The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  ‘And while they walk,’ said Medor, breathing in the heady perfume from his cup, ‘imagining some portentous birth?’

  ‘Yes,’ said that aged man, touching the wine with his lips, then lifting it to gaze through against the sunlight:

  ‘The prophetic soul

  Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.’

  Within, beyond the ante-chamber and beyond inner doors which, even were it against him their captain, Medor’s own guardsmen barred, Duke Barganax now laid down his brush. Wrapped, as in a toga with right arm and shoulder bare, in a voluminous flowing gown of silk brocade of a creamy dun colour and edged with black fur, he sat back now in a deep chair. Before him, on the easel, was the beginnings of his picture: from it to her, from her to it, and so back again, his eye swung restlessly and as if unsatisfied.

  – You,’ he said. ‘Bitter-sweet. You are that.’

  She, bare from the waist upwards, lying on her face upon cushions of a white silken couch under the cool light of the north window, rested on folded arms, her back and shoulders flowering so, in a sleek-petalled warm paleness as of old ivory, from the dark calyx of her skirt of black silk spangled lace. From armpit to elbow her right arm, folded upon itself, swept its immaculate line. Above the lazy weight of it, midway of the upper curve, about the biceps, her nose rested daintily ruminant. From beneath the armpit, as four serpents from some vine-shadowed lair of darkness should lay out their necks to feel the day, the fingers showed of her left hand bearing the soft lustre, starred about with a circle of little emeralds, of a honey-coloured cat’s-eye cymophane. Her mouth was hidden. Only her eyes, showing their whites, looked out at him sideways. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am that.’

  he said, under his breath: then suddenly scowled, as if upon the motion to destroy his work.

  ‘“Post”—’ she said: ‘in what musty book was that written? —“omne animal triste”.’

  ‘It was written,’ replied he, ‘in the book of lies.’

  As in the quivering of a dragonfly’s sapphired flight across the tail of a man’s vision, under the down-weighing intolerable heat of a cloudless summer noonday, hither and back betwixt them the halcyon glance leapt, overtaking all befores and afters. The Duke rose, went to the table in the window upon his left, opened drawers, took out needles and a copper plate: came back to his seat.

  ‘You have resolved then against chryselephantine work? Each hair?’ she said, out of that unseen mouth. ‘Wisely so, I should say.’

  He pushed aside the easel. ‘Why do I make away at last every picture I paint of you?’

  ‘How can I tell? Easier destroy than finish, may be? A harder question: why paint them? Having the original.’ Lights moved in her green eyes like the moving lights on a river.

  ‘Can you be still – so, a minute? Perhaps,’ he said, after a silence, ‘perhaps I try to know the original.’ Chin in hand, elbow on knee, in the tenseness of a panther crouched, he watched her.

  ‘To know?’ said she, out of the long stillness. ‘Is it possible (if you will credit Doctor Vandermast) to know, save that which is dead?’

  Barganax, as if body and mind were enslaved to that sole faculty of vision, did not stir. After a while, his face relaxed: ‘Vandermast? Pah! He spoke but of dead knowledge. Not my way of knowing.’

  ‘And you will know me, when, in your way of knowing? Today? In a week? Next hawthorn time?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘O, it seems then, this knowing of me is as your painting of me: as Tom o’ Bedlam, would warm a slab of ice with his candle to make him a hot plate to hold his supper?’

  ‘That which can be done, ’twas never worth the doing.’

  ‘Attempt is all,’ she said.

  With the overtones of a new music that cast firefly gleams across the darkness of her voice, ‘You have much changed your former carriage: become strangely a harper of one string,’ she said, ‘this last year or two. Before, they tell me, there might not one of our sect come here to court that, unless she were a very owl or an urchin for ill favour—’

  ‘Tittle-tattle,’ said the Duke.

  ‘O, some of their private, lavish, and bold discourses. That you bearded at fifteen: is that true?’

  He lifted an eyebrow: ‘It pricketh betimes that will be a good thorn.’

  ‘Let me but fantasy myself,’ said she, ‘in your skin. Nay then, ’tis certain. I should say to myself, “Well, she is very well, high-witted Fiorinda. But – there be others.” And yet? And why? It is a mystery: I cannot attain to it. See but Rosalura, left in your way as harmless as a might lodge his wife in some seminary. Though, to give you your due,’ she said, caressing delicately with the tip of her nose the smooth skin of her arm and returning so to her just pose again, ‘you were never a hunter in other men’s preserves. Save but once, indeed,’ she said, browsing again in that lily-field. ‘And indeed I count not that, being that it was neither preserve there, nor—’ She fell silent.

