The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  Something seemed to stir in the warm air, with the falling tones of her voice: a languorous opening, rising and falling and closing again, of some Olympian fan. As it should have been sunset beholding the going up of Night, the Duchess stood and beheld her: as to say – You and I are one: the same common sky: one air: beauty, colour, fire. Night is young, rising in her ascendant while sunset dies: Night, kirtled with blackness and a steely glitter of stars: bat-wings; owl-wings soundless as the feathered wings of sleep; and, coming and going in unplumbed pools of gloom, pairs of eyes, bodiless, like green moons, and the soft breathing of snakes that glide by invisible. So Night enters on her own, bitter-sweet with a passion of nightingales; and all presences of earth and air and water cover their faces before her: young (young enough, the Duchess said in herself, to have been my daughter), yet far older than all these: older than light: older than the Gods. But sunset, too, has her climacteric, renewed at every down-going: flowering into unimagined fire-shadows, as of some conflagration of the under-skies where all dead splendours and lovelinesses past and gone are burnt up with their own inward fire, and the red smoke of it is thrown upward in rays among incandescent mists, and overhead heaven is mottled like a kingfisher’s wings, turquoise and gold and greenish chrysolite more transparent than air; and the sea spreads to a vast duskiness of purple on which, as on the dear native bosom of their rest, all winds fall asleep.

  Fiorinda looked suddenly in the Duchess’s face, through the deepening dusk, with eyes that seemed washed to the very hue of that chrysolite of the sky. ‘Words!’ she said. ‘Will your noble grace abdicate your sovereignty to words: tonight, of all nights? Have words so much power? In Memison? O open your eyes, and wake.’

  For an instant the Duchess seemed to hold her breath. Then, with a high and noble look, ‘Put away your displeasure,’ she said, ‘and pardon me. The mistress of a great house hath many melancholies, and so it fareth with me tonight: not for aught concerns you. I bit the hand was nearest.’

  ‘Your grace has done me that honour to be open with me. I will be open too. I am not a commodity, not for any man.’

  ‘No,’ said the Duchess, searching Fiorinda’s face. ‘I think that is true.’ She paused: then, ‘What are you?’ she said. The dusk seemed to deepen.

  ‘That is a question your grace must ask yourself.’

  ‘How? ask myself what am I myself? Or ask what you are?’

  ‘Which you will. The answer fits.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Duchess: ‘as for myself, I am a woman.’

  ‘I have been told the same. And will that content you?’

  ‘And with some beauty?’

  ‘That is most certain.’

  ‘Yet it answers me not.’

  ‘No,’ said Fiorinda. ‘It is words.’

  The Duchess said, ‘I will search lower.’

  ‘Do, as the lady said to her gallant. You shall find a thing worth the finding.’

  ‘We are both, to say, in love.’

  ‘O unhandsomest and most unrevealing word of all. And of me – to say, in love!’

  ‘Shall I tell you, then,’ said the Duchess, ‘who it is you are taken in love with?’

  ‘I dearly wish your grace will do so.’

  ‘With your own self.’

  Whether for the failing light that veiled their faces, or because the thought behind each withdrew as a bird behind leafage until the intermittent flutter only and the song remains, their faces were become harder to read now and the beauty of each less a thing of itself and more a thing of like substance with the beauty (so unagreeable and contrarious to itself) which it looked upon. Of all their unlikes, unlikest were the mouths of those ladies: Amalie’s with clear clean Grecian lines which gave strength and a certain inner heat of pride and resolution to what had else been over-sweetness: but Fiorinda’s settling itself, when at rest, to a quality more hard and kinless than is in stone, or in the grey dawn at sea in winter, or in the lip of a glacier seen at a great height against frozen airs under the moon. And yet, near the corner of each mouth, bringing a deep likeness to these unlikes, dwelt a somewhat: a thing now still, now trailing a glitter of scales along the contours of lips that were its nesting-place and secret intricate playground of its choice. This thing, alert suddenly at the corner of the Duchess’s mouth, beheld now as in a mirror, its second self in the curl of Fiorinda’s lip, as, with a little luxurious silent laugh, she threw up her head, saying, ‘And with whom else indeed should one be in love?’

