A faint flush rose to Salustra’s pale cheek. “I came, my lord, to ask thee if thou wouldst like to accompany me through places of interest in Lamora. We have many wonders here which may not as yet have gained fame in Althrustri: the Temple of Sati, the solar centers, the Temple Beautiful, the College of Total Knowledge.”
“Ah, the Temple Beautiful, the rejuvenation center.” He smiled. “Why dost thou not try its wonders on old Mahius?”
She laughed. “He had one such experience and wants no more.”
As Signar pressed her hand, an electric current seemed to pass between them. Their eyes held, and Salustra’s pulse quickened. He again bent and kissed her hand and then his lips traveled to hers and clung for a long moment.
Salustra quivered ecstatically. He must die! she told herself fiercely.
She must die! thought Signar glumly.
22
Tyrhia had just emerged from her bath and was a healthy rosy hue under the gently massaging hands of her slaves. Brittulia held up several robes for her approval and Tyrhia was so absorbed in a choice that she did not even look up as the Empress entered.
“Lazy maid!” said the Empress. “The sun hath reached its zenith, and thou art but rising.”
Tyrhia shrugged without answering. She cried out as the slave girl accidentally pulled one of her curls, and slapped the girl sharply. Salustra frowned, with a glance at Brittulia, who raised her eyebrows.
The Empress approached Brittulia and laid a kindly hand on her shoulder. Brittulia winced as though contaminated. Understanding, Salustra withdrew her hand. “How dost thou like the Palace, Brittulia?” she asked.
“It is as I expected, Majesty,” she answered quietly.
Salustra regarded her thoughtfully. “And dost thou wish to be relieved of thy position?”
Salustra’s face was pale and strained. She appeared drained. Pity is generally alien to the pure in body. But Brittulia for once was moved to compassion.
She caught the Empress’ hand impulsively and kissed it. “I am at thy command, Majesty,” she said, to her own amazement.
“Nay, it would please me if thou wouldst stay, but I put no command upon thee.” She turned to her sister. “Tyrhia, I am taking thy betrothed about the city. It is my wish that thou shouldst accompany us.”
As Tyrhia remained sullenly silent, Salustra recalled the girl’s mother, the treacherous and pretty Lahia, and it seemed to her that the second wife of Lazar stood before her again. She wondered, as she noted the girl’s expression, why the resemblance had not struck her before.
“I would rather remain here,” the girl pouted.
Salustra laughed mockingly. “What! Is not Signar agreeable to thee, little maid?”
“I am afraid of him!” cried Tyrhia. “His eye is unpleasant. Were I a slave girl, he could notice me no different. He is an animal.” She stamped her foot.
“Thou wilt have an animal for a mate then,” Salustra said dryly.
She decided that her sister would only be an impediment in her desire to impress Signar with the solid substance that was still Atlantis. “Ah, well, Tyrhia, if thou dost not care to come with us thou mayest remain here.”
Alone with Brittulia, Tyrhia began to weep with fury. When Brittulia attempted to console her, she pushed the older woman aside and resumed her toilet. When this was completed at last, she went into the gardens, accompanied by Brittulia and two slave girls. All the while, she maintained her sullen silence, walking slightly ahead of Brittulia, whom she was beginning to resent as an unwelcome encumbrance.
Suddenly Tyrhia paused, with a low cry. At a distance, before a sparkling fountain, Erato was sitting on a marble bench, pondering the dancing waters with an air of complete desolation. Tyrhia’s young breast rose and fell with a new emotion. She turned abruptly to Brittulia.
“Return thou with the slaves, Brittulia,” she said in a tense voice.
Brittulia hesitated. “I would rather remain with thee, lady. Thy sister might not like it.”
Tyrhia stamped her foot. “What! Darest thou disobey me, Brittulia?”
Brittulia lifted her hands in a gesture of surrender. She called the slaves and reluctantly returned to the Palace.
Tyrhia waited until they were well out of sight. Then, with a soft step, she approached the poet. He started to his feet as his eye fell upon her and bowed perfunctorily.
Tyrhia, smiling warmly, came close to him and laid her hand upon his arm. “Thou dost appear dejected, Erato,” she said softly.
