A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  'Sometimes, my lady sister,' he said, ‘I am almost a little afeared of you.'

  Fiorinda looked at him through her fingers. 'I know you are. It is wholesome for us both you should treat me with respect. If I am minded to lend you a hand in the otherwhile vacations of your graver businesses, be thankful. But forget not, sweet brother, I am not to be used for ends outside myself: not by any man: not were he my lover even: much less by a politician such as you.'

  The Lord Beroald's lean lips under his short clipped mustachios stirred upon a sardonic smile. 'You are all firishness and summer lightnings this afternoon. There's something unovercomable underlies it,' he said. 'Howsoever, I think we have the wit to understand each other. Enough, then. I came not to speak on these trifles, but to let you know her grace hath bid me to supper to-night, private, a fish dinner, at the summer palace. Know you who shall be there?'

  "The King. The Duke. The Parry. You. My lord Admiral (Gods be gentle to his harmless soul). There's the sum, I think.'

  'No ladies?'

  'Myself.' All delicious pleasures and delectations worldly respired about that word as she spoke it, ‘No more?'

  'O a one or two, for form sake.' She looked at him a moment, then said: ‘I will tell you a thing, now I remember me. I have been honoured with a new proposal of marriage.'

  'Ha?' the Chancellor's cold eye sparkled. 'I know from whence.' 'You know?' 'All Meszria knows.' 'Indeed? Well, and I have refused it.' 'Nay, I am put from shore then. Who was it?' 'Ask not overcuriously.' 'Not the Duke of Zayana.' The Duke of Zayana.'

  'But I thought so. But you jest, sister. You have refused the Duke?'

  ‘I have refused him once, twice.' 'But third time?'

  'And he come to me a hundred times with such a suit, he shall have No for every time he shall ask me.'

  'But wherefore so? Duke Barganax?'

  'I know not,' said she. 'Perhaps for because that I grow out of liking of this vain custom, whereby husbands have been sessed and laid upon me, as soldiers are upon subjects, against my will.'

  Like wind on clear water, ruffling the surface that none may see what rests below, a kind of laughter hid the deeps of her unblemishable green eyes. Beroald shrugged his shoulders. ‘I would know some more weighty and more serious reason why you refused so great a match.'

  'For a reason too nice for a man of law to unravel,' she said. 'Because truly and undissemblingly I wonder, sometimes, if'I be not fallen, may be, a little in love with him.'

  Beroald looked her in the eye. 'In love with him? And therefore would strain him fast and sure? And therefore not minded to dwindle into his Duchess?'

  'Why truly and indeed you are my brother!' she said, and very sisterly kissed him.

  The Chancellor being departed, Fiorinda resumed her walk, to and fro under the trees, from splendour to shadow and from shadow to splendour again as the arrows of gold found or missed her as she passed. There alighted upon pebbles at the pond's further brink a water ousel and began to regard her, with much dipping and bobbing of his body and much rolling up of the whites of his eyes. Whether because of her being alone, without so much as a brother's unenchanted eye to rest upon her, or for whatever cause, Her presence, in this hour of but natural beauties' composing of themselves for slumber, seemed to unsubstantiate all that was not Her. Black velvet's self and this milky way of seed-pearls and yellow sapphires: close-bodied coat, gown, and girdle: seemed as if fined to tissue of night made palpable, unveiling more than they clothed. Slowly some perfection, opening its heart like evening, began to enfold air, sky, and shadowy earth.

  Presently came two little yellow wagtails to play in the air like butterflies, up and down, back and across, above the water. She held out a hand: they left playing, to perch upon her fingers, and there fell to billing and kissing of one another.

  'The little silly birds too!' said Barganax, as, suddenly aware of his presence behind her, she shook them off.

  'And will your grace think there is anything new in that?' said she, looking at him over her shoulder through the curtained fringes of her lids. There was something questionable, coloured her mood, this evening. Her lips, where but a moment since, like the dog-star's frosted sparkle of winter-nights, the colours of her thought seemed to dance, settled suddenly to the appearance as of lips carved out of sard or cornelian: so stone-like, so suddenly unmerciless in the harsh upward curling of them, like fish-hooks at her mouth's corners. 'Will you think there is anything new in that? They are grateful, I suppose, for the tricks I teach them.'

