by E R Eddison
The King, who has for years understood, as from inside, this "most wolvy and most foxy sergeant major general of all the Devil's engineers," and loves him dearly, partly for the very danger of him and for the zest of feeling his own powers stretched to their uttermost in controlling himn, is well alive to these proceedings, but cannot be moved by those nearest in his counsel (Beroald, Jeronimy, Roder, Barganax) to take overt action to coerce him.
At last, this summer of 775, the King has secret intelligence (which he partly discloses to the Chancellor and to the Duchess but to no person else) of a conspiracy to seize Rerek and set it up as a realm to itself, with the Vicar for king. The conspirators have appointed to meet one night in Middlemead, a lonely ruined farmstead on the upper waters of the Zenner; and here the King means to surprise them in person: "wherein if I bring not the rest to destruction and him to his obedience, at least I'll die attempting it." At the last moment he makes the Chancellor wait behind, a few miles short of Middlemead, and himself goes on, completely alone.
This incredible act of daring succeeds. The Parry, already misdoubting him of the sufficiency of these men he has assembled to be his instruments, and (which the King had with unerring insight gambled upon) coming himself to heel when faced with the King in person, accepts the King's whispered diagnosis of the situation: namely, that the Vicar has lighted by chance upon a wasps' nest which the King has come himself to take. The five rebel lords, suddenly surprised, are overcome by the King and the Vicar after a bloody fight, and their three survivors (Gilmanes, Arquez, and Clavius) are, upon the King's direction, then and there beheaded by Gabriel Flores. (This episode, treated in detail in A Fish Dinner in Memison, is in this present book not narrated directly but disclosed in a private and secret conversation, after the event, between the Vicar and his mother Marescia, now aged seventy-three. He has always been her favourite child, and so far as he ever opens his mind to anybody it is to her. But even from her sympathetic ear the greater part (for example, the true extent of his implication in this conspiracy) is forever hidden.)
The Vicar's personal attachment to the King not even this treason can break: in fact the outcome is an immeasurable strengthening of it. The savage dog has, for the first time, snapped at his master. But he knows he ought not to have done it, and is sorry. He will never snap at King Mezentius again; but all the more is he inwardly resolved to brook no overlordship in Rerek (were the King to die) from a young quat such as Styllis, or, for that matter, from Barganax.
Bad feeling has been growing between the Vicar and Styllis to an extent that gives Rosma real anxiety. For the first time she comes to be ranged in a definite hostility against her cousin the Vicar, and tries, in sober earnest not in half earnest as of old, to set the King against him. But her efforts merely harden the King in his curious affection for this untameable unforeseeable ravening wild beast of his, grown now so big that by no power on earth can he be safely handled but by the King's personal ascendancy alone.
32 - Then, gentle cheater
THE STROKE at Middlemead (publicly understood, with the King's connivance, to have been a signal service to the crown on the part of the Vicar) was on 26 June 775. During the following few weeks, Barganax's frequenting of Fiorinda's company has become matter for every scandalous breath in both Memison and Zayana. The lady, with every exasperation of mockery, elusiveness, and unbearable provocation, holds him on a string, but at ann's length. Morville, a simple and stupid man fatally conjoined to a wife whom he can neither win nor hold nor satisfy nor understand nor be worthy of, is wrung with jealousy, while Barganax is almost driven out of his wits by a love which he can neither fulfil nor yet tear himself away from.
33 - Aphrodite Helikoble Pharos
ON 21 July, foully insulted and struck across the mouth by Morville upon the false (or at least, premature) accusation of being the Duke's mistress, she takes the Duke for her lover indeed. Morville, guilty of further threats and outrage, is destroyed by Anthea in her lynx dress.
The course of true love for Barganax and Fiorinda never runs smooth: their natures are too fierce, hazardous, and passion-ridden, for that. But it runs always deeper and stronger and with mounting superlatives, and always morning-new. He repeatedly urges her to become Duchess of Zayana, but she as steadfastly refuses; knowing, by an insight which (in common with all her qualities) reaches perhaps beyond the strain of mortality, that it is in the core of his nature to set supreme store by un-safeties and uncertainties, dangerous elysiums, the bittersweet:(Greek Text). And these things she gives him, unfailably, often almost unbearably, and with both hands.
