking at the map again. The beating of hooves came louder, then on a sudden faint again. Lessingham said from the window, 'There's one rideth hastily. Now a cometh down to the ford in Killary Bottom, and that's why we lose the sound for awhile. Be his "answers never so good, let him not pass nor return, but bring him to me.'

  II The Duke of Zayana

  portrait of a lady doctor vandermast

  fiorinda: 'bitter-sweet' the lyre that shook mitylene.

  The third morning after that coming of the galloping horseman north to Mornagay, Duke Barganax was painting in his privy garden in Zayana in the southland: that garden where it is everlasting afternoon. There the low sun, swinging a level course at about that pitch which Antares reaches at his highest southing in an English May-night, filled the soft air with atomies of sublimated gold, wherein all seen things became, where the beams touched them, golden: a golden sheen on the lake's unruffled waters beyond the parapet, gold burning in the young foliage of the oak-woods that clothed the circling hills; and, in the garden, fruits of red and yellow gold hanging in the gold-spun leafy darkness of the strawberry-trees, a gilding shimmer of it in the stone of the carven bench, a gilding of every tiny blade on the shaven lawn, a glow to deepen all colours and to ripen every sweetness: gold faintly warming the proud pallour of Fiorinda's brow and cheek, and thrown back in sudden gleams from the jet-black smoothnesses of her hair.

  'Would you be ageless and deathless for ever, madam, were you given that choice?' said the Duke, scraping away for the third time the colour with which he had striven to match, for the third time unsuccessfully, the unearthly green of that lady's eyes.

  'I am this already,' answered she with unconcern. 'Are you so? By what assurance?' 'By this most learn'd philosopher's, Doctor Vandermast.'

  The Duke narrowed his eyes first at his model then at his picture: laid on a careful touch, stood back, compared them once more, and scraped it out again. Then he smiled at her: 'What? will you believe him? Do but look upon him where he sitteth there beside Anthea, like winter wilting before Flora in her pride. Is he one to inspire faith in such promises beyond all likelihood and known experiment?'

  Fiorinda said: 'He at least charmed you this garden.'

  'Might he but charm your eyes', said the Duke, 'to some such unaltering stability, I'd paint 'em; but now I cannot. And 'tis best I cannot. Even for this garden, if 'twere as you' said, madam, (or worse still, were you yourself so), my delight were poisoned. This eternal golden hour must lose its magic quite, were we certified beyond doubt or heresy that it should not, in the next twinkling of an eye, dissipate like mist and show us the work-a-day morning it conceals. Let him beware, and if he have art indeed to make safe these things and freeze them into perpetuity, let him forbear to exercise it. For as surely as I have till now well and justly rewarded him for what good he hath done me, in that day, by the living God, I will smite off his head.'

  The Lady Fiorinda laughed luxuriously, a soft, mocking laugh with a scarce perceptible little contemptuous upward nodding of her head, displaying the better with that motion her throat's lithe strong loveliness. For a minute, the Duke painted swiftly and in silence. Hers was a beauty the more sovereign because, like smooth waters above a whirlpool, it seemed but the tranquillity of sleeping danger: there was a taint of harsh Tartarean stock in her high flat cheekbones, and in the slight upward slant of her eyes; a touch of cruelty in her laughing lips, the lower lip a little too full, the upper a little too thin; and in her nostrils, thus dilated, like a beautiful and dangerous beast's at the smell of blood. Her hair, parted and strained evenly back on either side from her serene sweet forehead, coiled down at last in a smooth convoluted knot which nestled in the nape of her neck like a black panther asleep. She wore no jewel nor ornament save two escarbuncles, great as a man's thumb, that hung at her ears like two burning coals of fire. 'A generous prince and patron indeed,' she said; 'and a most courtly servant for ladies, that we must rot to-morrow like the aloe-flower, and all to sauce his dish with a biting something of fragility and non-perpetuity.'

&nbs
p; The Countess Rosalura, younger daughter of Prince Ercles, new-wed two months ago to Medor, the Duke's captain of the bodyguard, had risen softly from her seat beside her lord on the brink of. a fountain of red porphyry and come to look upon the picture with her brown eyes. Medor followed her and stood looking beside her in the shade of the great lime-tree. Myrrha and Violante joined them, with secret eyes for the painter rather than for the picture: ladies of the bedchamber to Barganax's mother, the Duchess of Memison. Only Anthea moved not from her place beside that learned man, leaning a little forward. Her clear Grecian brow was bent, and from beneath it eyes yellow and unsearchable rested their level gaze upon Barganax. Her fierce lips barely parted in the dimmest shadow or remembrance of a smile. And it was as if the low golden beams of the sun, which in all things else in that garden wrought transformation, met at last with something not to be changed (because it possessed already a like essence with their own and a like glory), when they touched Anthea's hair.

