A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  XV

  The Fish Dinner: Symposium

  IT WAS IN HER ASPHODEL GARDEN, under the south wall of the old keep, overlooking Reisma Mere, that the Duchess of Memison gave supper that night to guests select and few. The table was ring-shaped, eleven or twelve foot across by outside measurement breadthways, and nine from back to front, and its top about two foot wide. Where the bezel of the ring should be, where the two ends of the table curved round to meet each other, was a gap, may be of some four-foot width, for the coming and going of serving-maids to serve the company where they sat ranged in order round about the outer side of the table. 'A fish dinner,' the Duchess said as they took their places: 'sea-fare, in Her praise that is bred of the sea foam.' Lower, for the King's ear beside her, she said, 'L'absente de tons bouquets. You remember, my Lord?'

  The great King said, 'I remember.'

  They sat them down now: in the midst, the King in his majesty, and the Duchess at his right hand, in high-seats of sweet-smelling sandalwood cushioned with rough-plumed silver plush and inlaid with gold and ivory and all kinds of precious stones. Next to the King, Duke Barganax had his place; next to the Duke, the Vicar of Rerek; next, the lord Admiral Jerommy; and so at the end upon that side the lord High Chancellor Beroald. Upon the other side, looking across to these, sat first, on the Duchess's right, the Princess Zenianthe, niece to King Mezentius and guesting as now with her grace in Memison; on Zenianthe's right, my Lady Fiorinda; and beyond her again, making ten in all, Anthea and Campaspe.

  The legs of the table were of all kinds and colours of marble, massive and curiously carved, and the table top of figured yew and elm and cedarwood and its edges filleted with inlay-work of silver and lapis lazuli and panteron stone and pale mountain-gold. A lofty arbour with squared pillars of rose-pink clouded quartz partly shut out the sky above the table. From its trellised roof, over-run with ancient vines whose boles were big at the base as a man's thigh, grapes depended in a hundred clusters, barely beginning at this season of the year to turn colour: heavy sleepy-hued bunches of globed jewels hanging high on the confines of the candle-light Three-score candles and more burned upon the table, of a warm-coloured sweet-scented wax in branched candlesticks of glittering gold. So still hung the air of the summer night, the flames of the candles were steady as sleeping crocuses: save but only for a little swaying of them now and again to some such light stirring of the air as speech or laughter made, or the passing of serving-damsels in their sleeveless Grecian gowns, some green, some sky-colour, some saffron yellow, to and fro for changing of the plates or filling out of fresh wines. Pomegranates, lemons, oranges, love-apples, peaches of the sun, made an ordered show, heaped high upon mighty dishes of silver or of alabaster at set intervals along that table. Smaller dishes held dry and wet sweetmeats; and there was store of olives, soused haberdine, cavier on toast, anchovies, botargoes, pilchards, almonds, red herrings, parmesan cheese, red and green peppers: things in their kind to sharpen the stomach against luxurious feasting, and prepare the palate for noble wines. Cream wafers there were besides, and cream cheese; but, for the body and substance of their feasting, no meat save fish-meat alone, dressed in innumerable delicious ways and of all sorts of fishes, borne in upon great platters and chargers by turns continually: eels, lampreys, and crayfish: pickerells, salt salmon, fry of tunny; gurnards and thornbacks in muscadine sauce; barbels great and small, silver eels, basses, loaches, hen lobsters, eel-pouts, mussels, frogs, cockles, crabfish, snails and whilks; great prawns, a turtle; a sturgeon; skate, mackerel, turbot, and delicate firm-fleshed speckled trouts.

