A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  Surely in that Lady Fiorinda's voice were echoes of the imperishable laughter, as she answered and said, 'Indeed it is true and for every door you shall open in my mansion, my lord Duke, you shall find always another yet that awaits your opening.'

  Curtains were drawn and the fire raked up and candles lit and supper set for two in the gallery when the Duke returned. The mistress of the house was already in her place at table. He saw how that she wore a dress of soft scarlet sendaline, flourished with gold and spangles of gold and small bone lace of gold. No jewels she wore, save but only the smaragds and diamonds of her finger-rings and, at her ears, two great escarbuncles, round, smooth-cut, that each tiniest movement set aglow like two coals of fire. He saw on a chair beside her an elegant mountain lynx which she played with and caressed with her white hand luxuriously.

  She made sign to him to be seated over against her. There were candles on the table in candlesticks of orichalc, and, in little bowls of Kutarmish glass coloured with rich and cloudy colours like the sunset, odoraments to smell to: rose-water, violet-flowers, balm, rose-cakes, conserves of southernwood and of cowslip. Her face in the candlelight was more beautiful than the evening star when it upsprings as forerider of the night between clouds blackened with thunder.

  'I hope your grace will bear with our rude uplandish country manners this evening,' she said. 'Indeed I sent my servants out of the house two hours since, that our converse and business might be more free.'

  'But who set the table, then? Your ladyship's self?'

  'It amused me.'

  'On my account? with such lady-soft a hand? I am ashamed, madam.'

  'O but indeed I did it not myself. 'Twas this mountain cat of mine did do it for me. You think that a lie?'

  'I think it very like one.'

  "How say you to a taste of what she has set before us? What's this: a little sardine, dressed up in love-apple? May I please have that little plate to put this backbone upon.'

  'When next you mean to play serving-maid,' said

  Barganax, reaching her the plate, 'I hope your ladyship will let me be butler.'

  ‘I have told your grace, my creature did it. She is skilled in housewiferies of all kinds fitting.'

  The lynx stood up, making an arch of its back, and naughtily with his claws set to work on the edge of the chair: sat down again and, out of the upright slits of its eyes, stared at Barganax. He gave it (as at Kephalanthe) look for look, till it looked away and very coyly fell to licking its fur.

  'See what a tiny bird,' Fiorinda said, with a superfine daintiness taking a quail upon her fork. 'A little sparrow, I think. He that shot that must surely have frighted the mother off the nest and then caught it.'

  Barganax smiled. "There be some things ought best to be little. Othersome, best big.'

  'As for instance birds,' said she. 'For myself, I would desire always little birds, never big ones. But dogs, always big.'

  'And men?'

  'Truly that is a kind of cattle I find myself strangely disinclined to overbusy myself with. Of late. In their plurality. Your grace laughs?'

  'Some little shrubs of pride and vanity I have in me take comfort at that "plurality".'

  'Be not too confident.'

  'Faith, I am not. Should a beggar be a jetter? And yet—'

  'And yet? it is better kiss a knave than to be troubled with him?'

  'Ah, not that. I can tell true coin from false.'

  'And yet? in an undue manner the Devil coveted highness that fell not for him?'

  'His hopes were dasht, then. And serve him right. Nay but the "and yet" was mine. And, not to fall in open disobedience to your ladyship's command, it shall wait.'

  In soft lazy accents that wrought in the blood beyond all love-cups and enchantments, ' 'Tis a good "and yet",' she said, 'an amiable Devil, to wait so civilly. Let it not be despaired.'

  For a while now they ate and drank in such silence as wild hearts' desires will lie joined in, in closer lapped embraces than spoken word could tire them to: Fiorinda at every other while casting her eyes upon him, inscrutable under their curtain of long dark lashes; and he, so tall of his person, of so careless a repose of settled power in his magnificency, and with all his wilfulness and self-liking of ungoverned youth charmed asleep now, under the lynx's hot stare, and under the star of his lady's presence thus goldenly and feelably sitting before him in warrant of what transcendent fare to come.

  Presently, 'This is a strange wine, madam,' he said, 'as never in all my days I tasted. Of what sort is it? From the outlands?'

