by E R Eddison
Deare love, for nothing lesse than thee
Would I have broke this happy dreame,
It was a theame
For reason, much too strong for phantasie.
Therefore thou wakd'st me wisely; yet
My Dreame thou brok'st not, but continued'st it,
Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreames truths; and fables histories;
Enter these armes, for since thou thought'st it best,
Not to dreame all my dreame, let's act the rest.
As lightning, or a
Tapers light, Thine eyes and not thy noise wak'd mee;
Yet I thought thee
(For thou lovest truth) an Angell, at first sight,
But when I saw thou sawest my heart,
And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an Angels art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
Excesse of joy would wake me, and cam'st then,
I must confesse, it could not chuse but bee
Prophane, to thinke thee any thing but thee.
Comming and staying show'd thee, thee,
But rising makes me doubt, that now,
Thou art not thou.
That love is weake, where feare's as strong as hee;
'Tis not all spirit, pure, and brave,
If mixture it of Feare, Shame, Honor, have.
Perchance as torches which must ready bee,
Men light and put out, so thou deal'st with mee,.
Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come;
Then I
Will dreame that hope againe, but else would die.
There was no sound besides in that great hall while she sang. Eyes for the most part, rested not on the singer but on the lights, or in high dusky spaces beyond those lights, where nought was to see but moth-winged memories or wishes, conjured up in myriads by that unworldly singing: moments uncatchable as the beetle's droning on the air at the half-light, or as dart of a fieldmouse amid tufted grass: now here, now gone: lift of skirt above a known ankle, comfort of known hand, rustle of silks under the promise-laden starriness of a summer's night, or sound of a known breath taken gently in sleep: for each listener his own, her own. And each several one of these innumerable, infinitely little, treasures of hearts' desire, in this coming and departing and changing as smoke-wreaths change or eddies in water, seemed yet, at every come and go, contented: save perhaps for a fear, abysmal under all, lest such deep-contenting changes should, by some mischieving power beyond them, ever have end. The Duke, listening, had eyes for none of these shadows: only for Her, in whom all that beauty comes home.
She, listening, was leant now a little forward over her table, her right hand propping her chin. Her left arm rested in a largesse of lazy grace across the table sideways, its hand playing with her untasted goblet of golden wine, and on its ring-finger the great eye-refecting alexandrite-stone that changes colour from light to light, of Barganax's ring winking and blazing. Very still was her face: the sheen on her hair a tremble of stars on black sea at midnight. The low-cut bosom of her dress partly gave forth to view, as she so leaned forward, globed twin moons, plenilune at half eclipse, lovelier in their high Grecian pride than the moon of heaven, and holding in their warmed interspace (by patent of every Olympian untamed contour in her countenance above them) all sweets, all stings, all terrors, sense-furying over-weenings, doves, fire-worms, blindings, mandragoras, velvet-sheathed claws, lionesses' teeth: all beguilings: all incorruptibles: all keepings and waterings, returnings and reconcilements, performance and renewal of strength: all raging powers, from everlasting, of beauty and passion of love. And, for seeing eyes to see, between Her brows was the morning star.
Her gaze was, for this while, not upon Her lover but upon the great King, and His on Hers: an eye-parley swift beyond stretch of mortal sense, as though, accommodating Their large leisure to a brief moment of time, as the wide landscape and vault of the sky will lie mirrored in a dewdrop, God should speak with God. As if He should say: Daughter and Sister and Mother and Lover of Mine: Kythereia, brought up with Me from everlasting in the beginning of My way before My works of old: what is this You have done, almost a year ago? Why did you beguile Me to make You that false world?
And awful, gold-crowned, beautiful Aphrodite, answered and said: Because it flattered My mood that night. But I changed My mind. Give it not a thought, My Father. It is abolished: forgot: no, lost beyond forgetting: for how forget what never indeed existed?
He said: It is not the thing create was the mischief, but My creating of it. In that creation I came to know what theretofore I had blessedly (here at least, where to be is to do) not known. What profit to be Me, when action and the springs and issues of action, in Me, in You, in this wide world We live in, are tainted: known and foreknown to last tittle? This world, this heavenly mansion, is wasted and spoilt.