  ‘Why, with all else,’ replied the Duchess, ‘sooner than with that.’

  Fiorinda drew nearer. ‘Let me consider your grace, then, and try: suppose you skin-changed to the purpose: rid away the she in you: more bone in the cheekbones: harder about the forehead: this dryad cast of your eyebrows masculated to a faun: up-curled mustachios: more of the wolf about the mouth – no, truly, I think there is something in a woman’s mouth is lost in a man’s. Kiss me.’

  The Duchess, freeing herself from that embrace, stood half dazed and trembling, as one who, caught up and set on some pinnacle without the limits of the world, has thence taken one eye-sweep, one inward catch of the breath, and a headlong stoop back again to the common voices of earth: the thrush’s note and the wren’s, the talking of running water beneath alder and sallow, faint tinkle of cow-bells from hill pastures about Memison.

  There was a sound of footsteps: the guard’s challenge: opening of the gate beyond the trees: a swinging of lights among the leaves. Six little boys came with torches and took their station in a half circle above the pool; so that those ladies stood in the torches’ pulsing glow, but the shadows, rushing together on the confines of that warmth and brightness, made darkness where before had been but translucent ultramarines and purples of the chambered dusk. And now, down those steps from the arched shade of pine-tree and strawberry-tree, came the King. ‘Leave us the lights, and begone,’ he said. The boys set the torches on their stands and retired, the way they came. Fiorinda, with an obeisance, took her leave, departing up the steps in a mingled light of the torchlight which is never at rest and the silver-footed still radiance of the moon.

  ‘Word is come,’ said the King, as they turned from watching her: ‘“The foxen be at play.”’

  ‘That is the word you waited on?’

  The King nodded, Ay.

  ‘We have not even tonight, then?’

  ‘The horses are saddled.’

  ‘But will you not stay supper?’

  He shook his head. ‘Too much hangeth on it. The foil must be in their bosom when they thought it a yard off.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, and took hands with him; her grip less like a love-mate’s than a fellow commander’s: ‘your right hand find out all that you have hated, my friend.’

  The King sat down now on the deep-cushioned bench of onyx-stone, she standing beside him, her hand still in his, too close held to have escaped, even and it would. Presently she raised her eyes from their sidelong downward gazing and met the King’s eyes, dark, looking up at her. ‘How chance you go not?’ she said.

  ‘Because I stand upon a just order in all things.’ With that, he drew her down to him on the bench, saying behind her ear, on a breath that came starry as the alighting of thistle-down, yet, as his hands possessed her, resistless as the rising tide of the sea: ‘Amalie, I chose you and loved you in my happiest times.’

  The Duchess spoke: ‘This be farewell. I’ll not bring you on your way. Better fall from this than, i’ the manner of the world, walk down again. And tell me,’ she said, after a pause, as they stood now, her cheek against his, for she was tall, and his head bent to hers as he held her yet in his arms: ‘If we were Gods, able to make worlds as we chose, then fling ’em away like out-of-fashion garments, and renew them when we pleased: what world would we have, my friend?’

  And the King answered her and said: ‘This world, and none other: as a curst beast, brought by me to hand; with lovely Memison, for a jewel of mine about its neck; and you, my lov
e, my dove, my beautiful, for its rose, there set in adamant.’

  VI

  CASTANETS BETWIXT THE WORLDS

  LESSINGHAM sat iron-still. The music started once more: a bolero. Madame de Rosas, with bare arms braceletted with garnets above the elbow, bare-headed, and with one scarlet camellia in her hair, began upon an extremely slow, extremely smooth, swaying and rolling of the hips. Not to look at the sapphire, he looked at her: the red of her mouth, the whites of her black eyes. But immediately it was not she but the sapphire that, on the platform there, moved to these swaying rhythms; while the air of Mary’s presence, fining gross flesh to the pure spirit of sense, raised it to some estate where flesh and spirit put on one another.

