A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  'Yes, she intends, I think, for Memison,' said the doctor. 'And the Lord Morville, ridden with the cavalcade to Rumala.'

  Anthea bared her teeth. 'Pray Gods he break his neck. There's a lust upon me for a taste of horaified cattle-flesh, after supping on these kickshaws. O I could handle him with rough mittens: leave but guts and sinews for the kites. Can you think of him and not be angry as I am?'

  'Yes. For God, according to His impenetrable counsel, hath made it a virtue in you to be angry; but making of me, He cooled that humour with a cooler thing more meet for it in me: I mean with the clear milk of reason which in a philosopher should ever overmaster passion. The unmistrusting man, thinking no evil, a man of common earth and clay, endued with a soul not yet unmortal, how should he wed with a great comet or blazing star, or breathe in Her heights? Doubt not that, from the beginning, he, in the opinion of his own insufficiency, poisoned the very sap should have nourished him at root, and so was become, long ere the Duke took a hand in it, but the simulacrum of a live tree, all dead touchwood or tinder within. And blasted now, under Her devilish effects, with the thunderstroke of his own jealousy.' 'Why should such dirt live?'

  "The egg’ answered Doctor Vandermast, 'is a chicken in potential

  'But this was addled ere it was hatched.'

  The learned doctor was sat down now in Barganax's chair. Anthea came and sat sweetly on an arm of it, swinging one foot, her elbow propped on his shoulder, smiling down at him while with immemorial ancient gaze he rested in her cold classic beauty, so strangely sorted with lynx's eyes and lynx's teeth. 'And my Campaspe?' he said, after a little.

  'She is yonder in the leas. Some of her rattishnesses to-night, I think. Your eyes grow heavy, reverend master. Why will you sit so late?'

  'Ah,' said he, 'in this house now-a-days I need not overmuch repose:

  Here ripes the rare cheer-cheek Myrobalan,

  Mind-gladding fruit, that can unold a man.

  And to-night, of all nights, I must not be to seek if her ladyship haply have need of me, or if he do. What of you, dear snow-maiden?'

  'O it is only if I swaddle me in my humanity too thick that I grow sleepy,' said she. 'Besides, my lady bade me watch to-night. How were it if we played primero?'

  'Well and excellent,' said the doctor. 'Where are the cards?'

  'In the chest yonder.' She fetched them, sat down, and with two sweeps of her hand cleared the remains of supper off the table and onto the floor. 'The bull-fly can pick it up for himself to-morrow’ she said. 'We shall be gone.'

  They had scarce got the cards dealt when Morville came into the gallery.

  ‘How, how, who is here?' he said. 'You, old sir?’

  The doctor, keeping his seat, looked up at him: saw his face pale as any lead. 'My lord,' he said, 'I came upon urgent summons from her ladyship.'

  'What, in this time of night?'

  ‘No. 'Twas about noon-time. She bade me stay.'

  ‘Ha! Did she so? For my own part, I had rather have your room as your company. To speak flatly, I have long doubted whether you wore not your woolly garment upon your wolvy back. And you, madam kiss-i'-the-dark—

  From women light and lickerous

  Good fortune still deliver us—

  Why are you not in bed?'

  Anthea made no reply: only looked at him, licking her lips.

  ‘You admire the unexpectedness of my return?' said Morville. 'Let the cat wink’ and let the mouse run. It is very much if I may not for one short while turn my back, but coming home find all at large and unshut platters, dishes, and other small trashery flung so, o' the floor, with evident signs of surfeit and riot. Must I keep open household, think you, for the disordered resort and haunting of you and your kind? Where's my lady?'

  Anthea gave him a bold look. 'She is in bed.'

  ‘You lie, mistress. Her bed is empty. You,' he said to the aged doctor, ‘who are in her counsels and, I am let to understand, learned in arts and studies it small befits an honest man to meddle withal, where is she?'

  'My Lord Morville,' replied Vandermast, 'it is altogether a cross matter and in itself disagreeing, that you should expect from me an answer to such a question.' 'Say you so? I expect an answer, and by God I'll have it.'

  'Where my lady is,' said Vandermast, 'is her affair. I mean you well, my lord, and where in honour I can serve you, serve you I will. But when her ladyship is concerned (even and I knew the answer) it would not be for my honesty to give it even to yourself without I first asked leave of her.'