She said: Not for Me. I am well served. For I (through You, there where, in what I begin to think a more wiser dress of Yours, You do sit at Your own right hand) still find this true world a world apt to My nature. And to Yours.
The "Why?" in his eyes was a doubt more freezing cold than the grave.
She said, to answer it: Because, I suppose, I can be content to embrace this world's all: can contemplate all; desire all; possess and receive into My being, all; and see that it is good. For I (even when I pleasure Myself to behold Myself in the mirror of My Lover's eyes, and so behold that which is without spot, without bridle, and without bourne) do still, in that all-seeing, limit Me to perfection: to the perfect sum of all perfects which in Me do have their eternity. I limit Me so to All which Is. Eschewing so (through Our common wisdom, which do not You and I possess from the beginning?) that More than all: which is Not; and which (seeing that all which Is, is Good; and all which is Good, Is) is therefore Not Good.
He said: But We went down, into that misconceived misfortuned world of Your passing fantasy. For a moment. To know.
She said: For a life-time's moment. Yes. It was enough.
He said: Since that night in Memison when first I tasted Mine own infinite power: since that unchaining then in Me of this unextinguishable lust of knowing: "enough" is become to Me a noise without meaning.
She said: Our Father which watchest out of Ida, most glorious, most great, what is this You have spoken? A dangerous saying; and not Your own, I think. Certainly not Mine. What turn next, then?
He said: My creation-old instrument, Death. She said: No more than so? O, You have turned up the lights again. Your talk had put a strange thing in Me I could not give a name to, without it were Fear.
He said: Be You not too certain sure. This lust that devours Me, of knowing and doing, burns fiercelier than can be put out with what mortals call Death. I could, before, by that common gate, cross Lethe: even as have not I and You, tune unto time and without time, crossing it drunk oblivion? And so, with Our mind as a white paper unwritten, have refreshed Us for life and action in new mansions of this Olympus. In which are many mansions. But what soul-heal is there in that, to redeem this all-knowing knowing? Whereby they are all, here and now, present to Me already: as good go here as there, do this as that: alike it is idleness and vanity.
She said: Do not I, O My Father and My Lover, know them too? Yet there is in My knowing, no stain of this fever, of this unpeace.
He said: Who knoweth better than I, that You know All? But You are of so blest a nature as can be content to know and look on: enjoy, and not meddle: be adored, be had, rest in Your peace: the peace of that which is All, and Enough. But I, by some necessity of My nature, will to go further.
The song had ended. In the moment's silence, while folk yet sat 'held with the passion of it and the language and the vision, King Mezentius looked still (as Barganax too looked, but he, for his comfort, with a gaze that sounded not, as his Father's, the uttermost deeps) on that Dark Lady.
In the sea-fire eyes of laughter-loving Aphrodite, grown gentler now than a dov
e's eyes, seeming now to the King to be Amalie's eyes new-unmaidened in Acrozayana five and twenty years ago, but to Barganax Fiorinda's, knowledge sat, detached, tolerant, and merciful; and, by reason of its reach beyond infinitude, begat in the secret places behind the all-wielding all-seeing eyes of the King, infinite pity. Pity for Rosma, who could hate well, but not truly love: for Roder, sitting there, a man of common clay destined within a year or two for a bad end: for Styllis, foredoomed, of his rashness and stiff-necked arrogance, never to seize and hold the shining moment to be given him: for the Admiral, good faithful dog whose loyalties and self-misdoubting irresolution in action must yet withhold him from detachment alike and peace of mind; for Beroald, blinded by his own sceptic humours and intellectual ironies to the inmost natures both of Her, his sister in blood, and of the King, his master: for Heterasmene, left now with but memories of her governesship to warm her commonplace marriage: for Emmius Parry, whose greatness could as little reck of other men's pity as waste his on them: for the great Vicar of Rerek himself, not because of any warring or unhappiness in his self-perfect nature (where there was neither), but because, whereas the King and She understand from within by very feeling what it were to be this man, who all his life must, but for the master-hand upon him, have mischieved all middle