A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  Men began to shift in their seats a little, as unballassed ships are rocked and tossed. Clavius, being high with wine, shouted out, 'Yes: and a hundred swords ready behind the door to secure him.'

  That,' replied the King, ‘were an unwise mistrust of them that were loyal. And yet for a jest: instance the extreme of improbability: say you were of that rank sort, here met to devise my ruin. Then I, having some wisdom, and knowing as a King should know, might come indeed, as I am come, but with a force of men without prepared to seize upon you; 'stead of (as 'tis) secure in my friends, and not so much as a man-at-arms to guard me.'

  Olpman whispered privately to the Vicar, 'This be set forth to blear our eyes. He hath men at call. Our only safety, strike and strike suddenly.'

  'Quiet, fool, and wait my word,' said the Vicar. He paused a moment, smiling, playing with his ring: then made sign to Gabriel to fill round the wine again. A look of intelligence passed between him and Gabriel, slight and fleeting as, at slack-water, is the beginning of the turning, this way and no longer that, of the great tide unresistable of the sea. Gabriel, when he had filled round, went out by the door. The Vicar found means to say to Olpman under cover of the general talk, 'I had prepared this beforehand. We will a little play for time. When you shall hear me say to Gabriel, "Why not the wine of Armash?" that is a sign to him to admit those that shall dispatch the King's business for him right suddenly. Pass round the word. This too: that no man, on his life, stir afore my bidding.'

  While Olpman was cautiously in this sense instructing Arquez, the Vicar said covertly to the King, 1 entreat your highness, let's manage your faces so as none shall doubt we speak on aught but trivial matters. And if I speak improbably, yet believe it,—'

  ‘No more,' said the King, with a like secrecy and a like outward carelessness. 'I’ll tell it you myself. You have stumbled to-night upon a wasps'-nest. But I am come on purpose to take it. All present, you alone excepted, play underboard against my royal estate and person. I have proof: I have letters. Your charge it shall be that not a man of them escape.'

  'A squadron of horse, my own, distant from the farm some half mile,' said the Vicar. 'And these, I well guess, have twice as many against us. What profit in men-at-arms, though, when the head is off?'

  The King laughed. 'I am glad you are not a fool, cousin.'

  The Vicar, playing as before with the great ring on his thumb, said, 'Go, I think there's not one here, I alone excepted, believes your serene highness is in truth come alone here and unattended.'

  'But you, cousin, are not a fool,' said the King.

  1 know now. I have put my life in your highness's hand.

  'How so?'

  'Sitting thus at your right hand. Your hand next my heart. And your dagger, I see, ready to your hand.'

  'We are neither of us slow of understanding,' said the King. 'And I think either would be sorry to lose the other.'

  They had means to speak some word or two more thus privately. Then came Gabriel Flores in again with a flesh flagon of wine. 'I shall in a moment,' said the Vicar, 'give your serene highness proof of my love and fidelity plain and perfect.' Gabriel filled first to the King, then to the Vicar, who whispered him some instruction in his ear. 'And you shall see too I can play at shuttlecock with two hands,' said the Vicar, under his breath to the King. 'Which oft cometh well.'

  As Gabriel passed now behind Count Olpman's chair, his eyes met his master's, and he paused. Gilmanes, Clavius, and Stathmar were in talk, heads together, at the far end of the table. Olpman, biting his lip, had secretly, under cover of the table-top, bared his sword. The Vicar rapped out suddenly to Gabriel, 'Why not the wine of Armash?' and, the word scarce out of his mouth, hurled his heavy goblet in Gilmanes's face, throwing at the same time with his other hand his dagger, which pinned Clavius's right hand (put up to save him) to his cheek. Gabriel, bringing down the wine-flagon with all his might upon the bald pate of Olpman from behind, dashed out his brains. The King was sprung to his feet, sword drawn: the Vicar beside him. Amid this broilery and fury, leaping shadows on wall and ceiling, knives thrown, chairs and benches overset, the King crossed blades with Stathmar: both notable swordsmen. Arquez threw a pie-dish at the King: grazed his cheekbone: then a chair, but it fell short, sweeping (save one) every candle from the table. At fifth or sixth pass now in that uncertain light, Stathmar fell, run through the heart. Arquez, seeing this: seeing Olpman lie sprawled over the board, his head in a pool of blood: seeing Gilmanes stretched senseless, and Clavius wounded and in a mammering whether to fly or fight: threw another chair, that tripped up the Vicar rushing bloodily upon him: then yet another at the King. It missed. Arquez jumped for the window. The King caught the chair in mid-air, hurled it again, took him on the backside, well nigh broke his tail-bone. Down from the window he dropped, and Gabriel, with skillfully aimed kicks and with strampling on his face and belly, soon stopped his noise.

