The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  ‘Be such as I think you to be,’ said the King, ‘and my friendship followeth the gift.’

  The doctor, that audience being done, came and went for a while his leisurely to and fro, within door and without, and always upon the fringes of the company, not as member thereof so much as looker on rather and listener, remarking whatsoever in any person appeared of remarkable: carriages, aspects, moods, manners, silences, little subtleties of eye, nostril, lip. And about and above him, at every succeeding step of his progress through this palace upon the southern horn of Rialmar, the greatness and the ancientness of the place hung heavier. Even as, to a climber, the mere vastness of the mountain becomes, as he goes higher, a presence, unite and palpable, built up of successive vastness of slabbed rock-face, vertiginous ice-cliff, eye-dazzling expanse of snow-field, up-soaring ultimate cornice chiselled by the wind to a sculptured perfection of line, sun-bright and remote against an infinite remoteness of blue heaven above it, so here was all gathered to an immobility of time-worn and storied magnificence: cyclopaean walls and gateways; flights of stairs six riders abreast might ride down on horseback and not touch knees; galleries, alcoves and clerestories cut from the rock; perspectives flattening the eye down distances of corbel and frieze and deep-mullioned windows six times the height of a man; colonnades with doric capitals curiously carved, supporting huge-timbered vaulted roofs; and domed roofs that seemed wide as the arch of day. All of which, apprehended in its wholeness, might cast a wise mind into oblivion not of its own self only and of all mankind but even of the everlasting mountains themselves; in the sudden apprehension that this Rialmar might be the nursery or breeding-place of a majesty and a loneliness older-rooted than theirs.

  Closed in these meditations, he came once more into that presence-chamber, with its sea-horse staircase, and here was one of the Queen’s chamberlains with her highness’s bidding that Doctor Vandermast should attend her in the privy garden. The doctor followed him; and, passing on their way through a vaulted corridor hewn in the rock and brightly lighted with hanging lamps, they were met with a nurse leading in her hand a child yet in his side-coats, of two or three years old. The doctor viewed the boy narrowly, and the boy him. ‘What child was that?’ he asked, when they were gone by. The chamberlain, with a skewing of his eye at him as of one smally trusting old vagrant men that were likely sprung of a stone and certainly best told nothing, as soonest mended, answered that it was one of the children of the palace, he knew not for sure which. Which answer the learned doctor let go without further remark.

  ‘It is her highness’s pleasure,’ said the chamberlain, at the garden gate, ‘to receive you in private. Be pleased to walk on’: so Vandermast entered in alone and stood before Queen Stateira.

  She was sitting sideways now on the jewelled bench, her feet up, sewing a kirtle of white satin embroidered with flowers of silver. Upon the doctor’s coming she but glanced up and so back to her needlework. It was yet bright sunshine, but with the wearing of the afternoon the shadow of that gold and ivory statue of our Lady of Paphos no longer touched the Queen where she sat. The air was colder, and she had a high-collared cloak about her shoulders of rich brown velvet, coloured of the pine-marten’s skin in summer and lined with vair. He waited, watching her, while she with down-bended eyes plied her needle. Nought else stirred, except now and then a blazing of hot colour where her hair caught the sun, and except, where the pleated neck-ruff of her gown ran lowest, the gentle fall and swell of her breathing. After a little, she raised her eyes. ‘Can you guess, reverend sir, why I have sent for you?’ The sun was behind her, and her countenance not to be read.

  He answered, ‘I will not guess, for I know.’

  ‘Then tell me. For, in good sadness, I know not why I did it. Answer freely: you see we are alone.’

  ‘Because,’ answered he, after a moment’s silence, ‘your highness is fugitive and homeless, therefore you did do it; vainly expecting that the will-o’-the-wisp of an old man’s fallible counsel should be a lamp to light you home.’

  ‘These are strange unlikely words,’ she said. ‘I know not how to take them.’

  ‘Truth,’ said Vandermast gently, ‘was ever a strange wild-fowl.’

  ‘Truth! I that was born and bred in Rialmar, where else then shall I be at home? I that am your Queen, how should I be a fugitive, and from what?’

  ‘To be here before your time is to be homeless. And the necessity you flee from is necessity by this cause only, that yourself (albeit I think you have forgotten) did choose it to make it so.’