“I am no longer, lady,” he answered with abstracted courtesy.
Tyrhia seated herself on the bench and motioned him to sit beside her. She saw that his face was pale and his eyes heavy, as though he had slept little. “What! Can it be that thou art in love, Erato?” she asked, not realizing the truth.
He smiled indulgently as one might smile at a lovable child. “Who knows, lady?” He studied her face, trying to find a trace of Salustra. Yes, in the movement of the head, in the curve of the throat, there was a suggestion of his beloved. He was heartsick enough to take solace in this resemblance, and his expression lightened.
“I, too, am in love,” said Tyrhia softly.
“Thou hast a mighty lover, lady,” he said gravely. “There is no greater figure than Signar.”
Tyrhia cried out pettishly, “I loathe him! He makes me think of a ravenous wolf, with his wicked eyes and avaricious mouth!”
Erato glanced about nervously.
“I would rather die than marry him,” continued Tyrhia warmly. “I would rather marry a slave than him. I shiver when he touches me.”
Because he loved Salustra, Erato was conscious of a sympathy for this lovely child. He took her hand and fondly kissed it.
Obsessed with her own passion, she was now convinced that Erato returned her feeling. “Why cannot Salustra marry him?” she murmured. “It is she that he desires. Do I not see it? He devours her with his eyes.”
Erato’s face darkened, and he dropped her hand, without Tyrhia for a moment suspecting the reason.
She laid her golden head upon his shoulder. “Erato, dost thou love me?” she whispered.
So warm and appealing was she that he impulsively put his arms about her, as he would have put his arms about a child. “I love thee,” she cried, her soft lips inviting his.
Erato’s arms fell from the girl, and a dull flush came to his cheek. “What art thou saying, girl?” he said in a shaken voice.
Tyrhia’s eyes widened. “I said, I love thee, Erato. Is that a revelation to thee? Didst thou not know it?”
Erato continued to gaze at her in a mystified manner. And then after a long moment, he smiled. “Sweet little maid,” he said gently, “thou dost not know the meaning of love. How canst thou love me?”
Her eyes flashed. “Fool!” she said with the imperiousness of Salustra. “I know not why I love thee. I only know that I do.”
Erato was easily touched. Deciding to deal gently with her, he put his arm about her and drew her to him. He was amused by the manner in which her arms stole about his neck, and the way the light beamed in her eyes. “And how could I help but love thee, Tyrhia?” he murmured, kissing the shining crown of her head, as he might have kissed a young and very dear sister. “Thou art as sweet and clean as the sunshine, and as radiant.”
She clung to him passionately, sobbing a little in joy. He gently kissed away her tears, sympathetic, but still amused at what he considered a passing inclination.
“And Salustra hath arranged all!” she cried furiously. “And I am to marry the barbarian. But thou wilt rescue me, wilt thou not, Erato?”
“And how can I do that, dear one? To where should I take thee? Dimtri? Alas, the lions of Atlantis would devour my little country in one mouthful. But canst thou not persuade the Empress to relieve thee of an odious union?”
Tyrhia’s small face hardened, and at that moment Erato saw a clear resemblance to the sister he loved. “She is fire and ice,” said the girl bitterly. “S
he would only laugh me into silence.” She turned to Erato imploringly. “But is there no place to which we might flee and be in peace?”
Still humoring her, Erato shook his head. “I fear not, sweet Tyrhia. Both Salustra and Signar would be upon us. Thy only hope is to ask the Empress for a reprieve.”
“She will not free me! I know it. But hark, here cometh that frozen Brittulia.” She surveyed the approaching woman in sulky silence.
Erato rose to depart, seeing that Brittulia was regarding him with displeasure. Tyria ardently pressed his hand and whispered in his ear.
What a child! he thought. And yet she is very comely, and not so much younger than I.
23
“Vice is merely an excess of good,” said Salustra to Signar, as they began their tour of the Temple of Sati. “Man is intemperate; he carried good to excess, making it evil, and then mistakes good for evil, and attempts to crush the original good in the name of righteousness. Behold, Signar, the temple of righteousness, or distorted good.”