  "There, at last!' said the Duke. *I have at last caught and pinned down safe on the canvas one particular minor diabolus of your ladyship's that hath dodged me a hundred times when I have had him on the tip of my brush; him I mean that peeks and snickers at the corner of your mouth when you laugh as if you would laugh all honesty out of fashion.'

  ‘I will laugh none out of fashion,' she said, 'but those that will not follow the fashions I set 'em. May I rest now?'

  Without staying for an answer, she rose and stepped down from the stone plinth. She wore a coat-hardy, of dark crimson satin. From shoulder to wrist, from throat to girdle, the soft and shining garment sat close like a glove, veiling yet disclosing the breathing loveliness which, like a rose in crystal, gave it life from within. Her gown, of the like stuff, revealed when she walked, (as in a deep wood in summer, a stir of wind in the tree-tops lets in the sun), rhythms and moving splendours bodily, every one of which was an intoxication beyond all voluptuous sweet scents, a swooning to secret music beyond deepest harmonies. For a while she stood looking on the picture. Her lips were grave now, as if something were fallen asleep there; her green eyes were narrowed and hard like a snake's. She nodded her head once or twice, very gently and slowly, as if to mark some judgement forming in her mind. At length, in tones from which all colour seemed to have been drained save the soft indeterminate greys as of muted strings, 'I wonder that you will still be painting,' she said: 'you, that are so much in love with the pathetic transitoriness of mortal things: you, that would smite his neck who should rob you of that melancholy sweet debauchery of your mind by fixing your marsh-fires in the sphere and making immortal for you your ephemeral treasures. And yet you will spend all your invention and all your skill, day after day, in wresting out of paint and canvas a counterfeit, frail, and scrappy immortality for something you love to look on, but, by your own confession, would love less did you not fear to lose it'

  'If you would be answered in philosophy, madam,' said the Duke, 'ask old Vandermast, not me.'

  'I have asked him. He can answer nothing to the purpose.'

  'What was his answer?' said the Duke.

  The Lady Fiorinda looked at her picture, again with that lazy, meditative inclining of her head. That imp which the Duke had caught and bottled in paint awhile ago curled in the corner of her mouth. 'O,' said she, 'I do not traffic in outworn answers. Ask him, if you would know.'

  ‘I will give your ladyship the answer I gave before,' said that old man, who had sat motionless, serene and unperturbed, darting his bright and eager glance from painter to sitter and to painter again, and smiling as if with the aftertaste of ancient wine. 'You do marvel that his grace will still consume himself with striving to fix in art, in a seeming changelessness, those self-same appearances which in nature he prizeth by reason of their every mutability and subjection to change and death. Herein your ladyship, grounding yourself at first unassailably upon most predicamental and categoric arguments in celarent, next propounded me a syllogism in barbara, the major premiss whereof, being well and exactly seen, surveyed, overlooked, reviewed, and recognized, was by my demonstrations at large convicted in fallacy of simple conversion and not per accidens; whereupon, countering in bramantip, I did in conclusion confute you in bokardo; showing, in brief, that here is no marvel; since 'tis women's minds alone are ruled by clear reason: men's are fickle and elusive as the jack-o'-lanterns they pursue.'

  'A very complete and metaphysical answer,' said she. 'Seeing 'tis given on my side, I'll let it stand without question; though (to be honest) I cannot tell what the dickens it means.'

  'To be honest, madam,' said the Duke, ‘I paint because I cannot help it.'

  Fiorinda smiled: 'O my lord, I knew not you were wont to do things upon compulsion.' Her lip curled, and she said again, privately for his own ear, 'Save, indeed, when your little brother calleth the tune.' Sidelong, under her eyelashes, she watched his face turn red as blood.