  Morville came a step nearer to him: stood leaning on the table upon his clenched fists that held his riding-whip: clenched till the knuckles showed white as marble. ‘You are in a league against me, then? Have a care. I have means to make you tell me. I have a right, too, to know where she is.'

  Vandermast said, ‘You are master of this house. It is in your lordship's right to search and find what you may find.'

  ‘I have searched every back-nook already. She is fled. Is it not so?'

  Vandermast answered never a word. His eyes, holding Morville's, were as pits umplumbed.

  'She is fled with the Duke,' said Morville, thrusting his face into his. 'Confess 'tis so. You are his secretary. Confess, and may be ‘I’ll spare your life.'

  Vandermast said, 'I am an old man. I am not afraid to die. But were it to forfeit my honour, I'd be sore afraid to die after that.'

  There was dead silence. Then Morville with a sudden unpremeditated motion swung on his heel and so to the window: stood there with his back to them, elbow crooked upon the window-sill, his forehead pressed into the crook of the arm, while his other hand beat an out-of-joint shapeless tune with his riding-whip against his riding-boot. 'O God!' he said suddenly, "aloud, and seemed to choke upon the word: ‘why came I not home sooner?' He bit the sleeve of his coat, rolling his head this way and that upon the window-ledge, still beating out the hell-march on his boot-leg, and now with an ugly blubbering sound of unremediable weeping between the bites. Doctor Vandermast, risen from his chair, began to pace with noiseless tread back and forth beside the table. He looked at Anthea. The yellow fires came and went in her strange inhuman eyes.

  The Lord Morville, as with sinews righted after that wrestling, stood up now and came to them: sat down in Vandermast's chair. 'I’ll put all my cards on the table,' he said, looking at the doctor who, upon the word, staid his haunting walk and came to him. "There was, and ill it was there was, some semblance of falling out betwixt us this morning, and I spoke a word at her I'm sorry for: hath sticked like a fish-bone across my throat ever since. When it began to be evening, I could not face the night and us not good friends again. Devised some excuse, got leave from my lord Admiral (would to heaven it had been earlier): galloped home. And now,' he said, and his teeth clicked together: 'all's lost.'

  ‘Nay, this is over general,' said the doctor. It remaineth with your lordship to save what can yet be saved.'

  Morville shook his head. 'I know not what to do. Instruct me.'

  'My lord,' said that old man, ‘you have not told me the truth.'

  'I have told you enough.'

  'I can be of little avail to your lordship if you give me unsufficient premises to reason from. But worse than tell it not to me, I fear you tell it not truly to yourself

  Morville was silent.

  Tall how it may,' said the doctor, 'it is hard to know how I may much avail you. Only this I most dutifully urge upon your lordship: wait. A true saying it is, that that is not to be held for counsel that is taken after supper.’

  Morville said, 'I am scalding in a lake of brimstone, and you stand on the edge and bid me wait'

  ‘With all my heart and for all sakes sake, yes, I bid you wait. If you fling into action now, in this uncertainty and your blood yet baked with angry passions, there's no help but 'twill be violent action and too little advised. Be you remembered, my lord, 'tis no littler thing than your whole life hangs on it; nay, for beyond the hour-glass of one man's life, your very so
ul, for being or for not being, is in the balance, and not for this bout only but in saecula saeculorum. And that is a matter of far greater moment to you than whether you shall have her or no, whom when you have had you have approved yourself not able nor not worthy of such a mistress: cursed indeed with a destiny too high for you.'

  Morville sat still as death and with downcast look while Vandermast said these things: then jumped up like a raging wild tiger. 'Would to God, then, I'd let her life out!' he said in an ear-deafening voice. 'Do you take me for more than a beast that you dare to speak such words to me? Am I lustless, sexless, tireless, mute? It hath laid up revenue this month past, and I’ll now take my interest. - She is with her vile leman even now. I know not where; but, if in the bed of Hell, I'll seek 'em out, hew the pair of 'em into collops. For fair beginning, I'll burn this house: a place where no filthy exercise has been left unexercised. Out of my way, bawd.'

  He thrust Vandermast aside, so that the old man was like to have fallen. Anthea said in a low voice like the crackling of ice, 'You struck her. You beetle with horns, you struck her, and spat your filth at her.'

