Zimiamvia: A Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  For, said the picture (and said the painter, to himself, out of himself), passivity is not for you: not for any man.—For a woman? Well, a species of passivity: the illusion, perhaps, of stillness, as at the maelstrom's center. A passivity that rests in its own most deep assurance of queenship over all overt power. A queenship that subsists even in its vertiginous climacteric of self-surrender:

  A quiet woman

  Is a still water under a great bridge;

  A man may shoot her safely.

  Mary, from her sleeping-carriage, arrived like day on the little lonely platform at Drigg about half past six the next morning: the sun in her eyes, sea-swallows' voices in her ears, and heady northern sea-smells salt in her nostrils. 'Leave it in the office, Tom. They'll come and fetch it this afternoon.' 'Yes, your ladyship,' said the porter, putting her things on his barrow. He, and in turn the station-master who took her ticket, and the girl doing the steps at the inn, for each of whom she had a happy familiar word as she passed, stood a moment to gaze after her with the estranged look of woodland creatures in whose faces a fire has been brandished suddenly out of the dark.

  It was a sweet morning: fields still wet, and lanes smelling all the way of wild roses and honeysuckle, with now and then heavier luscious wafts from the meadowsweet and sometimes the pungent breath of the golden whin-flowers. So she walked home, seven or eight miles or so, swinging her hat in her hand for pleasure of the air.

  Schooled, doubtless, to these ways, a well ordered household respectfully abstained from telling her that he was there first, and in fact now in his bath. And Mary for her part reading, doubtless, Ruth's too readable eyes, asked no questions. Only she remarked (falsely true) that the master had missed his train on Saturday morning, and would, it was to be feared, not be home till tomorrow. And so, resignedly, ordered her breakfast in the Refuge with Sheila. And was, resignedly, eating it when Lessingham came down.

  And he, doubtless no less ready to take his cue, watched her for a minute, himself unseen, as, bending her white neck, she rested, chin in hand, in a beautifulness, so self-sufficing, a contemplation so remote and so chill, as it had been some corruptless and timeless divinity, having upon Her (since spirit must corporal be) the habit of woman's body, and for a small moment come down so.

  IX

  Ninfea di Nerezza

  IT WAS high morning beside Reisma Mere, of Tuesday the twenty-first of July, with the shadows yet long, and with heavy dews that made lace shawls of the gossamer-spiders' weavings on hedge and wayside plant. Doctor Vandermast, walking his alone, came at unawares in a turn of the path upon the Duke his master. The Duke's back was towards him; he was in riding gear, and sat, facing away from Reisma, on a trunk of a fallen ash-tree, his horse grazing untethered in the brake near at hand. He was bare-headed, and the sun lighted a smoulder as of copper heating to redness in his short crisp-waved hair. Upon the doctor's good-morrow he turned with a black look that relented in the turning.

  'Your grace is become since but one short month to be as lean and as melancholic as a stag in autumn.'

  'Instance, then, of like effects worked by direct opposite causes.'

  Vandermast sat him down on the trunk, not too close but so he might at ease observe Barganax when he would: countenance and bearing. 'It is but in the merest outwards and superficies that the effects are like. Inwardly, as is sufficiently demonstrated in the treatise De Libertate Humana, Propositio XXX, the mind, in so far as it understandeth itself and its body sub specie aeternitatis, to that extent hath it of necessity an understanding of God, scitque se m Deo esse et per Deum concipi: knoweth itself to exist in God, and to be conceived through God. And so, by how much the zenith standeth above the nadir, by so much more excellent is it to be a man unsatisfied than a four-footed beast satisfied.'

  The Duke let out a bitter laugh. 'I must call you mad, doctor.'

  ‘How so?'

  'If you hope to reason with a madman. And, seeing you are mad, and safe so to talk nothings to, here's a piece of madman's wisdom came to me out of the suffocations that serve 'stead of air in these suburbs of hell, woman-infected watersides of Reisma, which 'cause I’m mad I turn from but still to return to, as the moth do the candleflame— Answere me this You Gods above: What’s lecherie withouten Love?

  — A thinge less maym'd (They answefd mee)

  Than maym'd were Love sans lecherie.'

