by E R Eddison
He saw Anthea's eyes levelled upon him in a sphinxian expressionless stare. Letting that go unregarded, he stood now, back to the fire, in a study, erect, feet wide apart, one hand thrust in his jewelled girdle, the other twirling and smoothing up his mustachios. The dark fires slept and woke, glowed and slept and glowed again, in his half-closed eyes. He said in himself, 'But no, dear Lady of Sakes, beguiler of guiles, O you, beyond soundings: there's something there beyond that. That he hath in him something of yours, I'll not think it past credit, that am inured to marvels. Nay, I believe it: it is a lamp: shows me much was dark till now. But you are more. O you! not with the help of all the devils could I, at this day, be bobbed with such an insufficient answer.'
Doctor Vandermast followed that lady through the garden: bare beds rough with hoar-frost, and over all, hanging high in a frost-clear heaven, the winter moon. 'While you are in a condition, madam,' said he, 'to understand and teach me: lest I fall out, may I know if my part is so far jusdy enacted, and agreeably to your ladyship's desires?'
'Desires?' she said. 'Have I desires?'
'Nay,' said he, ‘I speak but as men speak. For I am not ignorant that Dea expers est passionum, nec ullo laetitice aut tristitice affectu afficiture: that She Who dwelleth on high is with no affect affected, be it of sorrow or of joy.'
'How sweet a thing,' said she, 'is divine philosophy! And with how taking a simplicity it speaketh, so out of your mouth, most wise doctor, flat nays and yeas of these which were, as I had supposed, opinable matters and disputable!'
'Oh You, Who albeit You change, change not,' said that old man: 'I speak as men speak. Tell me, was there aught left undone?'
She took the reins and let Her beauty shine out for an instant, as a blaze of fire, now bright, and now away. His eyes took light in the light of it. 'There was nought undone,' She answered. 'All is perfect.' And they that were harnessed took wing and, thickening the crisp fine air with a thunder of countless wing-beats, sped with Her in an instant high below stars through the down-shedding radiance of the frozen silvery-moon. And the learned doctor, straining eyes and ears towards heaven, followed their flight, their mounting, circling, descending; and at length beheld them at his eastern upper window hovering, that their driver might alight; and there like a dream he beheld Her enter by that balcony, or like a pale moonbeam. For he saw that not as Our Lady of Sakes She entered now, but once more Our Lady of Peace.
So now he himself turned again, came in, shut the door, and came to the fireside again and his company.
The clock at his so coming in, (as if She in that dove-drawn flight betwixt earth and stars had swept the hours, bound to Her chariot, to a speed beyond their customed measure), struck the last hour before midnight. That old man came to Lessingham where he stood yet, in a study, his back to the fire. 'Sleep, my Lord Lessingham, is a surceasing of all the senses from travel. Her ladyship that came hither with you hath this hour since ta'en her chamber. Suffer me to conduct you now to yours.'
Pausing for good-night at his chamber door, Lessingham at last spoke. 'Tell me again,' he said: *what house is this?'
Vandermast answered, saying, ‘I have told your excellence, it is the house of peace.
'And,' he said, speaking, as old men speak, to himself, when he was come downstairs again and stood at the open door, scenting the April air that blew now from that garden and the scents of spring: 'it is the house of heart's desire.'
May be for the very deepness of the peace that folded that sleeping house, so that even his own breathing and quickened heart-beats had power to keep him waking, Lessingham might not sleep. An hour past midnight he arose and dressed and softly opened his chamber door. At the head of the stair he paused, seeing lights yet in the hall both of candles and the flickering firelight. Noiselessly he came down a step or two, and stood still. On the great cushioned settle drawn up before the fire sat Doctor Vandermast. Anthea, upon the-same settle, lay full length, a sleeping danger, very lovely in her sleep, her head upon the lap of that learned doctor. Zenianthe sat upon the floor, her back against his knees, staring in the fire. Campaspe knelt, sitting on her heels, her back to the fire, facing the others; Lessingham saw that she played some little game with cards on the floor, very intently, yet listening through her game to the doctor's words as he talked on in his contemplation.
'Be it but perceived and understood,' said Vandermast, 'sub specie aeternitatis, it can never be too sensual: it can never be too spiritual.'
Zenianthe, smiling in the fire, slowly shook her head. 'Multiplication of matterless words,' said she.
'Nay, you, dear lady, should know this per experientiam, as from withinward. For what will a hamadryad do if. her tree be cut down? What but die?'
'Can anything die?' she said. 'Least of all, we, that are not of mortal race?'
‘I speak,' said he, 'as men speak. And indeed I have thought may be there is in very deed a kind of death, as of foolish bodies who say, Tush, there is no spirit: or others, Tush, there is no sense. And have not old men ere this become dead before their time, with forgetting that this winter of their years is but a limbeck of Hers for trying of their truth and allegiance, as silver and gold are fined and tried in the fire? But, even as 'twas always that the cat winked when her eye was out, so they: 'stead of hold fast and trust in Her to bind up and bring back and give again hereafter.'
'Are you, to say, old?' said Campaspe, marrying queen of spades and king of hearts.
.Vandermast smiled. 'I am, at least, no more fit for past youth-tricks.'
'No more?'
'I speak,' said he, 'as of here and now.' "What else is there?' said she.
Vandermast stroked his white beard. 'It may be, nothing.'
'But you spoke but now,' said Zenianthe, putting very gently a fresh log on the fire so that the flames crackled up, and that oread lady, with the doctor's knees for her pillow, turned in her sleep: 'you spoke of "hereafter".'
'It may be,' said Vandermast, 'that "hereafter" (and, by like process of logic, "heretofore") is here and now.'
Campaspe turned up the seven of diamonds. 'What is old age?'
'What is youth, my little siren of the oozy quagmires and wood anemones in spring and sallow catkins where the puss-moth feeds at dusk of night?'
'Well, it is us,' she said.
'As for old age,' said Zenianthe, 'the poet hath it—
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.
That for age. And for youth I would but turn the saying, and say—
My joy lies onward/
'Who taught you that?' said the learned doctor. 'My oak-woods,' answered she.
He mused for a while in silence. Then, 'It is of divine philosophy,' he said, 'to search lower into the most darkness and inspissation of these antinomies which are in the roots of things. I am old;' and his eyes overran the sleeping beauty of Anthea, stretched feline at her length. Scarcely to touch it, his finger followed her hair where it was pressed upwards in aureate waves from under her left brow and cheek where her head lay on his knee in the innocence of slumber. 'I am old; and yet, as the Poetess,—
I love delicacy, and for me love hath the sun's splendour and beauty.'
Zenianthe said, 'We know, sir, who taught you that.'
Still Lessingham, upon the stairs, stood and listened. Their backs were towards him. Vandermast replied: 'Yes: She, ingenerable and incorruptible. Are youth and age toys of Hers? How else? seeing She plays with all things. And age, I have thought ere now, is also a part of Her wiles and guiles, to trick us into that folly which scorneth and dispraiseth the goods we can no more enjoy. Then, after leading of us as marsh-fires lead, through so many turn-agains, unveil the grace in Her eyes: laugh at us in the end.'
'Love were too serious else,' said Campaspe. She fetched for the queen of hearts the king of clubs: 'Antiope: Lessingham.'
'What is Lessingham?' Zenianthe asked the fibre. 'What is Barganax?'
'What am I?' asked Vandermast. Tell me, dreamer and huntress of the anci
ent oak-woods, is it outside the scheme that there should be, of young men, an old age wise, unrepentant, undisillusioned? I mean not some supposititious mathematical esse formale, as some fantastics dream, but bodied, here and now? For truly and in sadness, searching inward in myself I have not once but often times—' he fell silent.
'What is here and now?' Zenianthe said, gazing into the heart of the fire with brown dreaming eyes.
Vandermast was leaned back, his head against a cushion, his lean hands slack, palms downwards, on the seat on either side of him. He too gazed in the fire, and, may be for the hotness of it, may be for the lateness of the hour, the gleam of his eyes was softened. 'As part of Her peace?' he said. 'As part of Her pleasure?—O gay Goddess lustring, You Who do make all things stoop to Your lure.—Seeing all the pleasures of the world are only sparkles and parcels sent out from God? And seeing it is for Her that all things, omnia qua existunt, are kept and preserved, a sola vi Dei, by the sole power of God alone?'
Zenianthe spoke: 'And of lovers? Will you not think a lover has power?'
'Love,' said that aged man, 'is vis Dei. There is no other power.'
'And to serve Her,' said Campaspe, still sitting on her heels, still playing on the floor, '(I have heard you say it): no other wisdom.'
'To shine as stars into everlastingness,' said that hamadryad princess, still looking in the fire.
For a few minutes none spoke, none stirred, save only for Campaspe's playing her little game. Lessingham, upon the stairs, noted how the learned doctor, as old men will, was fallen asleep where he sat. Campaspe, noting it too, softly swept up her cards. She stood for a moment looking at him so sleeping, then on tiptoe came and bent over him and, very prettily and sweetly, kissed his forehead. Anthea, turning in her sleep, put up a hand and touched his face. Lessingham very quietly came down the stairs behind them and so from the stair-foot to the door. Only Zenianthe, sitting quite still, turned her head to watch him as he passed.
Lessingham went out and shut the door behind him and stood alone with that garden and the summer night. Under stars of June he stood now, in an awareness like to that which once before he had known, upon that night of feasting in her Rialmar: as then before the pavane, a hardening of sensual reality and a blowing away of dreams. Only no hardness was in this lily-scented night: only some perfection; wherein house and slumbering garden and starry sky and the bower of radiance southeastward where the moon, unseen, was barely risen behind Zenianthe's oak-woods, seemed now to flower into a beauty given them before all everlastingness. Slowly between sleeping flower-beds he walked to the eastern end of that garden and stood watching the top leaves of the oak-trees fill with the moon-rise. In the peace of it he remembered him of someone, not Campaspe, that had sat so a-nights upon heels before the fire, playing and talking and listening all at once: a strange accomplishment he thought now, and had thought so then: but as to speak of when, or who, the gentle night, as if it knew well but would not say the answer, held its peace in a slumbrous-ness of moon-dimmed stars.
He looked again at her windows. There, which had a minute before been empty, and no light within, he beheld her upon the balcony: facing the moon. From his place in the deep shade of a yew-tree, he watched her: Antiope: all in white. It was as if she stood upon no firm substance but on some water-wave, the most adored beauty that ever struck amazement in the world. Almost in disbelief, as if night had 'spoken, he heard her speak: 'You, my lord? standing there?'
Slowly he came towards her. As spread out upon some deepening of the stillness and the blessedness, the long churr of a nightjar sounded near. It ended, purring down like the distant winding of a clock, into silence. ‘I could not sleep,' he answered, under her window.
'Nor I,' said she. All being seemed now to draw to her, as lode-stones to the lode-star, or to a whirlpool's placid centre the waters which swirl round it and their floating freight, both of the quick and of the dead.
'Nor you?' said Lessingham. 'What is here, to inquiet your mind?'
Her answer came as upon a catch in her breath: 'Deep waters, I think.'
The wistaria blossoms hung like heavy grape-bunches below her balcony: the limbs of the tree, lapped about and crushed in the grip of their own younger growths, showed gnarled and tortuous under the moon. ‘I think,' Lessingham said, 'I am broken with the fall of such as climb too high.'
Again the nightjar trilled. Upon his left, sudden and silent it slipped from the branch where it had lain. He felt it circle about his head: heard the strange wild cry, Pht! Pht! saw it swoop and circle, its body upright as it flew, its wings, as it flew, uplifted like a great moth's that alights or like a bat's: heard the clap of its wings: heard Antiope's voice as in a dream, or as the summer night stirring in the wistaria's pendent blooms: 'There is a remedy: to climb higher.'
He took one step and stood quivering like a dagger struck into a table. 'Ha!' he said. 'If master but now, yet now am I water-weak.' Then in a sudden alteration, 'Tempt me not, madonna. In action I was ever a badger: where I do bite I will make my teeth meet.'
He heard her say, as a star should lean to the sea, 'What boots it me to be Queen? O think too,' her voice faded: '—howsoever they may seem chanceful,—are yet by God.'
The swinging heavy blossoms, brushing his face and beard, blinded him as he came up. Standing before her in that balcony, looking down into her eyes that were unreadable in the warm and star-inwoven darkness, 'Who are you?' he said in a breath without voice. 'Sometimes I hardly know,' she said, leaning back as if in a giddiness against the window-frame, her hands holding her breast. 'Except there was a word,' she said, 'written inside a ring, HMETEPA.—'Las,' she said, ‘I remembered; but it is gone.'
