by E R Eddison
He leaned towards her. "For all sakes, remember. Think of me as the King my Father. He made it, that thing, that massy glistering bubble, even as she required it of him: made and fashioned it, there on the table before us, growing between his hands. What was it? Did we not behold it put on substance, mature to an inconceivable intricacy in obedience to her unbitted fancy? As though all Gods and Powers had been but ministers to her least desires (as, by my soul, they ought to be). But a clockwork only it was: a make-believe: a dead world."
"His words," said the Duchess, and trembled: "his voice yet again. 'A dead world. A dead soul.' And she desired him then give it life: 'Let it teem with life,' she said; 'and that horribly.' So, and in that humour. Her laws for the living beings in that world: you remember? 'I will tease them a little with my laws'."
Barganax narrowed his eyelids, looking at his mother; and yet (it may be thought) not at his mother but, in her, at his Dark Lady. "That they should seem to have freedom," he said; "and yet we, who look on, should know 'tis no such matter. And her law of death: 'Every one that knoweth life in my world shall know also death. The little simplicities, indeed, shall not die. But the living creatures shall.' Well, was she not right? 'A just and equal choice: either be a little senseless lump of jelly or of dead matter, and subsist till world's ending; or else-" "Or else be a bird, a fish, a rose,'" said the Duchess, as if unburying a new fragment from amongst the chaos of broken memories of that strange supper-entertainment: " 'or men and women as we be,'-"
" 'Upon condition to fade, wax old, waste at last to carrion and corruption,'-Well? Is it so much unlike this loved world of ours?"
" 'Tis too much like," the Duchess replied. "It is the same as this world: but crooked: but spoilt."
"Your grace needs not to tell me," said the Duke: "et ego in Arcadia," and he laughed, " - but that scarce fits. 'Men and women as we be.' And then she said, sitting at your table here, before your summer palace, while her world-destroying beauty, pensive and stilled, shone down upon that misconceived master-work of self-thwarting perfections: 'As we be? How were that possible, out of this? Is there mind in this? - Unless, indeed' (you remember), 'unless We Ourselves go in and enter it. Know it so, go down-' And then my Father said: 'Undergrope it from within. For a moment, We might. To know.' "
"No more, I beseech you," said the Duchess. "What are we about?"
But Barganax had her by the hand. "Think of me constantly now, as the King my Father. Let's try it again. You and I, this time. I begin to remember things I, too, had forgot; and I know not who I am, nor who you are. Come, we will. I will know again whether there be truth in it or but make-believe."
"Stop!" she said, "I cannot bear it: not a second time."
But he, still straining her by the hand, overbore her. For a minute they stood, here in lovely Memison, as two unfleshed souls might aboard Charon's ferry, waiting to be put from shore. But nothing came about: no expected half-remembered translation out of their native substantiality of life and being into a more dimmer and crippled world, in detail so like, in sum so alien: unimaginable now: a prison-life which had been, or could be, theirs, but now well forgotten; and yet half tasted in remembrances which, slight, smudged, fleeting, were now blessedly lost again, blotted out in a wreathing of mists and fog and billowing darkness. Then, as with the going of a shadow from across the sun's face, was this real world back again true and perfect: smells of wet earth and wood-smoke, the snail on the path, the wren scolding from the yews: on the glassy waters of Reisma Mere afar a rippling here and there where the morning breeze touched them: great sulphur-coloured lilies seen against the yews' darkness, distilling on the air their voluptuous sweet scent: morning light upon Memison; and breakfast-time.
The same day, Duke Barganax rode south, having appointed the day after to hold his weekly presence: receive petitions, hear suits if any there were of enough matter and moment to be pleaded before him in person, treat with men in their quarrels and set them at one, or, where that would not speed, deliver judgement and give order for its execution.
It was past supper-tune when he rode up into Acrozayana. He delayed but to eat some cold collation: smoked salmon, caviar, boar's head spiced and dressed with hippocras sauce, with a flagon of Reisma wine to wash it down; then, retiring himself to the western balcony of his own privy lodging that looks on Zayana lake and Ambremerine, summoned Doctor Vandermast. "I would have your head in a matter, honoured sir: not as my secretary, but as of old, master and teacher in the noble dark science. How came this world, think you, and other worlds if other there be?"