  ‘In a mad world,’ said the doctor, 'that should be accounted madness indeed. For, albeit not so well declared as a great clerk can do, yet hath it the reach of unmutable truth; which is whole ever, and of that wholeness paradoxical, and of that paradoxicalness ever a thing that rides double. But the mad will ne'er content till he shall have patterned out to his own most mathematical likings the unpeerable inventions of God, which are the fundament and highest cornerstones of the world universal, both of the seen and of the unseen.'

  Invent some business shall make it needful I go home to-day to Zayana.'

  Vandermast noted the proud and lovely face of him: haggard now and unspirited, as if he had watched some nights out without sleep. If your grace hath a will to go, what (short of the King's very command) shall stay or delay you?'

  'My own will, which will not will it, unless forced by some outward urgence. I wilL yet will not. Unforced, I'll not go: not alone.'

  They sat silent. Vandermast saw the Duke's nostril widen and a strained stillness of intention overtake the bended poise of his head and face. He looked where the Duke looked. Upon a head of lychnis, that flaming herb, a yard or more beyond Barganax's foot above a bed of meadowsweet, a butterfly rested, in a quivering soft unrest, now opening now closing again her delicate wings. White and smooth were her wings, as ivory; and ever and again at their spread-eagling set forth to the gaze panther-black splashes exquisitely shaped like hearts. It was as if into the sunshine stillness of morning a heat welled up, out of the half-uncased tremulous beauties of that creature and out of the flower's scarlet lip, open, amid leaves and so many frislets of tangled fragrancies.

  'You in your time, I in mine,' said the doctor after a while, 'have wandered in the voluptuous broad way, the common labyrinth of love. We have approved by experiment the wise lesson of the Marchioness of Monferrato, when with a dinner of hens and certain sprightly words she curbed the extravagant passion of the King of France.'

  'A dinner of hens?'

  'Signifying per allegoriam that even as the so many divers and delectable dishes set before him were each one of them (save for variety of sauces and manner of presentation) nought but plain hen, so, in that commodity, all women are alike. It were well to be certified that it be not but that thing come up again. As the poet saith— Injoy'd no sooner but dispised straight, Past reason hunted, and, no sooner had,

  Past reason hated, as a swollow'd bayt On purpose layd to make the taker mad; Mad in pursuit and in possession so;

  Had, having, and in quest to have, extreame;

  A blisse in proofe, and, prov'd, a very wo;

  Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dreame’

  Barganax, elbow on knee, chin in hand, lips compressed, sat on so when Vandermast had ended, as if weighing it, tasting it profoundly: all very still. When at length he spoke it was softly, as to his own self retired into the secretary of his heart. 'Truth's mintage,' he said: that's most certain. But that's but the reverse side. Turn the coin, so: the obverse— Here, where all else is fair, I call thee fairest: Were the rest foul, foulest of all thou'dst be: So faithfully Love's livery thou wearest, Which art of all the rest the epitome.

  Virtues deifical, devils’-milk of wit, Eye-bite, maidenly innocence demure,—No proud and lovely quality but it Jewels thine enchantments with its essence pure.

  O best of best, that else were worst of worst, Love's prelibation is to kiss thee first.

  —And the obverse,' he said, rising to his feet to stand staring over Vandermast, like a leopard at gaze, toward Reisma and the clear-faced morning, 'is where the principal design is struck.' He l
ooked down: met the doctor's eye upon him. ‘Well?'

  Vandermast shook his head. ‘Nay, I find I have trained up your grace to be so good a metaphysician, there's no step further in the argument Thesis and antithesis, these be the leaved doors of truth. Philosophy can but show us them: unlock them; may be, set them open for us; but, that being done, it is for ourselves, each soul of us alone, to pass through and see, each for himself, without all guide or perspective-glass to clear the eye if it be purblind. What should a man do with a weapon,' he said after a moment's pause, that knoweth not how to use it? There is a He and a She, and a habitude of Them both, which we would have called the love, the union, or the kindness of Them. As Their rule is infinite, Their pleasures are unconfined.'.

  The Duke whistled his mare: she left feeding, whinnied, and came to him, delicately over the dew-bedangled grass. In the saddle he paused, then with some tormenting imp of self-mockery dancing in his eye, 'You have done me no good,' he said holding out a hand to the learned doctor: 'left me where I was. O Vandermast,' he said, gripping the hand of that old man, 'I am plagued to bursting. To bursting, Vandermast.'

  The aged doctor, looking up at him against the blue, beheld how the hot blood suffused all his face with crimson: beheld the hammering of it in his temples and in the great veins of his neck. 'And blackness,' said the Duke betwixt his teeth, 'is the badge of hell.'

  He shook his reins and rode off, a kind of unresolved unwilling pace: not the road to Zayana.

  My Lady Fiorinda was abroad too that morning a-horse-back. At the footbridge by the lake, where six days ago the learned doctor had talked with his water-rat, she came face to face with the Duke. She had walked her horse down to the edge of the stream to water it: he upon the western bank did the like. Three yards of stilled water parted them, and their horses drank at the same stream.

  'Fortunately met. I was come to give your ladyship the farewell.'

  'Farewell fieldfare?' said she upon a little eloquency of declension of her head. 'But is not this an odd up-tails-all procedure: farewell at meeting?'

  'No: at parting.'

  She rejoindered with but a satirical flicker of the nostrils.

  'I purpose this day,' he said, 'to go home to Zayana.'

  'I'm sorry to hear it.'

  'Let's talk truth for a change.'

  'Pray your grace begin, then. It will amuse me to mark a difference.'

  'Truth is, I begin to change my mind as touching your ladyship.'

  'Excellent. For indeed I feared you were settling so heavily into one mind on that subject as you should be in danger to become tedious to me.'

  'And I do begin to think, madam, that you do think overwell of yourself.' The mere bodily fact of her retorted back the words in his teeth: lily-proud poise of head and neck; smooth sea-waved blackness of parted hair which from under the bediamonded back-turned edge of her riding-bonnet overlay her brow; hands crimson-gloved, resting lightly one on the slacked rein at her horse's withers, the other on the crupper; swell and fall, as upon an undermotion of two silver apples of unvalued price, of the satin bosom of her dress; green eyes full of danger; lips that seemed apt in many a quaint unused way to play at cherry-pit with Satan; all the gems of gentleness and tiger-nursed soft graces of her, each where woman may be kissed. 'I mean,' he said, 'as for leading me in a string. But I,' in a sudden gust of rage, seeing her little silent laugh, 'am not for ever to be fubbed off with lip-work.'

  'Pew! what an ungratefulness and unwontness the man is grown unto!'

  ‘Nor keep-your-distance far-away future promises.'

  ‘Which your grace must think very unnatural, and therefore unwholesome, for a prince. Well? Saying is cheap. What will you do, then?'

  'And again last night: coming 'pon appointment, and, of all monstrous betrayals, after long attending your leisure in the gallery, to find you private with Morville.'

  With whom shall a careful housewife lawfully be private, then, if not with her lawful husband? To be honest, I was curious to observe you together: how you would behave.'

  'A player of mummeries, you think, for your ladyship's entertainment?'

  'Why not, if I choose? The better, since you can play the Furioso so lively.'

  'Well, good-bye,' said the Duke. He gathered the reins and sat a moment, switching his boot with his riding-whip, his eyes darkling upon her.

  'Good-bye,' she said. 'Truth is,' she said, caressing thoughtfully with her right hand her horse about the crupper; and every unheeding motion of her finger seemed as a precious stone, some one of which is of more value than a whole kingdom: 'truth is, I grow tired of the follies of this court'

  Barganax's nostrils tightened.

  ‘Besides, I find I am strangely falling in love with my husband.'

  'You think I’ll credit that?'

  ‘No,' she said, and her voice lazed itself on the air in a poisony deliciousness that stings, blisters off the skin: 'for indeed you are in case to become blockisher even than he. Blockish in the way you make suit to me: in the presumption of your unmatchableness, chat of love. As if (like as your Bellafronts, Pantasileais, I know not what little loose-legged hens of the game) it should need but a "Madam, undress you and come now to bed".'