Note on Transition to Chapter 34 (see page 185) and on Chapter 35 as yet unwritten
ON 25 July, the Duchess entertains privately at a fish dinner in Memison the King, the Vicar, Barganax, Jeronimy, Beroald, Fiorinda, Anthea, Campaspe, and the King's niece Zenianthe.
The talk turns to divine philosophy, and so to questions of Time and Creation: If we were Gods, what manner of world would we choose to make? To this question, raised by the King, most of the company answer, in effect: This actual world (that is to say, of course, Zimiamvia). But my Lady Fiorinda, in a dangerously irresponsible and contrary mood tonight, and speaking as if the King were in sober truth the Almighty and she herself Aphrodite Herself, for whom this and all conceivable worlds are made, asks him to make for her a strange mechanical hitherto undreamed-of world which she describes at large.
What followed, upon this request, probably none of the company but the two pairs of lovers (the King and Amalie, Barganax and Fiorinda) fully understood. Certainly, all present, the King and Fiorinda alone excepted, had forgotten by next morning.
The fact was this: Speculation merged into action: the King, sitting there at supper, did in very truth create, to her specification, this world we ourselves live in and belong to, so that they saw it evolve, a large teeming bubble, as this whole material universe might present itself under the eyes of the Gods, its miniature aeons passing beneath Their immortal gaze, as millions of years condensed into, say, half an hour. More than this: the King and the Duchess, Barganax and Fiorinda, in a desire to know this new world from within, entered it and so lived out a life-time here (in our own century), while to the other guests they merely seemed to sit gazing in a rapt attention for a few minutes on a monstrous bubble poised before them on the supper-table. Then the company, returning to reality, began to break up for bed. Fiorinda, in her most languefied luxuriousness lazying on Barganax's arm, having understandably had more than enough of this not very admirable world, snuffed it out for ever as though it had never existed, by idly pricking the bubble with a bediamonded hair-pin idly drawn from her hair as she passed. In that moment the Duke, looking in Her face, which is the beginning and the ending, from all unbegun eternities, of all conceivable worlds, knew perhaps (momentarily, and with as much certainty as is good for him) Who in very truth She was.
(This theme [of our present world as a misconceived and, were it not for its nightmarish unreality and transience, unfortunate episode in the real life of the Gods] is the subject of another book, A Fish Dinner in Memison. In The Mezentian Gate that ground is not gone over again, but sufficient indications are allowed to appear of the nature and outcome of the proceedings at supper-table to enable a reader to realize the cosmic repercussions of Aphrodite's sudden "unfledged fancy" and to be prepared for their effect upon the mind of the King. It is to be noted, that he and Fiorinda alone remember next morning (and thereafter) what took place at the fish dinner after talk had passed over into action.)
This brings us to August 775. Chapter 34 (The Fish Dinner: First Digestion), dealing with the effect of the fish dinner upon the minds of the Duchess and of Barganax, is already written. The as yet unwritten Chapter 35 (Diet a Cause), covering the next six months or so, deals with the effects upon the King and the Vicar.
The effect on the King, of this taste in Himself of omniscience combined with omnipotence in practice, is partly disclosed in a scene between
him and Vandermast. On the Vicar, who smells a subtle change in his great master which he is at an utter loss to define or understand but which he finds profoundly disturbing, the effect is to determine him to take all further precautions against the possibility that the King may die and he himself be left to fight for his place in the sun. By all covert means the Vicar begins to build up his armed strength in Rerek to such a pitch that, if it should come to a trial of mastery between himself and Styllis, he shall prevail, even though the united forces of Fingiswold and Meszria be brought to bear against him.
The grand finale of the book (Chapters 36-39: Rosa Mundorum, Testament of Energeia, Call of the Night-Raven, and Omega and Alpha in Sestola) is already written.