  The violent blood suffused all her face and neck, and with the suddenness of her half-rising from her seat the rich and costly embroidery slid from her lap and lay crumpled on the ground. She sat back again: ‘I see you are but some phantastical sophister who with speaking paradoxically will gain the reputation of wisdom and reach. I’ll listen to no more.’

  ‘I am nought else,’ answered that aged man, painfully upon one knee retrieving the fallen satins, ‘than your highness’s creature and servant. You do misprize, moreover, the words I spake, referring unto one particular accident what was meant in a generality more loftily inclusive.’ Then, standing again in respectful reverence before her, ‘And yet, it fits,’ he said, under his breath as to himself only; but the Queen, with head bowed as before over her needlework, seemed to shrink, as though the words touched her on a wound.

  ‘I have lost my needle,’ she said. ‘No. Here it is.’ Then, after a long pause, still sewing, and as out of a deep unhappiness: ‘Will the gull choose to dash herself against the Pharos light? Will a seaman, where the tide runs in the wind’s teeth between skerry and skerry, choose to be there in a boat without a rudder? Why should I?’

  ‘How shall any earthly being but your highness’s self answer that? Perhaps ’twas in the idle desire to feel your power.’

  With that, the Queen’s hand stopped dead. ‘And you are he they tell me can read a man’s destiny in his eyes? Can you not read in mine,’ and she raised her head to meet his gaze, ‘that I have no power? that I am utterly alone?’

  ‘The King’s power is your power.’

  She said, resuming her sewing, ‘I begin to dread it is not even his.’

  ‘It is yours, will you but use it.’

  She said, bending her white neck yet more to hide her face, ‘I begin to think I have lost the knack to use it.’ Then, scarce to be heard: ‘Perhaps even the wish.’

  Doctor Vandermast held his peace. His eyes were busied between this woman and this statue: this, more like in its outward, may be, to the unfacing reality, but of itself unreal, a mere mathematic, a superficies: that other real, but yet, save for an inner and outer loveliness, unlike, because wanting self-knowledge; and yet putting on, by virtue of that very privation, a perfection unique and sufficient unto itself albeit not belonging to the divine prototype at the fulness of Her actual; even as the great lamp of day has at sunrise and at sunset perfections of uncompleteness of transience which are consumed or blotted out in the white flame of noon.

  ‘You are a strange secret man,’ she said presently, still without looking up, ‘that I should have spoke to you thus: things I’d a spoken to no creature else in the world. And, until today, ne’er so much as set eyes on you.’ Then, suddenly gathering up her needlework, ‘But you give me no help. No more than the other standers by or hinderers.’

  He said, ‘There is none hath the ability to help your highness, except only your highness’s self alone.’

  ‘Here’s cold comfort, then. Yet against burning, I suppose, there may be some good in coldness.’

  She rose now and walked a turn or two in silence, coming to a stand at last under the statue; looking up at which, and with a face averted from that aged doctor, she said to him, ‘True it is, I did send for you in a more weightier matter than this of me. I have a son.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you read stars and significations in the heaven?’

  ‘Be it indeed,’ he replied, ‘t
hat in the university of Miphraz I did seven years apply my youth to study in the Ultramundanes and the Physicals, I have long since learnt that there is no answer in the mouth of these. My study is now of the darkness rather which is hid in the secret places of the heart of man: my office but only to understand, and to watch, and to wait.’

  ‘Well, have you seen the child? What find you in him? Give me in a word your very thought. I must have the truth.’ She turned and faced him. ‘Even and the truth be evil.’

  ‘If it be truth,’ said the doctor, ‘it can in no hand be evil; according to the principle of theoric, Quanta est, tanto bonum, which is as much as to say that completeness of reality and completeness of goodness are, sub specie aeternitatis, the same. I have beheld this child like as were I to behold some small scarce discernible first paling of the skies to tomorrow’s dawn, and I say to you: Here is day.’

  ‘To be King in his time?’

  ‘So please the Gods.’

  ‘In Fingiswold, after his father?’

  ‘So, and more. To be the stay of the whole world.’

  ‘This is heavenly music. Shall’t be by power, or but by fortune?’

  ‘By power,’ answered Vandermast. ‘And by worth.’

  The Queen caught a deep breath. ‘O, you have shown me a sweet morn after terrible dreams. But also a strange noise in my head, makes stale the morning: by what warrant must I believe you?’