Vandermast answered and said, "By God alone, that made all."
"Good. Ergo, made also Himself?"
"Undoubtedly so. Your grace hath not forgotten the definitio: Per causam sui intelligo id, cujus essentia involvit existentiam: sive id, cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens? Nought else save God alone is able to be cause of itself, since nought else hath such a nature as is not able to be conceived save as existing. In none else doth the Essence thereof inescapably involve also the Existence."
The Duke sat gazing before him, as rapt with some picture in his mind. Then leaning forward to look in the doctor's eyes (as well as a man were able, under their shadowing eaves and but starlight to see by): "But there is a Twoness," he said, "in the ultimate Onehead of Godhead?"
"There is a Darkness. If indeed by God we understand a Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, a Substance made up and compounded of infinite attributes, every particular one of which expresseth an Essence infinite and eternal."
"And you yourself," said the Duke, leaning nearer, eyeing him yet closelier, "when I was but of years sixteen and did first dally with the Metaphysicals, you did ground me in that principle you name lode-star and cynosure of divine philosophy: Per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo: 'Reality,' that is, 'and perfection are the same thing.'"
"Through the monster-teeming seas of thought, ay, and in action, assaying those topless spires whence in highest majesty God looks down, that," replied Vandennast, "is indeed man's cynosure: the alonely certain star to steer by."
Barganax sat back in his chair. The sky was of a soft violet-colour and full of stars whose beams showed, in those windless upper airs, a strange constancy, but the mirrored stars in Zayana lake swayed and broke in pieces and ran together again as quicksilver: a changefulness and a restlessness like as that of the dew-lights that morning in Memison. A like unrestful secretness stirred under the deep harmonies of his voice as he said, as if examining some strange unheard-of novelty in his own hidden mind: "Realitatem: Perfectionem. Well, I have found perfection."
Doctor Vandermast held his peace.
The Duke said, still as to himself, almost with a tang of mockery in his accents, yet in the same slow wonder: "Am not I therefore beyond example fortunate? What need I further, having possessed me of Perfect and Real in One?" He stretched his arms as one waking from sleep, and laughed. "Come, you are silent. Will you envy me, old man, to have found, and in my young years, this true philosopher's stone?"
"How shall any man but yourself tell whether you are to be envied or commiserated? Satiety is death. Desire is life."
"And is not the mere quality of Perfection, this," said the Duke, leaping to his feet to stand against the balustrade, his back to the night sky, his face in deep shadow looking down on Vandermast: "to be infinite? Infinitely desirable, and infinitely unsupportable: explored without and within, yet ever the more terrible and the more appassionately sought in its unknowable secrets. In fiercest beauties, in supremest delictis, absent, yet absent unsparable. And so, elysium beyond elysiums: here and away, yet so as a man would joyfully cut his hand off to buy off change, and when change is come, cut off t' other sooner than go back to status quo ante."
"Laetitia," said that ancient doctor slowly, as to weigh each word, "est hominis transitio a minore ad majorem perfectionem: Joy is the passing of a man from the smaller to the greater perfection."
"And (coro
llarium) the greater oft-times becometh greater by bringing back the smaller. Infinite change; yet infinite self-same bewitchment."
There was a grandeur of line, beyond the use of human kind, in the lithe frame of him outlined there against stars. Vandermast watched him in silence, then spoke: "I observed this in your grace, even at my first coming into your noble service, that alike by soul and body you are of apt temper to understand the depth of that wisdom: Nous connaissons la verite non seulement par la ration, mais encore par le coeur; c'est de cette demise sorte, que nous connaissons les premieres principes,"
"That is wisdom," said Barganax. "That is truth." He settled himself on the stone of the balcony that was warm yet after a day of unclouded sun, and, sitting there against the sky, said: "Our talk hath wandered somewhat beside my purpose, which concerned the making of worlds. Were I to tell you I saw one such devised and created, under my nose, a month ago, at supper-table, would you credit that?"
Doctor Vandermast paused. "As coming from your grace, known to me for a man of keen judgement and not given to profane jesting, I should impartially examine it."