  ‘No, it comes of the grape about Reisma.'

  'It is such as might be looked for at your ladyship's table. A moment ago, limpid, transparent, and still: now, restiess with bubbles. Blood-red, to suit your lips, if I hold the goblet so. Then, hold it so, snake-green, seaish. Then, against the light, all paly gleams and with changing bands of colour that go and come within it as I let it swirl in the glass. How call you its name?'

  'For make-believe,' said she as they pledged each other, 'say it is nectar.'

  'I could in sober truth believe that,' he said. Her arm, of a lily-like smoothness and a lily-like paleness, was laid idly across the table, darkly mirrored in the polished surface, idly toying with the cup. 'For make-believe,’ he said, sudden out of the silence, 'say you are my Duchess in Zayana. Say you love me.’

  Some fire-worm of mockery stirred in her eyes. ‘But surely to say that, were a raw weak undurable and soon souring make-believe? My own I am. I stand untied.'

  'I too.'

  'You too?'

  'Yes. And I am an incorrigible person, that will not be ordered.'

  She gathered herself sweetly back in her chair, but her eyes were unrelenting flint 'You think this is a play, then?'

  ‘How can I tell?'

  'How can I either?' said she. 'Say it is a play, then; and that, in the play, you and I have forgotten, my friend, that this is the wine we drink always, you and I. And forgotten that he that drinks it with me shall return to me for ever, never altogether finding, but never altogether losing.' She began to fondle the lynx and hold its head in her lap deliciously. 'Is it not a play indeed, my moppet? See: riches come, and the man is not satisfied. Will he expect that freshly roasted larks shall fall into his mouth? Or is it, think you, that he came into the house but an hour ago meaning by force to ravish me, when as prevailed not, these weeks past, his fawning toys and suing tales?'

  The beast fuffed at Barganax like a cat

  He laughed. 'When your ladyship speaks to this lapcat if is, I suppose, in some dumb-beast tongue of its own? I understand not a word of it.'

  Fiorinda had bent her head, caressing softly with her cheek the lynx's fur. The bloom of her skin had an olive tinge, pallid as fields that spread their night-dews under the morning. And for apparentest outward seal of all perfections was the spider-thread fineness of her hair, seen in the prettily ordered growth of it at the temples, behind the ears, and at the nape of her neck, where it resteer? coiled upon itself, a closely woven knot, superb sleek and disturbing as some sweet black hunting-beast coiled upon itself in sleep. Barganax's eyes were darkened so beholding her and his throat dried.

  When she looked up again, he saw her eyes filled with tears. 'There's a blindness upon me,' she said in answer to his look, 'now that I have come so far.'

  'A blindness?'

  'I know not well whether. Corned so, to the parting of two ways at night. How can I know? Talking, may be, to-morrow with your carousing toss-pot. Meszrian friends: a sweet tale, somewhat hot of the spice too, of the cozening doctor, the crafty Chancellor, and puss his sister. Indeed and indeed I could wish your grace had not gone beside your purpose: were walking even now amongst your orange-trees in Zayana. I wish you'd a stayed there. Wish most, Td ne'er set eyes on you.'

  Barganax said, This is damnable false doctrine.' He came and knelt beside her, one hand on the chair-back, but not to touch her.

  ‘Is it?' She was crying now, with little sobs, s
ometimes held back, sometimes coming miserably in a huddle together. 'My handkerchief.' She found it: a square of cambric edged with bone lace of silver, scarce big enough to cover the width of Barganax's hand. 'I have seen an ugly sight. The ugly face of Nothing,' she said, drying her eyes.

  'But when?'

  'This morning. This Tuesday morning of this instant July. No, no, no: not when you were there. Without you, I could not, O my friend, I could not, I think go on being.' She avoided his eye: still stifling at every now and again a convulsive sob, while with her left hand she feverishly stroked the lynx's long back. Barganax very gently laid his cheek on her other hand which, resting on the table's edge, held her poor handkerchief, now screwed up in the fist of it like a child's; and very gently, as though it had been a child's indeed, kissed it.