  ‘By none. You must believe not me, but the truth. I am but a finger pointing. And the nearest way for your highness (being a mortal) to believe that truth, and the sole only way for it to take body and effect in this world, is that you should act and make it so.’

  ‘You are dark to me as yet.’

  ‘I say that whether this greatness shall be or not be, resteth on your highness alone.’

  She turned away and hid her face. When, after a minute, she looked around at him again, she reached out her hand for him to kiss. ‘I am not offended with you,’ she said. ‘There was an instant, in that wild talk of ours, I could have cut your throat. Be my friend. God knows, in the path I tread, uneven, stony, and full of bogs, I need one.’

  Vandermast answered her, ‘Madam and sweet Mistress, I say to you again, I am yours in all things. And I say but again that your highness’s self hath the only power able to help you. Rest faithful to that perfectness which dwelleth within you, and be safe in that.’

  III

  NIGRA SYLVA, WHERE THE DEVILS DANCE

  THAT night Prince Aktor startled out of his first sleep from an evil dream that had in it nought of reasonable correspondence with things of daily life but, in an immediacy of pure undeterminable fear, horror and loss that beat down all his sense to deadness, as with a thunder of monstrous wings, hurled him from sleep to waking with teeth a-chatter, limbs trembling, and the breath choking in his throat. Soon as his hand would obey him, he struck a light and lay sweating with the bedclothes huddled about his ears, while he watched the candle-flame burn down almost to blueness then up again, and the slow strokes of midnight told twelve. After a tittle, he blew it out and disposed himself to sleep; but sleep, standing iron-eyed in the darkness beside his bed, withstood all wooing. At length he lighted the candle once more; rose; lighted the lamps on their pedestals of steatite and porphyry; and stood for a minute, naked as he was from bed, before the great mirror that was on the wall between the lamps, as if to sure himself of his continuing bodily presence and verity. Nor was there any unsufficientness apparent in the looking-glass image: of a man in his twenty-third year, slender and sinewy of build, well strengthened and of noble bearing, dark-brown hair, somewhat swart of skin, his face well featured, smooth shaved in the Akkama fashion, big-nosed, lips full and pleasant, and having a delicateness and a certain proudness and a certain want of resolution in their curves, well-set ears, bushy eyebrows, blue eyes with dark lashes of an almost feminine curve and longness.

  Getting on his nightgown he brimmed himself a goblet of red wine from the flagon on the table at the bed-head, drank it, filled again, and this time drained the cup at one draught. ‘Pah!’ he said. ‘In sleep a man’s reason lieth drugged, and these womanish fears and scruples, that our complete mind would laugh and away with, unman us at their pleasure.’ He went to the window and threw back the curtains: stood looking out a minute: then, as if night had too many eyes, extinguished the lamps and dressed hastily by moonlight, and so to the window again, pausing in the way to pour out a third cup of wine and, that being quaffed down, a fourth, which being but two parts filled left the flagon empty. Round and above him, as he leaned out now on the sill of the open window, the night listened, warm and still; wall, gable and buttress silver and black under the moonshine, and the sky about the moon suffused with a radiancy of violet light that misted the stars. Aktor said in himself, ‘Desire without action is poison. Who said that, he was a wise man.’ As though the unseasonable mildness of this calm, unclouded March midnight had breathed suddenly a frozen air about him, he shivered, and in the same instant there dropped into that pool of silence the marvel of a woman’s voice singing, light and bodiless, with a wildness in its rhythms and with every syllable clean and sharp like the tinkle of broken icicles falling:

  ‘Where, without the region earth,

  Glacier and icefall take their birth,

  Where dead cold congeals at night

  The wind-carv’d cornices diamond-white,

  Till those unnumbered streams whose flood

  To the mountain is instead of blood

  Seal’d in icy bed do lie,

  And still’d is day’s artillery,

  Near the frost-star’d midnight’s dome

  The oread keeps her untim’d home.

  From which high if she down stray,

  On th’ world’s great stage to sport and play,

  There most she maketh her game and glee

  To harry mankind’s obliquity.’