  'Ingenuities beyond Aretine's', he said.

  She flamed crimson, cheek and neck.

  'Forgive that,' said the Duke. ‘I forgot myself. And small marvel: I find all infirm and unstable whatever I behold out of you. But I forget not—'

  Very delicately she bent, upon that hesitation and with widened nostrils, to a yellow lily that she wore pinned at the bosom of her dress. Then, with questioning eyebrows: 'And what will your grace's untamed thoughts forget not?'

  'Tuesday night,' answered he; and watched the fires of her eyes curdle to some impenetrability of flint or ironstone.

  'Well? And what will your grace wish me to say to that?'

  'What you will. Worst woe in the world to me, were you ever act or speak upon order.' He paused: then, ‘Nor, I think, need your ladyship forget it neither,' he said.

  The sphinxian hooks unmild hardened in the corners of her mouth. ‘I am yet to learn but that a night is a night, and one night as another.' In the stilled silence, the blades of their eye-glances engaged: as in sword-play, feeling one another's temper.

  'Shall I, for my turn,' said Barganax, 'to match the honesty of your conversation, madam, tell you, then, a like truth?'

  'As you will. An unlawful and useless game, this truth-telling. Remember, too, you did not desire me to say truth, but say what I would.'

  'Know you what the wild unwise tongue of them blabbeth abroad about you, that I have it thrice in one day 'twixt here and Zayana?' 'I can conceive.'

  'What? that you do rustle in unpaid-for silks? live so disorderly? marry but to unmarry yourself by running away? or, the better to uncumber you of your husband, take a resolution to have him murdered.'

  'Fair words and good semblant.'

  'And fitly paid for. I'm sorry, madam, that the last, and the most mouthiest, speaker of these things—'

  'A duello?'

  'It was somewhat too sudden, overhearing him speak so buggishly of your ladyship: took him neck and breech, and threw him against the wall.'

  ‘And so?'

  'And so.' The Duke shrugged, looking at his fingernails. 'Well,' he said, after a moment, looking up: 'that was the third. You perceive how effectual and operative your ladyship's last dealings with me were: three men's blood,' he tapped his sword-hilt, 'for washing out this slander-work.'

  She smelled once more to the lily, all the while looking up at him with a smoulder of eyes from under delicate-arching eyebrows: very slowly smiling. It was as if some string had been plucked. All little evening noises of that garden, stir of leaf, babble of running water, winding of tiny horn of gnat, beetle, or bee, seemed to put on a kind of tumultuous enormity.

  'O You, unmedicinable,' he said, and his voice caught: ‘unparagoned: ineffable: unnameable.' And he said, very deep and low:

  ‘Nightshaded moon-still’d meadow-close,

  Where the Black Iris grows:

  The Black Musk Rose:

  Musk-breathing, deadly sweet,

  Setting the veins a-beat

  Till eyes fail and the sense founder and fleet:

  Imperial petals curl'd,

  Sable falls and wings deep-furl'd—

  You have drunk up the World.

  Flow'r of unsounded Night:

  Black fire over-bright:

  Blinder of sight—

  So, the supreme full close.

  So, drink up me, my Rose.'

  With unreadable grave eyes still holding his, she listened, her face still
mclining above the sulphur-coloured scarlet-anthered lily-flower, where it bedded so softly, there at the sweet dividing of her breasts. Surely all the pleasures of irresolution and uncertainness, all disordinate appetites of the body and unlawful desires of the soul, the very deepest secretaries of nature, unnaturalizing itself, took flesh in their most unshelled shining mother-of-pearled proportions, in that lady's most slow and covert smile. At length she spoke:

  'Si tu m'aimes dix fois

  Qu'une nuit de mal,

  Onziesme j'y croys

  Que ton amour soit vrai.—

  And remember, I will be wooed afresh chaque fois, mon ami: mais chaque fois.'

  The voice of her speech trailed under-tones as of ankle-rings a-clink, or as the playing of idle polished fingernails upon hanging mirrors, or the drawing of curtains to shut in the warmth and the things of heart's desire and shut out the dark. Then, like some day-drowsy sweet beast thatwakes, stretches, and rises for night and action, she faced him at her full stature. 'Some cannot do', she said, 'but they overdo. Or did I wish your impudent grace, indeed, to meet me here to-night?'

