A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  Her face, all save the smouldering trail of that blow turned bloodless white. 'This may be your death,' she said.

  But Morville went from the room like a man drunk, for the galling and blistering of his eyes with broken tears; and so from the house; and so to horse.

  .xi

  Night-Piece: Appassionato

  DUKE BARGANAX, while these things were fresh at Reisma, was already gone for Zayana: his folk a mile ahead with the baggage, himself riding alone. Every summer sound as he came on, of wind-stirred leafage, birds singing, becks falling, ran divisions on the tune of Loth to depart. He rode at a slowed idle pace, twenty miles south now from Memison and twenty yet before him. Whiles he shifted, as if the saddle chafed him: whiles, cursed aloud; and then, as it were to be spectator, not undergoer, of the comedy, laughed at himself. Here, where the road, high above the head waters of this southernmost arm of Reisma Mere, goes level for at last half mile along the shelf of Kephalanthe and thence rises steeply to the water-shed, he drew to a halt. Betwixt the road and the crag's lip that overhangs the lake, cedar-trees spread a roof, spiss, dense, high-raftered, beneath which the sun's glare entered but as attenuate pale shafts, clear-outlined as glass, motionless to the sight, save for a drowsed motion within them of floating specks which they kindled to dust of gold. The Duke dismounted, loosed girths, let her go graze, and sat down under the trees to rest. It was now the great heat of the day, but the air hung cool under that ceiling of cedar-fronds, and of a spice-laden sweetness. He fell asleep.

  It was very still under the trees. A red mouse ran out, sat up to wash his face with his little paws, and went about his affairs unconcerned, scuttering once or twice within an inch of Barganax's boot. A Jennie wren scolded in the brake. As the afternoon wore, a party of long-tailed tits passed through by stages, hanging upside down on the cedar-twigs, filling the air with their tiny pipings. Two young hares came by, and stopped to play. By imperceptible slow degrees the sunbeams took a less steep incline. And now, as it drew on towards evening, two came walking between the trees from the northward as it were two nymphs of the waters and wildernesses, each with her arm about the other's waist. Their dresses, of fine gauzy stuff kilted almost to the knee, sliimmered to all greys and greens of distance and whitenesses of snowfield or watersmeet. Light was their tread, scarce bending the grass beneath them; and the little things of the wild, as if knowing them familiarly, took but a hop or step aside as they passed.

  'Look, sister,' said she that was little and dark and with beady black eyes: 'a sleeping man.'

  'Is it him we were sent after?'

  'Are your lynx-eyes become beetle's eyes that you perceive not that?'

  'His face is from us,' replied the taller. Slender she was as some cattish creature of the mountains, and the colouring of her deep hair was as fire of gold. 'Besides, I ne'er yet spoke with him face to face. Nor did you neither, sister.'

  'No, but I know him by frame and fashion: arms and legs well lengthened and strengthed after the proportions of his body, which is proportioned as a God's. And he is colour-de-roy, too: his hair at least. Come softly till we see his face: I have looked on that Duke, sister, from betwixt the bulrushes, when he little thought 'twas such as me, so innocently beholding him. Come softly. Yes, it is he, it is he.'

  They stood a minute looking at Barganax asleep, as reremice at the bright beams of the clear sun. Then Anthea said, 'I'd have known him by his likeness to the Duchess his mother, only with a something straining or biting as ginger: more self-liked and fierce. What was the command to you?'

  'When my lady's grace hath dressed this evening, to bring him to come sup at her house.'

  'And what to follow? Lie and look babies in one another's eyes? See, he smiles in his sleep. "At pleasure now on stars empireth he"!'

  'Sleep is a spying-hole unto man', said Campaspe. 'Did you hear, sister? he spoke her name in his sleep.'

  'Let me consider him in his sleep, sister. You'd have thought there's more than mortal blood swells these veins. And even with the lids closed, as now, there is a somewhat betwixt his eyes, ay, in the whole countenance of him: a somewhat unfaint and durable, such as I ne'er saw till now in mortal man, but in them of our kind is never distracted either from soul or body. And firely and openly he burned with fire of love.'

  'See how unsettledly he searches about sideways with his hand. He speaks her name again.'