  Barganax caught her eye and smiled. ‘Set a candle in the sunshine,’ he said.

  ‘A courtly instance, but not new. Nay, I will have you tell me, why?’

  ‘Pew!’ he said: ‘a thing so plain as it needs no proof.’ He took up the plate as though to begin drawing, then slowly laid it down again. ‘Let me fantasy myself in your skin,’ he said, his eyes still picture-finding. ‘“This Duke,” I should say, “is one who, as in that song of mine, desireth,

  ‘por la bele étoile avoir

  k’il voit haut et cler seoir.

  ‘“And, to show I have that same star, if I chose to give it, while others kiss with lip I’ll give the cheek.”’

  ‘To say, which is what I do? Ungrateful!’

  ‘May be my ingratitude and your ladyship’s parsimony—’

  ‘O monstrous! And today, of all days!’

  After a pause, ‘And I too,’ she said, ‘have strangely changed my fashions, since you eased me of that: cut off my train and all. Pity, since the Devil’s servants must serve now without their casualties. Singular in me, that herebefore was almost a generalist in that regard. And yet,’ she said disdainishly, ‘not so singular; if to be given in wedlock, young, twice, to so and so, through policy. To spit in the mouth of a dog is not indecorous for a lady, and grateful too to the dog.’

  Like the shimmer of the sun on water, some reflection of her talk played about Barganax’s eyes the while they studied her from under his faun-like eyebrows, as if he would burn first into his perception the elusive simplicities of that wherein the changing stings and perfumes and unseizable shapes and colours of her mind had their roots and being.

  ‘Your royal father, too,’ she said, ‘(upon whom be peace), was a picker of ladies. Was it not his eye chose out my late lord for the lieutenancy of Reisma? And, that done, enforced the Duchess your mother, ’gainst all good argument she found to the contrary (for I was never in her books), receive me as one of her ladies of the bedchamber in Memison? Without which chance, I and you, may be, ne’er had met. Three years since. I was nineteen; you, I suppose, two and twenty.’

  These things,’ said the Duke, ‘wait not upon chance.’

  There was a long silence. Then, ‘You took little liking for me, I think, at first meeting,’ said she: ‘upon the out-terraces of her grace’s summer palace: midsummer night between the last dances, after midnight: I on his arm: you with Melates, walking the terrace by moonlight and meeting us at each return. And I but the tenth week married then.’ She fell silent. ‘And his breaking away (you looked round and saw it), and running to the parapet as if to vault over it into the moat? And your saying to him, jesting, as we met at the next return, you were glad he had thought better of it, not drowned himself after all? And his laughing and saying, “If you did but know, my lord Duke, what I was a-thinking on in that moment!” You remember?’

  ‘And I will tell you a thing,’ said Barganax: ‘that when we were gone by, I told Melates what, as I had ne’er a doubt, the man had in truth been thinking on.’


  ‘Well, and I,’ said she, ‘will tell you: that I read that easy guess in your grace’s eyes. But this you did not guess: what I was a-thinking on. For besides,’ she said, ‘my eyes are my servants: train-bearers but no talebearers.’

  All the time the Duke’s gaze was busied upon that unravelling quest amid many threads of knowledge and outward seeming. As if the memory of the words had risen like a slow bubble out of the marish waters of his meditation, his lips, while his eyes were busy, played now with that old sonnet which carries, even to the written page, the note of the lyre that shook Mitylene:

  ‘Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,

  Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie;

  Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree,

  Or til a reed ourblawin with the win.

  Twa Gods guides me: the ane of tham is blin,

  Yea and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;

  The next a Wife ingenrit of the sea,

  And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

  Unhappy is the man for evermair

  That tills the sand and sawis in the air;

  But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,

  That feidis in his hairt a mad desire,

  And follows on a woman throw the fire,

  Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.’

  Their eyes met, a merry, humorous, feasting look. ‘You are forgetting the good there is in change, I think,’ she said after a silence. ‘For my own part, I incline much to fair hair in women. Anthea, for instance.’