E. R. E.
Book VII: To Know or Not to Know
34 - The Fish Dinner: First Digestion
UPON a morning of late August the Duchess of Memison was abroad before breakfast upon the out-terraces above the western moat. The year was turning golden to all ripenesses, of late flowers, and fruit, and (albeit yet far off) fall of the leaf. In this light of early morning the yew hedges that run beside the terraces were covered with spiders' webs wet with dew-drops, a shimmering of jewels on mantles of white lace: a beauty ever changing, and with a hint of things altogether strengthless and ephemeral. No bird-voice sounded, except twitterings of swallows in the sky or exclamations from the Duchess's white peacocks, whose plumage was like woven moonbeams, and the eyes in their tail-feathers like iridescent moons when they displayed in the slant rays of the sun.
At the far end of the terrace southwards, she was met with Duke Barganax, picking his way among the peacocks and bending, as he came towards her, to stroke now this one, now that. They drooped tails, and with an elegant, crawling, swimming, undulating gait, in its extremity of submission too abject to be called pavane, passed under his hand for the caress. "You are up early, my lady Mother," he said.
"Well, and what of you? And besides, is it not a virtue?"
"Depends of the occasion. For my part, I never (provided I lie alone) insult a fair morning by lying a-bed."
"A very needful proviso. But tell me," said she, "while I think on't: was not that a misreckoning of mine, at our fish dinner here a month ago, not to bid you bring the learned doctor with you, 'stead of leave him to stew in his most metaphysical juices in Zayana?"
"I had not thought so. Why?"
"Might have told us now what in sober truth happened that night."
"I can tell you that," said the Duke. "Noble feasting. Good discourse."
"No more?"
"Come, you remember as well as I."
The Duchess shook her head. "If so, we are in one ridiculous self-same plight of forgetfulness. I remember nought past the ordinary, as you have summed it. But even next morning I woke to a discomfortable and teasing certainty that there was much forgot; and amongst it, the heart and argument of our whole proceeding."
"What if 'twere so indeed?" said the Duke. " 'Twas but pleasant talk. If unremembered, as like as not worth the remembering."
They walked slowly on, back along the terrace, in the way of the summer palace, peacocks following them at heel. She said presently, "More I consider of it, more am I suspicious that 'twas not talk only, but something we did. Could I call it back to mind, might give me the key to unlock certain perplexities."
"Did you not ask the King my Father?"
"Yes. But no light there. Did but laugh at me: fub me up with quips and riddles and double meanings: made me worse."
"Or my lord Chancellor? Or the Admiral (heaven be kind to him)? No light there? As for the Vicar-"
" 'Las," said she, "what a red lion, and what a red fox, is that! Disputations in divine philosophy are but dry hard biscuit to him."
"And to mend the dryness, did drink drunk or the true main act of our masque were led on. And that, as myself have noted in him afore this, needeth an unconscionable, unimaginable, deal of wine."
"The true main act: what was that?"
"Why," said he, "I meant when, after the rest of us (you remember this, surely?) had spoken our minds 'pon the question: What world would we choose to dwell in for ever, say we were Gods, and thus able to have our desire fulfilled into our hand soon as thought on? I meant when, after that, she, under pressure from you and from my Father, began to speak of the world which, had she that absolute sovereignty of choice, she would choose."
"And it was-?"
Barganax had come to a stand: his gaze across the dew-drenched grass. Here, seen in the pathway of the sun, hundreds of starry lights glowed and sparkled: topaz, emerald, fire-opal, ruby, sapphire, diamond; always changing place and colour, kindling, flashing, disappearing and appearing again in least expected places, as some shift of the eye of the beholder called them into being or laid them by; tiny unsure elysiums, here and away, unreachable; and yet perfect, yet never wholly extinguished: spawned or conceived by this unsightable golden splendour of the risen sun. "Strange. 'Tis a thing I had not thought on," he said; "my mind being bent on things nearer my concern. But true it is, when I try now to recall that latter part of our discourse, I am in your case: 'tis gone from me."
"Perhaps the night put it from our minds?"
"The night?" said the Duke: no more. But when he looked round at her it was as with eyes dimmed after gazing too near at hand into a naked flame.