  'I warrant that hand,' said Anthea, 'is a finder of the right way to heaven.'

  After a little, Campaspe said, with her liquid naiad voice, 'Whether think you better sport to wake him now, or give him our message while he sleeps? speak it into his dreams?'

  'This is a fine toy: let's try it. W can speak wider so.' 'Which shall speak it?'

  ‘Both, by turns. Then he shall taste in his dreams the true sharps and sweets of it,' said Anthea, and smiled with a white gleam of teeth.

  'Which shall begin?'

  'I will.—Salutation, my lord Duke. We be two waiting-maids unto my Lady Fiorinda in Reisma. And my lady said this morning that, in her seeming, red men be treacherous and full of quaintness and likened to foxes.'

  ‘But then, she said,' said Campaspe, 'your grace was liker a lion than a fox.'

  'And sitting so in her starry loveliness, with her breasts unbraced, she said: "That would have stood the Duke of Zayana in far more stead, to have kissed the dogged-ness out of me, 'stead of, when I bade him go, go indeed. For I already had, truly I think, a certain smackering towards him. And such thing as man's heart is most on," said she, "and that these weeks past he hath made great suit unto me for, indeed I begin to think I'd liever let him have it than any man born".'

  'No, no! that was never in the patent.'

  Anthea laughed. 'Timorous scrupulosities! 'Twas meant, if it were not said.—"And that," said my lady, "is why to-night I have requested his company at supper. For indeed matters stood altogether unadvanced 'twist me and the Duke, until the jealous ass my husband—'

  '—"who is the miserablest young raw puttock that e'er waited slugging on his bed for day,—'

  '—"this very morning, after many circumstances too long to trattle on now, gave me a smite in the face".'

  ‘Fie, sister! my lady would burst sooner than avouch that fact.'

  ‘I know,' replied Anthea. ‘But is a kind of charmed sour mare's-milk very forcible to turn the brain.—"And I told him," says my lady, "that my lord and lover the Duke would doubtless make a capon of him therefor before he had done with him".—Go on, sister.'

  "In token whereof,' said Campaspe, ‘I shall wear for the Duke to-night," says she, "my silken gown coloured of red corn-rose".'

  '"And for the more conveniency, 'cause I think the night will be close," says she, "I'll wear no undergarment".'

  'O sister! We've spoke beyond our licence, and most part, I fear, untrue. This bald unjointed chat of yours! Will you think the Duke heard it indeed in his dream? And will be remember it when he wakes? Truly I hope not'

  ' 'Twill do no hurt, silly flindermouse. What skills it? so only but— one desire

  May both their bloods give an imparted fire!

  'Sister, sister! clacketing out this nonsense, we've left the principal errand unsaid.' 'What's that?'

  ‘My lord Duke, in your dreams: we were to inform your grace directly, my lady sleeps alone to-night, the lieutenant being from home.'

  'O my stars, yes! that's more to the purpose than all.'

  'Come off, sister, and make an end. I think he's waking.'

  'One word of my own then, to bid him adieu.—Wear a good glove, I counsel you, my lord Duke, for your falcon-gentle straineth hard.'

  'Away, he opens his eyes.'

  Barganax. sat up, wide awake on the instant, swiftly looking about him. No living thing was to be seen, save but on a branch close by, touched with the beams of the westerning sun, a peggy-whitethroat trilling her sweet unbodied lay with its dying fall; and below her, in an outcropping of grey rock by a cedar's foot, an elegant lynx
with speckled fur, tufted ears erect, and eyes that had upright slits for-pupils. The Duke leapt to his feet. Every line of his body, and every muscle of his face, seemed to tighten as with some resolve gathering weight from within-wards, unrestrainable as a great tide coming in the high sea-springs of the year. Both creatures, the one with fiery the other with timid bead-like eye, as he stood there motionless, returned him look for look. 'I have dreamed of dream. Unformed stars,' he said. 'Small stake makes cold play. But no more of that.' With a flutter of olive-yellowish breast and wing the little bird flew. The lynx in the same instant bounded away through the undergrowth, graceful in her leap as an oread in the skyish summits at point of day. Barganax whistled his mare: she came, muzzled his neck below the ear. 'Come, child,' he said as he tightened the girths and then jumped into the saddle, ‘We must ride: we must ride.'