  A minute, so. Then she began, still trembling a little, with her finger-ends of the left hand to move caressingly over his short-cut coppery curly .hair; then lapped her lovely arms about his head. And Barganax's face, as by star-leap received up into that heaven, rested, unseen, unseeing, where, as it had been two doves, her breasts sat throned, ivory-smooth through the silk, violet-sweet, proud, and Greek.

  Without word spoken, they stood up from the table.

  The lynx watched them from its chair out of eyes that danced with yellow fires.

  That left-hand door opened upon a lobby. Fiorinda locked it behind them. At the end of the lobby they came to another doorway, doorless, curtained with rich and heavy curtains, and so to a room with tall windows at the ends west and east and, at either end between the windows, a fire-place, and the heat and movement and sweetness of fires burning of sweet cedar-logs. Scores of candles stood a-light in great branched candlesticks beside the bed, and on tables and mantle-shelves and in golden sconces on the walls. The great canopied, bedstead was of pure gold, throwing back fire-glitter and candlebeam, and its hangings and coverings of cramoisie silk were befringed all with gold and worked in gold thread with representations as of gryphons and manticores and flying fire-drakes and many unused shapes and semblances besides, but half-divined amid the folds of the costly hangings. The floor was strewn with beast-skins, of wolves, bears, and deep-voiced mountain-lions, upon a carpet honey-coloured, very soft to walk on, silent as sleep. The walls seemed to be of a pale green marble, but with a glistening in the body of it as of gold-dust and dust of silver, and with myriads of little gems inlaid in the veins of the marble like many-coloured sparkles of fire. Betwixt wall and ceiling ran a frieze carved with lotuses, which seemed in the wobbling candlelight and the glow of the logs, now a-smolder, now shooting up tongues of flame, to swing and circle, rise and sink, as upon slumbrous slow eddies and backwashes of their native streams.

  But the Duke, little regarding these marvels, regarded but his Fiorinda, standing there so close, into his hand, beautiful as golden flowers. So regarding her, surely his living self was drunk down as into the heat of a pool, deep, black-watered, full of sliding lotus-limbs: of the lotus, which yet floats so virginal-cool on the surface of the surface of the water.

  As the turning of the starred sphere of night, that lady turned her head where it lay back now on his shoulder, till his eyes, close-ranged in a nearness of focus that shut out all else, rested upon her green eyes, clear-lidded, stilled, seen a little sideways: upon her nostril, which had transiently now in its cool contours as aspect most arresting, most melting, of undefended innocence: upon her cheek, firm, smooth, delicate-bloomed: last, upon her lips. It was as if, in this slowing of Time upon contemplation, Fiorinda's lips put off all particular characters which in daylight life belonged to them, as to instruments of speech, vehicles of thought, of wit, and of all self-pleasuring fierce subtle colours and musics of their mistress's mind; until, disclothed of all these, the perils and loveliness of her mouth lay naked: a vision not long tolerable in its climacteric. The tickle of her hair against his eyelids stirred his blood to ichor. Her hand, in an unbodiliness fluttering upon his, shepherded it down by small and small till it paused at the tie of her girdle. 'Kiss me again,' she said: 'kiss the strength out of me.' And then, the voice of her speech becoming as the fanning of a moth's wings, felt sooner than heard: 'Unknit me this knot.'

  Silence swirled to down-sucking sea-floods of its own extreme, itself into itself. And Barganax, flesh and spirit as by anvil and fire-broil forged to one, beheld how She, tempering first to the capacity of mortal senses the acme and heat of the empyreal light, let slide down rustling to Her ankles Her red corn-rose dress and in the mereness of Her beauty, that wastes not neither waxeth sere, stood naked before him.

  At that striking of the hour, Time, with its three-fold frustration of Past which is dead, of Future which is unborn, and of Present which before it can be seized or named is Past, was fallen away. Not as for sleepers, to leave a void: rather, perhaps, as for God and Goddess, to uncover that incandescent reality in which true things consist and have their everlastingness: a kind of flowering in which the bud is neither altered nor gone but endures yet more burningly in the full-blown rose: a kind of action which still sweeping on to new perfections retains yet the prior perfection perfect: an ecstasy that is yet stable in itself: a desire that lives on as form in the material concrete of its fulfilment And while each succeeding moment, now as honey-fall, now thunder-shot, folded in under the hover of its wings the orb of the earth, it was as if She said:

  I am laid for you like starlight.