  So singing, she passed directly below him, in the inky shadow of the wall. A lilting, scorning voice it was, with overtones in it of a tragical music as from muted strings, stone-moving but as out of a stone-cold heart: a voice to send tricklings down the spine as when the night-raven calls, or the whistler shrill, whose call is a fore-tasting of doom. And now, coming out into clear moonlight, she turned about and looked up at his window. He saw her eyes, like an animal’s eyes, throw back the glitter of the moon. Then she resumed her way, still singing, toward the northerly corner of the courtyard where an archway led to a cloistered walk which went to the Queen’s garden. Aktor stood for a short moment as if in doubt; then, his heart beating thicker, undid his door, fumbled his way down the stone staircase swift as he might in the dark, and so out and followed her.

  The garden gate stood open, and a few steps within it he overtook her. ‘You are a night-walker, it would seem, and in strange places.’

  ‘So much is plain,’ said she, and her lynx-like eyes looked at him.

  ‘Know you who this is that do speak to you?’

  ‘O yes. Prince by right in your own land, till your own land put you out; and thereafter prince here, and but by courtesy. Which is much like egg without the meat: fair outsides, but small weight and smaller profit. I’ve heard some unbitted tongues say: “princox”.’

  ‘You are a bold little she-cat,’ he said. Again a shivering took him, bred of some bite in the air. ‘There is frost in this garden.’

  ‘Is there? Your honour were wiser leave it and go to bed, then.’

  ‘You must first do me this kindness, mistress. Bring me to the old man your grandsire.’

  ‘At this time of night?’

  ‘There is a thing I must ask him.’

  ‘You are a great asker.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said, as might a boy caught unawares by some uncloaking of his mind he had safely supposed well hid.

  Anthea bared her teeth. ‘Do you not wish you had my art, to see in the dark?’ Then, with a shrug: ‘I heard him tell you, this afternoon, he had no answe
r to questions of yours.’

  ‘I cannot sleep,’ said Aktor, ‘for want of his answer.’

  ‘There is always the choice to stay awake.’

  ‘Will you bring me to him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell me where he sleeps, then, and I will seek him out.’

  Anthea laughed at the moon. ‘Hearken how these mortals will ask and ask! But I am not your nurse, to weary myself with parroting of No, no, no, when a pettish child screams for the nightshade-berry. You shall have it, though it poison you. Wait here till I inform him, if so he may deign to come to you.’

  The prince saw her depart. As a silver birch-tree of the mountains, if it might, should walk, so walked she under the moon. And the moon, or she so walking, or the wine that was in his veins, or the thunder of his inward thought, wrought in him to think: ‘Why blame myself? Am I untrue to my friend and well-doer and dispenser of all my good, if I seek unturningly the good that seems to my incensed brain main good indeed? She is to him but an engine to breed kings to follow him. With this son bred, why, it hath long been apparent and manifest he is through with her: the pure unadulterate high perfection of all that is or ever shall be, is to him but a commodity unheeded hath served his turn. By God, what cares he for me either? That have held her today, thank the Gods (if any Gods there were, save the grand Devil perhaps in Hell that now, if flesh were or spirit were, which is in great doubt, riveth and rendeth my flesh and spirit), in my arms, albeit but for an instant only, albeit she renegued and rejected me, to know that, flesh by flesh, she must be mine to eternity? God! No, but to necessity: eternity is a trash-name. But this is now; and until my death or hers. And what of him? That, by my soul (damn my soul: for there is no soul, but only the animal spirits; and they unknown, save as the brief substance of a dream or a candle burning, that lives but and dies but in her): what surety have I (God damn me) that he meaneth not to sell me to the supplanter (I loathe him to the gallows) sits in my father’s seat? Smooth words and sweet predicaments: I am in a mist. Come sight but for a lightning-flash, ’tis folly and madness to trust aught but sight. Seeing’s believing. God or Hell, both unbelievable, ’tis time to believe whichever will show me firm ground indeed.’ He was in a muck sweat. And now, looking at that statue as an enemy, and in the ineluctable grip of indignation and love, each with the frenzy of other doubled upon it by desire, he began to say within himself: ‘Female Beast! Wisely was that done of men’s folly, to fain you a goddess. You, who devour their brains: who ganch them on your hook by their dearest flesh till they are ready to do the abominablest treasons so only they may come at the filthy anodyne you offer them, that is a lesser death in the tasting, that breaks their will and their manhood and, being tasted, leaves them sucked dry of all save shame and emptiness only and sickness of heart. Come to life, now. Move. Turn your false lightless lustful eyes here, that you may see how your method works with me. Would they were right cockatrice’s eyes, should look me dead, turn me to a stone, as you are stone: to nothing, as you are nothing.’