  Day was near spent when the Duke came at a hand-gallop to the ford by the footbridge. Here -he halted to let her drink. On the further side the land rises gradually to level stretches wooded with oak and holm-oak, through which the road winds a mile or so, and then, upon a sharp turn south-east, runs straight for a last two hundred yards in a tunnel of these trees and so out again into the open, and so down by gently sloping moory ground to the mains of Reisma. As the Duke rode into that straight, the beams shooting level through the wood from behind him struck red fire-marks on the tree-boles in front. Ahead, the end of the wood was as an arched gateway opening out of gloom upon field and champaign bathed drenched and impregnate with the red sun's glory. And seen full in that archway, in the mid distance as in a picture framed, groves of tall cypresses siding it left and right, stood the house. It shone in the last rays like a casket lifted up against the updrawing curtain of dark night, and lit by the fires of some jewel unprizable cased within it

  As Barganax drew near to that house of Reisma the sun set, and there came upon the land and air a strange uncustomed alteration. For, out of the baked earth of that evening of deep summer, smells of spring began to prick his nostrils as he rode; quinces and cherry-trees showed white through the dusk, under their traceries of pale sweet blossom; and out of short and springy turf young daffodil leaves rose excitedly like fingers, thick stiff and tense with the sap putting upward, and wet with dew. And, as the shadow of approaching night began to creep up the sky behind Reisma and the great snow ranges afar, the heavy obscurities of the strawberry-trees were filled with a passion of nightingales. In this out-of-rule mutation and unfashioning of July to April, only the heavenly bodies were some warrant of constancy, even the unsteadfast moon floating where she ought to do, all rose-colour to-night, low in the southeast among the dim stars of Sagittarius, a day or two short of her full.

  The house was silent: not a light showed at door or window. The Duke, making sure of his sword, loosening it in the scabbard, rode into the forecourt past the vine-hung trellis and that bench of asterite. As he passed the empty bench, a taint or perfume as by fine and quick fingering made all his senses stand in a fire-robed expectancy. It was gone the next instant, dissipated and lost on the evening breeze.

  The door stood open. He dismounted, ran up the steps, but checked at the threshold. In the profound stillness of the house sat a menace, as if the universal world were become in that sudden a city unsure, not impregnable. It seemed suddenly to be unsufferable cold and he, standing on a bridge of thread precariously above floor-less immensities, to look down between his feet to a driving upon noiseless winds, as dead leaves are driven, earthward, skyward, and about, without path or purpose, of half-memories out of the old age of time past, as if from other lives, other worlds. Then natural present cleared itself again; and the Duke, loosing the grip of his strong fingers upon the latch of the silver-studded door by which in that turmoil he had steadied himself, crossed the threshold into the silent house: stood listening: heard only the blood that pounded and pounded in his ears. Then he ransacked the house, room by room in the falling shadows that fell like slowed chords descending of stringed instuments in ever darkening procession, as door after door was flung wide by him and slammed to again. The very kitchens he ransacked, store-rooms, cellars underground, sculleries, buttery, and all. And when all was searched and found void of any living being he began again. And again everywhere, save for the clatter of his heavy riding-boots, was silence: empty all, as last year's nest in November. Only, as it were some intermittent rare flicker kindling ever and again an edge of those shadows falling, came at every while a scarce discernible tang of that most vading perfume. Upon that faint warmth and deliciousness, as though in carnal presence she had brushed by within an inch of him and away again unkissed and unknown, the sense was become to be no more a thing mediate but the unshaled nakedness of the live soul, held quivering like a bird in some titanic hand that was of itself but the bodiment of that world-enfettering sweet hyacinthine smell. As to say: This savour, this thread-like possibility of her, is all that knits the fabric together. Should it depart to come not again, this faint Olympian air which is as from the very mouth of laughter-loving Aphrodite of the flickering eyelids and violet-sweet breast, gone is then all else beside; and you go too, and the world from your hand. Barganax, like now to a man entering in the trembling passage of death, said in himself, 'God keep it!'