  Slowly, and upon disparate faint clicks of wood with wood, scarce distinguishable even through the pale texture of the now muted strings, the castanets awoke again; then, softlier still, quickened their beat, and in a most tense graduality began to gather strength, as if horse-hooves should begin to draw nearer and nearer at a gallop from very far away. Here, no doubt, in this present drawing-room of Anmering Blunds, was the physical sound of them: the production, in natural air, of certain undulations which struck upon the tympanum of this ear or of that with varied effect, noted or ignored by this brain or that, winding strange horns, letting loose swift hunting-dogs, wild huntsmen, in as many shadowy fields as minds there were to take the infection of this old clicking music dear to the goat-footed wood-god. But the inward springs or being of that music took a further reach; even as the being of some deep-eddying river-spate shapes and steers (not is shaped or steered by) these motions of leaf, twig, drowned flower-petal, water-fly, bubble, streak of foam, purling ripple, uprooted floating water-weed, which, borne by on its surface, swirling to its swirl, do but dimly portend the nature of the power that bears them.

  Northward twenty miles beyond Memison, in the low valleys of the Ruyar, King Mezentius rode with the Chancellor, knee to knee. Now they breathed their horses: now put them to a walking-pace, breasting the long upward training of meadowland north of Mavia: now quickened to a hand-gallop in the dewy pastures of Terainsht. Iron-still was the King’s countenance under the moon, and with a look upon it as if he had some hammers working in his head. But his seat in saddle was free and jaunting, as if he and the great black horse he bestrode shared but one body between them. So rode the King and Beroald, without word spoken; and in the beat of their horsehooves, irking the soft summer night, was the beat of the castanets, dear to goat-footed Pan.

  But in lovely Memison, where, seated with her women about her, the Duchess looked upon the revels held under the sky that night, this inside secret music touched the sense less unpeaceably, as it had been the purr of some great sleepy cat that rested as she rested.

  And now that same peace, quiet as summer star-shine in a night without wind, settled too about Mary, whether through the music, or through the opening, like night-flowers when the sun is down, of the innermost heart and mind within her, or through some safety that came of Lessingham’s nearness: of his coat-sleeve touching, light as a moth, her bare arm between shoulder and elbow.

  ‘Go, my Violante,’ said the Duchess: ‘bid them lay a little table for his grace here beside me and bring a light collation, caviar, and then what you will, and framboises to finish with; and Rian wine. For that is royal wine, and best fits tonight: red wine of the Rian.’

  Violante went, lightly in both hands gathering her gown, down the half-dozen steps which, wide, shallow, made of panteron stone and carpeted in the midst with a deep-piled carpet of a holly-leaf green, led from this gallery down to the level where the dancing was. The summer palace in Memison is in plan like the letter T, and all along the main limb of it (which faces south) and along the shorter limb (which faces west) this gallery runs, with doors giving upon it and great windows, and with columns of some smooth white stone with silvery sparkles in it: these, set at fifteen-foot intervals, carry the roof above, and the upper rooms of the palace. A grass-plat, a hundred paces or more in length by sixty broad, lies below the gallery, with a formal garden of clipped ancient yew to bound it on the southern side, and a tall thick hedge of the same dark growth upon the western; and on the grass, in the north-west corner of this quadrangle, was an oaken floor laid down on purpose that night to dance on, with hanging lamps and flamboys and swinging lanterns round about on every side of it to give light to the dancers. Fifty or sixty couples now footed the coranto, in such a shifting splendour of jewels and colour of tissue in doublet, kirtle, lady’s gown, rich-wrought fan and ornament, as is seen in some cascade that comes down a wide wall of rock in steep woods facing the evening sun, and every several fringe of freshet as it falls becomes a fall of precious stones: amethyst, golden topaz, ruby, sapphire, emerald, changing and interchanging with every slightest shifting of the eye that looks on them.

  But as when, with the altering of the light, some watered surface or some column of falling water among the rest suddenly throws back the radiance of the great sun itself, and these lesser jewels are dimmed, so was the coming of the Duke of Zayana among this company. He came without all ceremony, with great easy strides, so that Medor and Melates, who alone attended him, had some ado to keep up with him: without all ceremony, save that, at word gone before him, the music stopped and the dancers; and two trumpeters, standing forward from their place behind the Duchess’s chair, sounded a fanfare.

