The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith
Page 24
I have come post-haste.
Smaragad:
Well, what about her? Why
Have you left her? Is she alone?
Baltea:
She’s not alone
But has for company a nameless thing
Vomited forth by death.
Smaragad (half-starting from his seat):
What’s all this coil?
A nameless thing, you say? There’s nothing nameless.
I’d have a word for what has sent you here,
Panting, with undone hair.
Baltea:
Well, then ’tis Galeor.
Smaragad:
Hell’s privy-fumes!
He’s cooling underground, if my grave-diggers
Shirked not their office.
Baltea:
And yet he has returned
To visit Queen Somelis, with dark stains
Of earth upon his brow, and goblin torches
Lighting his torrid gaze.
Smaragad (standing up):
Tell me about it,
Though I cannot believe you. Though he be
Quick or dead, by Thasaidon’s dark horns
What does he in the chamber of the queen?
Baltea:
I wot not how he came nor why. But she
Was parleying with him, speaking gentle words
When I ran forth to seek you.
Smaragad:
Sargo, Boranga, hear you this? Attend me,
And we’ll inquire into this nightmare’s nest
And find what’s at the bottom. (He starts toward the door, followed by the others.) By all the plagues
Afflicting the five senses, there’s too much
That stinks amid these walls tonight…. Where were
The guards? I’ll prune their ears with a blunt sickle
And douche their eyes with boiling camel-stale
For such delinquency as lets
Goblin or man or lich go by them.
(Curtain)
SCENE VI
The hall before Somelis’ bed-chamber. Enter Smaragad, Sargo, Boranga and Baltea, followed by two chamberlains. Smaragad tries the queen’s door. Finding that it will not open, he beats upon it with the hilt of his drawn sword, but without response.
Smaragad:
Who has barred this door? Was it the queen? I vow
That she shall never close another door
When this is broken down. I’ll bolt the next one for her,
And it will be the tomb’s. Boranga, Sargo,
Give here your shoulders, side by side with mine. (All three apply their weight to the door but cannot budge it. Sargo, more intoxicated than the others, loses his balance and falls. Boranga helps him to his feet.)
Truly, my stout forefathers built this palace
And all its portals to withstand a siege.
Boranga:
There are siege-engines in the arsenal,
Great rams, that have thrown down broad-builded towers
And torn the gates of cities from their hinges.
With your permission, Sire, I’ll call for one
Together with men to wield it.
Smaragad:
I’ll not have
A legion here to witness what lies couched
In the queen’s chamber. Nor am I accustomed
To beat on closen doors that open not.
In all my kingdom, or in Thasaidon’s
Deep tortuous maze of torments multi-circled,
There is no darker gulf than this shut room
Which reason cannot fathom, being shunted
From the blank walls to madness.
Sargo:
Your Majesty,
If this indeed be Galeor, it smells
Of Natanasna, who has called up others
From tomb or trench, inspiriting with demons
Malign or lewd their corpses. There’ll be need
Of exorcism. I would have the priests
Brought in, and rites performed.
Smaragad:
I hardly doubt
That the curst necromancer is the getter
Of this graveyard fetus. But I will not have it
Either your way or Boranga’s. (Turning to the chamberlains) Bring to me
Fagots of pitch-veined terebinth, and naphtha.
Boranga:
Sire, what is your purpose?
Smaragad:
You will see full soon.
Baltea:
Your Majesty, bethink you, there are windows
To which armed men could climb by ladders, finding
Ingress to the queen’s room. It may be she’s
In peril from this intruder, who had about him
The air of an incubus.
Smaragad:
Truly, I think
That he is no intruder to the queen
Who has barred these portals. Nor am I a thief
To enter in by a window.
(The chamberlains return, bearing armfuls of fagots and jars of oil.)
Pile the wood
Before the door, and drench it with the naphtha. (The chamberlains obey. Smaragad seizes a cresset from one of the sconces along the hall, and applies it to the fagots. Flames leap up immediately and lick the cedarn door.)
I’ll warm the bed of this black lechery
That lairs within my walls.
Boranga:
Have you gone mad?
You’ll fire the palace!
Smaragad:
Fire’s the one pure thing
To cleanse it. And for fuel we lack only
The necromancer and his swart catamite.
(The fire spreads quickly to the curtains of the hallway, from which flaming patches begin to fall. Baltea and the chamberlains flee. A section of the burning arras descends upon Sargo. He reels, and falls. Unable to rise, he crawl away, screaming, with his raiment ignited. A loosened splotch sets fire to the king’s mantle. He flings the garment from him with an agile gesture. The flames eat steadily into the door, and assail its heavy wooden framework. The heat and smoke compel Boranga and Smaragad to stand back.)
Boranga:
Your Majesty, the palace burns about us.
There’s little time for our escape.
Smaragad:
You tell me
A thing that’s patent. Ah! the goodly flames!
They will lay bare the secret of this chamber
Whose mystery maddens me…. And at the last
There will be only ashes
For the summoning of any sorcerer.
Boranga:
Sire, we must go.
Smaragad: Be still. It is too late for any words,
And only deeds remain.
(After some minutes the charred door collapses inward with its red-hot bars, Boranga seizes the king’s arm and tries to drag him away. Smaragad wrenches himself loose and beats at Boranga with the flat of his sword.)
Leave me, Boranga.
I’ll go and carve the lechers while they roast
Into small collops for the ghouls to eat.
(Brandishing his sword, he leaps over the fallen door into the flaming chamber beyond.)