"I have not told you I saw it. The more I consider of it, the less know I whether I truly beheld that marvel or 'twere but legerdemain."
"If it pleased your grace open it to me more at large-"
"Better not. I have indeed almost clean forgotten it, save the circumstances. But this I will tell you, that I seemed, when 'twas over, to have lived myself (and yet something more than myself: mixed of myself and his serene highness my Father, and, in the mixture, may be a less than him and something less too than me, as impurer; like as orange-colour hath not the pureness of red neither of yellow, being compound of both) - in that mixed self, I seemed to have lived a life-time in that world. Well," he said, after a moment: "I sucked its orange. But a cheap frippery of a world it was, take it for all in all: made tolerable, as I bethink me now, but by rumours and fore-savourings of this. And I seemed, besides, to have looked on from without, while untold ages passed there: first the mere ball of incandescence: then the cooling: the millennial ages through which a kind of life was brewing, in enormous wastefulness and painfulness and ever-growing interweaving of tangle, until human kind began there: slow generations, ever changing and never (on the whole) bettering, of human kind, such as we be. Ay, and I was stood by, viewing it thus from withoutward, even at the golden moment for which that defaced, gelded, exiled creation, so like the real world, yet so unlike, had from its first beginnings waited and thirsted: its dissolution. And that was when she, to pleasure whose chanceable idle soon-changed fantasy it was made, took from the braided blackness of her hair a pin starred with anachite diamonds, and as idly with it touched the bubble. And at that prick-puff! 'twas gone: nought left but the little wet mark on the table to witness it ever existed."
Vandermast said: "With one breath They create: with one breath uncreate."
"I have forgot, almost," said the Duke. Then, "Indeed since I spoke to you even this instant moment gone, old sir, all is fled from me, like as dreams are scattered and broken at the very words we wake with on our lips to recount them. This remains (O the unsounded seas of women's bloods), that that night she wore glow-worms in her hair."
"There is danger for a man," said Vandermast, after a silence, "in knowing over-much."
"Or for a God?"
"To be able to answer that with certainty," said Vandermast, "were, for a mortal, to know over-much."
35 - Diet a Cause
Unwritten-see page 160 ante.
36 - Rosa Mundorum
V ELVRAZ SEBARM stands upon the lake, among orange trees and pomegranates and almonds and peaches of the south, a mile north-west over the water from Zayana town, and two miles by land: an old castle built of honey-coloured marble at the tip of a long sickle-shaped ness that sweeps round southwards, with wild gardens running down in the rocks to the water's edge, and behind the castle a wood of holm-oaks making a windbreak against the north. Here my Lady Fiorinda was keeping household in June of that next year, some few months later than these things last told of, the Duke having put it at her disposition for such times as she should not be resident in Memison or his guest in Acrozayana.
It was midsummer morning, at the half-light before the break of day. For the heat of the night, the curtains were left undrawn in the great bedchamber that looks three ways across the water: south, towards Zayana, whose towers, spires, and gables seemed in this twilight to be of no solider substance than the sky against which they rose, the reflections of them barely set moving by a ripple on the lake's placid surface: west, to the isle of Ambremerine, wooded with oak and cedar and cypress and strawberry-tree, and all misted with the radiance behind it of the setting silver moon: east, across low vineyard-clad country, to the sea at Bishfirthhead. Within that chamber the colourless luminosity of the summer night, beginning to obey at this hour some influence of the unrisen sun, partly obscured, partly revealed, shapes and presences: lustrous balls of moon-stone and fire-opal like a valance of strange fruits fringing the canopy of the great bed, which was built to the Duke's designing and by art of Doctor Vandermast, and with posts of solid gold: lamps and sconces and branched hanging candlesticks of gold and silver and crystal: pictures let into the panels of the doors of tall wardrobe presses: bookshelves filled with books between the windows: two scented lamps, filigree-work of orichalc, burning for night-lights at the bed's head, one upon either side, whose beams dimly lighted a frieze, of eagles, phoenixes, chimaeras, satyrs, gorgons, winged buns, sea-goats with fish-tailed bodies, water-horses, butterfly-ladies, carved out of rose-coloured marble in high relief on a background of peacock green. And with the incense of the lamps was mingled a perfume more elemental and of a sweeter and more disturbing luxury: of that lady's breath and her sleeping presence.
