by E R Eddison
Sleep folds mountain and precipic’d ridge and steep abysm,
Wave-worn headland and deep chasm;
Creeping creatures as many as dark earth doth harbour;
Beasts too that live in the hills, and all the bee-folk;
And monsters in gulfs of the purple ocean;
Sleep folds all: folds
The tribes of the wide-wing'd birds.
And, because to-morrow the great stage of the world waits my action, and because not many such nights may we enjoy in lovely Memison, therefore we will for this night, to all who have sat at your board, madonna, wish (as Sappho of Lesbos wished) the length of our night doubled. And why we wish it,' he said, secret to Amalie, ‘we know full well, you and I; for Night that hath the many ears calls it to us across the dividing sea.'
But now, as a score of little boys, for torch-bearers, formed two lines to light them to bedward and the guests began two by two to take their stations for departing, the Lord Beroald, marking where this ensphered creation rested yet where the King had left it, said, 'What of that new world there your serenity was pleased to make us?'
The King half looked round. 'I had forgot it. No matter. Leave it. It will ungo of itself. For indeed,' he said, with a back-cast look at Fiorinda, 'rightly reading, I hope, the picture in your mind, madam, I took occasion to give it for all your little entities that compose it, this crowning law:—that at every change in the figures of their dances they shall by an uneschewable destiny conform themselves more and more nearly to that figure which is, in the nature of things, their likeliest; which when they shall reach it at last, you shall find dance no more, but immobility: not Being any more, but Not-Being: end of the world and desistency of all things.'
The Duchess's arm twined itself tighter in his. Fiorinda said, 'I had noted that pretty kind of strategematical invention in it. And I humbly thank the King's highness and excellency for taking this pains to pleasure me.'
'O, we have done with it, surely?' said the Duchess. 'What began it but an unfledged fancy of hers?' Her eye-glance and Fiorinda's, like a pair of fire-flies, darted and parted: a secret dance in the air together. 'Her fault it ever was made.'
'For myself,' said that lady. 'I do begin to find no great sweetness in it. It has served its turn. And were ever occasion to arise, doubtless his serene highness could lightly make a better.'
The King laughed in his black beard. 'Doubtless I could. Doubtless, another day, I will. And,' he said, under his breath and for that lady's ear alone, looking her sudden in the eye, 'doubtless I have already. Else, O Beguiler of Guiles, how came We here?'
Anthea whispered something, inaudible save to Campaspe. Their dryad eyes, and that Princess Zenianthe's, rested now on the King, now on Barganax, now once more on the King.
And now, as the company began again to take their departure towards the Duchess's summer palace, my Lady Fiorinda, in her most languefied luxuriousness lazying on Barganax's arm, idly drew from her back hair a hair-pin all aglitter with tiny anachite diamonds and idly with it pricked the thing. With a nearly noiseless fuff it burst, leaving, upon the table where it had rested, a little wet mark the size of her finger-nail. The Duke might behold now how she wore glow-worms in her hair. His eyes and hers met, as in a mutual for ever untongued understanding of his own wild unlikely surmise of Who in very truth She was: Who, for the untractable profoundness sake of his own nature and his unsatiable desires and untamed passions sake, which safety and certitude but unhappieth, could so unheaven Herself too with dangerous elysiums, of so great frailty, such hope unsure: unmeasurable joys, may be undecayable, yet mercifully, if so, not known to be so.—Her gift: the bitter-sweet:
'Well?' she said, slowly fanning herself as they walked away, slowly turning to him once more, with flickering eyelids, Her face which is the beginning and the ending, from all unbegun eternity, of all conceivable worlds: 'Well?—and what follows next, My Friend?'
PROPER NAMES the reader will no doubt pronounce as he chooses. But perhaps, to please me, he will let Memison echo 'denizen' except for the m: pronounce the first syllable of Reisma 'rays': keep the i's short in Zimiamvia and accent the third syllable: accent the second syllable in Zayana, give it a broad a (as in 'Guiana'), and pronouce the ay in the first syllable (and also the ai in Laimak, Kaima, etc., and the ay in Krestenaya) like the ai in 'aisle': accent the first syllable in Rerek and make it rhyme with 'year': keep the g soft in Fingiswold: remember that Fiorinda is an Italian name, Beroald (and, for this particular case, Amalie) French, and Zenianthe, and several others, Greek: last, regard the sz in Meszria as ornamental, and not be deterred from pronouncing it as plain 'Mezria.'
In Doctor Vandermast's aphorisms students of Spinoza may often recognize their master's words, charged, no doubt, with implications which go beyond his meaning. Lovers of the supreme poetess will note that, apart from quotations, I have not scrupled to enrich my pages with echoes of her: this for the sufficient reason that Sappho, above all others, is the poet not of 'that obscure Venus of the hollow hill' but of 'awful, gold-crowned, beautiful Aphrodite.'