  The Duke winced.

  ‘I am resolved: good: dye my hair yellow.’

  ‘If you dared but even do your hair any way else but my ways—’ he spoke slowly, as lost in a contemplation, his mind on drawing, not on his words.

  ‘So, then I’ll cut it off,’ said she.

  His feeding gaze seemed to grow keener. He said on his breath, ‘I’d kill you.’

  ‘I should make you some sport ere that,’ said the lady, her mouth still hidden behind the lily smoothness of that indolent arm. ‘Have you forgot our first assay, laying aside of ceremonies, a month after that first meeting, three years ago next summer? I showed you then, my friend: bit a piece of flesh off your bones.’

  ‘Two minutes, my heart-dear!’ He suddenly fell to drawing, line by line in swift and firm decision. There was a stillness upon that lady, while line after line traced, true and aware, its predestined furrow on the polished copper, like the stillness of a sunshine evening upon some lake in which mountain and wood and sky hang mirrored in reverse, and nothing moves save (may be with the settlings of little winged creatures) the dancing gleams, one here, one there, seven or eight at a time, of liquid golden stars coming and going upon that glassy water.

  The Duke sprang up: went to the table to rub lampblack into the lines. When he turned again, she had put on again her bodice, as it were a sleeved mail-coat made of thousands of tiny orient pearls, close fitting like a glove, and sat with her back towards him, upright on the couch. He stood for a minute looking at his drawing, then came and sat down behind her, holding the plate for both to see it. The clock struck three.

  ‘As for painting, that was a true word you said that night to Lessingham.’

  ‘To Lessingham?’ she said.

  ‘For a lover: hard to paint the thing which is.’

  ‘O I remember: by the dream-stone.’

  ‘The One, that I still was a-hunting of in the Many, till your day; and now the Many in you.’ Her face was sideways towards him, looking at the dry-point. Her eyes were become Medusaean and, in its repose, her mouth snakish and cruel. ‘Paintings,’ he said: ‘all trash. They give me but a barren One out of your Many, and never your One that breeds those Many, as the sun breeds colours.’

  ‘But this is better, you think?’

  ‘It is beyond comparison better; and my best.’

  ‘Of that which changeth ever, and yet, changeth not?’

  That lady’s voice took on yet another quality of wonder, as if into the sun-warmed, cud-chewing, indolence of it were distilled all the warring elements of her divinity: fanged peril couched amid blood-red peonies: green of seawater, still and deep, above a bottom of white shell sand, or the lights in lionesses’ eyes: the waved blackness of the Stygian flood in the ferrying across of some soul of sweetness untimely dead: coal, snow, moonlight, the light of burning cities, eclipse, prodigious comets, the benediction of the evening star; and behind these things, a presence as of some darkness that waited, awake, shawled, and still: gravid with things past and half remembered, and things present yet not apprehended well, and with things to come: or, may be, not to come, swaying betwixt birth and the unbeing of the void.

  ‘Of manifoldness: yes,’ said he, after a minute. ‘But of your Oneness, a shadow only: Persephone beneath the sod.’

  She considered the picture again. ‘You have my mouth there, I see?’

  ‘Ah, you can see that? Though your arm hides it?’

  ‘You have it in the eyes, and in the fingers.’

  ‘I am glad,’ said he: ‘for I meant it so.’

  ‘It came of itself I should say. I set much by mouths: especially my own.’

  He stood up, laid the plate on the table, turned and stood looking at her. ‘Omne animal triste?’ she said, the devil of provocation viperine in her mouth’s corner.

  ‘I told you that was a lie,’ Barganax said, his eyes on hers. She settled back a little, sitting there facing him, and her eyes seemed to grow darker and larger. ‘It were not for every man’s comfort,’ he said: ‘mate with you: a swan swimming with her wings expansed, then, whip, in a moment mew that white outward skin, soar against the sun, bring out your pounces, fly at fools and kill too. Nor for every man’s capacity.’

  ‘And yet you will still be picture-making.’

  ‘O it is well,’ he said: ‘well that eagles do mate together: other else—’

  ‘Other else,’ said she, ‘must Fiorinda have led apes in hell? Or, worse, lived housewife in Reisma? Well, I like that a man should high himself even thus insufferably, so he have the pith to maintain it.’