“We have naught in Althrustri to compare with this,” said Signar, looking about the vast hall, with its walls and ceilings of solid gold crusted with rubies and pearls.
“My father lavished the ransom of an empire on this temple,” said Salustra. “He knew that worship springs involuntarily in the human soul, and he gave the setting a magnificent materiality the worshippers would appreciate.”
They spoke in undertones, but the echoes reverberated over their voices. As they moved to the altar, they stood in a pool of yellow light that fell from the eternal flame. Salustra lifted her eyes, and her face grew somber. In that instant she remembered the inseparable gulf between them.
“Thou art weary, Majesty?” he asked, with a show of concern.
“Nay, I am never weary,” she replied, toying with her necklace. She attempted to disengage her hand, but he carried it to his lips.
“The great Sati was never so fair as thee, Salustra,” he said softly.
“I have misunderstood Althrustri. Apparently, pretty speeches are not unknown there.”
“We speak the truth between friends,” he said with sudden gravity. “Perhaps that is a virtue unknown in Atlantis?”
“Truth should be used with discretion,” she said. “But it is not unknown in Atlantis.” Anger touched her face like a flame. “And Atlantis is not as low as her enemies would believe.”
A heavy silence fell between them.
I love her! thought Signar. And so she must not die!
Thought Salustra, I love him! But he must die, or else…
She turned calmly and motioned with a shapely hand. “Here, my lord, is our famous College of Total Knowledge. Here, in this temple dedicated to speculation, the philosophers wage war on the vague battleground of the intellect. Here Talius, the sickly exponent of virility, hatred, strength and courage, preaches his doctrine that equality is the watchword of the democrat and that man should cultivate his inherent ruthlessness. Here Morti, the gay cynic, declares that of one thing only can we be sure: that we know nothing. Here Yonis declares that the ultimate happiness of man depends on natural simplicity and a return to nature, and that man is inherently good and merely acquires evil; Zetan expounds his theory of the great pantheism, that God and the universe and man are one, all moving together toward some yet unknown goal. Here Lodiso evolves his dreams of some ideal state, wherein all individuals will be coordinating wheels, turning smoothly together for the common good. We have them all, these parasitic spinners of fantastic dreams, these shadows dreaming of shadows in their shadowy chambers.”
“Thou hast little respect for philosophy, I see,” said Signar, smiling.
Salustra shrugged. “Thought is the death knell of action. However, I admire Talius, though I disagree that man is enervated by excessive virtue. I can laugh with Morti, who laughs at everything, including himself and me. At times, when I am depressed, I enjoy Zetan. He almost makes me believe that my soul is immortal; he props up my languishing ego with pillars of spiritual strength. I love to argue with Lodiso and crush the fragile fantasy of his ideal state with the hammer of fact. Yonis infuriates me with his enthusiastic simplicity. He tries to convince me that man is born good, when I know that he is born neither good nor evil.”
She gave him a look of friendly inquiry. “Thou hast few philosophers in Althrustri?” she said.
“True,” rejoined the Emperor. “We set them to work.”
Salustra laughed. “As thought kills actions, so action kills thought.” They entered a tremendous chamber, where, on a raised dais, the philosopher Zetan was eagerly expounding his doctrine of infinite oneness. The pupils, dozens of youths and maidens in white robes, rose as the Empress entered.
“When I was very young, my father brought me to these philosophers. My father had a low opinion of feminine intelligence, but he would say that I had the active brain of a man in the body of a woman. For some reason, he considered that the highest flattery!”
“I prefer action,” said Signar, “as the best cure for melancholy.”
“This is Zetan, my lord,” said Salustra smilingly. “His doctrine is a triumph of hope over evidence.” She pointed to a tall, dark man with a wen on his nose.
Zetan was mildly affronted. “Nay,” he retorted quickly. “It is a triumph of knowledge over materialism, Majesty.”
Signar glanced carelessly at the youths and maidens. All had sensitive, expressive faces, and the magic of unfulfilled dreams in their eyes.
“All philosophers claim to hold the precious jewel of truth in their hands,” he said. “Look sharp. You will find that the radiant gem is but a piece of glass, after all.”