(Curtain)
THE HASHISH-EATER; OR,
THE APOCALYPSE OF EVIL
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-coloured sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment, when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.
Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,
The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,
By jealous moons maleficently urged
To follow me forever; mountains horned
With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed
With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,
Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;
/> And continents of serpent-shapen trees,
With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,
Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire
By that supreme ascendance. Sorcerers,
And evil kings predominantly armed
With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin, whereon
Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,
Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,
With foam-light songs from silver fragrance wrought,
Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons
Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,
With antic gnomes abominably wise,
Heave up their icy horns across my way:
But naught deters me from the goal ordained
By suns, and aeons, and immortal wars,
And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name
Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs,
By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ
For ending of a brazen book; the goal
Whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand,
In amplest heavens multiplied to hold
My hordes of thunder-vested avatars,
And Promethèan armies of my thought,
That brandish claspèd levins. There I call
My memories, intolerably clad
In light the peaks of paradise may wear,
And lead the Armageddon of my dreams,
Whose instant shout of triumph is become
Immensity’s own music: For their feet
Are founded on innumerable worlds,
Remote in alien epochs, and their arms
Upraised, are columns potent to exalt
With ease ineffable the countless thrones
Of all the gods that are and gods to be,
And bear the seats of Asmadai and Set
Above the seventh paradise.
Supreme
In culminant omniscience manifold,
And served by senses multitudinous,
Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,
With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields
Of utter night and chaos, I convoke
The Babel of their visions, and attend
At once their myriad witness: I behold,
In Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell,
With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat,
The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug
Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list,
Too late, the clang of adamantine gongs,
Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet
Have felt the wasp-like sting of little knives,
Embrued with slobber of the basilisk,
Or juice of wounded upas. And I see,
In gardens of a crimson-litten world
The sacred flow’r with lips of purple flesh,
And silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes
Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests
At moonless eve in terror seek to slay,
With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood
That hide a hueless poison. And I read,
Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,
The annuling word a spiteful demon wrote
With gall of slain chimeras; and I know
What pentacles the lunar wizards use,
That once allured the gulf-returning roc,
With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause
Midmost an alabaster mount; and there,
With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’-gut,
Uplift by cranes a captive giant built,
They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird,
And plucked, from off his sabre-taloned feet,
Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood,
With amethysts from Mars. I lean to read,
With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,
The monstrous archives of a war that ran
Through wasted aeons, and the prophecy
Of wars renewed, that shall commemorate
Some enmity of wivern-headed kings,
Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms
Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,
That bloat within the craters of the moon,
And in one still, selenic hour have shrunk
To pools of slime and fetor; and I know
What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown,
Are proffered in Uranus to their gods
By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed
Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate,
Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor,
Took root between the burnished flags, and now
Hath mounted, and become a hellish tree,
Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths,
Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne,
And strain at starting pillars. I behold
The slowly-thronging corals, that usurp
Some harbour of a million-masted sea,
And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold—
Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed
And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns
The octiremes of perished emperors,
And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed
From a sea-deserted haven.
Swifter grow
The visions: Now a mighty city looms,
Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar,
To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged
With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned
In shifting erubescence. But whose hands
Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought
To semblance of prodigious blooms of old,
No eremite hath lingered there to say,
And no man comes to learn: For long ago
A prophet came, warning its timid king
Against the plague of lichens that had crept
Across subverted empires, and the sand
Of wastes that Cyclopean mountains ward;
Which, slow and ineluctable, would come,
To take his fiery bastions and his fanes,
And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now
I see a host of naked giants, armed
With horns of behemoth and unicorn,
Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells
Of hostile wizardry, and stagger on
To forests where the very leaves have eyes,
And ebonies, like wrathful dragons roar
To teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom;
Where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs,
From writhing palms with swollen boles that moan;
Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked
The eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled
To bask upon his azure-spotted spine;
Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing,
Or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew,
Whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then,
I watch a war of pygmies, met by night,
With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide,
On plains with no horizon, where a god
Might lose his way for centuries; and there,
In wreathèd light, and fulgors all convolved,
A rout of green, enormous moons ascend,
With rays that like a shivering venom run
On inch-long swords of lizard-fang.
Surveyed
From this my throne, as from a central sun,
The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;
Forgotten splendours, dream by dream unfold,
Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,
Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring
Their rays about me, like the coloured lights
Imploring priests might lift to glorify
The face of some averted god; the songs
Of mystic poets in a purple world,
Ascend to me in music that is made
From unconceivèd perfumes, and the pulse
Of love ineffable; the lute-players
Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon,
Call forth delicious languors, never known
Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers
Of hooded stars inscrutable to God,
Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls,
Inscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies
And awful transformations.
If I will,
I am at once the vision and the seer,
And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,
And still abide their suzerain: I am
The neophyte who serves a nameless god,
Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos
Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear,
Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am
The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds
Into the nave where suns might congregate,
And veils the darkling mountain of his face
With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests
Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems—
Opals that are a camel-cumbering load,
And monstrous alabraundines, won from war
With realms of hostile serpents; which arise,
Combustible, in vapours many-hued,
And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I,
The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand
The helm of some great barge of chrysolite,
Sailing upon an amethystine sea
To isles of timeless summer: For the snows
Of hyperborean winter, and their winds,
Sleep in his jewel-builded capital,
Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry,
Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he flees,
With captive kings to urge his serried oars,
Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn
Hath never left the faintly sighing lote
And fields of lisping moly. Or I fare
Impanoplied with azure diamond,
As hero of a quest Achernar lights,
To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames,
That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar
To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap