by E R Eddison
His doublet was of a rich velvet of a most fine texture, revealing, as it had been his very skin, the ripple and play of the great muscles as he moved: the hue of it, warm brown of peat-water where it runs deepest between moss-hags in full sun: slashed with blue satin (wave-reflections of blue heaven on such waters), and the lips of the slashes close-broidered with wire of silver. The ruff about his neck and the lesser ruffs at his wrists were stiffened with saffron: his shoes of velveted brown leather overwrought with gold and silver thread, and their buckles set with yellow diamonds The linked collar which he wore between neck and shoulder had every link broad as a man's hand, all in filigree of pure gold and ablaze with precious stones: sapphire and topaz, smaragd and ruby and opal, diamond and orient pearl. The belt about his middle was of black cobra-skin, studded with great diamonds in figure of stars and thunderbolts, and fastened by a clasp of pale gold carved in the image of two hippogriffs, nose to nose, wings erect, cabochon rubies for the eyes of them, and hundreds of tiny stones, topaz and burnt topaz and brown zircon and every kind of tourmaline, tracing the convolutions of their manes. Upon his head shone the crown of old Meszria, wrought with artificial semblances, in gold and jasper and pink quartz and sardonyx and jet, of poppies, flower and seed-cod of dittany, mandrake leaves, strawberry leaves, and the thorn-apple's prickled fruit.
For all this array, it was the majesty of the King's countenance and of his bearing that went to the marrow of folks' backbones, of those lords and ladies as they beheld him come up the hall: a majesty that seemed, tonight, no longer of this earth: holding its seat and glory chiefliest in his eyes, that showed hollow now like the eyes of lions, and terrible more for the calm that underlay the glare of them than for that all-mastering glare itself: more, even, than for the slow and consuming heat that seared the eyeballs of each person meeting his regard, as though the glance of this King were able to unclothe the soul of man or woman looked upon: have it out, stripped and freezing, for him to examine, before, behind, above, below, between, in the cold betwixt the worlds.
The men of his bodyguard, two by two as he passed them, fell in and followed him with spears at salute. Upon the dais he halted and turned to overlook the hall, while these soldiers, doing obeisance before him two by two upon the steps, divided and went up past him, these to the left, those to the right, to take their stand along the east wall behind the high-seats. Earl Roder, as captain of the guard, armoured to the throat and with the ties of his sword-hilt hanging loose from the scabbard, took his stand behind the King.
Next entered the Queen, crowned and wearing a robe of black figured satin purfled with gold and lined with watermaux, the train of it borne by four little blackamoors in green caps and long coats of cloth of silver. The King took her by the hand: set her in the high-seat upon his left; while two by two the guests of honour came up the mid hall, mounted the dais, did their obeisance, and took their seats in order.
The Duke sat at the King's right hand. In him, when he spoke or when he smiled, the conscience-born gaiety of a bridegroom stirred darkly tonight, fire shut in fickle-force; infusing with a kind of morning splendour both his countenance and his lithe body's strength, lovely, whether at rest or in motion, as the Hermes of Praxiteles. Next to him was that old Lord Bekmar, white-haired, twi-bearded, each half of his beard falling in a diminishing spiral of twisted curls: on Bekmar's right, my lord Chancellor Beroald: then Count Medor: then, at the last of the tables on this side, the Lord Perantor. Upon him as often as Rosma's eye fell and met his gaze constant on her as on some anchorage of his prime, she looked hastily away, as from an unseasonable memento of time's iniquity gravid upon her: that this man, grown fat now, and bald, and with dewlaps on the jawy part of his face, should be, by mockery, that self-same smooth courtier and oiled-tongued suing servant whom, in the latter years of her lone queenship, by this twenty-five, thirty, years ago, she had had for lord chamberlain in Zayana.
Anthea and Campaspe, oread arm wreathed in a most unwonted protective assurance about dryad waist, watched the proceedings from their places at the highest table on the Queen's side below the dais.
"Sister, quiet this leaping thing I find here, under your left breast. Else I'll be sadly tempted to eat you up."
"It will not quiet, sister, when changes are toward."