  All the company were in holiday attire. The King wore a rich doublet of cloth of gold, with wine-dark velvet slashes. The linked belt about his middle was of massive gold set with emeralds and night-dark sapphires, every stone big as a thrush's egg: the buckle of the belt in the likeness of two hippogriffs wrought in gold; with wings expansed, and between the hippogriffs a lion's face, garnished with sparks of rubies, and for its eyes two es-carbuncles that glowed like hot burning coals. The Duke, upon his left, was clad from throat to toe in soft-woven dark-brown satin, cut about and bepinked with broidery of silken and silver thread: close-fitting, moulding itself to his lithe strong body's grace, upon such under-rhythms as, when a panther moves or a wakening python, with sleek-gliding ripple and swell inform the smooth outward skin. His ruff and wrist-ruffs were stiffened with saffron, and his sword-belt of bull's-hide edged above and below with beads of opal and fire-opal and balas ruby: its clasps, two dark hyacinth stones cabochon, of the colour of peat-water when the sun wades deep in it. The Vicar, sitting next to him, was all in scarlet, with a gorget of dull gold about his neck. There was, when he moved, a hard look about his chest and large broad belly, witness that beneath that peaceful outward covering of weak silk he carried a privy coat, against stabbers at unawares; having, indeed, many unlovers in the land, and especially here in Meszria, and of all estates. His beard, clipped and bristly, showed red as Thor's in the candlelight. For the rest, the Chancellor went in gold-broidered brocade the colour of a moonless night in summer where the blue shows blackest: the Admiral in a loose-sleeved coat of unshorn velvet of sober green, with black brocaded cloak and white trunk hose. But as for the costly gorgeous apparel of those ladies, hardly should a man have marked it, dazzling as it was, were he come suddenly to that board, but should have stood mute amazed by their first countenance, so untranspassably lovely of themselves—breathing, moving, discoursing—without need of all adornments in this flattering candlelight: each in herself a natural heaven in which, unmanured, all pleasure lies.

  Malmsey presently and muscatel, being strong sweet wines, began to circle sunwise about the board; and now free ranged their discourse, with bandyings to and fro of the ball of wit, and with disputation, and laughter, and with sparkles struck, as from flint, out of thought by thought. King Mezentius, taking, for the while, little part in the game of words, yet of his only mere presence seemed to rule it. Almost it was as if this one man sat hooded, and unbeknown looker-on at a scene of his devising, and the players thereof but creatures engendered of his hid and deep judgements out of his own secretness. In whose free persons he seemed to call into being each particularly of speech or look or thought itself, when, how, in whom and from whom, he would.

  'So silent, madonna?'

  The Duchess dimpled her cheek. 'I was but considering how good a gift that were, to be able to .stay Time, make it stand still'

  'To taste the perfect moment?'

  'What else?'

  'But how? when Time is put to a stop and no time left to taste it in?'

  'I would taste it, I think,' said she, 'in a kind of timeless contemplation.'

  'Timeless?' said the Princess Zenianthe.

  'Why not?'

  'Contemplation. Tis a long word. To say it takes time. To do it, more, I'd have thought'

  'Ah, cut Time's claws, then,' said the Duchess. 'Let him be, for me, so he snatch not things away.'

  Barganax smiled. 'Say I were a squirrel, sat in the fork of a nut-tree, pleasantly eating a nut. At first bite, Time stands still. Where's my second?'

  The Duchess wrinkled up her nose. 'Why, just! into what distemper have the Gods let decline this sweet world of ours! It is so. But need it be so? in a perfect world?'

  'A perfect?' said the King.

  ‘Now and then I have conceived of it'

  'Was it like to this world?'

  She nodded. 'Most strangely like.' And now, while the sturgeon was ushered in with music in a golden dish, she said privately, 'Are you remembered, dear my Lord, of a thing I asked you: the night you rode north alone with Beroald and left me, good as fresh wed and fresh bereaved?—If we were Gods, able to make worlds and unmake 'em as we list, what world would we have?'Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

  'Yes, I remember.'

  'And your answer? you remember that?'

  'May be I could and I would. But natural present, madonna mia, should better best rememberings?'

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p; 'Your very answer!' she said. 'Not word for word; but the mind behind the word.' She paused. 'Makes me frightened sometimes,' she said, in a yet lower voice, looking down.

  'Frighted?'

  'When I’m alone.'

  ‘We are as the Gods fashioned us.' Unseen, beneath the table, his hand closed for a moment over hers: Amalie's hand, mistress and outward symbol of so unconsumable store and incorruptible of shyest and tenderest particular wisdoms and goodnesses and nobilities of the heart, heaped through slow generations to that dear abundance, yet outwardly of so lamb-like an unprovidedness against the crude nude gluttony of the world and iniquities of time and change and death.

  'There's wits enough about this table, could we unmuzzle them,' he said aloud, after a moment's silence, 'enough to pick the world to pieces and devise it again span new. My Lord Horius Parry: what world will you make us, say, when we shall have granted you patent to be God Almighty?'

  'Go, some have called me ere now,' answered he, 'and not always out of pure love of me, a man of high-vaulting ambitions. But, Satan shield us! here is a new puzzle. I ne'er looked above the moon. I can not how to answer.'

  'Answer, cousin, without these protestations,' said the King; ‘which be stale as sea-beef. I and you do know one another by this time.'

  'Your highness knoweth me. Would God I were sure I as thoroughly knew your highness.' He guzzled down his wine, carouse: stayed toying a minute with the empty cup. 'Why, as for worlds,' he said, 'this world fits: I ask no other. A world where the best man'—here his eye, enduring the King's, had a look less unsearchable in its depths, belike, than the looker reckoned—'a world where the best man beareth away the victory. Wine, women, war: nay, I rate it fit enough. And, upon conditions,' he swept a hot bold stare round the table, 'even peace,' he said, 'can be tolerable.'

  'Pax Mezentiana' said the Duke to himself.

  'But peace,' said the Vicar, 'softeneth, womanizefh a man'; and his stare, to the disembarrassing of the ladies, singled in turn the Chancellor, the Admiral, and the Duke. Fiorinda, catching the Duke's eye, did no more but act him again a gesture of his, of an hour since in the garden: look at her finger-nails.

  'In sum, my Lord the King,' said the Vicar, 'I am a plain man. Know my trade. Know myself. Obey my master. And, for the rest (saving present company):' he glowered, right and left, upon Duke, Admiral, and Chancellor: 'nemo me impune lacessit,'

  'In sum,' said the King, 'you like well this world and would let well alone?'

  'Humbly, it is my judgement.'

  ‘Which,' said the King, 'your excellency may very wisely and wholesomely act upon.'

  It was as if, for a freezing instant, an axe had shown its mouth. The lean lines of the Chancellor's lip and nostril hardened to a sardonic smile.

  ‘You and I,' said the King, turning to the Lord Jeronimy, 'are oldest here. What say you?'

  'My Lord the King,' answered he, 'I am five years older, I think, than your serene highness. And the older I grow the more, I think, I trust my judgement, the less my knowledge. Things I thought I knew,' he said, leaning an elbow on the table, finger and thumb drawing down over his forehead one strand of his lank pale hair, while he cast about the company a very kindly, very tolerant, very philosophic look, ‘I find I was mistaken. What in a manner were certainties, turn to doubt. In fine,—' he fell silent.

  'There you have, charactered in speech, the very inwardness of our noble Admiral,' whispered the Duchess in Zenianthe's ear: 'a man wise and good, yet in discretive niceness so over-abounding that oft when it comes to action he but runneth into a palsy, from unability to choose 'twixt two most balanced but irreconcilable alternatives.'

  Eyes were gentle, resting on the lord Admiral. A humorousness sweetened even Beroald's satirical smile as he said, answering the King's look, 'I, too, hold by the material condition. This world will serve. I'd be loth to hazard it by meddling with the works.'

  The Duke shrugged his shoulders. 'Unless thus far only, perhaps,' he said, eyeing that Lady Fiorinda across the table: 'seeing that a world should be, to say, a garment, should it not be—to fit the wearer 'twas made for—' and something momentarily ruffled the level line of her underlids as the sun's limb at point of day cuts suddenly the level horizon of the sea, 'everchanging, never-changing?'

  'And is this of ours not so?' said the King, his eyes too on that lady. .

  'Ever-changing,' the Duke said: 'yes. But as for never-changing,' Campaspe heard the alteration in his voice! as the nightbreeze sudden among sallows by the margin of some forsaken lake, ‘I know not. Best, may be, not to know.' Anthea, too, pricked ears at the alteration: scurry of sleet betwixt moraine and ice-cave when all the inside voices of the glacier are stilled by reason of the cold.

  'Yes, even and were we Gods,' said the King, and the stillness seemed to wait upon his words: 'best, may be, not to know. Best not to know our own changelessness, our own eternal power and unspeakable majesty altogether uncircumscriptible. For there is, may be, in doubts and uncertainties a salt or savour, without which, all should be turned at last unto weariness and no zest remain. Even in that Olympus.'

  'Time,' said the Duchess, breaking the silence. 'And Change. Time, as a river: and each of us chained like Andromeda upon the bank, to behold thence the ever-changing treasure or mischief of our days borne past us upon the flood: things never to be seized by us till they be here: never tarrying to be enjoyed: never, for all our striving, to be eluded, neither for our longing, once gone to be had again. And, last mischief, Death.'

  'A just image,' said the Admiral. 'And, as with the falling waters of the river, no stay: no turn back.'

  'Yes. We may see it is so, Zenianthe said. 'But how and it were other than as we see it? We on the bank, moveless at our window: Time and the world stream by. But how if the window be (though we knew it not) the windows of a caroche or litter, wherein we are borne onward with so smooth, soft, and imperceptible a motion, as floating in air, morning mists are carried beside some lake—?'

  'So that we could not tell, but by descending from our chariot, whether, in a manner, the motion were in us or in the scene we look out on? Tis all a matter, howsoever: the masque, howsoever, of our life-days goeth by.'

  'Ah, but is it all a matter, my lord Admiral?' said the Duchess. 'For, upon this supposition, there is not but one river only and the floating burden upon its waters: there is the wide world to move in, forth back and about, could we but command the charioteer,—'

  'Or but leap from chariot and walk, as a man should, in freedom of the world,' said the Duke.

  The King said, 'Or as God and Goddess should, in freedom of all the university of all possible worlds.'

  'As to say,' said Barganax, I will that it be now last Tuesday night, midnight; and, at a word, at a thought, make it so.' His eye waited on Fiorinda's, which, as in some overcast night at sea the lode-star, opened upon him momentarily green fires.

  'Should need a God, I should think,' said she, and some bell of mockery chimed in her lazy accents, 'to devise wisely, with such infinite choice. New singular judgement, I should think, to fit your times to the high of their perfection.'

  The King turned to her. ‘Your ladyship thinks, then, 'tis as well that all is done ready to our hand, without all power whether to tarry or go back, or choose another road: much less, have done with all roads and chariots and be free?'

  ' 'Tis as well, I should say,' the idle self-preening glance of her hovered about the Vicar: for some of us. Your serene highness will call to mind the old tale of the good-man and his wife and the three wishes.' Her brother, the Lord Beroald, stiffened: shifted in his chair. 'O, ne'er imagine Fd tell it, sweet brother: plain naked words stript from their shirts—foh! yet holdeth as excellent a lesson as a man shall read any. I mean when, at their third wishing, so as to rid 'em out of the nasty pickle whereinto they had brought themselves with the two former, they were fain but to unwish those, and so have all back again as in statu quo prius. And here was but question of three plain wis
hes: not of the myriads upon myriads you should need, I suppose, for devising a world.'

  The King laughed in his beard. 'Which is as much as to say,' he looked over his left shoulder into the face of Barganax, 'that a God, if He will dabble in world-making, had best not be God only but artist?'

  ‘Because both create?' said Amalie.

  Barganax smiled: shook his head. ‘Your artist creates not. Say I paint your grace a picture: make you a poem: that is not create. I but find, choose, set in order.'

  'Yet we say God created the world? Is that wrong then?' She looked from father to son. 'How came the world, then?'

  There fell a silence: in the midst of it, the Vicar with his teeth cracking of a lobster's claw. Amalie looked on the King, within hand's-reach upon her left. She said, as resolving her own question: 'I suppose it lay in glory in His mind.'

  Barganax seemed to pause upon his mother's words. 'And yet, so lying,' he said, 'is not a world yet. To be that, it must lie outside. Nor it cannot, surely, He whole in his mind afore it be first laid also outside. So here's need to create, afore e'er you think of a world.' He paused: looked at Fiorinda. 'And even a God,' he said, 'cannot create beauty: can but discover.'

  'Disputing of these things,' the King said, ‘what are we but children, who, playing on the shore, chart in childish fancy the unharvested sea? Even so, sweet is divine philosophy and a pastime at the feast.

  ‘But to play primero you must have cards first. Grant, then, the eternity of the World (not this world: I mean all the whole university of things and beings and times). Grant God is omnipotent. Then must not that universal World be infinite, by reason of the omnipotence of God? It is the body; and the soul thereof, that omnipotence. And so, to create that universality, that infinite World, is no great matter, nor worth divinity: 'tis but the unwilled natural breath-take or blood-beat, of His omnipotence. But to make a particular several world, like this of ours: to carve prima materia, that gross body of chaos, and shape it to make you your World of Heart's Desire,—why, here's work for God indeed!'