Mezentian Gate
E.R. Eddison
BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK
TO YOU, MADONNA MIA,
AND TO MY MOTHER
AND TO MY FRIENDS
JOHN AND ALICE REYNOLDS
AND TO
HARRY PIRIE-GORDON
a fellow explorer in whom (as in Lessingham) I find that rare mixture of man of action and connoisseur of strangeness and beauty in their protean manifestations, who laughs where I laugh and lives the salt that I live, and to whom I owe my acquaintance (through the Ortyieyinga Saga) with the earthly ancestress of my Lady Kosma Parry
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
Let me not to the marriage of true mindes
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration findes,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no, it is an ever fixed marke
That lookes on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandring barke,
Whose worths unknowns, although his higth be taken.
Love's not Times foole, though rosie lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickles compasse come,
Love alters not with his breefe houres and weekes,
But beares it out even to the edge of doome:
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare
And ride in triumph through Persepolis! Is it not brave to be a King, Techelles? Usumcasane and Theridamus, Is it not passing brave to be a King, And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
Marlowe
I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart.
Keats
PREFATORY NOTE
My brother Eric died on 18 August 1945. He had written the following note in November 1944;
"Of this book, THE MEZENTIAN GATE, the opening chapters (including the Praeludium) and the final hundred pages or so which form the climax are now completed. Two thirds of it are yet to write. The following Argument with Dates summarizes in broad outline the subject matter of these unwritten chapters. The dates are Anno Zayanae Conditae; from the founding of the city of Zayana.
The book at this stage is thus a full-length portrait in oils of which the face has been painted in but the rest of the picture no more than roughly sketched in charcoal, As such, it has enough unity and finality to stand as something more than a fragment. Indeed it seems to me, even in its present state, to contain my best work.
If through misfortune I were to be prevented from finishing this book, I should wish it to be published as it stands, together with the Argument to represent the unwritten pa
rts.
E. R. E.
7th November, 1944."
Between November 1943 and August 1945 two further chapters, 28 and 29, were completed in draft and take their place in the text (pages 123-52).
A letter written in January 1945 indicates that in the writing of Books II to V my brother might perhaps have "unloaded" some of the detail comprised in the Argument with Dates. In substance, however, there can be no doubt that he would have followed the argument closely.
My brother had it in mind to use a photograph of the El Greco painting of which he writes at the end of his letter of introduction. 1 am sure that he would have preferred and welcomed the drawing by Keith Henderson which appears as a frontispiece. The photograph has been used, by courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, as a basis for the drawing.
We are deeply grateful to my brother's old friend Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton for his unstinted help and counsel in the preparation of THE MEZENTIAN GATE for publication. We also warmly appreciate the generous assistance given by Sir Francis Meynell in designing the form and typographical layout for the book. The maps were originally prepared by the late Gerald Hayes for the other volumes of the trilogy of which THE MEZENTIAN GATE is a part.
C. R. E.
CONTENTS
LETTER OF INTRODUCTION
PRAELUDIUM: LESSINGHAM ON THE RAFTSUND
BOOK I. FOUNDATIONS
1 Foundations tn Rerek
2 Foundations in Fingiswold
3 Nigra Sylva, where the Devils Dance
4 The Bolted Doors
5 Princess Marescia
6 Prospect North from Argyanna
BOOK II. UPRISING OF KING MEZENTIUS
7 Zeus Terpsikeraunos
8 The Prince Protector
9 Lady Rosma in Acrozayana
10 Stirring of the Eumenides
11 Commodity of Nephews
12 Another Fair Moonshiny Night
BOOK III. THE AFFAIR OF REREK
13 The Devil's Quilted Anvil
14 Lord Emmius Parry
The books and chapters shown in italics were not written, but are represented by the author's own full summary ARGUMENT WITH DATES
BOOK IV. THE AFFAIR OF MESZRIA
15 Queen Rosma
16 Lady of Presence
17 Akkama brought into Dowry
18 The She-Wolf tamed to Hand
19 The Duchess of Memison
BOOK V. THE TRIPLE KINGDOM
20 Dura Papilla Lupae
21 Anguring Combust
22 Pax Mezentiana
23 The Two Dukes
24 Prince Valero
25 Lornra Zombremar
26 Rebellion in the Marches
27 Third War with Akkama
BOOK VI. LA ROSE NOIRE
28 Anadyomene
29 Astarte
30 Laughter-loving Aphrodite
31 The Beast of Laimak
32 Then, Gentle Cheater
33 Aphrodite Helikoble pharos
The Fish Dinner: Transitional Note
BOOK VII. TO KNOW OR NOT TO KNOW
34 The Fish Dinner: First Digestion
35 Diet a Cause
36 Rosa Mundorum
37 Testament of Energeia
38 Call of the Night-Raven
39 Omega and Alpha in Sestola
Genealogical Tables Map of the Three Kingdoms
Letter of Introduction
TO MY BROTHER COLIN
DEAR BROTHER: Not by design, but because it so developed, my Zimiamvian trilogy has been written backwards. Mistress of Mistresses, the first of these books, deals with the two years beginning "ten months after the death, in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in his island fortress of Sestola in Meszria, of the great King Mezentius, tyrant of Fingiswold, Meszria, and Rerek." A Fish Dinner in Memison, the second book, belongs in its Zimiamvian parts to a period of five weeks ending nearly a year before the King's death. This third book, The Mezentian Gate, begins twenty years before the King was born, and ends with his death. Each of the three is a drama complete in itself; but, read together (beginning with The Mezentian Gate, and ending with Mistress of Mistresses), they give a consecutive history, covering more than seventy years in a special world devised for Her Lover by Aphrodite, for whom (as the reader must suspend unbelief and suppose) all worlds are made.