"Little fool. Great and small can alter and change: come and go. But we alter not. Neither can any of these shakings, that shake nations, shake us."
Campaspe huggled herself closer, her eyes fixed, as by fascination, upon the Queen. "I do abhor her from my heart," she said in a whisper. "As if my flesh were her meat."
"It is her day: day of darkness and shrouded dawn. Are you afeared, little mouse, little sparrow? We have known such days ere now."
"Yes. Many time, since the beginning. I fear not, dear sister. 'Tis but only that I cannot but puff up my weak furs and feathers and quake with the cold a little, these nights of dread."
"They are of our Mother's milk, I think," said that oread lady, and snarled with her teeth. "Fix your eye, here, where it belongeth: upon Our Lady. Doth not She fill heaven and earth?" Their pure eyes (hunting-beast eyes of the oread: eyes of the dryad wide and soft as a startled hind's) turned from Rosma, as from void darkness, to that thunder-laced windrush of darkness which is the heat and unpicturable secret centre of light's and beauty's self, the rending of heavens, the coming down: where that Dark Lady sat, last but one on the Queen's side, between Roder and Selmanes of Bish; and in the trust of Her presence found their unrestful rest.
Upon the Earl's right the Countess Heterasmene had her place: upon her right, next to the Queen, the lord Admiral Jeronimy.
With the first service brought in, and all kind of wine in great flagons and gallipots of silver and crystal and gold, merry waxed the talk both upon the dais and in the body of the hall. Queen Rosma, strangely affable and amiable, said: "You have not been to see me of late, lord Admiral. I miss your company. And now, tomorrow, we must bid you farewell: progress towards the north."
"All will lament your highness's departure."
"Not all. Myself, I shall be glad on't. I envy no man that must inhabit in Meszria these days: least of all, foreign-born. Too many hates and cloaked rivalries."
"Home is good," he said in his simplicity. "But duty is best."
Rosma's regard wandered from his face to rest on that Lady Fiorinda, so that the Admiral had freedom for a minute to study her countenance, himself unobserved. Viewing her thus, a man might have supposed twenty years had been lifted from her natural burden: as though the safe candlelight held an alchemy, transforming as lovers' eyes, to charm away and make effectless that false time which heretofore had carried her past the age of loving and being beloved. "I laugh sometimes," she said, an unwonted tender sadness stirring in her voice, "to think on these turnagains we live in. Born and nursed in Sleaby: Argyanna for my salad-days: then queened here in Zayana, and for so long time wielding powers of life and death here as to mix blood with it. And yet now, no sooner come back hither, but homesick in run for where's least my home: Rialmar."
" 'Tis there your highness's state and stead. Little marvel you should desire it."
The Queen took a sip from her goblet, set it down and sat silent a minute, gazing into the blood-dark darkness of the wine as though memories floated there; or foresha-dowings. Then, turning to him with a smile: "I think you are homesick too, for the north."
He made no reply, toying with the dish of prawns before him.
She laid down her fork and looked at him. "It is not hid from his serene highness nor from me," she said, leaning sideways over the arm of her great chair, a little nearer him, to speak more privately, "the weight of the charge we do lay on you three who now have the vogue here. To you yourself, albeit so many years set in government here in Meszria, the land's but a step-dance, and hard it is for you to contend against the jealousies that beset you."
The Admiral shook his head thoughtfully, then looked in the Queen's face. "Live and
let live. The only way."
"This late-discovered conspiracy against your own person, for example. We are not ignorant whence such mischiefs draw their sustainment."
"Nay," said the Admiral, lowering his eyes under her look, "if your highness aim at last week's chance, of this rakehelly dissembling scrub who, being brought to my presence, would a sticked me with a dagger, 'twas no conspiracy there. No great hand behind that."
"Judge you so indeed? I hope you are not miscast in your arithmetic."
"Only the private discontent of a certain lord who shall be nameless. We shall make friends with him too, ere long. Mean time, the instrument i' the attempt was took and hanged."