  As white mists

  Dispart at morning with touch of the sun,

  Look, I wait you:

  Look, I am yours:

  Secrets before unpublisht.

  A God could take no more.

  I am a still water:

  Come down to me.

  I am falling lights that glitter. I am these darknesses

  Panther-black,

  That scorch and unsight

  At the flame of their unspher’d pride.

  Make sure of me how you will.

  Take me in possession.

  First, kiss me, so.

  Parting my sea-waved sea-strange sweet-smelling hair

  So, left and right.

  Iam utterly yielded, untiger’d, unqueen'd:

  Have I not made me

  Softer and tenderer for you than turtle's breast?

  Ah, tender well my tenderness:

  Life in me

  Is a wing'd thing more aery than flies hemerae:

  This beauty of me

  More fickle and unsure

  Than the rainbow'd film of a bubble, hither and gone,

  On some tall cataracts lip.

  Yet, O God!

  Were you God indeed,

  Yet, of my unstrength,

  Under you, under your lips, under your mastery,

  I am Mistress of you and Queen:

  I hold you, my king and lord,

  The render'd soul of you bar'd in my hand

  To spare or kill.

  God were ungodded,

  The world unworlded,

  Were there no Me.

  Into the other and may be less perdurable Lotus Room, the night after that race home from Austria, dawn was already now beginning to creep between the curtains of the high eastern window, and the note of a blackbird in Lessingham's garden boded day. Downstairs in the Armoury the great Italian clock struck four. And Mary, between sleeping and waking turning again to him, heard between sleep and waking his voice at her ear:

  O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!

  O run slow, run slow, chariot-horses of Night!

  XII

  Salute to Morning

  ANTHEA in the mean time, left to follow her devices in that western gallery at Reisma, took her true shape, sat daintily down in her mistress's chair, and began to make her supper of the leavings. Leisurely, delicately, she ate, but playing with the food betweenwhiles after a fashion of her own: now pouring the wine from glass to glass and balancing the glasses perilously one upon another. Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa, Pelion; now
chasing a flaun hither and thither over the polished table with her finger; again, tearing a quail to pieces and arranging the pieces in little patterns, then a sudden sweeping of them all together again in a heap and begin a new figure. So, with complete contentment, for hours. At length, while she was trying her skill at picking out with her teeth special morsels from the nicely ordered mess she had made, as children play at bob-cherry, her disports were interrupted by the entrance of Doctor Vandermast.

  Like a silver birch-tree of the mountains in her kirtle of white satin overlaid with network of black silk, she rose to greet him as with staid philosophic tread he came the length of the long gallery and so to the table. He kissed her brow, white as her own snows of Ramosh Arkab. 'Well, my oread?' he said, touching, as a lapidary might the facets of a noble jewel, with fingers more gentle than a woman's the aureate splendours of her hair which she wore loosely knotted up and tied with a hair-band of yellow topazes. A little shamefaced now she saw his gaze come to rest on the results of her table-work, but, at the twinkle in his eye when he looked from that to her, she sprang laughing to him, hugged him about the neck and kissed him.

  'Have you supped, reverend sir?'

  Vandermast shook his head. 'It is nearer breakfast-time than supper-time. Where is her ladyship?'

  'Where the Duke would have her. In the chamber you made for them.'

  'It were best seal the doors,' said Vandermast; and immediately by his art both those doors, the left-hand and the right, were changed to their former state, parts of the panelling of the inner wall. He stood silent a minute, his hawk-nosed face lean in the candlelight 'It is a place of delights,' he said. 'Ex necessitate divinae naturae infinita infinitis modis sequi debent: out of the necessity of the Divine nature, Her infinite variety. And now he, to the repossession of his kingdom. But let him remember, too, that She is fickle and cannot be holden against Her will.' He stood at the window. "The moon is set two hours since,' he said. 'The night grows to waste.'

  'My lady sent away her servants. Paid 'em all off, every Jack and Jill of'em.'