Zimiamvia: A Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  That oread lady said to the doctor, "Shall I rip his belly open up to the chin?"

  But Vandermast, lending him a hand to find his feet again, answered, "No."

  Aktor, for all the ache and smart of his wounds, could not forbear to laugh. "You are of a better disposition, I see, than this hot-reined stew-pot of yours, to say nought of that hell-cat you did set upon me. Where is it?"

  Mistress Anthea curled her lip: turned away from him. The classic beauty of her face, thus sideways, was like an ivory in the fireless pure glimmer of the moon.

  Aktor said, " 'Twas never in my heart, learned sir, to a done you any hurt. 'Twas in a way of taste only: trying your metal."

  "I am glad to hear that," replied he dryly. "As for her, 'tis a most innocent animal, howsoever nature hath armed her most magnificently: fell to action, it is true, somewhat hastily (like as did your excellency), and with no setting on by me. As well, perhaps, that she did; for fighting is an art I am scantly customed to, both by natural inclination and as being somewhat entered in years. You did take me, also, a little by surprise, bursting forth into such a sudden violence; which I hope you will henceforth be less ready unto, and will wisely bethink you beforehand, using meditations and weighings of pro and contra, afore you begin to attack men. But as for the wounds your excellency did (to consider the matter honestly), do unto yourself, here is better than any leech to their speedy healing"; and Anthea, a little impatiently at the doctor's bidding, using simples that he gave her from his purse, washed, dressed, and bound up with bandages torn from the gauze of her skirt, the evidences of her expert science in claw-work.

  4 - The Bolted Doors

  SO ENDED the twelfth day and last, of that marriage-feast in Rialmar. Upon the morrow, guests took their farewells and departed: a few betimes (and earliest among these that ancient doctor and his questionable she-disciple); but the most part of them, suiting by just anticipation the measure to be set them by bride and bridegroom, lay till past midday. The Lord Emmius tarried but to greet his brother and sister and, for the while, bid them adieu. In mark of singular favour the King and Queen brought him to the gate, and so, parting with them in the greatest esteem and friendship, he rode off with his train by the great south road.

  Supervius and his bride, it was given out, would remain yet another week in Rialmar. But when it came to the day for their departure, Marescia said she would stay yet a full week more: let her lord go now with the baggage and stuff, and see all prepared orderly against her home-coming to Laimak. This absurdly, with no further reason assigned; but folk thought it sprung of her insolency and the wish, since she was now wife, to be not only his mistress still (as were right and fitting) but her great master's master. Howe'er that might be, upon that twenty-fifth of March Supervius rode south without her.

  He being gone, with the honourable leave-taking as his brother had had, and the King and Queen being now returned up to Teremne, Stateira, with her hand upon her Lord's arm as he came his way to his private chamber, prayed him gently that she might come too. "I am infinitely full of business, madam," he said. "But come if you must."

  In that chamber, which was round and domed and with great windows looking east to the mountains, were tables and heavy chairs old and curiously carved, and, between the pillars of polished marble jet-black with yellow and purple veins in it which ranged at every two paces along the walls, presses with shelves to put books in. Upon a hearth well fifteen foot wide a fire of sweet-scented cedar-wood was crackling and blazing, and the floor was carpeted to within two or three feet of the walls with russet-coloured velvet that the foot sank in, giving warmth in winter and silence all the year. But the King, crossing to the further side, undid with his secret keys the ponderous iron-studded doors, an outer and an inner, of his closet, and, when she had followed him in, locked both behind them. For here was the close work-house of his most deep-laid policies, and to it neither counsellor nor secretary had ever admittance: not Aktor even, to whom men noted he showed, more and more this last year or two, the kindly and dear respect due to a loved kinsman or very son. But the Queen, it was said, was partner to all its secrets; and a light misspeaking it was, that were she invited more oftener to his bed and seldomer to his chancery, there were a custom all the ladies in the court could be envious of, to be owl in such an ivy-bush.

  The closet measured but five or six foot-paces either way. Cupboards of black iron with latches of silver lined the walls from ceiling to floor, and here, as in the outer chamber, was the like deep-piled velvet carpet. A long table of green prassius stone, resting on six legs of solid gold in the semblance of hippogriffs with wings spread, was under the window, and a great chair, hard-cushioned (seat, back, and arms) with dark, wine-coloured silk brocade, was set at the table to face the light. Upon that table papers and parchments lay thick as autumn leaves: here an unsteady pile with an armoured glove for paperweight: there another, capped with a hand-mace to keep them together: great maps, some in scrolls, one at the far end of the table, unrolled and held down flat with inkstands at two corners and a heavy ivory ruler at a third. Into which seeming chaos King Mardanus when he had thrown himself down in that chair, began now to dig; and easy it was to see that what to the general eye were confusion was in his capable mind no such matter, but orderly, where whatsoever scrap or manuscript he had need of came instant to his fingers' ends.

  "Still Akkama?" said the Queen, after watching him awhile from between table and window.

  "What else?" he said, clearing a space before him by pitching a heap of letters on the floor by his chair. "Do you expect that business to be huddled up in a week or two?"

  "It has trickled on for years. I wish it were ended."

  "It moves," said the King. "And moves at the pace I mean it shall. There's his latest letters missive (God give him a very mischief): pressing most sweetly for the handing over of Aktor": he tossed it across the table.

  She let it lie. "Well, hand him over."

  King Mardanus, for the first time, looked swiftly up at her; but there was nought in his look beyond such shock as a tutor might betray, having from his chosen pupil a foolish answer.

  "Nay, I meant not that," she said hastily. "But yet: poor Akkama. 'Tis a pardonable impatience, surely, seeing he broached that demand two years since. Wonder is, he does not drop it."

  "No wonder in that," said the King. "I keep it alive: I mean not to let him drop it. Here's reports from two or three sure intelligencers, imports Aktor's faction plus on flesh, grows to admired purchase. Treat with the one and bolster up t'other: these two'll cut each other's throats i' the end. Then I walk in: take what I please."

  The Queen said, "Yes, I know. That is our policy," and fell silent as if held in a still, strained eagerness, between the desire to ask a thing and the terror lest, asked, it should be denied, and thus leave the matter in worse posture than before. She said suddenly, "I wish, dear my Lord, you would send Aktor away."

  The King stared at her.

  "I wish you would."

  "What, back to Akkama? That were a dastard's deed I'd be sorry for."

  "Never that. But send him away from Rialmar. Let him go where he will."

  "And fall in all kind of mischief? No, no. Safest here, under my hand. Besides, 'twere pure lunacy: discard the knave of trumps in the middle of the game."

  "He does no good here."

  The King sat back in his chair. "Why are you so stubborn set of a sudden to be rid of him? What harm does he do to you?"

  "None at all," she paused. He said nothing. "I advise you," she said, "make clean riddance of him."

  Mardanus, as if troubled by some urgence in her voice that he could ill understand, looked hard in her face. But if there were characters writ in it they were in a language he was as little schooled in as was his two-year-old son in the Greek. "But why?" he said at last.

  "Because I ask you."

  "The best of all reasons, madam": (she interrupted, under her breath, "It used to be"): "but not a reaso
n of state. Come, come," he said, still watching her narrowly, and his brows frowned as with some mounting anger at this insisting, without all reason, upon a thing of so small weight or moment to fool away his time withal: "Woman's nonsense. The boy wants his revenge; wants to be his own again: wants to be king. And all these are appetites make him meat for us. Why, he is the peg my whole design's hung upon. No need for you to be troubled with him; but I will for no sake let him go. Besides," he said, turning again to his papers, "I love him well. Were't but to play chess a-nights with, which is a prime merit in him, I'll not forgo his company."

  Queen Stateira bit her lip. He reached for the letter from the King of Akkama, took his goose-quill pen and, slowly and awkwardly as with fingers to which such an instrument comes with less handsomeness than a sword or a spear, yet steadily without pause nor doubt, as one under no necessities to search for words to fit his clear-built purpose, fell to drafting of his reply. The Queen, noiselessly on that deep carpet, came round behind him: hovered a moment: bent, and kissed his head. He wrote on, without sign that he was any longer ware of her presence. "I must go," she said. The King sprang up: undid the doors for her. As she came into the outer chamber, where at a side-table the King's secretary was setting papers in order, the great iron locks clashed home behind her.

  Not until she was well shut in the privacy of her own room, did she unmask. There, thrown, as on a bed of snakes, between (like enough) some drunkenness in her blood strained up by Aktor and (like enough, for the moment) a scalding indignation against the King, she let go all and wept.

  5 - Princess Marescia

  THE LORD Supervius Parry, albeit with pace slowed by a long train of pack-horses laden with wedding gifts and nine-tenths of Marescia's wardrobe, came by great journeys south over the wind-scourged wastes of the Wold, and so down to Megra, and thence by Eldir and Leveringay to Mornagay. Thence, taking the bridle-path over the mountains (which is steep, dirty and dangerous, but shorter and more expeditious than the low road south-about by Hornmere and Owldale), he came, after a three-and-a-half-weeks' journey from Rialmar without stay or mishap, on the afternoon of the seventeenth of April, home to Laimak. Here were preparations already completed for his return, but for the next seven days he set all his household folk to toil and moil as if three-score devils were at their tails, labouring to turn his own private quarters above Hagsby's Entry into a fit place to lodge a bride in, to whom luxurious splendours were but the unremarkable and received frame proper to ordinary polity and civility. And doubtless it would have ill suited his intents, were his great house of Laimak to show in her eyes as little better than a rude soldier's hold, or she to suppose him content that here from hence-forward she should live like a hog. By the week's end, all was altered and nicely ordered to his liking, and the folk about the castle set agog for impatience to welcome home so great and famous a lady as history hath not remembered among those that had been mistress here aforetime.

  But as day followed day and yet no word or sign of the Princess, men began to wonder. Nor did they find wholesome nor comfortable their lord's thunderous silences that deepened and darkened as the days passed; nor his sometimes flashings into unforeknowable violence, which, like flashings of lightning, struck with impartial chanceableness and frightening suddenness who or what soever happed in their path at their blasting-time.

  Between sunset and dark on the second day of May, it being a clear evening with the stars coming out in a rain-washed sky after a day of down-pour and tempest, Supervius was pacing to and fro in the great courtyard: slow, measured steps with a swift caged-beast turn-about at either end of the walk. Laughably in manner of a farm-lad who approaches an untethered bull of uncertain temper that may suffer him to draw near, then, without gare or beware, rush upon him and destroy him, came the captain of his bodyguard: said there was a lady below at the gate, alone and on horseback, would answer no questions as concerning her name or condition, but demanded to be brought instant before their master.

  Supervius glowered at him. "Hast seen the woman?"

  "No, my lord."

  "You lewd misordered villain, why not, then? Why is she not brought to me here, if she asks that?"

  "Because of your lordship's command, that no unknown person shall be admitted without your lordship's pleasure first known. 'Twas referred to me by the officer o' the guard for tonight, to learn your will, my lord, what he must do with her."

  "I would the Devil had her, and you to the bargain."

  The captain waited.

  Supervius took another turn. "Well, why is she not fetched up?"