"Well, so far," said the Queen, "But you are to remember, my lord High Commissioner, there's hands behind hands in all these things. I that do, from long use, almost to the manner born know the ways of this land, would wish you have an eye to a person I bear ever in mind but will not name. Who (in your ear) may justly think a hath cause (not from you, but from your near friends)," here she cast a covert look, not unnoted by the Admiral, on Earl Roder, "to fear a knife or a Spanish fig from near about you."
"In humble honesty," said he slowly, after a pause, "I am troubled at your highness's gracious words. And the more, in a manner, that I take not their meaning."
Without looking at him, but speaking low beside his ear: "Come to me ere we depart tomorrow," she said, "and I'll speak more openly than here were convenient. I have observed in you three, whiles I have sojourned here, a strange carelessness touching ever-present threats to your proper safety, and these from a high quarter not ten miles from here I think you do least suspect. The King's highness would not for all sakes, as I would not, see aught ill befall you. Enough. Let's be merry. But," said she, looking past the King to Duke Barganax and quickly, as from some undecent sight, withdrawing her gaze to meet the troubled eyes of Jeronimy fixed questioningly upon her: "come to me tomorrow."
Madam Anthea, using that lingua franca which half-gods and nymphs have amongst themselves, but to human kind it is unlearnable and unintelligible, like the crackling of ice, or soughing of wind among leaves, or cat-talk or bird-talk or all voices else of wood and water and mountain solitudes, spoke saying: "She is ill at ease, behind all this outward talk, when she looks on my Lady."
"Will you think," said Campaspe, in the same safe tongue, 'it cometh her in mind of the nestling she spurned out of the nest for dead and you bore it hither to the southlands in your mouth; by her reckonings, twenty years ago?"
"You can read as well as I."
"But I cannot endure to look upon her. Or if I look, thought quite forsakes me. Lynx eyes are searchinger too, than water-rats'."
Anthea drew back her lips, in a stealth watching the Queen. Her left hand, slipping privily down from Campaspe's flower-soft waist, gave her a nip where least, may be, such liberties were looked for: made her shut together her knees with a little smothered scream. "She knows in her bones," Anthea said, "that 'tis here the very child of her body she looks upon. Which knowledge is wormwood to her, beholding in Her her own lost (nay, never had) youth as might have been; but she, of her own excess, fooled away the winning hand fortune and her father dealt her, and, having misplayed all, is left naked now and penniless, save for her hate against everyone. Seeth my Lady's beauty: the height, the might, and the glory of it, fed to its starriest with desire. Tasteth my Lady: almost even as he tasteth, beside whom much better men than yonder o'er-petted swaggering Styllis of hers should suffer eclipse, meteors beside the sun. And for that eclipse, and because of his blessed condition, as being love-drunk - from my Lady's nice teasing and wantoning and prouding of him up this morning - and as having (as I smell this Queen do foggily sense in their eye-casts and in the under-music of their voices tonight) the world, all worlds, all Olympus, in his having of Her: because of these things, she sits crammed with stinking hellebore. Mark you, my flindermouse:-we shall see the vomit ere supper well done."
So sped the time with eating and drinking, gross meats first and finer meats afterward, and with discourse grave and gay. Bekmar, cheered by good wine and by his exalted place at table, which was above both Chancellor and Earl (this as well for respect of his white hairs as out of policy, the Queen being present, to honour especially the ancient houses of Meszria), was full of instances and remembrances of forty or fifty years' standing: better banquets then in Sestola, when Kallias was King: not a woman let come into the hall here then, save the dancing-girls. As though the memory fanned dead embers within him, a kind of corpse-light stirred in his pale eyes. "Well," he said, "other times, other manners: King Haliartes put an end to those spectacles when he took kingdom in Zayana. 'Twas thought," he said mournfully, "that was by the Queen's setting on."
"In that," coldly said the Chancellor, "T have ever thought her highness showed herself more Meszrian than our own folk of those times, Meszrians by birth. 'Tis symptom of decay in a great people nursed in civility and high gifts of learning, when they begin to make so much vulgarness of mankind's noblest pleasure as to have their courtesans dance before them stript to the buff, and so glutton on all in public."
"I am an old man," Bekmar replied, "I account old things best."