  'Chaque fois?' said the Duke, gazing at her between half-closed lids. 'It has been so, and it ever shall be so, and the better so shall our tastes run in harness. I hold, not as the poet, but thus:

  Love given unsought is good, but sought is better’

  ' "Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut"? Well?' said she. 'But "our tastes" you said? As for Meszrian grandeur, will you think, and well-shapen mustachios?'

  'O and in very particular matters I have studied your ladyship's taste too.'

  She turned from him: then, after a step or two, upon a lazing motion full of languishing luxuriousness, paused at the pond's brim, to look down, hands lightly clasped behind her, to her own counter-shape in the cool of the water. Her hair was dressed for to-night to a new fashion of hers, close-braided in two thick tresses which, coiling each twice about her head and interwoven with strings of honey-coloured cat's-eye chrysoberyls, made her a kind of crown in the likeness of two hearts bound together; all setting back, like an aureole of polished jet, from her beautiful white brow and from the parting above it, where the black hair, albeit drawn never so demurely backward on either side, carried even so some untameable note of its own free natural habit of smooth-running waves of ocean beneath midnight unstarred. The Duke, as a man that draws tight the curb on some unrulable thing within him, stayed himself for a minute, overlooking her from that distance, twice and again, from head to foot. Without further word spoken, he came over to stand beside her, so that they looked down to their two selves, mirrored there side by side.

  ‘I find,' he said presently, 'that I do begin, in you, to know my own self. My way it hath long been, born bastard and unlegitimate, to have what I have a mind to, as the whirlwind, suddenly, unresistably. But you shall find I am not a man quickly fired and quickly laid down with satisfaction.' He paused. It was as if his heart's pounding were become a thing outwardly audible. 'These four days,' he said: 'Tuesday, and now it is Saturday: back to Zayana and back again: the unfillable desire of you. Take away you out of the world,' he said, 'and it unworlds all.'

  As if bodied out of that appassionate quietude, a little owl settled on Fiorinda's shoulder. Barganax, looking round at her, met its eyes, sharp, inscrutable, staring into his. The lovely face of that lady, and lovely head inclining forward a little, showed clear, side-face in the light that began to be crimsoned now toward sun-setting: clear of the small feathered thing that perched bolt upright upon her shoulder. The whole unseizable beauty of her seemed moment by moment to suffer alteration, waxing, waning, blazing anew, as now some Greek purity of feature, now some passing favour of an unassayed sensual sweetness or, in cheekbone or nostril, some old Tartarean fierceness untreatable in the blood, wore for the instant her beauty as its own. 'Another taste in common,' he said: 'for that fire that burneth eternally without feeding.'

  Utterly still she abode, save for the upward mounting of her bosom and deep fall and swell again, like the unquiet sea remembering.

  Barganax said: ‘You are unattainable. I have proved it. The sun rising, a roundel of copper incandescent against purple cloud: you'd swear—upon witness of your senses—'tis come near, divinely come down to earth 'twixt us and that cloudbank; and yet, with the drifting of some thicker fold of that cloud 'twixt us and the sun's face,—suddenly we know. So you. Even in the extreme having of you, I had you not. The knownest and unknownest thing in the world.'

  'And that,' said she: 'is it not in the essence and very perfect nature of love?' Her words were as the plumed silence of the owl's flight that, sudden as it came, now departed, sudden from her shoulder on noiseless wing. The plague that sat dozing in her mouth's corner proked at him swiftly, an unslockened burning merry look, as she turned to him, hands behind her head, settling the plaits of her hair. 'I hope it remains not unkindly with your grace that I am not one that will eat a pear un-pared? Nor that there's more than but make me dress and undress because you find me pliant?'

  'You and I!' said the Duke. In their stilled eye-parley, darkness trembled upon darkness. 'And I think I shall carry to my grave,' here he touched his left shoulder, 'the print of your most eloquent teeth, madam!'

  As golden bells pealing down star-lit sleep-muffled corridors of all dreaming worlds, Fiorinda laughed. 'Come she held out her hand. 'Your grace may take your revenge upon this.'

  He took the divine white daisy-hand: took the little finger: delicately, his eyes on hers, as might a cat in play, to let feel the teeth but not to hurt, bit it

  'Your ladyship smiles.'

  'Perhaps. At my thought.'