earth, yet should the Vicar never understand and contain Their loves as They in a manner do his: pity for the nothings, rests and pauses and unresolved discords necessary in the symphony of this brave world, as for Fiorinda's ill-starred unsufficient husbands, as well for Valero, for Aktor, for the tragic nothings of Middlemead: for His Amalie, who must tonight be widowed and left to her motherhood and her Memisonian peace: for Queen Stateira, now to lose (except in memory) her very motherhood, and with no memories of true love and perfect, only of Mardanus's perfunctory transient love, and of her own restless, consuming, never wholly satisfied passion for Aktor: for Vandermast, albeit a contemplative that walked with God, yet exiled (unless through kindly sympathy and back-returns of the mind) from the joys and fevers of youth: for Antiope, fated, as the rock-rose's queenly blossom, to a tragic ephemeral perfection and tragic death: for Barganax even, and Lessingham, because of the limitations of their beings, not to be wholly Himself: for these nymphkind, dwelling in the superficies and so coming short of Godhead: for every man, woman, child, and living creature in Zimiamvia, because instruments, means, and ingredients to His and Her perfection in action and beatitude: even for Her, as to all eternity unable to be, were it but for a moment, He. Last, pity for that which sat conscient in Her eyes: for His love and Hers, troubled now for sake of God Himself, that He should be choked with His own omniscience and omnipotence here terribly loosed in self-emptying collision within Him: for sake of His loneliness, here where should be His home: that here, through dull privation of that doubt which alone can bring zest to omnipotency in action, He, knowing overmuch, fails of his way.
And, darkly unspoken in that commerce of eyes, a horror moved; horror not of the unknown, but of the unknowable, the impossible, the unconceivable.
King Mezentius gave command now (for ending of the revels) to bring in the Cup of Memory. A great goblet it was, of rock-crystal, egg-shaped, resting in the grasp of three feet upraised to corftain between them the belly of it: feet of pure gold, one in the likeness of the pounces and talon of an eagle, another a lion's paw with claws ex-pansed, and the third a hippogriff's hoof, all rising from a nine-sided base of hammered gold bossed with rubies and chrysoprases and hyacinth-stones and pearls. This, being brought in, went round, first at the lowest tables and so in order upwards, until every person in the body of the hall below the dais had drunk of it, each a sip. And each in turn, having drunk bowed low toward the King. The cup-bearer now, brimming it anew with ruby-dark wine of the Rian, bore it to Earl Roder, who, as captain of the guard, tasted it and with bis own hand bore it to King Mezentius. Upon that, all the company below the dais stood up in their places, while the Earl returned him to his chair of state. The King, raising the cup, looked into the wine against the light, savoured it with his nostrils, and so, looking towards the company, drank deep: then said in a great voice, for all in that great banquet-chamber to hear: " 'Tis time to say goodnight. Rest well, my friends. Our banquet is sweetly ended." Upon which word all, save only the company on the dais, bowed low toward the King and so, with that for goodnight, departed. The King meanwhile, wiping the lip of the cup with his handkercher, set it down, yet three parts full, upon the Queen's table before her.
She, for her turn, lifted it in both hands: drank (as next in order of nobility) to Duke Barganax: wiped, and reached across the King's table on her right, to have passed it to the Duke. But the King, intercepting it, said lightly, "Nay, I will break custom tonight. For good luck, since these be farewell revels, I'll pledge him too."
Rosma laid a hand on his arm. "Pray you, dear my Lord," she said, smiling, but her face suddenly gone grey as ashes: "that bringeth bad luck, not good, to drink twice ere the cup be gone round."
King Mezentius but shifted the cup from his left hand to his right. "Fear nothing, madam. Luck, long as I remember me, hath been my servant still. I'll go my gait, as in great things so here in little, and spite all omens."
His eyes, while he so spoke, were met with my Lady Fiorinda's, chilling as snakes' eyes now or as stones a-glitter with heatless green fire, and saying to Him: What terrible unlawful unimagined lust is this? You are putting Us, both You and Me, and all that proceedeth from Us (or hath, or shall proceed) into deadly danger. Whither do You mean to go? What do You mean to do?