The trilogy will, as I now foresee, turn to a tetralogy; and the tetralogy probably then (as an oak puts on girth and height with the years) lead to further growth. For, certain as it is that the treatment of the theme comes short of what I would, the theme itself is inexhaustible. Clearly so, if we sum it in the words of a philosopher who is besides (as few philosophers are) a poet in bent of mind and a master of art, George Santayana: "The divine beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in a world of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished: for it visits time and belongs to eternity." Those words I chanced upon while I was writing the Fish Dinner, and liked the more because they came as a catalyst to crystallize thoughts that had long been in suspension in my mind.
In this world of Zimiamvia, Aphrodite puts on, as though they were dresses, separate and simultaneous incarnations, with a different personality, a different soul, for each dress. As the Duchess of Memison, for example, She walks as it were in Her sleep, humble, innocent, forgetful of Her Olympian home; and in that dress She can (little guessing the extraordinary truth), see and speak with her own Self that, awake and aware and well able to enjoy and use Her divine prerogatives, stands beside Her in the person of her lady of the bedchamber.
A very unearthly character of Zimiamvia lies in the fact that nobody wants to change it. Nobody, that is to say, apart from a few weak natures who fail on their probation and (as, in your belief and mine, all ultimate evil must) put off at last even their illusory semblance of being, and fall away to the limbo of nothingness. Zimiamvia is, in this, like the sagatime; there is no malaise of the soul. In that world, well fitted to their faculties and dispositions, men and women of all estates enjoy beatitude in the Aristotelian sense of --------------- (activity according to their highest virtue). Gabriel Flores, for instance, has no ambition to be Vicar of Rerek: it suffices his lust for power that he serves a master who commands his dog-like devotion.
It may be thought that such dark and predatory personages as the Vicar, or his uncle Lord Emmius Parry, or Emmius's daughter Rosma, are strangely accommodated in these meads of asphodel where Beauty's self, in warm actuality of flesh and blood, reigns as Mistress. But the answer surely is (and it is an old answer) that "God's adversaries are some way his owne." This ownness is easier to accept and credit in an ideal world like Zimiamvia than in our training-ground or testing-place where womanish and fearful mankind, individually so often gallant and lovable, in the mass so foolish and unremarkable, mysteriously inhabit, labouring through bog that takes us to the knees, yet sometimes momentarily giving an eye to the lone splendour of the stars. When lions, eagles, and she-wolves are let loose among such weak sheep as for the most part we be, we rightly, for sake of our continuance, attend rather to their claws, maws, and talons than stay to contemplate their magnificences. We forget, in our necessity lest our flesh become their meat, that they too, ideally and sub specie aeternitatis, have their places (higher or lower in proportion to their integrity and to the mere consciencelessness and purity of their mischief) in the hierarchy of true values. This world of ours, we may reasonably hold, is no place for them, and they no fit citizens for it; but a tedious life, surely, in the heavenly mansions, and small scope for Omnipotence to stretch its powers, were all such great eminent self-pleasuring tyrants to be banned from "yonder starry gallery" and lodged in "the cursed dungeon."
The Mezentian Gate, last in order of composition, is by that very fact first in order of ripeness. It in no respect supersedes or amends the earlier books, but does I think illuminate them. Mistress of Mistresses, leavi
ng unexplored the relations between that other world and our present here and now, led to the writing of the Fish Dinner; which book in turn, at its climax, raised the question whether what took place at that singular supper party may not have had yet vaster and more cosmic reactions, quite overshadowing those affecting the fate of this planet. I was besides, by then, fallen in love with Zimiamvia and my persons; and love has a searching curiosity which can never be wholly satisfied (and well that it cannot, or mankind might die of boredom). Also I wanted to find out how it came that the great King, while still at the height of his powers, met his death in Sestola; and why, so leaving the Three Kingdoms, he left them in a mess. These riddles begot The Mezentian Gate.
With our current distractions, political, social and economic, this story (in common with its predecessors) is as utterly unconcerned as it is with Stock Exchange procedure, the technicalities of aerodynamics, or the Theory of Vectors. Nor is it an allegory. Allegory, if its persons have life, is a prostitution of their personalities, forcing them for an end other than their own. If they have not life, it is but a dressing up of argument in a puppetry of frigid-make-believe. To me, the persons are the argument. And for the argument I am not fool enough to claim responsibility; for, stripped to its essentials, it is a great eternal commonplace, beside which, I am sometimes apt to think, nothing else really matters.