He began to walk up and down, the Duchess in silence watching him. Suddenly he turned heel, came straight to her where she stood, took her in his arms and kissed her. He said, still holding her, looking down into her eyes: 'Who made you such a queen-rose, my Mother?"
"I don't know," she said, and hid her face on his shoulder, her right hand coming up to his cheek. "I don't know. I don't know." When she looked up, her eyes were smiling.
Taking her hands in his, "What is this?" he said. "You're not unhappy?"
"Something has changed since that night." She was looking down now, playing with his fingers.
"Come, sweet Mother. You have not changed. I have not changed."
"God be thanked, no. But - well, weather has changed."
"Nonsense. It is set fair."
"It is changed," said she, "and changing. I have a disliking for changes."
He said, after a pause, "I think I should die of the tediousness without them."
The Duchess smiled. "Everybody has a different weather, I suppose. You and I certainly. May be that is why we love each other."
Barganax kissed her hand. She caught his and, under laughing protest, kissed it.
"My Father, then?"
She said, "I can feel the change in him. It frightens me. I would have him never change."
"And he you."
"That is true, I know."
Barganax's brow was clouded. He walked over to the parapet's edge, upon their left, and stood there silent a minute, looking over. The Duchess followed him. "I have not seen him since then," he said, after a while. "So I cannot tell." A clump of belladonna lilies were in flower there beside them: thick strong stems, sleek and columnar, and great trumpets of a silvery rose-colour, smooth-skinned as a woman's throat, cool, bedewed, exhaling a heavy sweetness. The Duke picked one. Suddenly he spoke: "Can you remember what she said that night, when you and my Father pressed her to answer? About her world she would have?"
"Yes. That came before the things I have forgotten. She said: 'The choice is easy. I choose That which is.' "
"True. And the King took exceptions: saith, what could that be but the ultimate Two alone? They, and the lesser Gods and Goddesses who keep the wide heaven, of a lower reality, may be, than His and Hers, yet themselves more real than such summer-worms as men? And he bade her picture it to him that he might perceive it: all this and the golden mansions of the Father; - I liked not that. I saw she was angry with him, thinking he mocked. She was in a strange contrary temper that evening. Answered him, 'No. Like as her grace, I also will change my mind too: look lower.' You remember that Look lower?"
The Duch
ess covered her face with her hands. "When I would remember, I seem to walk on a swaying rope between darkness and darkness. What happened in truth that night?" she said, looking up again. "Had we drunk too much wine, will you think?"
"A love-draught?" said Barganax. " 'Tis not impossible." He clasped his strong hand about his mother's shoulder and drew her to him: then, in her ear: "Those words, Look lower. And with them a look in her eye I'll swear, Mother, no eye but mine hath seen or shall ever; to be seen, it needs to be loved. An unplacable look: a serpent-look."
"The dream comes back to me," said the Duchess, turning her fingers in his, of his hand that rested on her shoulder. " 'I have thought of a world,' she said. 'Will your highness create it indeed for me?' "
"Be careful," the Duke said, in a kind of fierceness. "It was no dream. You have brought it back alive to me, and not the words only, neither. You have caught the very accents of her voice beyond all elysiums." Then, loosing his hold and stepping back to have full view of her: "You remember my Father's reply? 'I'll do my endeavour'?"
The Duchess was trembling. "Since when have you, my son, had this art to speak to me, out of your own mouth, with his voice?"
"She lifted her head," said the Duke, as if locked up alone with his inward vision, "as a she-panther that takes the wind. By heavens!" he said, as the Duchess lifted hers; "you have the motion. Continue, if you love me. Continue. Her eyes were on me, though she spoke as if to him. Rehearse it: act it for me, to prove it more than a dream of mine."
And the Duchess, looking at this son of hers as it were to look through a perspective that should show her his father, her lover, began to speak: as a sleep-walker might, not her words but the Lady Fiorinda's.
When she had ended, her son abode motionless against the parapet, staring at her. Then she, as if by mere silence startled out of her sleep-walking: "What have I said? It is gone from me: I cannot remember."