  The hand rested soft in his. He turned it up slowly: the under-part of the wrist: that place where hand joins arm, and the bluish tracings of veins but enhance the immaculation of skin, beneath which, a bird in prison, the pulse flutters or quiets. He kissed the hand suddenly, full in the warm palm of it: then, very formally, gave it back. 'At your thought? And it is—if one may know?'

  'That your grace is an artist.'

  'You like an artist?'

  'I am hard to please. I like a good servant.' 'And, for you, the better artist the better servant?' Her eyelids flickered.

  'Enough. Your ladyship shall take me as servant' ' 'Las, my unpatient lord, and have I not taken,' said she, and the sidelong downward halcyon-dart of her eyes was a caress, secret, precise, butterfly-fingered, mind-unthroning, 'all eleven-tenths of the journey toward that consummation already?'

  Barganax's glance flashed and darkened. 'Ah,' he said: ‘but I look to perpetuity. I mean, 'pon indenture.'

  'O no indentures. I keep my servant so long as he please me.'

  'And I my mistress, 'pon like terms: so unsure, both of us, what manner mind we will have to-morrow. To avoid which, madam, no remedy but we must instantly be married.'

  'Never. I have twice answered that.'

  ‘With answers which are not worth an egg.'

  'I have answered unanswerably.'

  'To be Duchess of mine? Your ladyship is the first woman was e'er so stubborn set as say no to that offer.'

  'And the first, I dare say, e'er had the offer, to say yea to or nay to?'

  Instance again, we be like-minded.'

  'You mean, you to offer in extremis a bond you'd hate to be tied withal? while I, in sheer discerning bounty, please my own self—and you—by refusing of it?'

  'My life's-queen, once more your hand,' said the Duke. 'As for this suit, the court's up: stands adjourned—till to-morrow. But,' he said, 'there's measure in all things. Summer nights are but half-length. I hold me bound for to-night.'

  ‘Well, and for to-night, then,' said she, letting him by her hands in his, draw her: letting herself be drawn so, from arm's-length, in a slow and level gradualness of air-light sailing motion, nearer and nearer, as a swan descending calm streams in windless July weather: 'for to-night, may be, I’ll not tie up all refusals fast beyond untying.'

  'Then, to
seal the title': for all the supple strength of her striving and eluding, he kissed her in the mouth. ‘Copula spiritualis. And, 'cause One is naught: 'cause all university's reckoned in Two alone: therefore'—and again, deep and long, he kissed her, pasturing his eyes, in that close-ranged nearness, on hers which, open-lidded, impersonal as a dove's eyes, still avoiding his, seemed as in soft amazement all unperceiving of outward things, their sight turned inward. 'And the third: nay, then, by heaven! but 'cause I will!' From her quickened breaths new intoxications disclosed themselves and spread abroad, and from that lily, crushed in the straining of her sweet body to his, and, in that crushing, yielding up its deliciousness. "Cause must be must be. 'Cause blind men go by feeling. 'Cause,—What's here?'

  'Girls,' she said, coolly disembroiling herself. 'Had your grace not seen such a beast before? Mistress Anthea: Mistress Campaspe: a kind of servants too of mine.’ With all demureness, they made their courtesies to the Duke. They grow,' said the Lady Fiorinda, 'like rosemary, in any air: despatched now with commends, most like, from her grace, to desire us go in to supper. Nay, misdoubt them not: of a most exquisite tried discretion. Will you think her grace would employ 'em else? or that I would?'

  'I wager no wagers upon that,' replied he. 'Enough that I ne'er beheld them till now; nor e'er heard tell of 'em neither.'

  'And yet, since they first could prattle, have been of our lady Duchess's household. There yet remain matters hid from you, there, my lord.'

  Barganax looked at them. 'If I should hear a cat low like an ox,' he said, 'that should surprise me. And so now, if I should see a pretty mountain lynx wear part-lets of cobweb lawn and go gowned in peach-coloured chamlet; or see a peggy-white-throat,' here he changed glances with Campaspe's shy black bead-like eyes, 'with red Tyrian hair-lace, and dressed in velvet the hue of the coat of a water-rat, and with little brown musky gloves,—'

  Anthea laughed behind her fan. Her eyes, looking at him over the edge of it, were yellow, with upright fiery slits for pupils.