A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  Northward twenty miles beyond Memison, in the low valleys of the Ruyar, King Mezentius rode with the Chancellor, knee to knee. Now they breathed their horses: now put them to a walking-pace, breasting the long upward training of meadowland north of Mavia: now quickened to a hand-gallop in the dewy pastures of Terainsht Iron-still was the King's countenance under the moon, and with a look upon it as if he had some hammers working in his head. But his seat in saddle was free and jaunting, as if he and the great black horse he bestrode shared but one body between them So rode the King and Beroald, without word spoken; and in the beat of their horsehooves, irking the soft summer night, was the beat of the castanets, dear to goat-footed Pan.

  But in lovely Memison, where, seated with her women about her, the Duchess looked upon the revels held under the sky that night, this inside secret music touched the sense less unpeaceably, as it had been the purr of some great sleepy cat that rested as she rested.

  And now that same peace, quiet as summer star-shine in a night without wind, settled too about Mary, whether through the music, or through the opening, like night-flowers when the sun is down, of the innermost heart and mind within her, or through some safety that came of Lessingham's nearness: of his coat-sleeve touching, light as a moth, her bare arm between shoulder and elbow.

  'Go, my Violante,' said the Duchess: 'bid them lay a little table for his grace here beside me and bring a light collation, caviar, and then what you will, and framboises to finish with; and Rian wine. For that is royal wine, and best fits to-night: red wine of the Rian.'

  Violante went, lightly in both hands gathering her gown, down the half-dozen steps which, wide, shallow, made of panteron stone and carpeted in the midst with a deep-piled carpet of a holly-leaf green, led from this gallery down to the level where the dancing was. The summer palace in Memison is in plan like the letter ‘I, and all along the main limb of it (which faces south) and along the shorter limb (which faces west) this gallery runs, with doors giving upon it and great windows, and with columns of some smooth white stone with silvery sparkles in it: these, set a fifteen-foot intervals, carry the roof above, and the upper rooms of the palace. A grass-plat, a hundred paces or more in length by sixty broad, lies below the gallery, with a formal garden of clipped ancient yew to bound it on the southern side, and a tall thick hedge of the same dark growth upon the western; and on the grass, in the north-west corner of this quadrangle, was an oaken floor laid down on purpose that night to dance on, with hanging lamps and flamboys and swinging lanterns round about on every side of it to give light to the dancers. Fifty or sixty couples now footed the coranto, in such a shifting splendour of jewels and colour of tissue in doublet, kirtle, lady's gown, rich-wrought fan and ornament, as is seen in some cascade that comes down a wide wall of rock in steep woods facing the evening sun, and every several fringe of freshet as it falls becomes a fall of precious stones: amethyst, golden topaz, ruby, sapphire, emerald, changing and interchanging with every slightest shifting of the eye that looks on them.

  But as when, with the altering of the light, some watered surface or some column of falling water among the rest suddenly throws back the radiance of the great sun itself, and these lesser jewels are dimmed, so was the coming of the Duke of Zayana among this company. He came without all ceremony, with great easy strides, so that Medor and Melates, who alone attended him, had some ado to keep up with him: without all ceremony, save that, at word gone before him, the music stopped and the dancers; and two trumpeters standing forward from their place behind the Duchess's chair, sounded a fanfare.

  Duke Barganax halted upon the steps and, with a sweep of his purple cloak, stood a moment to salute the guests; then upon one knee, kissed the Duchess's hand. She raised him and, for her turn, kissed him on the forehead.

  'You are late,' said she, as, letting a boy take his cloak, the Duke seated himself beside her in a golden chair.

  ‘I am sorry, my lady mother. The King, I am told, was here to-day?' ‘Yes.'

  'And gone again? Why was that?' She shook her head. Thunder in the air?'

  Amalie shrugged her shoulders gracefully. 'And why late?' she said. Like they seemed, she and he, one to the other, as the she-lion and her son.

  'Only that I had set myself to finish a head I was painting of for a new piece I am upon, of a mural painting of Hippokleides' betrothal feast And so, third hour past noon ere I took saddle.'

  ' "Hippokleides, you have danced away . . . your marriage". A subject needing some delicacy of treatment! And whose head that you painted?'

  'Why, a late lady of your own: Bellafront's.'

  ‘Bellafront? she is red: Titian: of our colour. Could you not have left it till another day, this painting?'

  'She might have been dead when I came home again.'

  'Dead? Is she sick then?'

  ‘No!' said the Duke, laughing.' 'Tis no more but follow my father's good maxim; when I was little, and the best strawberry saved up at the side of my plate to eat it last: told me, eat it now, since I might not live to eat it later.'

  'You are absurd,' said Amalie: ‘you and your teacher both. Is it true, Count Medor?'

  'I were a bad servant, to call my master absurd,' replied Medor; 'and a worse courtier, to contradict your beauteous excellency in your own house. Well, it is true. He is absurd. But always by choice, never upon compulsion.'

  'O perfect courtier! But, truly, men are absurd by nature; and were you, my noble son, less than absurd, then were you less than man. And that—faugh! it was naught of mine: whether to have bred it, or to truckle withal.'

  Supper being done, they sat on now (Barganax, with those Lords Melates and Medor, the Duchess, with her Myrrha, Violante and others), looking on the scene, in a contented silence which awoke ever and again into some lazy bandying of contented humorous talk. Lamps above and about them shed a slumbrously inconstant light. From great stone jars, ranged along the terrace edge, orchids laid out their strange and luxurious shapes, dusky-petalled, streaked or spotted, haired, smooth-lipped, velvet-skinned, exhaling upon the warm air their heady heavy sweetness.

  'Will not your grace dance to-night?' Medor said at length to the Duke.

  Barganax shook his head.

  'Why not?' said the Duchess. 'But no: it were unkind to ask you. You are in love.'

  'I was never in love yet,' said Barganax.

  Then all these tales are but false?'

  'The Duke,' said Medor, 'has never been out of love: to my certain knowledge, these seven years.'

  'What will you say to that?' said the Duchess. 'As captain of your bodyguard, he should know.'

  'It is a prime error in these matters,' said Barganax, 'to fall in love. Women are like habits: if good, they stick fast, and that becomes tedious: if bad, and you love 'em, the love will stick like a leech though the woman go. No, I have taken a leaf out of their book: treat 'em as they treat fashions: enjoy for a season, then next season cast about for a new one.'

  Amalie fanned herself. 'This is terrible good doctrine. To hear you, one might imagine some old practitioner, bald before his time with o'er-acting of the game, spoke with your lips. If you be not secretly already in love, take care; for I think you are in a dangerous aptness to be so.'

  The Duke laughed. ‘I was never sadly in love but with you, my lady mother': he took her hand in his and kissed it. 'Nor need you to blame me, neither. Surely 'tis the part of a good son to look to's parents for example? and here's example of the highest in the land for me to point to, when I will not overmuch fret myself for aught that's second best' He was leaned back in his chair, legs crossed at full stretch before him, silent now for a minute. His fingers, of the one hand, played absently with the Duchess's, while through half-closed lips his eyes rested on the bright maze of the dance and night's blue curtain beyond. 'And, for your old masters of the game, madam: no. I am too hard to please. I am a painter. But pity of it is, nothing lasts. All passes away, or changes.'

  'Your grace,' said Medor, 'is a painter. Well, a p
icture painted will not change.'

  'Give it time, dear Medor, it will rot. And long ere that, you shall find the painter has changed. That, I suppose, is why pictures are so good, soon as painted.'

  'And no good, certainly, before they are painted,' said the Duchess. 'For is it not but in the painting that a picture takes being?'

  'That is certain.'

  Medor said, 'I have long begun to think, my lord Duke, that you are an atheist' ‘By no means.'

  'You blaspheme, at least,' said Amalie, 'violet-crowned Kythereia, the blessed Goddess and Queen of All'

  'God forbid! Only I will not flatter Her, mistake Her drifts. She changes, like the sea. She is not to be caught. We needs must believe Her fixed and eternal, for how should perfection suffer change? Yet, to mock us, She ever changes. All men in love, She mocks; and were I in love (which thanks to Her, I am not, nor will not be), I know it in my bones, She should mock me past bearing. Why, the very frame and condition of our loving, here upon earth, what is it but an instrument of Hers to mock us?'

  'Is this the profundities your learned tutor taught you, the old grey-beard doctor?'

  'No, madam. In this, myself taught myself.' Medor smiled:

  Tho' wisdom oft hath sought me,

  I scorn'd the lore she brought me,

  My only books

  Were women's looks,

  And folly's all they taught me.

  'Well, Medor? And what of your young lady of the north, Prince Ercles' daughter, you told me of? What has she taught you?'

  Medor answered soberly: 'To keep her out of such discussions.'

  'Forgive me,' said the Duke. 'I know not what pert and pricking spirit leadeth me by the sleeve to-night.' He leaned forward to pluck a pallid bloom of the orchid. 'Flowers,' he said, slowly examining the elegant wings and falls, domed and spreading sleeknesses: raising it to his nostrils to take the perfume. 'As if it had lips,' he said, considering it again. He dropped it: stood up now, leaning lightly against one of those silvery-sparkled pillars, the easier to overlook the company.

  'You have out-Memisoned Memison to-night, madam,' he said presently. 'And the half of them I ne'er saw till now. Tell me, who is she in the black gown, sequins of silver, dancing with that fox Zapheles?'

  The Duchess answered, 'That is Ninetta, Ibian's younger daughter, newly come to court. I had thought you had known her.'

  'Not I,' said the Duke. 'Look, Melates: for dancing: as if all from the hips downward she had never a joint, but all supple and sinuous as a mermaid. I said I will not dance to-night; but, by heavens,' he said, ‘I am in two minds, whether not to try, in this next dance following, which will she the rather, me or Zapheles. But that were 'gainst present policy. I am taming that dog-fox now by kindness: to do him that annoyance now were the next way to spoil all.'

  ‘Well, there is Pantasilea,’ said the Duchess, as there now passed by in the dance a languorous sleepy beauty, heavy eyelids and mouth like a heavy crimson rose: ‘a friend of yours.'

  But the Duke's gaze (which, never so idle-seeming, not the littlest thing escaped) noted how, upon that word, Melates reddened and bit his lip.

  ‘I retired long since,' said the Duke, 'in favour of a friend. Now there,' he said, after a little, 'is a lady, I should guess, madam, of your own choosing. There: with hair coloured like pale moonshine, done in plaits crown-wise round her head: one that I could paint in a green dress for Queen of Elfland. Is she maid or wife?'

  'She is indeed of my choosing: Lydia, wife to a chamberlain of mine.'

  'Does he use her well?'

  'It is to be hoped so. I think he loves her.'

  The Duke sat down again. 'Enough. Go, Melates. I shall not dance: I am looker-on to-night. No, in sober sadness, I mean it But I would have you dance. Medor too.'

  ‘I had liever keep your grace company,' said Medor. Melates with a low leg departed.

  There is no hope for Medor,' said the Duke. 'As good as wedded already’

  Amalia smiled at the Count over her peacock fan. 'And looks,' she said, 'as who should say, "God send it were so".'

  Their talk drifted idly on.

  Below, in a pause between the dances, Mistress Pantasilea waited, on Melates's arm, for the music to begin again. 'You came this evening with the Duke?'

  'Yes.'

  'He and his father: very unlike.'

  Melates raised his eyebrows. 'Very like, I think.'

  'One red: t'other black.'

  'Well?'

  'One all for love: t'other all for doing.'

  'I have two spears', said Melates: 'each of gold and iron: the one with main show of iron, t'other of gold. Yet are both fair to look on, and each fit for the business at need.'

  'This one hath a more speeding trick, I would warrant, to lay down ladies than to govern a kingdom.'

  'You do belie him,' said Melates. 'Say rather, he grounds himself thus early in a wide apprenticeship to both these noble arts.'

  'Come,' said she: 'while you defend and I accuse, mischief is we both needs must love him.'

  Now began, stately and slow, a pavane. Barganax, on his feet again, still idly watching, bent over now and then to his mother's ear or to Medor's or to one of her girls', to ask or answer somewhat or let fall some jest. But now, at a sudden, upon one such motion, he stopped short, hand flat-palmed against the pillar, bending forwards a little, following very intently with his eye one couple amongst the dancers. The Duchess spoke. He made no reply. She looked round: saw that he had not heard: saw the fashion of his gaze, tense, like a bowstring at stretch: saw the direction of it: followed it. For well two minutes, very discreetly not to be observed, she watched him, and, (hidden behind her eyes that watched), with a smile of the mind.

  'Do you remember,' Mary said, 'that dance at the Spanish Embassy?'

  'Do I remember!' said Lessingham, while, under his gaze, the quiver of velvet darkness within the sapphire deepened to the shadow or rumour of some profounder and living presence: as of all eyes and lips that have been man's since the world began: blinding themselves there, swept down there, drowned there to a kiss.

  'It was curious,' Mary said, very low: 'our first meeting: not to have known.'

  The Duke spoke, suddenly down into Medor's ear, that was nearest: 'What is she?'

  Medor looked where the Duke gave him the direction. Something blenched in his eye. 'I cannot tell, Till now, I have never seen her.'

  ‘Find out, and tell me,' said the Duke, head erect, feeding his eyes. Under the upward curl of his mustachios the lamplight rested upon the Olympian curve of lips which, unlike other men's, the hotlier blown upon in the fires of luxury the finer ever and more delicate became their contours, and the subtler and the more adamantine their masterful lines of strength and self-domain. 'Go,' he said. 'I would be informed of name and quality of everyone here to-night: 'tis as well, that the Duchess be not put upon by outsiders and so forth. Get me particulars.'

  The Duchess Amalie, in the mean time, very slowly and equably fanning herself, abode (in all beseeming) utterly remote and unaware.

  It was after midnight now, and between the last dances. The Duchess and her ladies were, the most of them, now retired, and most of the guests departed. The full moon, riding in her meridian but low down in Capricorn, flooded the out-terraces westwards above the moat with a still radiance of silver. The Duke with slow, measured paces came and went with Melates the length of the terrace to and fro, two hundred paces, may be, to every turn. Eastward, the lights about the summer palace glimmered beyond the yew-trees: there was no music: no sound, save the crunch of the gravel as they walked, little night-sounds in the leaves, and, from below beyond the moat, a loud singing of nightingales. The path was white under the moon: the shaven grass of the borders on either hand wet with dew: the clumps of giant pink asphodel that, at spaces of ten feet or so, rearing their lovely spikes taller than a tall man, lined the length of that terrace on either hand, were blanched too to an ^determinate immateriality of whiteness.

>   And now as they walked, they became ware of two other persons come upon the terrace at the further end: a man and a woman, she on his arm, moving now slowly towards them. Midway, they met and passed. That lady's smile, as she acknowledged Barganax's lifted bonnet, came like the flashing, in a vista parted between blood-red lilies, of the deadly whiteness of some uncharted sea-strait.

  ‘Do you know that lady?' said the Duke as they walked on.

  Melates answered, ‘I know her. But name her I cannot.'

  ‘I can tell you who she is,' said the Duke. 'She is young sister to my lord High Chancellor.'

  'Why, then, I know where 'twas I saw her. He has kept her exceeding close: never till now at court, I think: certainly I ne'er saw nor heard of her at your presences, my lord Duke, in Zayana.'

  'Myself,' said the Duke, ‘I ne'er saw her till to-night I saw her dance the pavane, with this man that is, I am told, her new husband.'

  'Your grace will remember, there was a notorious murder. True, it was never brought home where it belonged.'

  The Duke was silent for a minute. Then, 'Your great men, Melates, have commodity for bringing to pass suchlike a needful thing, when need is, without all un-decent show or scandal.'

  There was show enough here,' said Melates: 'six hired cutters to make sure of him in broad daylight, in Krestenaya marketplace. And yet none durst name my lord Chancellor in it, nor her, save in a whisper and curtains drawn: and then, as your grace knows, there were pretty tales told.'

  'I've heard 'em.'

  'And yet,' said Melates, 'for less matter, himself hath ere this headed or hanged, in this time, scores of common men.'

  'The way of the world,' Barganax said. 'And some will say, best way too: better a hundred such should die, than one great man's hand to be hampered.'

  ‘But, too cruelly practised,' said Melates, 'may breed such discontent as should pluck us down, as history hath ere now remembered.'

  'There was never yet great men plucked down by the common riff-raff,' said the Duke, Trot they had first of their own selves begun to fall from their greatness. Never in this world, Melates: nor yet in any world. For that is a condition of all possible worlds.'