  Duke Barganax halted upon the steps and, with a sweep of his purple cloak, stood a moment to salute the guests; then upon one knee, kissed the Duchess’s hand. She raised him and, for her turn, kissed him on the forehead.

  ‘You are late,’ said she, as, letting a boy take his cloak, the Duke seated himself beside her in a golden chair.

  ‘I am sorry, my lady mother. The King, I am told, was here today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And gone again? Why was that?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Thunder in the air?’

  Amalie shrugged her shoulders gracefully. ‘And why late?’ she said. Like they seemed, she and he, one to the other, as the she-lion and her son.

  ‘Only that I had set myself to finish a head I was painting of for a new piece I am upon, of a mural painting of Hippokleides’ betrothal feast. And so, third hour past noon ere I took saddle.’

  ‘“Hippokleides, you have danced away … your marriage.” A subject needing some delicacy of treatment! And whose head that you painted?’

  ‘Why, a late lady of your own: Bellafront’s.’

  ‘Bellafront? She is red: Titian: of our colour. Could you not have left it till another day, this painting?’

  ‘She might have been dead when I came home again.’

  ‘Dead? Is she sick then?’

  ‘No!’ said the Duke, laughing. ‘’Tis no more but follow my father’s good maxim; when I was little, and the best strawberry saved up at the side of my plate to eat it last: told me, eat it now, since I might not live to eat it later.’

  ‘You are absurd,’ said Amalie: ‘you and your teacher both. Is it true, Count Medor?’

  ‘I were a bad servant, to call my master absurd,’ replied Medor; ‘and a worse courtier, to contradict your beauteous excellency in your own house. Well, it is true. He is absurd. But always by choice, never upon compulsion.’

  ‘O perfect courtier! But, truly, men are absurd by nature; and were you, my noble son, less than absurd, then were you less than man. And that – faugh! It was naught of mine: whether to have bred it, or to truckle withal.’

  Supper being done, they sat on now (Barganax, with those Lords Melates and Medor, the Duchess, with her Myrrha, Violante and others), looking on the scene, in a contented silence which awoke ever and again into some lazy bandying of contented humorous talk. Lamps above and about them shed a slumbrously inconstant light. From great stone jars, ranged along the terrace edge, orchids laid out their strange and luxurious shapes, dusky-petalled, streaked or spotted, haired, smooth-lipped, velvet-skinned, exhaling up
on the warm air their heady heavy sweetness.

  ‘Will not your grace dance tonight?’ Medor said at length to the Duke.

  Barganax shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’ said the Duchess. ‘But no: it were unkind to ask you. You are in love.’

  ‘I was never in love yet,’ said Barganax.

  ‘Then all these tales are but false?’

  ‘The Duke,’ said Medor, ‘has never been out of love: to my certain knowledge, these seven years.’

  ‘What will you say to that?’ said the Duchess. ‘As captain of your bodyguard, he should know.’

  ‘It is a prime error in these matters,’ said Barganax, ‘to fall in love. Women are like habits: if good, they stick fast, and that becomes tedious: if bad, and you love ’em, the love will stick like a leech though the woman go. No, I have taken a leaf out of their book: treat ’em as they treat fashions: enjoy for a season, then next season cast about for a new one.’

  Amalie fanned herself. ‘This is terrible good doctrine. To hear you, one might imagine some old practitioner, bald before his time with o’er-acting of the game, spoke with your lips. If you be not secretly already in love, take care; for I think you are in a dangerous aptness to be so.’

  The Duke laughed. ‘I was never sadly in love but with you, my lady mother’: he took her hand in his and kissed it. ‘Nor need you to blame me, neither. Surely ’tis the part of a good son to look to’s parents for example? and here’s example of the highest in the land for me to point to, when I will not overmuch fret myself for aught that’s second best.’ He was leaned back in his chair, legs crossed at full stretch before him, silent now for a minute. His fingers, of the one hand, played absently with the Duchess’s, while through half-closed lips his eyes rested on the bright maze of the dance and night’s blue curtain beyond. ‘And, for your old masters of the game, madam: no. I am too hard to please. I am a painter. But pity of it is, nothing lasts. All passes away, or changes.’