  With a sudden violence the Duke dashed his handful of brushes to the ground and flung his palette skimming through the air like a flat stone that boys play ducks and drakes with, till it crashed into a clump of giant asphodel flowers a dozen yards away. Two or three of those stately blooms, their stems smashed a foot above the ground, drooped and slowly fell, laying pitifully on the grass their great tapering spikes of pink-coloured waxen filigree. His boy went softly after the palette to retrieve it. He himself, swinging round a good half circle with the throw, was gone in great strides the full length of the garden, turned heel at the western parapet, and now came back, stalking with great strides, his fists clenched. The company was stood back out of the way in an uneasy silence. Only the Lady Fiorinda moved not at all from her place beside the easel of sweet sandalwood inlaid with gold. He came to a sudden halt within a yard of her. At his jewelled belt hung a dagger, its pommel and sheath set thick with cabochon rubies and smaragds in a criss-cross pattern of little diamonds. He watched her for a moment, the breath coming swift and hard through his nostrils: a tiger beside Aphrodite's statua. There hovered in the air about her a sense-maddening perfume of strange flowers: her eyes were averted, looking steadily southward to the hills: the devil sat sullen and hard in the corner of her mouth. He snatched out the dagger and, with a savage back-handed stroke, slashed the picture from corner to corner; then slashed it again, to ribbons. That done, he turned once more to look at her.

  She had not stirred; yet, to his eye now, all was altered. As some tyrannous and triumphant phrase in a symphony returns, against all expectation, hushed to starved minor harmonies or borne on the magic welling moon-notes of the horn, a shuddering tenderness, a dying flame; such-like, and so moving, was the transfiguration that seemed to have come upon that lady: her beauty grown suddenly a thing to choke the breath, piteous like a dead child's toys: the bloom on her cheek more precious than kingdoms, and less perdurable than the bloom on a butterfly's wing. She was turned side-face towards him; and now, scarce to be perceived, her head moved with the faintest dim recalling of that imperial mockery of soft laughter that he knew so well; but he well saw that it was no motion of laughter now, but the gallant holding back of tears.

  'You ride me unfairly,' he said in a whisper. 'You who have held my rendered soul, when you would, trembling in your hand: will you goad me till I sting myself to death with my own poison?'

  She made no sign. To the Duke, still steadfastly regarding her, all sensible things seemed to have attuned themselves to her: a falling away of colours: grey silver in the sunshine instead of gold, the red quince-flowers blanched and bloodless, the lush grass grey where it should be green, a spectral emptiness where an instant before had been summer's promise on the air and the hues of life and the young year's burden. She turned her head and looked him full m the eye: it was as if, from between the wings of death, beauty beaconed like a star.

  'Well,' said the Duke,, 'which of the thousand harbours of damnation have you these three weeks been steering for? What murder must I enact?'

  'Not on silly pictures,' sai
d she; 'as wanton boys break up their playthings; and I doubt not I shall be entreated sit for you again to-morrow, to paint a new one.'

  The Duke laughed lightly. 'Why there was good in that, too. Some drowsy beast within me roused himself and suddenly started up, making himself a horror to himself, and, now the blood's cooled, happily sleeps again.'

  "Sleeps!' Fiorinda said. Her lip curled.

  'Come,' said the Duke. 'What shall it be then? Inspire my invention. Entertain 'em all to a light collation and, by cue taken at the last kissing-cup, let split their weasands,. stab 'em all in a moment? Your noble brother amongst them, 'tis to be feared, madam; since him, with a bunch of others, I am to thank for these beggar-my-neighbour sleights and cozenage beyond example. Or shall't be a grand night-piece of double fratricide? yours and mine, spitted on one spit like a brace of woodcock? We can proceed with the first to-day: for the other, well, I'll think on't.'

  'Are you indeed that prince whom reputation told me of,' said she, 'that he which did offend you might tremble with only thinking of it? And now, as hares pull dead lions by the beard—'

  The Duke swung away from her a step or two, then back, like a caged beast. His brow was thunderous again. 'Ever going on beyond your possession,' he said, 'beyond your bounds. Tis well I am of a cool judgement. There*s more in't than hold up my hand, or whistle in my fist Content you that I have some noble great design on foot, which in good time shall prove prodigious to 'em all: and once holding good my advantage over them, in their fall I'll tempt the destinies.'

  With an infinite slow feline grace she lifted up her head: her nostrils widening, the flicker of a smile on her parted lips: from beneath the shadow of long black lashes, half-moons of green lambent fire beheld him steadily. 'You must not speak to me as if I were a child or an animal,* she said. 'Will you swear me all this?'