  Clavius, casting himself prostrate now under the King's feet, cried out that, might but his life be spared, he would declare all: 'I was neither author nor actor: only persuaded and drawn in by Olpman and Gilmanes and by—’ His speech dried up in his throat as, gazing wildly round, he saw how the Vicar beheld him with a look as fell, as venomous, and as cruel as is in the face of the death-adder.

  'Tie them all up,' said the King: these three that be left alive.' Gabriel tied them hand and foot with rope from the pack-saddles: set them on a bench against the wall: gathered some candles from the floor to make a better light. Gilmanes and Arquez were by now come to themselves again. Little content they seemed with their lot; seeing moreover how the King drew a sheaf of papers from his bosom. But never a word they uttered.

  The King's countenance seemed as a pouring down of black darkness from the sky, where all else becomes un-discernable, even to the stars whose operations make the fortunes and the destinies of men. 'Some things,' he said, 'be provable, some unprovable. I know not how many principal members there be and how many unprincipal. I say (and that not without sufficient evidence of your own letters) that you came hither confederated to work an utter mischief against my estate, that am your King and Lord. What reason had you for such ingratitudes and undeserved unkindness?—You, Gilmanes? that four years ago I spared your life at the suit of your grey beard, and ever since have too patiently borne with your harsh government and cruelties used against my liege-men? But your ungracious and unheard wickedness shall come down upon your own pate.—You, Arquez? in hope that, if the realm were but turmoiled and shaken, your oppressing of your neighbours might have easy scope? It will come to fifty thousand ducats that you have robbed of my good subjects; but now is your audit near.—You, Qavius? because time and again my hand has opened bounty to you, but, for all that, you have remained our well proved evil wilier, and, as we see, a fool besides and a dastard.

  'I bid you, therefore,' he said to the Vicar, 'let me see the three heads off, of Clavius, Arquez, and Gilmanes, before either any man else go from this room or come into it. Olpman's too: should have been. Second bite, after I'd pardoned him his share in Valero's rebellion: it was too much. But the rat your secretary saved us that trouble. Stathmar I'd have spared. A good man, but unfit, after this, to be in the land, considering too he held the government and sway of so high a place. Him I'd have banished. But Fate, you see, hath banished him further than I could.'

  For a minute there was dead silence. Then the Vicar motioned to Gabriel. 'Work for you to try your hand on. You have the King's warrant. Creep into them.' Gabriel took up his sword and stepped forward, trying the edge with his thumb. The Vicar said again, 'Creep into them, basset.'

  But Clayius began to scream out against the Vicar: ‘What of yonder cruel devil, that bred all our miseries? setter on of all this, the arch-rebel himself?—’

  'Hold!' said the Vicar like a thunder-crack, and Gabriel lowered his blade, swung hastily for the blow.

  '—Spoke to us, King,' shouted Clavius, 'ere you came in: a seditious discourse farsed full of unfitt
ing words, bordering on such strange designs that had made me haste forth, but that in the nick of time your serene highness fortunately coming in—'

  The Vicar's face was scarlet: his regard inscrutable as stone. But in the King's eyes there but flickered an ironic smile. He snapped his fingers: 'Why are their heads not dealt with?' and Gabriel speedily dealt with them, having off the head first of Clavius, then of Arquez (at two strokes, for the fatness of his neck); last, of Gilmanes.

  'Your secretary, I see,' said the King, taking the Lord Horius Parry by the arm now and causing him to go with him out into the open air, 'hath some pretty fetches: beyond what commonly we look to a learned clerk to do. Well, a fair riddance,' he said, as they stood now alone under the starry sky, their eyes not yet used to the darkness. 'Such men, alive or dead, lack substantial being: are a kind of nothing. Except Stathmar (whom I slew for indeed he gave me no choice) I'll be sorry for none of them: discard 'em as not worth the holding.