He was at the point to drink. Rosma made a movement so slight as none but his own most eagle eyes might note it, as if ready, in the open sight of the court, to have knocked the cup from his lips; but his great left hand shut, gentle but unresistable, upon her hand, pinning it to the table. He set down the goblet once more, out of her reach. "Let's finish the evening in private. Earl, clear the hall. Let the maids and the music be gone. Set guards without all the doors, and to keep folk from the portico."
While this was doing, those lords of Meszria and the Lady Heterasmene, in obedience to eye-signs from the King and Queen, bade goodnight, took their leaves, and departed. They being gone, Rosma said to the King: "Lord, I beseech you, for all sakes' sakes, bear with my foolish fears. 'Tis the one boon I ask of you tonight and surely 'tis a light nothing for you to grant. There's a curse in a twice-drunk Memory-Cup. However silly I seem, to take a small matter too heavily, O, tempt no fates tonight. For my sake, Lord. And if not for mine," she checked: then finished, looking at Barganax, "for his."
It was grown very close in the hall now, for all that the windows stood open. The long-gathering storm began: a great flash in dry sultry air, near overhead, and deafening peals of thunder: then pitch darkness without, as the thunder rolled away to silence. Barganax looked swiftly from Rosma to the King: from him to Fiorinda, sitting motionless as Aphrodite's statua: so to the King again. "Lord and Father," he said, "pray you drink it not. The Queen's highness feareth some practice, I think. 'Twere well send for fresh wine. Let this be ta'en away and examined"; and he took hold on the goblet.
"Lay off your hand," said the King, "I command you,"
Barganax met his eyes: seemed to hover an instant betwixt unclear contrarious duties: then obeyed. He sat back, eyes flaming, face red as blood. Bringing his fist down upon the table before him with a blow set the plates a-leap and a-clatter, "Yet would I give my dukedom," he said violently, "that your serene highness taste not this again."
"I do not care whether you would or no. But you, as all man else i' the kingdoms, shall do my bidding." So saying, the King, taking the great goblet betwixt his hands and looking down into the wine, swirled it about: a whirlpool in little. Presently, laughing in his black beard, "Moonshine in water," he said to the Duke. "Have not she and I drunken o' this same pottle already? Were aught amiss with 't, we were both of us sped ere now."
Queen Rosma said, and her voice shook: "Nay then, myself, I do seem
now to find, I know not what, but an after-taste in it: something sluggish in its working, may be. By heavens," she said suddenly, "I accuse this Roder. A meant it for Lord Barganax."
The Earl stared at her like a startled bull.
"Come," said the King, "this is fits of the mother. A most strange, most unmerited, brainless accusation against a true, tried servant of ours;" he said, with a glance at Roder, whose eyes were now boiling out of his face: then turned him once more to Rosma. "No more fooleries. A curse in a twice-drunk cup? You are much mistook, madam. This, I pledge you my kingly word for 't, is nectar." While she sat unpowered to move or speak under the tyranny of his eyes upon her, he drank. "To your deepest wishes, my Rosma. Which have, e'en at such times as least you dreamed it, galloped in harness with mine."
He wiped the brim: set the half-empty cup on his table within her reach: then, Ms eyes meaningly and steadfastly on hers but without all note of menace or blame or resentment in them, held his handkercher to the candleflame. Being well alight, he dropped it to burn out on the table-top: of panteron stone, in some part black, in other part green, in other part purple, which is said to bolden a man, and make him invincible. The Queen, those words echoing in her ears, those things done before her eyes, that understanding in the King's eyes upon her, sat stone still.
At last, sweeping her gaze round upon Barganax, Beroald, Fiorinda, Roder, Jeronimy, to end upon the King again, "Yes. Well," she said, "it is true. It is nectar": then thrust aside her table, rose to her feet and, facing him, seized the cup. "But I meant it for that whoreson, that calletn himself Duke of Zayana." Standing so before them, she drained it, no trickle left: turned again with a hideous cry: fell with a crash in the half-moon space before the tables, without a struggle, stone dead.
Barganax spoke silence: "God's precious Lady be thanked then, your highness swallowed it not."