  'Mew your tongue, mistress, or we'll cut it out. Void the house. You have no business here.'

  'I've a good pair of nails to cratch and claw with.'

  'Out, both of you, unless you mean to be whipped.'

  Anthea rose in her chair. 'Shall I unpaunch him, reverend sir?'

  'O be still, I charge you, be still,' said the doctor. ‘We will go,' he said to Morville, and in the same nick of time Morville struck Anthea with his riding-whip across the smooth of her neck. Like the opening of the clouds with the levin-flash she leapt into her lynx-shape and upon him: threw him flat under her.

  Above the noise of their fighting on the floor, of Morville's pantings and curses, the snarls and spittings of the lynx and the doctor's railing of her off, sounded a battering upon the wall now, and the great voice of Barganax snouting from within, 'Open, or I'll beat down the partition with my heels.' And immediately, by art of Doctor Vandermast, the left-hand door was there, and immediately it was open, and the Duke among them, sword in hand.

  That oread lady, still in her lynx-skin, in obedience to Vandermast drew back now, heckles up, still ruffing and growling, ears flattened to her head, claws out, eyes ablaze. Morville was on his feet again, his left cheek scored to the chin with four parallel furrows from which the blood ran in trickles. 'Where's this whore,' he said to the Duke: 'this jay of Krestenaya? Your bill I’ll clear first, and hers after, and,' stripping out his sword, 'here's coin shall pay the two of you.'

  'Unmannered dog,' said the Duke, 'fall to. And the foul word you spoke absolves me utterly.'

  'Ay, fall to foinery: your trade, they tell me,' said Morville as they crossed blades.

  They fought in silence: the most desperate foins, cross-blows, stoccata, imbroccata, rinverso, overthwart pricks, thrusts, breaking of thrusts: sometimes closes and grips, striking with the hilts. It was well seen that each was a master in that art: Morville, may be, of the deeper grounding, but fighting as now with a less cool resolution than the Duke's and once or twice coming in with so much madness with his full career upon the body, that past belief it was how he escaped the Duke's most deadly montanto. At last the Duke, forcing him back against the table, beat him from his best ward, mastered his weapon and, their hilts being locked now, by main strength of wrist broke it from his hand. Morville took a great fall, clean over the table backwards, on his ear and left shoulder, and lay like one dead. His sword was shot far across the room: Vandermast picked it up, gave it into the hand of the Duke. In the same moment they were ware of the Lady Fiorinda standing in that doorway.

  In silence for a breath or two Barganax beheld her so stand, her nightgown of orange-colour satin fastened about her waist with a chain of pomanders and ambers and beads of pearl. Her hair, let down, untressed, freed of pins and fastenings, reached, as it had been her mantle imperial woven of all mists and stars and unpathed black darknesses of the heart of night, almost to her ankle. He said, 'When he comes to, shall it go on till I kill him, madam? or shall I let him be?'

  There was a glitter in her green eyes as if, from behind their careless outwardness of self-savouring languorous disdain, suddenly a lion's eyes had glared out, red, fiery, and hollow. 'Your grace were as good do the one as the other. Commonly, I am told, you were the death of any that angered you.' The glassy coldness of her face and of her voice was like the ice-sheathes, finger-thick, cold and transparent as glass, that enclose the live twigs and buds after a frozen thaw in winter. 'If his neck be not broke already. It concerns not me,' she said.

  'Why, it concerns you solely,' said the Duke. 'Without your ladyship, where were question of choice?' Vandermast watched his master's eagle gaze, fixed upon that lady, a mariner's upon the cynosure, out of mountainous seas: watched her most sphinxian, waiting, ironic, uncommunicative, nothing-answering smile. 'You and I,' said the Duke at last, and fetched a deep breath: ‘we are not much unequals.'

  ‘No, my friend. We are not much unequals.'

  And now the Lord Morville, coming to, looked at her standing in such sort in that unaccustomed doorway: looked at Duke Barganax. It was as if the injuries he was about to utter shrivelled between his lips. The Duke held Morville's sword in his left hand: offered it him hilt-foremost. 'Were you in my shoes, I make no doubt you'd a finished me on the floor then. May be I had been wiser do the like with you, but my way is not your way. We will now leave you and depart to Memison. Shortly there shall be set on foot a suit for a divorce to be had by the law betwixt you. And remember, I am a sure discharger of my debts to the uttermost. If you shall blab abroad, as vilely you have spoken to-night, one word against her ladyship, by all the great masters of Hell I swear 1’11 kill you.’