  The Duke came a step towards her. ‘There is no middle way with you,’ he said: ‘you are all night and day: dazzling night and intolerable day.’

  ‘And roses.’ It was as if not she but the very stillness of her mouth had spoken. ‘Some red, some pink-colour.’

  ‘And eyes that are the sea. I drown in them,’ he said upon a sudden intake of the breath. ‘When I kiss you, it is as if a lioness sucked my tongue.’

  She leaned back with hands clasped behind her head, Valkyrie breasts breathing under that pearl-woven byrny, and above it her throat’s lithe splendour and strength. ‘Seas are for who can swim,’ she said, and a sweeping of lyres was in the lazy voice of her. ‘White noon is for the eagle to kindle his eyes upon: the sweetness of the red rose is to be weighed down upon, to be crushed, to be scented: the wonder of darkness is lest you should despair and, numbering perfections, say, It is the sum: it is all. For am not I all, my friend? I am more than all. And when all is told and numbered and multiplied and told over again, I say to you, In my darknesses I have more. Come. Prove it again. Come.’

  Upon the chimes of four Doctor Vandermast knocked at the topaz-studded cedar doors of the painting-room and entered to the Duke’s ‘Come in.’ The Duke, wearing no more that brocaded fur-purfled gown, but fully dressed in doublet, ruff, and hose, apprised of Medor’s importunities for audience, went out to him in the gallery. The Lady Fiorinda, yet in some disarray and with her hair unbound, reclined upon the couch fanning herself with a fan of white peacock feathers twined with silver wires and set with apple-green chrysoprases in the ribs.

  ‘Small advance, it is to be feared,’ she said as Vandermast surveyed the picture on the easel. ‘But what will you have, if two hours must be expended but in settling of my pose?’ There stirred in the accents of her speech a self-mocking, self-preening, sleepy grace which, to the attentive and philosophic ear, carri
ed some note of that silver laughter that the ageless remembering waters yet dream of, foaming disconsolate in Paphian sea-shallows.

  The doctor smiled, looking on the painting but half begun; then, seeing the dry-point on the table, took it up and considered it awhile in silence. ‘I judge from this,’ he said at last, ‘that your ladyship has been teaching some lessons in philosophy. It is better. Nay, confine it but within its limit of purpose defined and propounded for it, there is no more to do: it is perfect.’

  ‘You will say “Othello’s occupation’s gone”, then? A melancholy conclusion.’

  ‘I will not say that, save after your ladyship,’ answered that learned man.

  ‘Well, you must do maid-service first (these ill-appointed ways we live in): bring me the looking-glass to do my hair. Thanks, reverend sir;’ she sat up, putting off in an instant her grace of languorous ease for a grace of wakefulness and speed of action, with deft sure fingers pinning into a formal court elegance her hair’s braided lovelinesses, night-black, smooth-waved, with blue gleams where the light struck, like the steel-blue gleaming of certain stars, as of Vega in a moonless night in autumn. Her hands yet busied upon a last pranking of her ruff, she turned to meet Barganax’s face as he strode into that room like a man that contains within his breast the whirlwind. Medor, with flushed countenance, followed at his heel.

  ‘Here’s news, and hell’s fires in the tail of it,’ said the Duke, making with great strides towards the window and flinging himself down in his chair. ‘The hennardly knaves: yes, I mean your strutting stately brother, madam, with’s prims and provisoes,’ he said, rocking from side to side: ‘he hath accepted Sail Aninma bestowed of him by the thundering tyrant, slick as was Mandricard to take Alzulma ’pon like offer. And Jeronimy with’s cringing in the hams, licking the hand of the king-killer: if there be a badder man than that Beroald ’tis this back-starting Admiral with his thin wispy beard, ever eats with the jackals and weeps with the shepherd: now sworn new entire allegiance and obedience: given out all’s o’er ’twixt them and me, our late confirmed league, ’cause of slaying of Mandricard. Damn them! After a month’s digesting of it, now the meat bolketh up again. Damn them!’ he said, springing up and stalking, like a beast caged, about the room: ‘they’re all habs and nabs, foul means or fair: hearts in their hose when they catch a breath from Rerek. I almost enrage!’ He caught Fiorinda’s eye. ‘Well, will not your ladyship go join your brother in Sail Aninma? Will you not be i’ the fashion, all of you, and down with me now I’m going?’