  The captain, with a low leg, departed: came again the next minute with the Princess Marescia Parry in pitiful disarray. Supervius looked at her, and the whole poise of his body seemed to stiffen. "Leave us," he said, resuming his to's and fro's. When they were alone he came to a halt and stood there, looking at her. Not a muscle in him stirred, save that a quick ear might catch a thickness and a tumultuousness in his breathing and a keen eye note the eyes of him in this half-light, while he watched her as a trained dog points at game. The Princess, for her part, held a like silence and a like stillness. Even in this gathering dusk it was easy to see she was as a very dowdy or slut, dirted and dishevelled with long hard riding, and hard lying may be, in the open field; and, for all she bore herself bravely enough, there was that in her that said, for all her speechlessness and the firmness of her lip, that she held it good her travels were over and she, howsoever miserably, here at last. With bull-like deliberation he began now to move towards her: then, as he came near, seized her in like sort and to like purpose (but with all unlike effect) as Tarquin seized Lucrece. Marescia was a big woman and a strong, but in a twinkling he had her up in his arms and in under the huge shadowy archway of Hagsby's Entry. Thence, without pause for breath, and despite her inarticulate protests and gusts of astonished half-smothered laughter, he carried her up the dark stairs of his own chamber trimmed up on purpose for her with those sumptuous costly furnishings he had brought south with him, and there, without ceremony, and quite unregarding of the pickle she was in, rain-soaked riding-habit and muddied boots, disposed her on the bed.

  "Nay, and now tell me, you sweet-breath'd monkey," said Supervius, upon his elbow, and with his face at near range looking down at hers. She lay there supine: outplayed and tamed for the while: closed eyes, half-closed lips: head turned away, exposing so into view her throat, smooth, sleek, white, like some Titan woman's, and the pulse of blood in it: one hand twining and untwining and straying and losing itself in the curled masses of his great red beard, the other yet straining down on his hand which rested upon her breast.

  "Shorn of my train," she answered presently, in a sleepy voice that seemed to taste pleasure in its own displeasure: "tooken like a common cut-purse by my own folk: should a been clapt up in prison too, I think, and I'd not given 'em the slip. I hope you deserve me, my lord: so good faithful a wife, and a so quick contriver of means. There's this in you, that you love me impatiently. I'd ne'er stomach you less than greedy." Then, suddenly springing up: "In the Devil's name, how much longer must I famish here without my supper?"

  "Shall be here in the flick of a cat's tail."

  "Well, but I'll dress first," said Marescia.

  "Mean time, tell me more. So far 'tis the mere chirping of frogs: terrible words I scantly believe and can make no sense of."

  "I'll dress first," she said, opening a cupboard or two and, with some satisfaction, seeing her clothes hang there that came on before with Supervius. "Nor not with you for looker-on, neither, my lord. Who suffers her husband in her dressing-chamber, were as good turn him off to go nest with wagtails. Where did I learn that, think you? From my mother's milk, I think. 'Tis native wisdom, certain."

  Supper was in the old banquet-hall, that was built in shape like an L, having a row of great windows in the long north-western wall, a main door, opening on the courtyard, at the far end, and a door going to the buttery and kitchens at the end of the short
er arm. of the L. On the inner angle was the hearth, capacious enough to roast a neat, and a fire burning, of mighty logs. The walls were of black obsidian stone, and upon all save that which had windows were huge devilish faces, antic grotesco-work, cut in high relief, thirteen, with their tongues out, and upon each tongue's tip a lamp; and the goggling eyes of them were of looking-glass artificially cut in facets to disperse the beams of the lamplight in bushes of radiance, so that the hall was filled with light that shifted and glittered ever as the beholder moved his head. Long tables ran lengthways down the main hall, one on either side, and here the Lord Supervius's home-men were set at meat.

  When the great leaved doors were flung wide and the Lady Marescia Parry, for this her first time, entered in state, gorgeously attired now in her bridal gown of white chamlet and lace of gold and with her yellow hair braided and coiled in bediamonded splendour above her brow, every man leapt from his seat and stood up to honour her and to feast his gaze upon her; while she, not a filly un-ridden but with the step and carriage of a war-horse and with bold chestnut eyes flashing back the bright lights, passed up between the benches on her lord's arm to take her place with him at the high table, which stood alone upon a dais in the north corner opposite the fire. Here, in sight but out of ear-shot of all other parts of that banquet hall, were covers laid for two.