Zimiamvia: A Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  'The seven seas,' he said, answering her: 'ever since I was fifteen years old.'

  'And you are now—fifty?'

  'Six times that,' answered Lessingham gravely; 'reckoned in months.'

  'With me,' she said, 'reckonings go always askew.' 'Let's give over reckonings, then,' said he, 'and do it by example. I am credibly informed that I am pat of an age with your Duke.'

  'O, so old indeed? Twenty-five? No marvel you are so staid and serious.'

  'And you, madam?' said Lessingham. 'How far in the decline?'

  'Nay, 'tis me to ask questions,' said she: 'you to answer.'

  Idly Lessingham was looking at her hand which rested on the cushion beside him, gloved with a black scented gauntlet with falling cuff of open-work and flower-work of yellow zircons. ‘I am all expectation,' he said.

  Campaspe stole a glance at him. Her eyes were beady, like some shy creature's of the fields or woods. Her features, considered coldly one by one, had recalled strange deformities as of frogs or spiders; yet were they by those eyes welded to a kind of beauty. So might a queen of Elfland look, of an unfair, unhuman, yet most taking comeliness. 'Well,' said she: 'how many straws go to goose-nest?'

  'None, for lack of feet.'

  'O, unkind! You knew it afore. That cometh of this so much faring 'twixt land and land: maketh men too knowing.' After a little, she said, 'Tell me, is it not better here than in your northlands?'

  ' 'Tis at least much hotter,' said Lessingham.

  'And which liketh you better, my lord, hot or cold?'

  'Must I answer of airs, or of ladies' hearts?'

  'You must keep order: answer of that you spoke on.'

  'Nay,' said Lessingham, ' 'tis holiday. Let me be impertinent, and answer of that I set most store by.'

  'Then, to be courtly, you must say cold is best,' said she. 'For our fashion here is cold hearts, as the easier changed.'

  'Ah,' he said: ‘I see there is something, madam, you are yet to learn.'

  'How, my lord? i' the fashion?'

  'O no. Because I am a soldier, yet have I not such nummed and so clumsy hands for't as tell a lady she's out of fashion. I meant 'tis warm hearts, not cold, are most apt to change: fire at each fresh kindling.'

  'Here's fine doctrine,' said she. 'Do you rest it, pray, upon experience?'

  He smiled. ' 'Tis a first point of wisdom', he replied, 'to affirm nought upon hearsay.'

  Campaspe sat suddenly forward, with a little murmur of pleasure: 'O, my friend!' addressed, as Lessingham perceived, not to him but to a lady-duck with her seven young swimming close by in column ahead. For a fleeting instant, as she leaned eagerly across to watch them, her hand, put out to steady her, touched Lessingham's knee: a touch that, sylph-like and immaterial as a dream, sent a thousand serpents through his veins. The duck and her children took fright at the gondola, and, with a scutter of feet and wings, left a little wake of troubled water which showed the better, as a foil sets off a diamond, the placid smoothness of that lake.

  'And how many foolish ladies ere now', said Campaspe, very demurely, 'have you found to give open ear to these schoolings?'

  'There, madam,' said he, 'you put me to a stand. They come and go, I suppose, with the changing of the moon.'

  'I was a fine fool', said she, 'to come into this boat with you, my lord.'

  Lessingham smiled. ‘I think', he said, ‘I know an argument, when we come to it, shall satisfy you to the contrary.' His eyes, half veiled under their long lashes, surveyed her now with a slow and disturbing gaze. It was as if the spirit that sat in them tasted, in a profound luxurious apprehension beyond the magic of mortal vintages, the wine of its own power: tasted it doubly, in her veins as in his own, attuning blood to blood. Then, turning his gaze from her to the back of his own hand, he looked at that awhile in silence as if there were there some comic engaging matter. 'Howe'er that be,' he said lightly at last, 'you must remember, 'tis the same moon. That were a quaint folly, for love of last month's moon at the full, to have done with moonlight for ever.'

  'O, you can a game beside tennis, my lord, there's n'er a doubt,' she said.

  'I have beat the Duke ere now at tennis,' said Lessingham.

  'That is hard,' said she. 'But 'tis harder to beat him at this.'

  ' 'Tis but another prime article of wisdom,' said Lessingham, 'ne'er to let past memories blunt the fine point of present pleasures. I am skilled', he said, 'to read a lady's heart from her hand. Let me try.' Campaspe, laughing, struggled against him as he would have drawn off her glove. 'Moist palms argue warm hearts,' he said in her ear. 'Is that why you wear gloves, madam?'

