The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  FEW OF THESE PRECISE DETAILS HAVE A PLACE IN THE ARGUMENT, WHICH BRIEFLY DESCRIBES AKKAMA AND THEN SUMMARIZES ITS HISTORY:

  Akkama is a vast country lying north-west from Fingiswold: its southern parts all sandy desert, its north and centre a high table-land. The country has a wintry climate and is sparsely inhabited by nomads and woodmen. Five or six generations ago rebellious nobles from Fingiswold fled to Akkama and there founded a dynasty, intermarrying with the natives and living like robber kings on Pis-sempsco, a high rock on which sits the capital and only city of importance. With this for their hold, they lived by foray and piracy, throwing criminals to the pigs (their chief cattle, and very fierce), and worshipping the ‘dirty gods’ of the country. They vaunted themselves rightful heirs to the throne of Fingiswold and the nobles speak the English tongue (which is common to the three kingdoms), but the natives, a cruel, base and savage people, have a gibberish of their own. The Nine represent these noble families who had fallen from power when the usurping king, Tzucho, expelled Aktor and slew the king his father. This Tzucho was a bastard of a cadet branch of the ruling family, his mother a queen of Akkama who was thrown to the pigs for adultery with a pirate of native birth.

  The Nine, having slain Tzucho and set themselves in power as an oligarchy, now send an embassy to Rialmar offering every conceivable apology and atonement, short of surrender of their country. The Queen, dealing with the ambassadors in person, makes a treaty whereby Akkama promises perpetual friendship and alliance, and Aktor renounces any claim to the throne of Akkama.

  It is Aktor’s conduct during these negotiations that finally decides Queen Stateira to marry him. With great dignity and finesse and in a scene which does credit to them both, she in effect proposes this, and Aktor is almost frightened at the sudden fulfilment of his dearest hopes. Upon their marriage (September 726), he is proclaimed Prince Protector, making at the same time public and solemn renunciation of any higher ambition and swearing fealty to King Mezentius and to Stateira as Queen Regent.

  The Queen sends for Doctor Vandermast and gives him the responsibility, under her, for the young King’s upbringing. Aktor is at first in a dread lest Vandermast should disclose his secret, and meditates the doctor’s destruction. But while he procrastinates he learns to trust the doctor, and soon to revere him.

  With the passage of the years, Mezentius learns that he himself is King: learns too, with surprise, that he had a father other than Aktor. He shows an early instinct for command and a delight in danger for its own sake: dangerous dogs, horses, bulls, and Anthea in her lynx dress: dangerous climbing on the walls and cliffs of Rialmar. He is untirable, incredibly generous and open-handed, and in all dispute an upholder, from native inclination, of the losing side.

  IX

  LADY ROSMA IN ACROZAYANA

  IN 732 Emmius’s Meszrian policy bears fruit in the marriage of his daughter the Lady Rosma Parry, now eighteen, to King Kallias. Kallias’s meaning was by this alliance to re-estate his power in the Meszrian Marches and further to aggrandize himself at the expense of Rerek. But Emmius, a more subtle and no less brutal Machiavellian, had a private understanding with Haliartes, the king’s brother and heir presumptive, whereby, in case the king should die and the succession be endangered, Emmius would support Haliartes by force of arms upon condition of his immediately making Rosma his queen.

  The lady, taken with a loathing for Kallias (who is forty, a gloomy tyrant, and very dissolute and debauched), murders him on his wedding-night and forthwith weds Haliartes, a weak and easy-mannered prince much more to the taste of the lords of Meszria than his self-willed, hard-driving brother. She easily persuades Haliartes to make her not his queen only but joint sovereign with himself.

  X

  STIRRING OF THE EUMENIDES

  IN 736 the Nine secretly offer to Aktor the throne of Akkama. The envoy, seeing Aktor in private, explains that this is upon condition of his first becoming King of Fingiswold. Aktor refuses, and the matter is dropped. He refuses mainly because of his love for the Queen (to whom he never reveals this offer) and because of his oath of renunciation, to break which would ruin him for ever in her esteem. But the refusal is wormwood in his soul. He grows more and more melancholic: begins to ponder whether it were not best to make away with Mezentius who he fears may, as he grows up, find out the true circumstances of his father’s taking off: but devotion to Queen Stateira (perhaps the one stable principle in him), seconded by a congenital proneness to put things off, always holds him back from this further crime. Nevertheless, the bloody secret is always a barrier between himself and the Queen.

  XI

  COMMODITY OF NEPHEWS

  QUEEN Rosma, grown weary after five years of the unenterprising water-gruelish Haliartes, in 738 casts her eye on his nephew Lebedes, a villainous young scoundrel five years her junior, to whom she now promises her hand in marriage if he will first kill the king his uncle. Lebedes accordingly raises rebellion and kills Haliartes in battle; but Rosma, alarmed now lest this young man prove too devilish, denies her part of the bargain and, finding ready to hand Beltran, Lebedes’s elder brother, invites him to rid her of Lebedes, the consideration of which service is to be, as before, her hand in marriage. Beltran, unscrupulous but attractive, and with many saving graces, and able moreover (as no man she had before encountered) to stir faintly her affections, is madly in love and savagely jealous of his brother. He surprises Lebedes in the queen’s chamber and, with a hearty good will and under her very eyes, stabs him to death. In the same hour she takes Beltran as lover, but forthwith upon a revulsion repudiates him, threatens him with death, and drives him with contumely into exile.

  Rosma, now aged twenty-four, reigns henceforward as Queen of Meszria in her own right. She is a big powerful woman, dark-haired, black-eyed, dissembling, proud, grasping, perfidious, and cruel. She is handsome, and can be physically extremely alluring: not vicious, but cold: obsessed with the lust of power. In due course, Beroald, her son by Beltran, is born in Zayana. Rosma, being by nature ‘of masculine virtue,’ hates to be a woman, hates her offspring, and indeed has posed, and continues to pose (with what justification none can tell) as a Virgin Queen. She conceals the birth and orders the child to be exposed on a mountain. Anthea, in her lynx dress, saves it, and, by direction of Doctor Vandermast, substitutes it for the same-aged son of the wife of a gentleman in South Meszria.

  XII

  ANOTHER FAIR MOONSHINY NIGHT

  KING Mezentius, as he approaches manhood, begins to discover justice: begins too to discover that the beauty which is in action is the necessary complement to that physical beauty which he has already learnt to worship. He shows early promise of that supreme gift of a man of action, the power to put from his mind everything except the business in hand, and develops at the same time berserk traits: fits of intense vigour and achievement which alternate with periods of moodiness, silence, lassitude, and retirement into himself. Stateira watches these things with mixed admiration and anxiety. He begins to talk to her about his father, and about Aktor, to whom (without himself knowing why) he begins to take a certain dislike. This troubles him, and his mother. And it troubles Aktor. The closer Aktor draws to the Queen, the more he is tortured with remorse. Yet he realizes that it was in fact that wicked and secret treason that gave him his present happiness and power. His mind is thus in a perpetual conflict, and his melancholy increases upon him. Queen Stateira for her part never ceases to be under his passionate domination and grows more and more fearful lest he should someday confess to her the guilt which she never admits, even to her own secret mind, that she suspects. Deeper and nobler and more Olympian is her clinging to Mezentius’s future greatness (foreshadowed by Doctor Vandermast), as her sheet anchor.

  In December 740, the King (aged seventeen) has been questioning his step-father about his father’s murder. He does not, save in recurring moments of gnawing uneasiness and guesswork that originate in the blood rather than in the brain, suspect Aktor’s complicity. Moreover, hi
s rooted dislike for Aktor itself makes him the less ready to suspect; for it is clean against his nature to be unjust, most of all to a man personally repugnant to his sympathies. He questions Aktor now, simply because he is impatient to clear up the mystery and have done with it, and Aktor (having caught and disposed of the actual poisoner) seems to be the one person who may be able to throw any light on the thing.

  The outcome of their conversation is indeterminate (as for any advancement of the King’s purpose), but to Aktor, devastating. His fears, bred of a bad conscience, tell him the King has divined the secret, or been told by Vandermast. In a like agony of spirit as fourteen years ago, he comes once more at midnight to the Queen’s privy garden, expecting solitude but finding Anthea there, as if waiting for him.

  It is the real frost this time: the longest night of the year. That oread lady is cold, pitiless, scornful, and unkind. She knows, of course, the truth, and ‘harries mankind’s obliquity’ in the person of the unhappy Prince Protector. Her unmercilessness, terribly seconding his own inward conscience, is in effect a means of illuminating the good (which is not inconsiderable) in Aktor, and so of awakening in an onlooker, had any been there, pity and charity on his behalf.

  In this cold and this clarity induced by the scorpion sting of Anthea’s scorn, he reviews the choices:

  First: Kill Mezentius? But that would kill also the Queen’s love for himself. And moreover, how could he hope to escape?

  Second: Flee? But where to? Akkama will not have him. Besides, what profit in life without the Queen? They are by this time, it is true, scarcely more lovers than she and Mardanus had been after Mezentius’s birth; but this time it is the Queen, not her lover, who has sated her passion and finds it burned out at last. But she is deeply fond of Aktor, and (as he believes in his bones) has never imagined the truth about his hand in Mardanus’s murder: and to live with her, even upon terms of brother and sister, has become to him the one reason for continuance upon earth.

  Third: Confess all to Mezentius, and hope he will kill him? But that, albeit quieting his conscience, would (again) hurt the Queen. Also Mezentius would tell her all, and that Aktor cannot even in imagination face.

  And so, feeling he has miscooked his life (possessed his lady by unlawful means, mixed his love with ambition and, for sake of both, become a traitor, a murderer of his friend and benefactor, and a life-long liar henceforth and fugitive from truth: things which can never be reversed and never confessed but can, maybe, be expiated), and being resolved the Queen shall never know, nor Mezentius (if he does not know, or has not guessed, already), he asks Anthea to do him a single favour: the favour of silence. She scornfully, but (as Aktor by some obscure intimation realizes) with faithful meaning, assents. Aktor throws himself backwards down the eight-hundred-foot cliff that overlooks the harbour.

  Anthea keeps her word. The King keeps his thoughts to himself, and refrains, with an almost feminine sympathy and intuition, from letting his mother suspect the truth, or what he guesses to be the truth.

  ON 5 DECEMBER 1943, EDDISON RECORDED SOME OF HIS THOUGHTS ABOUT AKTOR’S SUICIDE:

  Make Aktor’s tragic end not a melodramatic retribution on a villain, but the destined expiation of a crime that demands expiation. ‘What’s done is done’; and in taking that way out Aktor may be thought to have redeemed himself. He is not a Morville, far less a Derxis; a man of promise, led by passion and ambition into wicked courses but in some sort reconciled at last.

  BOOK THREE

  THE AFFAIR OF REREK

  ARGUMENT WITH DATES

  Emmius Parry continues his policy: looking north

  King Mezentius gains Rerek

  (Chapters XIII–XIV)

  XIII

  THE DEVIL’S QUILTED ANVIL

  IN 741 the Nine fall from power in Akkama and Melkis becomes king, being by Aktor’s death the next in legitimate line of succession. After eighteen months of hesitation and diplomatic interchanges, Melkis moves to unseat King Mezentius. Supervius Parry, aged forty-six, who has now sat in Laimak twenty-one years, sends his younger son, Horius Parry (now aged sixteen) as an officer in attendance upon the general in command of a Rerek contingent in aid of King Mezentius in Fingiswold. This first meeting of Horius with the King results in a mutual interest and subtle equivocal attraction.

  In the campaign which follows, the King, aged nineteen, finally repulses Akkama, who is left disgraced and licking his wounds (742).

  Supervius’s main concern is now to oust Gilmanes (who has succeeded his father Alvard as Prince of Kaimar) from his position of favour in Rialmar. He is jealous of Gilmanes, as of the other princes in the north (Ercles, Keriones’s son and successor in Eldir, and Aramond of Bagort). Supervius is no great statesman, and is obsessed with his ambition to see Laimak received as mistress of all Rerek. He is never really loyal to his brother Emmius, as Emmius is to him for family sake and for a kind of love of him. He walks in a net so far as Emmius is concerned, and Emmius, enjoying and frustrating his brother’s deep-laid and tortuous disloyalties, constantly uses him as a cat’s-paw to further his own more subtle and less parochial policy.

  Emmius (aged fifty-two), is preeminently by nature a user of cat’s-paws: this explains his never attempting to seize Meszria for himself, but preferring to control it through his daughter Rosma. He is probably already privately toying with the notion of a marriage between her and the King. This he sees might mean the hemming in and even (if the King turns out from these beginnings a very great man) the subjection of Rerek. But if the King turns out so, this will be of little moment; for Rerek, on the doorstep of Fingiswold, could not then in any event hope to stand long against him. If, on the other hand, the King’s capacities prove but mean, then the alliance would strengthen the Parry (particularly Emmius’s own branch of the family), and would mean an aggrandizement of Meszria and so run with Emmius’s policy, since the queen his daughter has not only married into the reigning house in Zayana but now supplanted it.

  Openly, Emmius plays for time; refuses to regard Gilmanes seriously (a view justified later by the event); and prepares to use Peridor of Laveringay, his sister Lugia’s son, as a thorn in Ercles’s side. This project fails, however, Peridor inclining more and more to Ercles.

  King Mezentius (now aged twenty), noting the uneasy balance of power in Rerek (the age-long leadership of the house of Parry counter-weighted by the loose alliance of the princes of the north, and the complicated courtship, by both sides, of the free cities), begins to think of extending his influence southwards.

  His mother, Queen Stateira, mistrusting the Parry instinctively, now produces in Rialmar Ercles’s sister, the Lady Anastasia, a beautiful girl whom the King easily falls in love with and marries (July 732): a further setback for Emmius Parry.

  XIV

  LORD EMMIUS PARRY

  OPEN strife breaks out next year (744) between the Parry and Ercles in Rerek. Supervius holds Megra, left to Marescia by her father’s will who died a year or two ago. Ercles, feeling that this threatens his safety in Eldir, disputes the will. He prepares to besiege Megra, and Supervius, getting wind of this, sends an army to ravage the lands of Eldir itself. Ercles, thwarted, appeals to Rialmar for succour. The King refuses, telling Ercles plainly that he is not disposed to make his policy a family affair. Horius Parry (aged eighteen), shrewdly diagnosing the King’s impartiality, induces his father (with Emmius’s approval) to agree with Ercles to a joint application to the King to arbitrate. The King establishes a just peace, confirming the Parry in Megra, but (to save the old treaty) formally as Lieutenant of the King of Fingiswold, and he must retire from Lailma pending a free election in that city.

  Early in 745 Queen Anastasia dies.

  In 746 a renewed attack by Akkama is bloodily thrown back by the King, demonstrating once more his armed strength in Fingiswold.

  Emmius Parry now judges it the happy moment for a crucial move to bring the King into Rerek. For this purpose he successfully makes Peridor his cat’s-paw (w
ho is quite unconscious of being so used) to provoke Ercles, Gilmanes, and Aramond to assault Megra in violation of the concordat. After fruitless negotiations lasting eighteen months, during which Megra stands a siege, Supervius, as injured party, appeals to the King. The King summons a conference in Rialmar, insisting on personal attendance: no ambassadors or legates. Mainly because of stiffness on the part of Supervius and Horius, whom the princes distrust, the conference is stormy; but Emmius’s diplomacy brings it at last to a joint request by all unanimously, backed by other lords of Rerek, that the King should assume the crown of Rerek as their overlord, guaranteeing all freedoms. The King accepts this (748).

  Henceforth, the King’s policy in Rerek is consistently divide et impera; and his great weapon a scrupulous fairness. (His habit, all his life, is to look for (and find) the best in people. This does not mean he is never taken in, but he consistently sees the best in them, and gets the most out of them. In Horius Parry, for instance, and (later) in Rosma, he sees many bests (and many worsts). Those that disappoint him (for instance, later, Valero, and Akkama) have been wittingly tested by him, and run risks with.

  BOOK FOUR

  THE AFFAIR OF MESZRIA

  ARGUMENT WITH DATES

  The King gains Meszria

  Amalie