  Then, in the long upper gallery that opens toward the sunset, he was ware of her in the dusk, standing in the embrasure of a window.

  The floor rose by two steps to that embrasure, so that when she turned at the Duke's approaching she looked down on him from above. With her back to the light there was no reading of her face, but she held out her hand to him. It glowed through the half-dusk, a water-chill unsubstanced glow, like the moonstone's; but warm it was to the touch and, as he took and kissed it, redolent, to unseating of the wits, of that ambrosial scent. 'This one too,' she said, and the self-savouring indolent voice of her came like the disclosing of dewy roses, blood-red, underset with thorns, as she held him out the other hand. And while he kissed that, 'So you have come?' she said.

  ‘Yes, my life-blood and my queen,' said the Duke. 'I have come.' Over and over again he kissed the two hands: caught them both together to his lips, to his eyes: fell down upon his knees then before her: seized his arms about her waist that rose slender as neck of a Greek vase above the statuesque smooth languor of her hips and yielding as throat or breast of some sleepy dove. His forearms, crossing each other, were locked now behind her knees so that she stood pinioned, backward-leaning against that window-ledge, breathing fast, limbs unstrung. So for a fire-frozen minute, while the Duke's forehead and eyelids pressing blindly against the folds of her silken gown, here where it covered her flank, here her thigh, here the dream-mounded enchanted mid region between hip and hip.

  He bent lower, as if to kiss her foot. 'No.' she said, upon a catch of the breath. ‘No. We will wait for that, my friend.'

  'Wait? Have I not waited long enough?' and he took her with both hands by the waist again, drawing her down to him. 'By heavens, too long.'

  She said, 'No. You must order yourself mannerly with the things are set before you. We will wait till after supper.'

  He was on his feet now beside her in the window, gripping with his left hand the window-ledge, searching her face: her colubrine slanting eyes with their lashes now asleep, now a-flicker: eyes enabled, with such a mouth, with such nostrils, to infinite allurements, confections of sugared gall honeyed with the promise of unspeakable benedictions, unspeakable delights, or (when the Devil drives) to the summoning of strange horrors, ice-cruel or tiger-fanged, out of the deep. 'Fob.! I have dreamed dreams,' he said.

  She threw up her head in a little laugh, that seemed to take flesh in her disordinate and unresty beauty. 'Dreams are like an orange. The rind is hot, and the meat within it is cold. I love a doer, not a dreamer.'

  'Your ladyship sent for me. Is it not so?' He saw how her eyes, averted now, busied no more with his, were for this once, in the fast failing light, become softer and stiller than the eyes of a yearl
ing hind.

  'For a wild hart wandering out of order? Well, if I did? In a dream of my own?'

  The Duke looked now where she looked, north-westward to the lake roughened with wind, a sapphire lit from within, darker in the distance. A little north of it, Memison showed grey against cloud-banks of a stronger grey behind it, with a slanting smudge of pale crimson upon a sky of yellow ochre. To the left, westward, the cloud-bank was indigo against that yellowishness of the sky, here smirched with brown. Hesperus, beautifullest of all stars, burned low in the west. High over all hung that night-hue: that heaven's-blue which holds depth beyond depth within it, and is the young unfledged dark. Still the breath of spring persisted on the air, and the lay, bitter-sweet, of the nightingales.

  "Then you sent, and sent not? Good,' he said. Leaning now his two elbows on the window-sill, he looked up at her sideways. It was as if the string of a lyre, invisible, unvibrating, strained his dark eyes to hers and tasted, in some inward contemplation of its two-fold self, the un-boundlessness of music to be. 'Well,' he said, standing up like a man that shakes himself awake, 'for the present I am content to unlace no more of these mysteries. Enough that there is a pair of us.'

  'And that it is supper-time.'

  Barganax glanced down at his dusty boots. 'First I would lay off the sweat and dust I have soiled me with, hastening to this place.'

  'O, for that, all is laid ready for your grace within there. No, the right-hand door: this left-hand leads, I know not well whither. To heaven, perhaps. Or hell.'

  He looked at the doors: then at her. 'Right or left, I saw neither of these two doors till now,' he said. 'And 'tis very certain, madam, that every door in this house I have seen and opened, twice over, before I found you here.'