  Barganax, as struck doubly in the face betwixt such accordances to discord, but caught in his breath and remained staring at her in silence.

  ‘You put me to forget a lady's manners. But indeed and you shall find, my lord Duke, (were it to come to that indeed), loving of me is not a play nor a prittle-prattle.'

  The fine thread of continual nickering provocations seemed to strain and prevail past all supposed breaking-points between him and that seeming woman: a twine or twist-line, alternate of gold and fire, made fast with little grappling-hooks sharp and harder than diamond-stone to the web, secret within him of blood and spirit. 'Well,' said he. ‘When next I see your ladyship I shall look to find you in a more tractable mood.'

  'You will not find me. I too purpose to go away.'

  'And whither, if it be permissible to inquire?'

  'If I answered that, where were the good of going?' The thing that nested by her imperial lips set up its horns at him, special pricks and provokements to ecstasy and anguish.

  The blood left his face. 'Go, then,' he said. 'And the Devil tear you in pieces.' He jagged at his mare's mouth, who, uncustomed to such usage, swerved, spun round upon her hindlegs full circle, and bore him away at a gallop.

  The lady, for her part, sat on for a minute, watching till the last glimpse of him vanished in trees at a quarter-mile's distance. Mean time the Lord Morville, himself conveniently aspying her from a hiding-place among the alders, had ocular proof how that thing, which had not in all those fourteen weeks of unmatrimonial matrimony so much as cast him a chipping, sat up now to gaze after Barganax in a veiled merriment that seemed to accept as by nature some secret league betwixt them, what unbefits a mind to search into. As amid great fireballs of lightning he sat mute.

  But violet-crowned Kythereia, Daughter of Zeus, turned Her thoughts to other things. Mav be She noted his presence, may be not. Gathering her reins, she turned homeward, guiding her horse not to trample a flower that grew at the shady foot of the bank beside her: a kind of hill poppy, having a saffronish mounded centre and frosty-furred leaves, and the petals of it delicate frills of that pallid yellow that tinges the moon when first it begins to take colour after sunset.

  X

  The lieutenant of Reisma

  MORVILLE, his lady being gone, fetched his horse that he had tethered in a spinney hard by, and, as best for the unbenumbing of his thoughts, came his way at a slow walking-pace not homeward but north-westward toward Memison. A big man and strong he was and of good carriage, may be five and twenty years of age, proud of eye, clean shaven, with enough of boniness about his features to import masculinity in what had else been almost feminine for its transparency of skin, flaming red now as with furying of inward passions.

  Corning upon the highway where it
runs north under Memison castle and south toward Zayana, he was met with a courier on horseback who off-capped to him and handed him a letter. ‘From my lord High Admiral, my lord, new come up but yestermorn from Sestola to Zayana and expected hourly to-day in Memison. I have delivered five more at the palace yonder.'

  To whom?' said Morville, undoing the seal.

  'Count Medor. The lords Melates, Zapheles, and Bar-rian. One for his grace of Zayana.'

  'To-day to ride north,' said Morville in himself, reading Jeronimy's letter, for meeting of the King at Rumala, and as guard of honour to conduct him in his progress south to Sestola. That's spend to-night in Rumala. 'You delivered them all?' he said aloud.

  'All save my lord Duke's: he was ridden forth, they said, but expected back within the hour.'

  Morville put up the letter, saying in himself, 'The formal phrase of it is invitation; but yet, the requests of King's men can be strong commands. If the Duke must go too, what danger in my going? Besides, 'tis a notable honour. Good,' he said to the messenger: 'here's money. I've saved you your journey to Reisma. I'll attend my lord Admiral.'

  The Duchess's use it was to keep late hours in Memison. So it was that few were astir this morning when Morville rode in, save the porter at the gate and some score or so of gardeners and household folk. He gave his horse to a horse-boy and, leaving the Duchess's summer palace on his right, came by way of the great gardens to the colonnade. Here, upon sound of a known voice, rasping and full of mockery, and, most catching of all, his own name striking through his ear, he stopped quickly, stepped aside into the thick leafage of a yew-tree against the north-west corner of the wall, and from that close bushment, listened.