  'Keep it,' said Morville, refusing his sword again. 'From you I'll take nothing but your life. And the same of you,' he said to Fiorinda: then, as if afeared of her face, strode hastily from the gallery.

  Anthea, yet in her lynx dress, had marked these proceedings from a corner, herself unobserved. She now upon velvet paws, noiseless as a shadow, still unobserved, stole from the gallery on the track of Morville.

  Barganax put up his sword. 'O over-dearest Mistress of Mistresses and Queen of Queens,' he said, ‘was that rightly handled?' But that Dark Lady but only smiled, as well She knows how to do when She will judge without appeal.

  They saw now, through those western windows, how the whole wide champaign and wooded hills and bight of the lake, Memison upon its rock-throne, and the swift-rushing clouds of dawn, threw back the lovely lights and new-washed wide-eyed pure colours of the morning. And the scents and sounds of morning danced through the high gallery from floor to shadowy ceiling: a coolness and a freshness that held intoxications more potent than wine's. From those windows Barganax turned to her: from similitude to the self-substantial reality: her who in her alone unique person, through some uncircumscribable adorableness, seemed to complete and make up morning and evening and night besides and whatsoever is or has been or shall be desirable, were it in earth or heaven. 'It is almost clear dawn,' he said, and her eye-beams answered, 'Almost.'

  'And morning,' said Barganax, 'were in proof the sweet of the night, might we but take upon hand to prove it.'

  'Your grace's archery,' said that lady, and the mockery in each successive lazy word set on her lips new snares of honey and thorns, 'never, I find, roves far from the mark you should level at. And indeed to-night for the once I truly think you have perhaps deserved to be humoured.'

  That learned doctor, alone now at the window, they being departed, abode in his meditation. 'But where have you been?' he said, aware suddenly, after a long time, of Mistress Anthea a little side hand of him, very demure and morning-cool in her birch-tree kirtle. 'I had forgot you, and there's a bad-cat look in your eyes. What have you been eating? What have you done?'

  ‘I’ve been but gathering news,' answered she, avoiding his gaze. 'Nought seems newer than t
his of Lord Morville, eat up with wild animals in the west woods they say.'

  For a minute Doctor Vandermast regarded her in silence: her Greek features, so passionless, and so chill: her white skin, nails sharpened to claws, strong fierce milk-white teeth; and her yellow eyes, a little horrible now as though fires from the under-skies had but just died down in them. 'Could you not learn by example of the Duke, having beheld him win a man's greatest victory, which is by feeling of his power but not using it?'

  'I am not a man,' answered she. 'It was a most needful act. And,' she said, licking her lips and looking at her finger-nails, ‘I won't be blamed.'

  Vandermast was silent. 'Well.' he said at length, 'I, for one at least, will not blame you over much.'

  XIII

  Short Circuit

  IT WAS EASTER in England, the fifth year after, as in this world we reckon them: nineteen hundred and nineteen. The sun's limb, flashing suddenly from behind the shoulder of Illgill Head, shot a dazzle of white light through the french window of the breakfast-room at Nether Wastdale and into Lessingham's eyes as, porridge-plate in hand, he came from the sideboard to his place at the table. Patterned to squares by the window-panes the light flooded the white table-cloth: danced upon silver, glowed warm through translucent yellow trumpets and green leaves of the wild daffodils which filled a great Venetian bowl in the table's centre. On the left, windows, with their lower sashes thrown up, widely let in the morning air and the view up the lake north-eastwards, of Gable, with outlines as of a wave-crest in the instant of breaking struck to stone, framed between severities of headlong scree-clad mountain sides. White clouds, blown to spidery streaks and flying dappled flecks, radiated, like the ribs and feathers of a fan, upwards from the sun against the stainless blue. Country noises, bleating of lambs, a cock crowing, a dog's bark, a cock pheasant's raucous rattling squawk, broke now and again the stillness which listened to, was never a silence but a stream of subdued sound: thin bird-voices, under-tones of water running over stones. Here in the room the fire crackled merrily with a smell of wood burning. Breakfast-smells, moving in a free fugato of fried Cumberland ham,