She lay there prone, in an innocency of beauty asleep, face turned aside and pillowed in the curve of her right elbow, her left hand inshrining its smoothness between smooth right arm and cheek. All naked she slept, sheet and bed-clothes thrown off to lie in a heap upon the floor at the bedside for warmness of the night. Anthea, too, was asleep on the bed, curled up in her lynx shape at her mistress's feet.
From the gardens below the western window, the first bird-song sounded: bodiless little madrigal of a peggy-whitethroat, ending upon that falling cadence. So, and again. A third time; and the dividing notes took to themselves the articulation of human speech: Campaspe singing her morning hymn to Her that is mistress both of night and of day:
Our Lady, awake! Darkness is breaking.
Bat wings are folded: Crop-full the owl.
Night-flowers close, -
Their sweetness withhold:
The east pales and quickens to gold:
Night-raven and ghoul
Flee to their make.
A breath of morning stirs on the lake.
Colours disclose: -
Carnation, rose.
The Worlds are waking-
Thou, Onemost, awake!
At the sound of that singing and at a touch of the lynx's cold nose against her foot, Fiorinda, with a little unarticulate slumbrous utterance still betwixt sleeping and waking, turned on her back. In a more slowed voluptuousness than of python uncoiling, she stretched her sleep-loosened limbs to the wide ambiency of self-oblation, and, with that, her whole body was become a source of light: sea-glitter between her opening eyelids: a Praxitelean purity, swan-white fined to tinctures of old ivory, in breast, throat, thigh, and in all the supple rondure of her hips: panther-black livery of the darkness that burned as consuming fires, blackness shining down blackness to the out-splendouring of all earthly suns. Her youth, with the lithe wild-beast strength and dove-like languor of these perfections, shadowless now, faintly incandescent, was transfigured to that ache and surquedry of beauty which great poets and great lovers, uncontented by earth's counterfeits, have strained inward eye and sense to draw down from Olympus, those things' true home; where they subsist unsmirched by
times or allegiances unsubject to their sovereignty, and are not exiles bound servant to ends not theirs. Thus for a while (which whether it were of minutes or of ages, were a question barren of all result or answer) she lay: She of Herself: the verities of Her waking presence manifest, convenable to sight, touch, hearing, scent, and taste: here, in Velvraz Sebarm.
Rising at last from the golden bed, She stood to contemplate awhile, in the tall looking-glass by the growing light, the counter-image of Her own face and, at their plenilune upon which not even the eyes of a God can long bear to rest, Her ultimate beauties, from unbegun eternity lode-star, despair, and under-song, of all hearts' desires. And now, with Her standing so in deific self-knowing, everything that was not Her went out like the flame of a blown-out candle: the room, the familiarities of that Meszrian countryside, the softness of velvet carpet under Her feet, fallen to the formless ruin of oblivion.
Beneath Her, presently, some unfading dawn uncovered itself: morning of life, ancienter than worlds: saffron-hued, touching cliff and glacier to pale gold, and throwing into gullies and across snow-fields shadows of an azured transparency, chill as the winds that sprang up : I with day. From behind Her mountain-top where She stood, the sun lept up, throwing the shadow of the mountain mile upon mile across lesser heights to the westward that were gilded with the first beams, their nearer summits bathing in primrose radiancy, their more distant in more paler, more air-softened, hues; range succeeding range to where, over the furthermost crest, day was breaking on the sea-strand and sea-foams of Paphos. Long and level in the mid distance far below Her, grey-houndish clouds drove past, trailing ever-changing shadows across the landscape of ridges and hill-tops and deep-cleft dales. Against that dawn-illumined background the great cast shadow of Olympus rested, a wide-flung wine-dark mantle of obscurity, wearing on its outermost edge a smoulder of crimson fire. Anthea and Campaspe, in their nymphish true outwards, knelt at Her feet in virgin snow. In the depths, but far above the habitations of men (if men were yet, or yet continued), a gyr-falcon, queen of the air, took her morning flight.
