The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  It was as if he had not heard her. The grip of his arms was tenser about her knees. His face, when he now looked up at her, had the look of a man dazzled from sleep. He said, ‘I am sick with love of you.’

  Fiorinda met his eyes for a minute in silence. Then she trembled: her laughter-loving imperial lips parted a little: the long black eyelashes half veiled her eyes: her eyelids quivered. With a little sudden catch of her breath, she bent forward; her chin lifted a little; her throat and bosom became in that instant the pure benediction of beauty, the opening of heaven, the coming down. ‘Love me, then,’ she answered. ‘I am here to be loved.’

  The Duke, now upon that throne beside her, had her now in his arms. As a sweet in the goblet, as pearls when the silken thread is broken, all her fierce lithe pride and queenship was unstrung: fallen loose: melted away. In the nape of her neck, where her hair was done in a knot that nestled there black and sleek like a sleeping leopard, he kissed, a dozen times, the last lowest little hairs, too young to be commanded, which, finer than gossamer-spiders’ silk, shadowed the white skin with their delicately ordered growth: little hairs prophetic of all perfections. And now his bee-winged kiss, hovering below her ear, under the earring’s smouldering of garnet, passed thence to where neck and shoulder join, and so to the warm throat, and so by the chin to that mocking spirit’s place of slumber and provocation; until, like the bee into the honeyed oblivion of some deep flower incarnadine, it was entertained at last into the consuming heaven of that lady’s lips.

  Now opened the last door of all before that leaf of virtue, the high double door that led from the main staircase to the throne-room, and Lessingham, striding out of darkness into the very presence, checked in the threshold. In the first bright glimpsing, indeed, he beheld the Lady Fiorinda thus in Duke Barganax’s arms; but, ere foot or hand might act on his will, shut doors and be gone, she had stood up and turned her eyes upon him: and with that he was like a man ensorcelled.

  For now in her, so facing him from beside the dream-stone, he beheld no longer that lady, but another. In her hair, too pale for gold, too golden for silver, braided with strings of pearls, light itself seemed fallen a-dreaming, caught and stung asleep by the thousand little twisting tendrils that floated, hovered, vanished, and glinted again, with every stir of the quiet air. Feature by feature so might have been Barganax had he been born woman: a golden girl, in the sweet holiday spring-time of her awakening beauty. Her grey eyes drew to far spaces, like the sea. On her cool lips, full, clean cut, pure of curve, everything desirable on earth or heaven seemed delicately to slumber: As a man out of the deathlike sleep of some drug comes to his senses at first with a disordered perception, wherein familiar things stand new, with no root in time, no perfume, no promise, no echo: so Lessingham beheld her but as a vision uncurdled from the phantasmagoria of some dream: a thing which the awakening sense, making as yet no question of perduration or possession, or of a world beyond the charmed present, accepts without surprise. Then on the sudden he noted the fashion of her dress, strange, fitter for a lover’s eye than for the common gaze of the court, and knew it, with a knowledge that seemed to shut fingers about his naked soul, for that very dress and garb which that dream had worn, standing but a half hour since at his bed’s foot.

  Up the empty hall he came to her, slowly, not to frighten away this wonder, but resolute. The Duke sprang up, his eyes shining like a lion’s surprised. But Lessingham, as marking him not, was come now within ten paces of them, still with that unwavering noiseless stride, and now his foot was even upon the carpet. He halted with the prick of Barganax’s sword against his chest. He stepped back a pace, and drew. For the second time in a day and a night they stood as opposites; and this time in a witched kind of stillness, wherein each leaned towards other across the kindling instant that should let them together, point and edge, like two great strokes of lightning and thunder. And for the second time, and now strangelier still, for the hotter occasion that was now than in the council chamber for bloody rages, the moment passed.

  Lessingham lowered his sword. ‘Who you are,’ he said, ‘I know not. But I’ll not fight with you.’

  ‘Nor I with you,’ said the Duke, yet with thunder on his brow. ‘Nor I with you.’

  With the look on the face of each of them that a man’s face wears when he strives to remember some forgotten tune, each fell back yet another pace or two from the other, each staring at the other still. And so staring, both slowly put up their swords, and, with the double click of them going home in the scabbards, both turned as upon a common impulse towards Fiorinda.

  Like a man’s beside himself, Barganax’s eyes leapt from that other to Lessingham, from him to her, and his sword was jumped half-bare from the scabbard again. ‘What mummery’s this?’ he said. ‘Where is my lady? God’s death! Speak, you were best, man, and you, woman, whoever you be.’

  But Lessingham, looking too at that lady, and standing as if drunk, said, in a starved voice unlike his own, ‘Give me her back’: then bit it in and set his jaw. Barganax, with a dazed look, passed his hand across his eyes.

  ‘My cloak, my lord,’ she said, turning for the Duke to put it about her shoulders. He paused a moment. Her presence, thus strangely snatched away and as strangely restored, and in so serene an unconcernment; the curve of neck and hair; her skin; the sweet smell of her: these things shook the fierce blood in him so that he scarce dared trust his hand upon her, even through the cloak. But Lessingham near her too, and more, face to face with her dark and alluring loveliness, bore himself with a cold formal courtesy.

  She thanked the Duke with a look: that slow, unblinking, unsmiling, suddenly opening and then fading, stare, with which upon his birthday she had promised herself in the garden. It mastered and then steadied his senses like wine. In that moment, so near the high climacteric, his eyes looking over her shoulder met the eyes of Lessingham in a profound recognition. In Lessingham’s face, the masculine of hers by many particulars, he read a promise; not indeed, as in hers, the world-dissolving epithalamion of sense and spirit, but a promise of something scarcely less deep in the blood, albeit without arrows and without fire: of brotherhood beyond time and circumstance, not to be estranged, but riveted rather together, by mutual strife upon the great stage of the world and noble great contentions.

  ‘My Lady Fiorinda,’ said Lessingham, ‘and you my lord Duke: inconsiderate excuses are no better than accusations. I could not rest. I will say no more.’

  ‘In this world-without-end hour,’ said the Duke, ‘let us say but good night.’

  Fiorinda spoke: ‘You go north, my Lord Lessingham?’

  ‘Tomorrow, madam.’

  ‘Today, then: it is past midnight. Ere you go, I would know a thing. Were you ever a painter of pictures?’

  ‘No. But a doer of deeds.’

  ‘My lord the Duke painteth past admiration. Of me he hath painted forty pictures, but not yet one to’s liking, and so burnt all.’

  ‘There was a man I knew did so,’ said Lessingham: ‘burnt all save one. Yet no,’ he said, with a strange half-waked look at her. ‘What was’t I said?’

  ‘It is hard, I suppose,’ said that lady, as if, in the enjoyment of her own thoughts’ stoops and hoverings, she had no eye to note the lightless gaze with which he seemed to search inward in himself: ‘It is hard, I suppose, for a lover, if he be a very lover, to paint his mistress. For then that which he would paint, if he be a very lover, is not appearance, but the thing which is. How can he paint her? Seeing that his picture, when it is painted, changeth then no more; but that which is, changeth unceasingly: and yet changeth not.’

  ‘And yet changeth not,’ said Lessingham.

  ‘This ring of mine,’ she said: ‘see, it is wine-red tonight, but a-daytime sleepy green. And such, as Doctor Vandermast affirmeth, is beauty: ever changing, never changing. But truly it is an old prating man, and I think hardly knoweth what he prateth of.’

  ‘Ever changing, never changing,’ said Lessingham,
as if he felt his way in the dark. Once more his gaze met the Duke’s.

  Her slanting green eyes, snakish, veiled with their silky darknesses, turned upon Barganax and then again upon Lessingham.

  Lessingham, after a little silence, said, ‘Good night.’

  ‘And yet,’ said she, as he bent to kiss her hand; and surely everything of that lady, the least turn of her finger, the least falling tone of her lazy voice, was as a stirring of mists ready to blow away and open upon wonder: ‘what riddle was that you did ask me but now, my lord? A man’s Self, said you? Or his Love?’

  Lessingham, who had asked no riddle, made no answer.

  ‘I think it is both,’ Fiorinda said, looking steadily at him. He was ware of a settled quality of power in her face now, diamantine, older and surer than the primal crust, older than the stars: a quality that belonged most of all to her lips, and to her eyes: lips that seemed to close upon antique secrets, memories of flesh and spirit fused and transfigured in the dance of the daughters of the morning; and eyes yet blurred from looking upon the very bed of beauty, and delights unconceived by the mind of man. Those eyes and those lips Lessingham knew as a child knows its mother, or as the sunset knows the sea. In a dizziness of conflicting yeas and nays, he recognized in her the power that had drawn him but now up the hall, on to Barganax’s sword-point. Yet she who had had that power so to draw him was strangely not this woman, but another. He bethought him then of their supper under the moon, and of her allegretto scherzando that had then so charmed his mind. The movement was changed now to adagio molto maestoso ed appassionato, but the charm remained; as if here were the lady and mistress of all, revealed, as his very sister, the feminine of his own self: a rare and sweet familiarity of friendship, but not of love; since no man can love and worship his own self.

  Again she spoke: ‘Good night. And you are well advised to go north, my Lord Lessingham; for I think you will find there that which you seek. North, in Rialmar.’

  In a maze, Lessingham went from the hall.

  And now Barganax and Fiorinda, standing under the shadowing glory of those wings, for a minute regarded one another in silence. The Duke, too, knew that mouth. He, too, knew those upper lids with their upward slant that beaconed to ineffable sweets. He, too, knew those lower lids, of a straightness that seemed to rest upon the level infinitude of beauty, which is the laying and the consolation and the promise on which, like sleeping winds on a sleeping ocean, repose all unfulfilled desires. And now at the inner corners of those eyes, as she looked at him, something stirred, ruffling the even purity of that lower line as the first peep of the sun’s bright limb at morning breaks the level horizon of the sea.

  ‘Yes,’ she said: ‘you have leave to resume our conversation where it was broke off, my friend. Yet this throne-room perhaps is not the most convenientest place for us, considering the lateness; considering too the subject, which, once thus raised between us, was never, as I remember, well laid again ere morning.’

  IX

  THE INGS OF LORKAN

  THE RUYAR PASS • OWLDALE AND THE STRINGWAY • THE VICAR PREPARES WAR; SO ALSO THE DUKE • LESSINGHAM INVADES MESZRIA • BURNING OF LIMISBA • RODER MOVES • BATTLE OF LORKAN FIELD • BEROALD AND JERONIMY IN THE SALIMAT.

  LESSINGHAM in the same hour, not to fail of his word, burnt up that leaf. On the morrow he rode north by way of Reisma Mere and Memison, going, as he had come south three weeks ago, but twenty in company, but so fast that now he was his own harbinger. So it was that the Duke’s safe conduct procured him welcome of all men and speeding on his journey, while at less than a day’s lag behind him was shearing up of the war-arrow and the countryside ablaze with rumours of war. So by great journeys he came at evening of the third day up through the defiles of the Ruyar to the windy stony flats that tail away north-westward between the glacier capped cliffs of the Hurun range on the right and Sherma on the left, and so to where, in the cleft of the Ruyar pass where it crosses the watershed to Outer Meszria and the north, the great work of Rumala leaves not so much as a goat’s way between cliff and towering cliff.

  ‘This were a pretty mouse-trap,’ said Amaury, as they drew rein in the cold shadow of the wall: ‘if he had bethought him out of prudence, may hap, say a Monday last, soon as you broke with him, to send a galloper whiles we dallied and gave him time for it: enjoin his seneschal of Rumala shut door upon us, hold us for’s disposal upon further order. Had you thought on that?’

  ‘I thought on’t,’ said Lessingham, ‘when I took his offer.’

  ‘So I too,’ said Amaury, and loosened his sword in its scabbard. ‘And I think on’t now.’

  ‘And yet I took his offer,’ said Lessingham. ‘And I had reason. You are prudent, Amaury, and I would have you so. Without my reason, my prudence were in you rashness. And indeed, my reason was a summer reason and would pass very ill in winter.’

  In Rumala they were well lodged and with good entertainment. They were up betimes. The seneschal, a gaunt man with yellow mustachios and a pale blue eye, brought them out, when they were ready after breakfast, by the northern gate to the little level saddle whence the road drops northwards into Rubalnardale.

  ‘The Gods take your lordship in Their hand. You are for Rerek?’

  ‘Ay, for Laimak,’ answered Lessingham.

  ‘By the Salimat had been your easiest from Zayana.’

  ‘I came that way south,’ answered he; ‘and now I was minded to look upon Rumala. ’Tis as they told me; I shall not come this way again.’

  Amaury smiled in himself.

  ‘You are bound by Kutarmish?’ said the seneschal.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have despatches for the keeper there. If your lordship would do me the honour to carry them?’

  ‘Willingly,’ said Lessingham. ‘Yet, if they be not of urgency, I would counsel you keep ’em till tomorrow. You may have news then shall make these stale.’

  The seneschal looked curiously at him. ‘Why, what news should there be?’ he said.

  ‘How can I tell?’ said Lessingham.

  ‘You speak as knowing somewhat.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Lessingham, ‘was always dark today. Today is clear: so enjoy it, seneschal. Give Amaury your letters: I’ll see ’em delivered in Kutarmish.’

  They were come now to the edge of the cliff upon the face whereof the road winds in and out for two thousand feet or more before it comes out in the bottom of Rubalnardale, plumb below the brink they stood on as a man might spit. The seneschal said, ‘You must walk and lead your horses, my lord, down the Curtain.’

  ‘Can a man not ride it?’

  ‘Nor ever did, nor ever will.’

  Lessingham looked over and considered. ‘Maddalena hath carried me, and at a good racking pace, through the Hanging Corridors of the Greenbone ranges in nether Akkama: ’twas very like this.’ He began to mount: ‘Nay, touch her not: she will bite and strike with her forelegs at an unknown.’

  The seneschal backed away with a wry smile as Lessingham leapt astride of his dangerous-eyed red mare. With him barely in the saddle, she threw a capriole on the very verge of the precipice; tossed her mane; with a graceful turn of her head took her master’s left foot daintily between her teeth; then in a sudden frozen stillness waited on his will.

  ‘I had heard tell,’ said the seneschal, as the mare, treading delicately as an antelope, carried her rider down and out of sight, ‘that this lord of yours was a mad fighting young fellow; but never saw I the like of this. Nay,’ he said, as Amaury mounted and his men besides, ‘then give me back my letters. As well send ’em later with the party must take up your corpses.’

  ‘We shall now show you a thing: safe as flies on a wall,’ said Amaury.

  Lessingham shouted from the bend below, ‘’Tis a good road north by Rumala: a bad road south.’ Amaury, smiling with himself, rode over the edge, and the rest followed him man by man. The seneschal stood for a while looking down the cliff when they were gone. There was nothing to be seen:
only on the ear came a jangling of bits and the uneven clatter of horse-hooves fainter and fainter from the hollows of the crags. Far below, an eagle sailed past the face of that mountain wall, a level effortless sweep on still wings brazen in the sunshine.

  Dusk was confounding all distances, smoothing away all shadows, smudging with sleepy fingers the clear daylight verities of whinbush and briar and thorn, mole-hill and wayside stone, outcropping rock and grassy hummock, fern and bent, willow and oak and beech and silver birch-tree, all into a pallid oneness and immateriality of twilight, as Lessingham and Amaury came at a walking-pace over the last stretch of the long open moorland sparsely grown with trees that runs up north from Ristby, and took the road north-eastward for Owldale. The westermost outlying spur of the Forn impended in a precipitous gable on their right; beyond it, north and round to the west, gathered by the dusk into a single blue wall of crenelled and ruined towers, the Armarick peaks and the fells about Anderside and Latterdale were a vastness of peace against the windy sky. There had been showers of rain, and thunder among the hills. Great Armarick, topping the neighbouring peaks, had drawn about his frost-shattered head a coverlet of sluggish and slate-hued cloud.

  They had long outridden their company. Amaury’s horse was blown. Even Maddalena had quieted her fiery paces to the unrelenting plod that draws on to corn and a sweet bed and sleep at night. Lessingham in a graceful idleness rode sideways, the slacked reins in his left hand, his right flat-palmed on the crupper. Turning his head, he met Amaury’s eyes regarding him through the dusk. Something in their look made him smile. ‘Well,’ he said: ‘grey silver aloft again, Amaury?’

  ‘There’s more in’t than that,’ said Amaury. ‘You are stark mad these five days I think, since we set out north from Zayana. I cannot fathom you.’