  'Nay, but I will not. Fie, shall the gondolier see us?'

  ‘I am discretion itself,' said Lessingham.

  'You must learn, my lord,' she said, putting away his hands, 'if you would have me to spread your table, to fall to it nicely, not swallow it like flapdragons.'

  Lessingham said, close at her ear, 'I'll be your scholar. Only but promise.'

  But Campaspe said, 'No promises in Zayana: the Duke hath banned them. As for performance, why, respectful service, my lord, hath its payment here as in other lands.'

  Her voice had taken on a new delicacy: the voice of willow-trees beside still water when the falling wind stirs them. The great flattened ball of the sun touched the western hills. Lessingham took her under the chin with his hand and turned her face towards his. 'I like little water-rats,' he said. Her eyes grew big and frightened, like some little fieldish thing's that sees a hawk. For a minute she abode motionless. Then, as if with a sudden resolution, she pulled off her glove: offered her bare hand, palm upwards, to his lips. The gondola lurched sideways. The lady laughed, half smothered: 'Nay, no more, my lord. Nay, and you will not have patience, you shall have nought, then.'

  'Jenny wrens: water-rats^ willow-leaves sharp against the moon like little feet. Why is your laugh like a night breeze among willows? Do I not descry you? behind your mask of lady of presence: you and your "friend." Are you not these? Tell me: are you not?'

  Each soft stroke of the gondolier's paddle at the stern came like one more drop in the cup of enchantment, which still brimmed and still did not run over. Tt is not time, my lord. O yes, these, and other besides. But see, we shall land upon the instant. I pray you, have patience. In this isle of Ambremerine is bosky glades removed, flowery headlands; in two hours the moon will ride high; and she, you know—'

  'And she', said Lessingham, 'is an ancient sweet suggester of ingenious pleasures.' He kissed the hand again. 'Let us turn the cat in the pan: say, If I have patience I shall have all, then?'

  In Campaspe's beady eyes he read his passport.

  Their landing was near about the south-east point of that isle, in a little natural harbour, half-moon shaped and with a beach of fine while sand. The sun had gone down, and dusk gathered on the lake; eastward, pale blue smoke hung here and there over Zayana and the citadel; the walls and the roofs and towers were grown shadowy and dim; their lamps came out like stars. In the north, the great peaks still held some light. A wide glade went up into the isle from that harbour in gently sloping lawns, shut in on all but the water side by groves of cypress-trees: pillar-like boles and dense spires so tangled, drenched, and impregnate with thick darkness that not mid-day itself might pierce nor black night deepen their elemental gloom. In the midst of that glade, on a level lawn where in their thousands daisies and little yellow cinquefoils were but now newly folded up and gone to sleep, tables were set for the feast. The main table faced south to the harbour, where the gondolas and the caravel, with their lofty stems and stern-posts and their lights, some red some green, floated graceful over their graceful images in the water. Two shorter tables ran down from that table's either end: the one faced Zayana and the night, and the other westward to the leavings of the sunset, above which the evening star, high in a pellucid heaven of pale chrysolite, burned like a diamond from Aphrodite's neck.

  The tables were spread with damask, and set forth with
a fish dinner: oysters and lobsters, crayfish both great and small, trout, tunny, salmon, sturgeon, lampreys and caviare, all in fair golden dishes, with mushrooms besides and sparrow-grass, cockscombs and truffles, and store of all manner of delicious fruits, and wines of all kind in great bowls and beakers of crystal and silver and gold: dry and ancient wines golden and tawny, good to sharpen the stomach and to whet the edge of wit; and red wines the heavy sweetness whereof, full of the colour of old sunsets and clinging to the goblet like blood, is able to mellow thought and steady the senses to a quiet where the inner voices may be heard; and wines the foam whereof whispers of that eternal sea and of that eternal spring-time towards which all memories return and all hearts' desires for ever. Fifty little boys, yellow-haired, clothed all in green, planted and tended torches behind the tables to give light to the feasters. Steady was the burning of those torches in the still summer air, with ever a little movement of their light, like the fall and swell of a girl's bosom; and the scent of their burning mingled in wafts with the flower scents and wood scents and the dew-laden breath of evening.

  So now they made merry and supped under the sky. Scarcely was the sunset's last ember burned out westward, and night scarce well awake in the eastern heavens behind Zayana town, when from that quarter a bower of light began to spread upward, into which stepped at length, like a queen to lead night's pageant, the lady moon, and trailed her golden train across those sleeping waters. At that, their talk was stilled for a minute. Barganax, sitting in the midst of the cross table with Lessingham on his right, looked at Fiorinda, beside him on his left, as she looked at the moon. 'Your looking-glass,' he said, under his breath. Her face altered and she smiled, saying, with a lazy shrug of the shoulders, 'One of!'

  'My Lord Lessingham,' said Campaspe: 'imagine me potent in art magic, able to give you the thing you would. Whether would you then choose pleasure or power?'

  'That question,' answered he, 'in such company and on such a night, and most of all by moonrise, I can but answer in the words of the poet:

  My pleasure is my power to please my mistress: My power is my pleasure in that power.'

  'A roundabout answer,' said the Duke: 'full of wiles and guiles. Mistrust it, madam.'

  'Can your grace better it then?' said Campaspe. 'Most easily. And in one word: pleasure.' Fiorinda smiled.

  'Your ladyship will second me,' said the Duke. 'What's power but for the procuring of wise, powerful and glorious pleasures? What else availeth my dukedom? 'Las, I should make very light account thereof, as being a thing of very small and base value, save that it is a mean unto that rich and sunny diamond that outlustreth all else.'

  'Philosophic disputations', said Fiorinda, 'do still use to awake strange longings in me.'

  'Longings?' said the Duke. 'You are mistress of our revels tonight. Breathe but the whisper of a half-shapen wish; lightning shall be slow to our suddenness to perform it.'

  'For the present need,' said that lady, 'a little fruit would serve.'

  'Framboises?' said the Duke, offering them in a golden dish.

  'No,' she said, looking upon them daintily: 'they have too many twiddles in them: like my Lord Lessingham's distich.'

  'Will your ladyship eat a peach?' said Melates.

  ‘I could,' she said. 'And yet, no. Clingstone, 'tis too great trouble: freestone, I like them not. Your grace shall give me a summer poppering.'

  The Duke sent his boy to fetch them from the end of the table. 'You shall peel it for me,' she said, choosing one.

  Barganax, as drunk with some sudden exhalation of her beauty, the lazy voice, the lovely pausing betwixt torchlight and moonlight of fastidious jewelled fingers above the dish of pears, was taken with a trembling that shook the dish in his hand. Mastering which, ‘I had forgot', he said with a grave courtesy, 'that you do favour this beyond all fruits else.'

  'Forgot? Is it then so long ago your grace and I reviewed these matters? And indeed I had little fault to find with your partialities, nor you I think with mine.'

  Lessingham, looking on at this little by-play, tasted in it a fine and curious delight; such delight as, more imponderable than the dew-sparkles on grass about sunrise or the wayward airs that lift the gossamer-spiders' threads, dances with fairy feet, beauty fitted to beauty, allegretto scherzando, in some great master's music. Only for the whim to set such divisions a-trip again, he spoke and said: 'If your ladyship will judge between us, I shall justify myself against the Duke that, would pleasure's self have had me, I should a refused to wed her. For there be pleasures base, illiberal, nasty, and merely hoggish. How then shall you choose pleasure per se?’

  'By the same argument, how power per se?' replied the Duke. 'What of the gardener's dog, that could not eat the cabbages in the garden and would suffer none else to do so? Call you that power good? I think I have there strook you into the hazard, my lord. Or at least, 'tis change sides and play for the chase.'

  'The chase is mine, then,' said Lessingham. 'For if power be but sometimes good, even so is pleasure. It must be noble pleasure, and the noblest pleasure is power.'

  Fiorinda daintily bit a piece out of her pear. 'Pray you honour us, madam, to be our umpire,' said Lessingham.

  She smiled, saying, 'It is not my way to sit in judgement. Only to listen.'

  Barganax said, 'But will you listen to folly?'

  'O yes,' answered she. "There was often more good matter in one grain of folly than in a peck of wisdom.'

  'Ha! that hath touched you, Vandermast,' said the Duke.

  That aged man, sitting at the outer end of the eastern table betwixt Anthea and the young Countess Rosalura, laughed in his beard. The Lady Fiorinda lifted her eyebrows with a questioning look first upon him, then upon the Duke, then upon Lessingham. 'Is he wise?' she said. 'I had thought he was a philosopher. Truly, I could listen to him a whole summer's night and ne'er tire of his preposterous nonsense.'

  'An old fool,' said Vandermast, 'that is yet wise enough to serve your ladyship.'

  'Does that need wisdom?' she said, and looked at the moon. Lessingham, watching her face, thought of that deadly Scythian queen who gave Cyrus his last deep drink of blood. Yet, even so thinking, he was the more deeply aware, in the caressing charm of her voice, of a mind that savoured the world delicately and simply, with a quaint, amused humour; so might some demure and graceful bird gracefully explore this way and that, accepting or rejecting with an equable enjoyment. 'Does that need wisdom?' she said again. And now it was as if from that lady's lips some unheard song, some unseen beauty, had stolen abroad and, taking to itself wings, mounted far from earth, far above the columnar shapes of those cypresses that, huge and erect, stood round that dim garden; until the vast canopy of night was all filled as with an impending flowering of unimagined wonder.

  'There is no other wisdom than that: not in heaven or earth or under the earth, in the world phenomenal or the world noumenal, sub specie temporali or sub specie osternitatis. There is no other,' said Vandermast, in a voice so low that none well heard him, save only the Countess close by on his right. And she, hearing, yet not understanding, yet apprehending in her very bowels the tenour of his words, as a reed bending before the wind might apprehend dimly somewhat of what betided in the wind-ridden spaces without to bend and to compel it, sought Medor's hand and held it fast.

  There was silence. Then Medor said, 'What of love?'

  Vandermast said, as to himself, but the Countess Rosalura heard it: 'There is no other power.'

  'Love', said Lessingham, cool and at ease again after the passing of that sudden light, 'shall aptly point my argument. Here, as otherwhere, power ruleth. For what is a lover without power to win his mistress? or she without power to hold her lover?' His hand, as he spoke, tightened unseen about Campaspe's yielding waist. His eyes, carelessly roving, as he spoke, from face to face of that company, came to a stop, meeting Anthea's where she sat beside the learned doctor. The tawny wealth of her deep hair was to the cold beauty of her face as a double curtai
n of fulvid glory. Her eyes caught and held his gaze with a fascination, hard, bold, and inscrutable.

  'I have been told that Love', said Fiorinda, 'is a more intricate game than tennis; or than soldiership; or than politicians' games, my Lord Lessingham.'

  Anthea, with a little laugh, bared her lynx-like teeth. 'I was remembered of a saying of your ladyship's,' she said.

  Fiorinda lifted an eyebrow, gently pushing her wine-cup towards the Duke for him to fill it.

  'That a lover who should think to win his mistress by power5, said Anthea, 'is like an old dried-up dotard who would be young again by false hair, false teeth, and skilful painting of his face: thus, and with a good stoup of wine, but one thing he lacketh, and that the one thing needful.'

  'Did I say so indeed?' said Fiorinda. 'I had forgot it In truth, this is strange talk, of power and pleasure in love,' she said. 'There is a garden, there is a tree in the garden, there is a rose upon the tree. Can a woman not keep her lover without she study always to please him with pleasure? Pew! then let her give up the game. Or shall my lover think with pleasing of me to win me indeed? Faugh! he payeth me then; doth he think I am for hire?'

  Barganax sitting beside her, not looking at her, his shoulder towards her, his elbow on the table, his fingers in an arrested stillness touching his mustachios, gazed still before him as though all his senses listened to the last scarce-heard cadence of the music of that lady's voice.

  Fiorinda, in that pause, looked across to Doctor Vandermast. Obedient to her look, he stood up now and raised a hand twice and thrice above his head as in sign to somewhat to come out of the shadows that stirred beyond the torchlight. The moon rode high now over Zayana, and out of torchbeam and moonbeam and starbeam was a veil woven that confounded earth and sky and water into an immateriality of uncertain shade and misty light. At Vandermast's so standing up, the very night seemed Jo slip down into some deeper pool of stillness, like the silent slipping of an otter down from the bank into the black waters. Only the purr of a nightjar came from the edge of the woods. And now on the sudden they at the tables were ware of somewhat quick, that stood in the confines of the torchlight and the shadowy region without; of man-like form, but little of stature, scarce reaching with its head to the elbow of a grown man; with shaggy hairy legs and goat's feet, and with a sprouting of horns like a young goat's upon its head; and there was in its eyes the appearance as of red coals burning. Piercing were the glances of those eyes, as they darted in swift succession from face to face (save that before Fiorinda's it dropped its gaze as if in worship), and piercing was the music of the song it sang: the song that lovers and great poets have ravished their hearts to hear since the world began: a night-song, bittersweet, that shakes the heart of darkness with longings and questionings too tumultuous for speech to fit or follow; and in that song the listener hears echoing up the abysses of eternity voices of men and women unborn answering the voices of the dead.