'And I remember,' said Lessingham. 'To say, ours: ours: of all things, ours: of you and me, beyond all chanceableness of fortune.' Sometimes so in deep summer will a sudden air from a lime-tree in flower lift the false changing curtain, and show again, for a brief moment, in unalterable present, some mountain top, some lamp-lighted porch, some lakeside mooring-place, some love-bed, where time, transubstantiate, towers to the eternities. "Tis gone!' he said. 'But you'—her body in his arms was as the little crimple-petalled early-flowering iris that a rough breath can crush. He felt her hands behind his head: heard her say, in breaks, into his very lips, ‘I cannot give you myself: I think I have no self. I can give you All.'
Through the wide-flung casements of Antiope's bedchamber in that wayside house came the golden-sandalled dawn: the sky gold, and without cloud, and the sun more golden than gold in the midst of it. The Queen said, at Lessingham's side, 'Thanks, my lord, I'll take my reins again.' As she gathered them, the thud of galloping hooves came down the whinflower-scented air behind them, and Tyarchus and Zenianthe, knee to knee, with Amaury thundering close upon their heels swept round the turn from behind the screening birch-woods.
They were nearing Rialmar when Lessingham found means of speaking with her in private. It had been late afternoon when they turned homewards, and now, the autumn day closing in early, the sun was setting. On their right, two-horned Rialmar was lifted up dark and unas-saultable against clouds that drifted down the west. The air was full of the crying of sea-mews. Southward, the wash of the sea answered from bay to bay. The blue smoke of houses and their twinking lamps showed about Rialmar town. Far as the eye could see from the eastern highlands round to Rialmar, the clouds were split level with the horizon. The dark lower layer was topped as if with breaking waves of a slate-dark purple, and in the split the sky showed pink, golden, crimson, apple-green. Above the clouds, a rosy flush thrilled the air of the western heavens, even to the zenith, where the overarching beginnings of night mixed it with dusk. The turf beneath them as they rode was a dull grey green: the whinbushes and thornbushes black and blurred. Lessingham looked at the Queen where she rode beside him: the cast of her side-bended eye: the side of her face, Greek, grave, unconscious of its own beautifulness. He said: 'I had a dream.'
But she, with a kind of daybreak in h
er eyes very soberly looking into his: 'I am not learned to understand these matters; but 'twas not dreaming,' she said. 'I was there, my friend.'
xvi
The Vicar and Barganax
'the divells quilted anvell' apprehensions in kessarey storms in the air a fief for count mandricard 'bull tread panther'
The Vicar meanwhile, sitting in his closet alone with his cursed dogs, upon the very morrow of Lessingham's setting out for Rialmar, sent for Gabriel Flores. 'Take ink and pen: write.' Word by word he gave it him, and, when it was written, scanned the letters; signed them: certified them with his seal vicarial. The same hour, he took a secret person, commanding him go with these to the High Admiral, that lay with the fleet in Peraz Firth, and to the Chancellor in Zayana. Another he sent to Kutarmish, to Earl Roder. That done, he summoned Count Mandricard from Argyanna, and Daiman, Thrasiline, and Rossilion from outparts of Rerek, and had with them Arcastus besides, that was already at hand. With these men, all five being creatures and instruments of his, and with Gabriel, he for a full day till supper-time held talk in secret, showing them of his mind so much as he deemed convenient.
Now came answers again from those three great com-missionaries, not concerted, for they had had no time to confer together upon them, yet as showing one common mind; which, plainly stripped, was readiness indeed to meet with him, but not as cattle with the lion in the lion's lair: not in Owldale. Upon this, having considered with himself awhile, he despatched more letters, and first to Jerommy in quality of regent of Outer Meszria, to the intent that he did, as earnest of his friendship and as not unfitting to the Admiral's charge and estate, give over and assign to him Kessarey castle and the township and lands thereof and all the roadstead harbour and sea-works of Kessarey, which, albeit within the March of Ulba, yet by its situation threw far into Meszria the shadow of its power; and now there let their conference be, in Kessarey instead of Owldale. And, for example of friendship, he would thither come with no more but a bodyguard; and upon such open and undoubtable terms of faith let them take counsel for the realm's good and their own.