  ‘But now, as for you, cousin: procurer and speciallest contriver—nay, deny it not—of all this horrible treason.. What have these done to be destroyed if you go free?'

  There was a strange stillness came upon the great muscles of the Parry's arm, locked in the strong arm of the King. Out of the masking darkness he answered and said, 'Your serene highness hath not a tittle of evidence there against me.'

  ‘No. I said, you are not a fool.'

  'And besides, it is something, I'd a thought, that I saved your highness's life.'

  'And why?' said the King. 'Why did you that?'

  They were pacing now, with slow deliberate steps, away from the house. It was as if, for a minute, under the undark summer darkness, blood talked to blood in the unquiet silence of their linked arms. Then the Vicar gave a strange awkardish little laugh. 'This is scarce the moment,' he said, 'to ask your serene highness to swallow gudgeons. I could give you a dozen specious untrue reasons you'd disbelieve. Truth is, with the suddenness and unknownness of your coming, I know not why I did it. If I had but a little backed my hand—'

  The King took him by either shoulder, and stood a minute staring down into his face. There was light enough, of starshine and that luminosity which lingers at this time of year in a kind of twilight all night long, to betray a most strange uncustomed look of the Vicar's eyes: almost such a look as himself was used to meet in the eyes of Gabriel Flores. The King began to laugh: the Vicar too. 'Truth is,' said the King, 'thinking of the matter unappassionately, there's something so glues me and you together as neither life nor death shall unglue us. Which you, my most wolvy and most foxy sergeant major general of all the Devil's engineers, are not able to forget when my eye is upon you (according to the old saying, ex visu amor). But when you are too much left to yourself, you are sometimes prone to forget it.'

  'I'll swear to your serenity,' said the Vicar, 'by all the dreadfullest oaths you shall require me of,—'

  'Spare your oaths,' said the King, 'and your invention. I and you do well understand each other: let it rest at that. Indeed, and more of your lies might try my temper. Send that little jackal of yours to call up your men you told me of: explain the miscarriage of these five noble persons within there how you will. Take the credit of it to yourself if you like: I grudge it you not. Good night, cousin. And ponder you well the lesson I have read you this evening. There is my horse, tied by the gate there.'

  'But your highness's men?' said the Vicar bringing the King's horse with his own hand.

  ‘I told you already, I am alone.' He leapt into the saddle lightly as man of five and twenty.

  'Alone?' said the Vicar and stood staring, 'Nay,' he said, 'but I thought—'

  'Are you in truth, cousin,' said the King, gathering his reins, 'so universal a liar as you end by seeing a lie in truth herself, even presented to you stark naked? As the drunkard that swallowed the true live frog in his beer-mug, supposing it but such another fantasm as he was customed to? Good night'

  'Alone?' said the Vicar again, in himself, as the hoof-beats of the King's departing died away, leaving behind here only a great stillness and the night. 'Go, I believed it within there 'mong those timorous and unthankful vipers. As well, perhaps, that I did. And yet: truth unbusked and naked, considered another way,—might a tickled me up to what I'd now a been sorry for. And now,—thinking on't in cold blood—go, 'tis a thing not believable!'

  VIII

  Lady Mary Lessingham

  IT WAS NOW the twenty-fourth of June, nineteen hundred and fourteen, at Wolkenstein in the Grodner Dolomites, nine o'clock, and a morning without cloud. Up in the sky, beyond church-spire and river and meadow and chalet and rolling pasture and pine-forest and grass-smooth steep-going alp, hung the walls of the Sella. Seen through that haze of air and the down-shedding radiance of the sun, the millions upon millions of tons of living rock seemed as if refined away to an immateriality of aery outsides, luminous, turquoise-shadowed, paler and thinner than thin clouds, yet immovable and sharp-outlined like crystal. It was as if slab, gully, scree-slope, buttress, and mile-long train of precipice wall, cut off from all supports of earth and washed of all earthy superfluities which belong to appearances subject to secular change, stood revealed in their vast substantiality; the termless imperishable eidolon, laid up in Heaven, of all these things.