"Measure is best, my lord: ruleth all in the end." The Chancellor, as if his own word spoken had minded him where his disquiet lay, turned his eyes, uneasy behind their mask of steely irony, on the King. In him, as he talked now with his son, burned (yet hotter and gayer than then, a year ago) that same recklessness and superfluity which, when he sent Beroald back and went on, alone with his self-sufficiency, into known instant peril of death at Middlemead, had outcountenanced the great lamp of heaven. The Lord Jeronimy, watching him, too, was remembered, like enough, of that all-mastering mood the King had set out in, rashly through mountainous seas in the dead of winter, to put down Akkama. And, soon as put down, had, against all prudence and human reason, set it up again.
As the waiting storm-gatherer should speak to the lightning pent up and struggling for birth, so spoke the King now to Rosma, under his breath: "Remember you my word. Do something. What, I care not, so it be your own."
She became ghastly white: then red again: then, slowly turning her eyes to meet his, lowered her gaze: answered slowly in a whisper: "Is it not a prayer commonly made to God; Tempt me not who am mortal?"
"But what God were that," replied the King deep and low, as it had been the houseless mockery of old Night speaking not in her ear but unescapably in her soul: "What God were that, that should hearken to any prayer of yours?"
The Queen put her hands under the table, in her lap, out of sight. She said, calm and equable again and with a gentleness in her voice: "Beseech you, dear Lord, spoil not this last night's pleasure for me in mine own land. Suffer me to have good memories to carry north. Torment me no more with riddles I can neither answer nor see the sense of. Remember, if you can, that I love you."
King Mezentius looked in her black eyes: almost a lover's look, with shadows of laughter in it but purged of all mockery: almost as a God should look, contented, upon the creature of His mind. With grave eyes she met it: then bent her head. In full view of that great company assembled, he kissed her on the forehead. "I have told him," he said to her, pointing, by a backward, sideways motion of his head, to Barganax, "that I am content with him. Content that he is learning to walk without me behind him to direct his steps. I find in him wisdom."
"I am glad," said she, her hands still beneath the table. "Forget, dear my Lord, what I mis-said, afore supper. I think I was sea-sick. In truth I know not what snappish devil drew out my tongue. There was no truth in it."
"I will forget it all, my Rosma. Have forgot already. Come, now: to make game: let's read thoughts, you and I. Begin with his," and he looked round upon Barganax, whose face was at this moment partly turned from them in courteous attention to Bekmar telling his tedious old dotterels' tales. "Where be his thoughts tonight, think you?"
The Queen looked too, this time
schooling herself not to look away: saw the Duke, while he listened, change a merry feasting glance with Fiorinda: answered, with a curl of her lip: "Upon Monte Nero."
Fruit was borne in now on golden dishes: peaches, dates, raisins of the sun, pomegranates, orange-apples of Zayana, and, in great bowls of gold, little wood-strawberries mixed with cream-cheeses and smothered in cream. The King spoke: "What sweet voice have we to sing to us, for crowning of the feast? Mistress Campaspe, will you do us that delight, if madam give you leave?"
My Lady Fiorinda, the imperial lazy echoes in whose voice trained on the all perfume-laden leavings of a breeze strayed from Paphos, answered and said: "Your serene highness's will, in little things as in great, is ours. And indeed I take a delicate pleasure to hear my gentlewoman sing."
"What song then? You shall choose it."
"By your serenity's gracious leave, I would have the Duke of Zayana be chooser for me tonight."
"Then sing us," said the Duke to Campaspe, but his eyes, darkly bright, were on her they belonged to, "that song of Deare love, for nothing lesse than thee. Be it mine to choose, I'll have none other tonight."
Campaspe, standing up in her place now like some little fieldish creature that is here and, whip, gone again in the twilight of nightfall or of dawn, but very lovely and sylph-like of posture in the faintly-moving upward glow of the candles, took her lute and began to sing. Light and immaterial was her singing as the last breath falling asleep with the falling shadows of a May evening without cloud. As the colour of red roses folding their petals as sunset ends, was the colour that softly mounted to her cheek while she sang:
