by E R Eddison
‘In my conscience, not I,’ said Derxis. ‘Yet, being your cousin, madam, should recommend a very cuckoo: by how much more a person of so much fame and nobility as my Lord— I’ve forgot your name, sir?’
‘It is not yet so renowned,’ said Lessingham, ‘as that ignorance need disgrace your highness.’
They turned to walk now, looking on the garden and the flowers that were there. Derxis held close at the Queen’s elbow, and spoke to her in undertones. Lessingham by and by fell behind, and walked now with the knight marshal and the old Countess of Tasmar and four or five others, talking of his journey north from Rerek and of matters indifferent. And first they looked askance and coldly, and cold was their talk; and then that coldness began to melt to him as morning frosts in autumn to the mounting sun, that makes warm the air, and the clouds disperse and mists are drunk up and the rime on a myriad twigs and grass-blades runs together to jewels. With so expert a touch he handled them, as one that himself at ease breathes ease into all the air about him.
And yet carried he little ease within him. To have fed in his thought these three months so many lusts and longings: to have come up to this much thought-on city of Rialmar, thus strangely held out that night to his desire: to have approved it but so, a plain walled hold, cold among northern mountains under ordinary daylight, and the dwellers in it, even to the Queen’s self and her maidens, but ordinary: these things were an outshedding in his mind of wormwood and darkness. In the Queen indeed, he saw a girl gay and high-hearted, and one in whom, as they talked together, he thought he touched a mind his own rode in step with, laughing at things his laughed at, leaping where his leapt. But in this was neither recompense nor echo of that which with so much wonder had been permitted to stand for a little moment and with so much aching loss had been taken and gone, upon that midnight under the winged glory in Barganax’s jewelled mansion of delights. Moreover, until now he had remembered and might feed on the memory of that moment; but now, from his first looking on very Rialmar, the memory was become as the thin lost perfume dreamed in a dream, that a man knows would restore him all, might he but breathe it again, but natural present walls him from it, as day is a wall to shut out the star-shine.
The Queen now, walking with Derxis, stopped at a bed of the yellow mountain-lily with spotted flower. ‘Poor little lilies,’ said she. ‘I cannot please them.’
Derxis shrugged and, catching the sound of Lessingham’s voice, would have walked on. But the Queen waited, so that, if with no good will, he must needs retrace his step.
‘My Lord Lessingham,’ said she: ‘are you a gardener? What is it hurts my lilies?’
Lessingham viewed them. His eyes and ears were opened to the estate of more than lilies in that garden. ‘Not the aspect,’ answered he. ‘Your grace hath given them sun for their faces, and these little mezereon bushes to shade their feet, and sheltered them from the winds.’
Derxis said apart to Alquemen, in such a whisper as all might hear, ‘Hast not wit to keep the fellow away, but must be thrust still into my company? Go draw him apart.’
‘But how of the soil?’ said Lessingham. ‘They have very particular likes. Mould of old oak-leaves, and—’
‘A word with you,’ said Alquemen, close to his ear.
Lessingham’s eyes crossed with the Queen’s. ‘Or if your grace should be troubled with land-mice, little rude beasts that gnaw your lilies underground? I know a way with such.’
His back was turned upon Alquemen, and he gave no sign that he had heard him or was ware of his presence.
Derxis, looking at Lessingham’s riding-boots, said to the Queen, ‘Belike I understand not the right ceremony of your grace’s court. It is custom, is’t, to come into the presence in disarray?’
Again her eyes crossed with Lessingham’s: a look sudden and gone like a kingfisher’s flight between gliding water and overshadowing trees. He turned to Derxis with a grave courtesy. ‘My lord the king of Akkama, I am a soldier. And it is custom, with a soldier, to obey his sovereign’s command.’
The Queen had moved onwards a step or two. ‘A soldier?’ said Derxis. ‘Go, and ’tis said women will love a soldier better than all other men?’
Lessingham lifted an eyebrow. ‘I know not that. But this have I known,’ said he, as if talking to the flowers: ‘in many countries of the world I have known ladies plagued with uncivil persons have found a soldier excellent good as doorkeeper.’
With so little conscience and so leisurable a gravity had he spoken these words, the king was unready how to take it; and ere he was resolved, Lessingham was some paces from him walking with the Queen and them of her household. The Princess Zenianthe alone was left: she had turned aside suddenly, handkercher to mouth, to contemplate a bunch of water gladiole in the near corner of the pond. Derxis turned colour, the more at the sight of Zenianthe’s shaking shoulders. With a hasty glance he satisfied himself that, save his own folk’s, no eye was on him. Then with two steps he was at her side, took her about the neck from behind, bent back her head and kissed her upon the lips, well and strong. Alquemen flung up his chin with a great laugh. Lessingham looked round. She, freeing herself, took Derxis a box on the ear that he heard bells.
The Queen and her folk waited now by the sunflowers for the king to come up. He came, twirling his walking-stick idly as he walked, his gentlemen in his wake, his features well composed. A poisonsome look was in his eyes. ‘And now, sir,’ said the Queen, ‘is my half-hour ended; and now must I be private in this garden to confer with my council ’pon matters of state.’
‘Madam,’ Derxis said: ‘of all cruel ladies are not you the cruellest? Is not sunlight a darkness, and every minute a year of prison, out of sight of your life-giving eyes? Well, I am your slave to obey, then; asking but that your sweet lips that speak the sentence shall give me yet some promise of more private conference; haply this afternoon?’
‘I pray you give us leave. And perhaps my huntsmen may find you the means to make life bearable.’
Zenianthe said with a levelled malice, ‘And you, my Lord Lessingham, care not: we can offer you some sport here in the garden: a toad-hunt!’ Derxis, kissing the Queen’s hand, turned colour again at those words. Laughter sat in the Queen’s eyes, but discretion locked it there.
As they of the king’s company moved off now towards the gate, Lessingham overtook them, came beside Alquemen, who walked last, and touched him on the arm. ‘My Lord Alquemen: this time, a word with you. Is it as it seemed to me but now, that you laughed, when a lady was put to an inconvenience?’
‘Well, and if I did?’ replied he, swinging round upon his heel and thrusting his face, with its full popping eyes, into Lessingham’s. ‘Shall need a better than thee to check me.’
King Derxis, ware of this jangling, paused in the gate and looked back. At a word from him, Kasmon, Orynxis, and Esperveris advanced menacingly towards Lessingham and stood scowling about him. Lessingham gathered their eyes with his and folded his arms. ‘Let us make no jarring in this presence, my lords,’ he said; and, to Alquemen, ‘can you use a sword?’ Amid their great burst of laughter Alquemen answered, with a bloody look, ‘It hath been thought so.’
‘Good,’ said Lessingham. ‘This then, and no more: You are a mannerless swine, and shall account to me for your unmannerly dealing.’
Alquemen said, ‘A word is as good as a blow. I take you very well. My Lord Orynxis will take order for my part.’
‘And for mine, my lieutenant, Amaury. I’ll send him, my lord, to speak with you.’
The twenty-fourth day after these things just told of, a little past sunset, the Princess Zenianthe stood at that same window of the Queen’s bedchamber. The room was all astir with lights and shadows of a log fire that blazed and sputtered on the hearth. To the left of the fire the deep-bayed window stood wide to the evening, which entered now with a tang of autumn and a tang of mountains and the sea. The roofs and towers of Mehisbon were a sharp screen of dark greenish violet against the west, where motes of a
rosy radiance swam and shimmered suffusing the smoky blues and purples, and, for a last lighting to bed of day, the broad and tapering blade of the zodiacal light slanted up from the place of settle-gang. The beetle, winding his faint horn to Zenianthe as he travelled the paths of opening night beside that window, saw her as some titanic figure darkly fair against a background of fire. The firelight saw her as its own, spirit of its spirit, dream of its dream, that which itself would become, might it but be clothed upon with the divinity of flesh: a presence secure, protective, glad, warm, fancy-free; and so it made sure of her, touching with trembling sudden fingers now her breathing bosom, now a ringlet of brown hair that rested curled on her shoulder, now a ruby warm against her throat.
She turned as the doors swung open in the middle of the side-wall to the left of the great bay of the window, and, with four ladies of the bedchamber to bear the candles before her and behind, the Queen entered, like a lily, from her bath. Surely her eyes outdanced the shining candles as Raviamne and Paphirrhoë lighted them, a dozen candles by the mirror that stood on the table to the right of the fire and another dozen by the tall mirror, framed in silver and white coral, to the right again, in the corner; surely the warmth of her presence hushed the encircling firelight and outglowed its glow. Zenochlide brought from a chair beside the fire, one by one, garments fine as the spider’s web, fragrant, delicate as the butterfly’s wing, and the Queen put them on. Anamnestra brought her coat-hardy of rich sarsenet, with a silver taint like a lily, yielding and clinging, wide-skirted downward from the hips: the Queen, pointing her white arms above her head, bowed and entered it like a diver, and like a diver came up laughing and shaking the hair from her eyes. The silken sleeves ended an inch or two below the shoulder, continuing thence with pale blue transparent gauze cut wide, shimmering with dust of gold, and gathered at the wrists to bracelets of fretted silver and margery-pearls. The skirt was purfled upon its lower edge, two spans deep, with flower-work in seed-pearls and the soft blue of turkey-stones and thread of gold, upon pale rose-coloured silk. Raviamne brought her shoes, sewn all over with pearls and amber.
The Queen now, standing before the mirror, took out the pins and, with a shake of her head, let down her hair like a garment of netted sunlight falling nearly to the purfled flounce of her dress. Zenianthe came with the little white cat and held it out to be kissed: ‘To salute your highness respectfully on your natal day, and ask you kindly admire my birthday collar Zenianthe gave me.’ Antiope bent and kissed it between the blue eyes. ‘And now,’ she said, sitting down with it in her lap upon a long backless tapestry-cushioned seat of sandalwood before the table and mirror, ‘you were best go and make ready yourselves. Zenianthe is dressed already: will help me do my hair.
‘The peace of it!’ she said, when they were alone, parting and combing the masses of her hair with a golden comb: hair that was like to the pallid soul of gold breathed into a mist at the foot of some waterfall. ‘It is most strange calm weather, cousin: i’ the court, I mean.’
‘Peace?’ said Zenianthe, fingering the jewels on the table. ‘Well, for a fortnight: since Lessingham’s killing of those five, and the hubble-bubble that that made, and your making the whole pack of ’em lodge henceforth without Teremne; certainly it is more peacefuller now.’
‘Ah, but I meant from our own folk,’ said Antiope. ‘Bodenay; old Madam Tasmar; our vulpine friend Romyrus; they let me have my way now. Do they give me line, but the readier to pluck me in? I know them too well, my puss,’ she said, stroking it: ‘twisty plots, but little sense. No, I am sure ’tis this: they are altogether carried by this man; and being by him taught sense, let me alone to go my ways. And for that,’ she said, meeting Zenianthe’s eyes in the glass with a most limpid, unconscious, and merry look, ‘I am much beholden to him, and but wish he’d a come here sooner.’
‘Must this Derxis be at your festivities tonight?’ Zenianthe asked. ‘Planted near two months, he begins to take root I think in Rialmar. Will you wear your sapphire comb, cousin, or the turkey-stone to go with your gown? Or will you have your hair low on the neck and no comb at all?’
‘I’ll have the little half-moon crown of flower-delices, and do it the Greek way, and with those long strings of margarets you did give me, dear cousin.’ She was silent a minute, a dimple coining and going near to her mouth’s corner. Then, ‘Must have been wormwood in his mouth, that business of Alquemen.’
‘These little margarets tangle in your hair, cousin, as if they were fain to wind cocoons in it and sleep themselves into fire-flies, or whatever ’tis margaret-chains turn to after their sleep.’
‘White moths,’ said the Queen: ‘owly faces and furry wings.’
Zenianthe said, ‘Methought I never saw so delicate playing as my Lord Lessingham’s, when you did send for him after that affair, ’pon Derxis’s complaint, and did confront them. So penitent and good as he bore himself toward the king, so’s who could take exceptions at it? And yet never to leave you in doubt, cousin, that he knew your mind and purpose; as if he should look through his fingers and wink at it. Faith, I near gave away all by laughing, ’twas so pretty. So remorseful, cousin: “Yes, now ’twas put so, he did see indeed ’twas hardly to be pardoned: kill five of the king’s men, and all in five minutes. And yet might he be indulged a little for ignorance sake; for truly he had not understood till now that Derxis, as a royal person, had free licence to set men in the dark under archways to kill and murder whom he pleased while guesting here in Rialmar.”’
Antiope smiled. ‘And there the other walked so neatly into it.’
‘Yes,’ said Zenianthe. ‘“By my soul, madam, I had nought i’ the world to do with it!” And then you, so sweet and harmless, “O I see, sir, then ’twas not upon your business they went then?” And while he felt about for firm ground then Lessingham again, most courtly and submissive, remembering Derxis of that former passage with Alquemen (I was the distressed lady there, cousin: the beast had laughed when Derxis did me that insolency). Precious heaven! I near burst myself keeping of my face, thinking (while Lessingham discoursed so formal and serious) of the true tale we had had of that encounter: of his snicking of the beastly fellow’s wrist at the third pass and flicking the sword from his hand, contemptuous as dust away a fly: and this their notable great duellist with twenty men’s deaths to’s credit: and then,’ she lowered her voice, that shook with suppressed merriment: ‘and then making him put offs breeches, and slashing ’em to ribbons, and then bid him go in that pickle, and learn when and when not to laugh from henceforth—’
‘O Zenianthe!’ said the Queen.
‘And then you,’ said Zenianthe: ‘“O, I’m sorry, sir. I understand. You are as blameless as I am in these mischances. This Alquemen of yours I see hath broke leash, run past your controlling, and ’twas he, not you, did fee these ruffians to sit for my officer to perform his death. Shall I punish him for you?” Cousin, I never saw man so angry, nor so checkmated. Worst of all, when, ’pon pretext to avoid such pothers from henceforth, you did decree them all lodging henceforth without Teremne.’
Her hair being done, Antiope stood up now. ‘What’s good in Lessingham is right sense,’ she said, ‘and a wit so turnable for all things alike. What needs doing, this man doth it, and that often even before I knew I needed it. And best of all, a man that stands on’s own feet in’s own place. Not with your own self, cousin, was I ever more at ease; that I can talk to as ’twere my brother, and never shadow nor taint of that folly that ruineth all.’
The princess was silent. She fetched from the bed a girdle which Antiope now put on, of clouded pink tourmalines; and after that her outer dress of white crinkled silken gauze, transparent as an April shower. Little blue flowers of the squill and the blue-bell were worked on it here and there, and little specks of gold. Soft it was, fitting itself to every movement, even as loveliness itself. And about her delicate neck was a ruff, heart-shaped, open-cut, edged with pearls, going down to a point between her breasts where it was fastened
with a flower-delice of little diamonds, so fine that it seemed to be made of mere light. ‘As for this tedious king,’ she said, ‘I have in mind a way to rid us of him tonight, if aught may rid him.’
‘What is that?’
‘O, a nice and courteous point of precedence I am minded to show him. You shall see.’
‘And but only this morning,’ said Zenianthe behind her, settling the ruff, ‘you did directly refuse, the third time, his offer of marriage. Poor king, he must be most pitifully fallen into your highness’ toils.’
‘Poor king. Well, shall I take him after all, Zenianthe? For indeed I am sorry for him. And indeed I find him most displeasing. And indeed it is pitiful to consider of a person so lost in the world: pleasing of himself, but displeasing of all other. Well, then, shall I take him then? – ’Las, cousin, you must not prick me with that pin so!’
The great Hall of the Sea-horses in the royal palace in Rialmar was shaped like a cross: a square central hall and four others, lower of roof, opening upon it: and each of these five was well thirty paces either way. The walls were panelled with green jasper between pillars of lapis lazuli. At the northern end, facing the main doors, was a staircase all of jasper; a broad flight leading down to the floor of the northern hall, and side-flights branching up right and left from it to the gallery. Windows, five times the height of a man, filled all the space upon the end walls east and west; in the west, the moon at this time looked in, three days old, a reaping-hook of silver fire. The main doors were in the southern side of the southern hall: doorways with pointed arches, and the doors all covered with leather of peacock blue, nailed all over with golden stars, and edged with rims of rose-pink crystal. The roofs of the side-halls were flat, of a dark stone full of fiery sparkles. Slender jasper columns, two rows down the middle of each hall, dividing it so into three aisles, bare up the ceilings. But of the main middle hall the roof was domed and exceeding high, and the whole floor of the middle hall empty and without pillars. Curtains or hangings of tapestry came down from the dome and, looped up at each corner at the level of the frieze, tumbled thence in billowy masses upon the floor: all of dusky stuff that showed blues or greens as the light moved or the eye that beheld them, and with streamed stripes of ultramarine, and roses worked in pink silk here and there, and at the converging of the stripes or streamers, bosses, broader than a man’s arms might span, of cushioned black silk, sewn with vast sunflowers in gold thread. One enormous lamp swung high in the dome, of silver and topaz and yellow sapphires, shedding a radiance very warm and golden: and everywhere, suspended by iron chains, were censers of bronze hammered and damascened, some in green and white enamel, some dusky bronze, some lacquered red, and in the chains were flowers twined and the verdure of creeping plants and leaves and fruits. Alternating with the censers, scores of small hanging lamps burned with a rose-red light. The floor was of inlaid work of rare and sweet-smelling woods, divers-coloured, but with a general show of redness, bare in the main middle hall for dancing, but with crimson carpets in the four outer halls. And at the ends of the balustrades of that great staircase where it came upon the floor (and from these had the hall its name) were two sea-horses rampant, with webbed feet and finny wings and scaly fish-like bodies with fishes’ tails. Bigger they were than the biggest horse that ever went upon the earth, and were carved each from a single stone of sea-blue rock-crystal.