  On the terrace before the inn, people were breakfasting at a dozen little tables. Here a lime-tree, there a wide umbrella striped white and scarlet, made its pool of shade upon green-and-white chequered table-cloth, gravel, and paved walk. Outside these shades, all was drenched with sunlight. Here and there, a glass ball, blue, yellow, or plain silver, the size of a man's fist and having a short bottle-neck to take the top of the bamboo stick that supported it, gleamed among the rose-trees to rebate the glance of witches. All the time, amid the clink of breakfast things, was the coming and going, strong and graceful upon their feet, of the inn-keeper's two daughters: capable, self-possessed, with a native ease of manner and an infectious laughter, charming to look at in their red petticoats, many-coloured aprons, Tyrolean blouses of white linen, and embroidered belts with clasps of silver. Underneath all the sounds and movements was an undersound of waters falling, and, closer at hand, a hum overhead of bees in the lime-trees which put out at this season their delicate sweet-smelling pendant flowers. And, an intoxication of lilies to make eddies of these simplicities, sat Mary: by herself at an outer table, part in sun part in shadow.

  There seemed a morning coolness, dew upon an ungathered lily, to rest upon her sitting there, unconscious, to all appearance, of the many pairs of eyes that having once looked could not but look again, as bees drawn (fly where they can) still to the honey-dropping of Aganippe's fount. Unregarding these looks, she now ate a piece of bread and honey; now (as if the little girl awoke anew in her to usurp the woman) dipped sugar in her coffee, and sucked and dipped and sucked again; now shaded her eyes to look up to the pale tremendous outlines afar of those dolomite walls under the sun.

  Upon the sound from indoors of a voice among the many voices, she looked up. To a careless eye's beholding, scarcely she seemed to move the least lineament of her face. Yet to Lessingham, making his way across to her table from the clematis-shadowed door of the coffee-room, there was in some hardly perceptible quickening of her body and its every seen or unseen half-suggested grace, a private welcome that thrilled upwards as the lark ascending welcomes day. He took a chair and sat down facing her, himself in the full glare of the sun. He was in his traveling-clothes. They both laughed. 'My dear Senorita, how extraordinary to run across you here, of all places!"

  'Most extraordinary. And most embarrassing!'

  'Of course I can understand that this is the last place in the world you'd expect to see me.'

  'The last in the world. So metropolitan. Much more natural to meet you in that shocking Georgian village in Suanetia: years ago,—you remember? the year after I was married.'

  'You? married? How distressing! Did I know it at the time?'

  'Behaved
as if you didn't.'

  'OI shall always do that. Do you mind?'

  ‘I think I prefer it,' Mary said, and her foot touched his under the table. 'We must be careful what we say. (Don't look round)—the gentleman behind you, with not one blade of hair on him: I'm a great puzzle to him. I'm sure this will make him draw the worst conclusions. A German gentleman, I think. He was in the train two days ago, coming up from Bozen. Had a curious stammer, and every time he stammered he spat. His wife has quite decided I'm the scarlet woman: shameless English hussy gadding about like this alone.'

  The elder of the girls brought Lessingham's coffee: 'And a large cup,' she said, putting it down with a flourish.

  'What a memory you have, Paula!'

  'O well, but some things one remembers.'

  'Are we to have the schuhplattler dance to-night?' said Mary. 'You and Andreas? I expect you've got all the steps now?'

  The girl laughed. To-morrow, it may be. To-night, no, no. To-night, some dancers from Vienna. We do not like them. But father say they can come once.'

  'Why don't you like them?'

  Paula screwed up her nose and shook herself. 'They are not as should be,' she said. Too saucy.—I must get you some more butter: some more honey.' She went about it, direct as a water-hen hastens across a lawn to fetch food for its young.

  'Herr Birkel is a pet,' said Mary. Tearful excitement when I arrived. Took my hand in both his. "Welcome, My Lady. You are taller, I think, than ever."—and then, ever so confidential and intense—"And prettier!"'

  ‘Perfectly true. Even in ten days.'

  ‘Ten days! It seems like ten months. Or,—some ways, —ten minutes.—You look very spry and wide awake after your all-night journey.'

  'Slept my berserk sleep out at Waidbruck: thirty-one hours solid. Hadn't had a wink for five nights. Woke up about midnight: dined, or rather breakfasted, on soup, an omelette, Wiener schnitzel, a bit of Hansl and Gretl cake, red wine, coffee: made them produce a chariot: and here I am.'