Zetan’s smile was gently dissenting. “It is not ours to conjecture whether the goal is worth the effort, or to decide the issue,” he said. “However, whatever we so desire, we must flow toward the goal. God is in us, and we are in God. He is closer than our hearts, and as far from us as the farthest-flung star. We are neither here nor there; we are one with Him in His Creation. Time and space are mere illusions, mere phenomena. For there is only one God, and naught else. God and matter are one entity, not yet perfect. It is God’s effort toward ultimate perfection that causes such vast upheavals in nature, and in the affairs of men. He tries an experiment with us. We are imperfect and so it fails; and so he erases it, and us with it.”
“And when perfection is reached, what then?” asked Signar, smiling. “How unutterably dull! Imperfection, continual experiment, failure. These all add zest to life. The uncertainty is the joy in the chase. When passionless perfection is reached, this God Himself must expire in sheer boredom.”
Zetan’s eyes were tremendous, full of a liquid brilliance and ennobling thought. There was nothing of the zealot in his face, only benignness and an amused indulgence. Signar, though disagreeing, found himself offering his hand to the philosopher.
“Jupia, my High Priestess, loathes Zetan,” said Salustra in an aside. “He is stealing her votaries from her. She preaches darkness and superstition, intolerance, hatred and fear. He preaches light and knowledge, tolerance, love and courage.” She shook her head at Zetan banteringly. “I am afraid that thou art doomed, Zetan. The hosts of darkness are always in the majority.”
They next visited Talius, the exponent of triumphant courage, cruelty, ruthlessness, strength and virility. He, too, was an unprepossessing and feeble man. His voice was gentle like a woman’s, yet the words cut like steel.
“We admire in others what we lack in ourselves,” observed Signar in a whisper to the Empress.
“He confuses virility with cruelty,” she replied in a low voice.
Signar found in Talius one great virtue, an almost insane loathing of mediocrity.
“We are producing no great men in this age, Sire,” said the philosopher wearily. “We have submerged individualism beneath a doughy mediocrity. We have leveled the mountains of thought, and a vast barren plain stretches about us. Greatness flourishes only in a reign of individualism; collecti
vism forces the great to sink to the level of the mass. We have preached for generations: the greatest good for the greatest number. The greatest number are beasts, yet we have compelled the great to grovel with the beasts and mediocrity has become our national anthem. We call the mediocre great, and the great, madmen. We have killed beauty and radiant originality, and are well pleased. If we but realized our offense, there would be hope. But instead we consider that we are virtuous, and that we have accomplished a worthy end.”
Signar laughed. “Theoretically, I agree with thee, Talius, but I would not wish such doctrines to be taught in Althrustri. It would make it very hard for us kings, priests and statesmen, exploiters of our fellowmen!”
“A dangerous man!” he said to Salustra as they walked away. “I wonder that thou hast allowed him to preach his revolutionary doctrine right in the shadow of thy Palace.”
Salustra shrugged. “Causes grow by persecution. I have disarmed him and made him harmless by giving him freedom of speech and a place in my College of Total Knowledge.”
“Still, much that he said was true,” said Signar. “Yon philosopher is too close to the truth for my comfort. For were all men individually great, there would be no mass conformity, and that would dispose of us.”
“And are we so necessary, we self-perpetuating Emperors?” said Salustra.
In the next classroom, the gay cynic, Morti, was lecturing his class, a smiling group of amiable, cultivated young men with somewhat dissipated faces.
“We print the foolish mouthings of absurd men,” he said to the class, “and, gazing on the printed word, call it God. We think by compulsory education to free the average man from the darkness of illiteracy and ignorance. We think to free him from his cunning exploiters, so he would be able to think for himself. But we have discovered the fallacy. He cannot think. We have only given him the ability to read the writings of fools such as himself. And a multiplication of fools is no better than one fool. Just as zero times zero adds nothing to zero. The exploiters once could only reach the illiterate directly, a slow and tedious task. Now, thanks to education and the printed word, they are able to seduce the millions, where once they were only able to seduce hundreds.”
The Romance of Atlantis Page 15
