The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  PRINCE Valero of Ulba, who had thought he deserved one of the key fortresses in 766, has ever since been secretly busy forming a faction and endeavouring to win the confidence and support of Count Bork, Lord President of the Marches. Horius Parry, having secret intelligence of this, fosters and waters it, meaning to destroy the prince in due time and win merit thereby.

  The Parry’s young cousin, Lessingham, has a finger in this ‘secret intelligence’. (In spite of his upbringing, Lessingham at the age of sixteen fell under the spell of Horius and became the means of reconciliation between him and Eleonora of Upmire, who, at her son’s request, now allows him to reside in Laimak as page to Horius.)

  Valero, now (770) in his fortieth year, is handsome and well liked, but vain, a brilliant rather than an able politician, and fundamentally dishonest. Nobody, except the King, Emmius, and Horius, sees this vital weakness. Beroald, for his part, knows Valero only by hearsay. Emmius, in this single case, suffers his predilections to blindfold his shrewd hard judgement, and is always inclined to forgive Valero and favour him. The King leaves him alone, partly to please Emmius and Rosma (whose pet he is); but he has his eye upon him, and lets Horius Parry know, pretty unmistakably, that he holds him answerable for seeing that the prince does no serious harm.

  Horius (now aged forty-four) hates Valero, but pretends friendship and does him various good turns. Valero foolishly underestimates the Parry’s subtlety and reach, and is in the end a complete victim to his wiles. Horius has for years maintained a most masterly patience in this business, never involving himself but always and by every means lulling Valero’s suspicions, encouraging him in his grievances, flattering him, giving him rope, and pretending not so much as to dream of his having subversive intentions.

  XXV

  LORNRA ZOMBREMAR

  QUEEN Stateira has now for many years lived at Lornra Zombremar. The king has been her guest there more and more often as the years of Pax Mezentiana afford more opportunity for such pleasures of quietude; and always Doctor Vandermast is her frequent visitor, as also (of more recent years) is the King’s niece Zenianthe, herself a hamadryad and friend and pupil of the learned doctor. All the nymphs, faun-kind, and half-gods, who inhabit these solitudes, are there to do Queen Stateira service. These creatures, with their pure unquestioning sight discerning the Queen Mother for who, under the disguise of wise and lovely old age, She truly is, are as children to her, loving her the more tenderly as they perceive Her inward divinity of which she for her own part is ignorant: an ignorance which is itself a grace; of equal excellence (in Vandermast’s philosophic eye) with that far different but no less perfect and essential grace, of self-enjoyment and self-knowledge, that belongs to the fully conscious Godhead. She is now well entered upon her seventy-third year.

  In November 770, the King and the Duchess (now aged forty-seven and thirty-seven respectively) come to see his mother in Lorna Zombremar. Amalie has never before made this journey, and it is eighteen years since she met the Queen Mother, who, then on her way from Rialmar to her new home, had been her guest in Memison. During the present visit the King and Amalie experience, in a more vivid and detailed manner than ever before, that assurance of having loved and had each other in another world (the world of the Praeludium: that is to say, this nineteenth- and twentieth-century world of ours): this time with the mutual knowledge that his name, there, is Lessingham, and hers Mary. They think of the Parry’s young cousin whose name is Lessingham: a strange coincidence. As on other occasions, the memory (or dream?) fades and vanishes; but this time less completely in the King’s mind than in the Duchess’s. Even in hers, there remains a teasing sense of a forgotten or unplaceable time, whenever she hears the name ‘Lessingham’.

  XXVI

  REBELLION IN THE MARCHES

  CHOOSING the favourable moment when the Wold is impassable in winter and the King safe out of the way in Lornra Zombremar, King Sagartis of Akkama, in contempt of all treaties, attacks Fingiswold and invests Rialmar. Bodenay ably defends it, with the assistance of Romyrus and of Roder, what happens to be in Rialmar for the winter. Queen Rosma, in face of this deadly peril, directs and inspires the defence with politic wisdom and with the courage and fire of an Amazon.

  The King, on receiving the news, comes down to Sestola, and thence sails with Jeronimy in mountainous seas (830 miles from Sestola to the nearest port of Fingiswold, fifty miles from Rialmar).

  Valero, as it now appears, has been in league with Sagartis, the tributary king of Akkama, who promised secretly his support to Valero’s wild scheme to make himself king in Rerek. As soon as the King has sailed to the north, this traitor raises rebellion in the March of Ulba. With foolhardy courage, he has placed himself for this purpose in Argyanna, where he now attempts to seize Emmius Parry’s person, his host and benefactor. Emmius, now an old man of seventy-nine, valiantly resists, but is cut down by Valero’s men in Valero’s presence. His wife, Deïaneira, flinging herself between Emmius and the murderers, is butchered with him. Morville, a distant cousin of the Parry, plays a part here: tries to help Emmius and, after his murder, escapes to inform Horius.

  Valero fails to secure Argyanna. Horius Parry, whose agents have kept him remarkably well informed, appears swiftly and in armed strength before the fortress (too late indeed to save his uncle: enemies ask whether he really wanted to), and demands its surrender. Valero escapes by the skin of his teeth.

  After several heavy battles, Horius (771) puts down the revolt. He then cleans up the rebels with merciless thoroughness and not without an eye to the interests of persons friendly to his house and supremacy in Rerek. He beheads Count Bork and a dozen other great men: spares, and so binds to his obedience, Olpman and Gilmanes (the latter, as Valero’s brother thirteen years his senior, is dangerously under suspicion): punishes many more. Valero himself, fleeing for sanctuary to his brother Gilmanes in Kaima, is by him handed over to the Parry, who puts him to death in a horrible and secret manner in Laimak dungeons. Because of these severities, the Lord Horius Parry comes to be called by his ill-willers (not too loudly, and behind his back) ‘the Beast of Laimak’.

  Barganax, leading a small force into the Ulba March during the rebellion, wins a brilliant cavalry victory: this to the confusion of many who had until now set him down as no better than a chambering dilettante, a do-little, and a dallier with women.

  With a small force the King makes a surprise landing in Akkama, defeats that power at the battle of Elsmo, and cuts the communications of the invading army, which is eventually destroyed before Rialmar, and Sagartis slain.

  XXVII

  THIRD WAR WITH AKKAMA

  LESSINGHAM gains renown at the battle of Elsmo, and in his pursuit of the enemy through the Greenbone ranges. It was upon Horius Parry’s recommendation that the King had taken Lessingham with him on this expedition. A mysterious and mutual attraction, as if rooted in some inward tie between them more subtle and more intimate than kinship, is privately felt both by Lessingham and by the King. The King indeed, when he looks at this young man, seems to see as in a mirror the image of his own opening manhood of thirty years ago.

  In 772 the King permits Sagartis’s young son Derxis (aged sixteen) to succeed his father as tributary king of Akkama, with a Fingiswold Commission of Regency to govern the country in his name, and tutors to guide him. This discontents the Queen and Styllis, who can see nothing but bravado and rashness in such action. But Barganax and the Duchess completely understand the King’s settled policy of admitting even the most unhopeful and dangerous of mankind to probation, and deeply delight both in his policy and in him.

  Horius Parry, since his quelling of the rising in the Marches, has enjoyed new power and exalted station as Vicar of Rerek.

  Beroald is made Chancellor of Fingiswold, but continues to live at Krestenaya.

  Roder, in recognition of his share in the defence of Rialmar in 771, is made an Earl.

  Bodenay (aged seventy-two) is, on similar grounds, made Knight Marshal of Fin
giswold.

  Jeronimy, for his service at sea in this third war with Akkama, receives the kingly order of the hippogriff, hitherto conferred only upon persons of the blood royal. He, Beroald, and Roder are now joined in a triumvirate as Commissioners Regent for Meszria, exercising (in like manner as the Vicar in Rerek and Bodenay in Fingiswold) vice-regal powers during the King’s absences.

  Barganax is well content with his dukedom and apanage, and rules it ably and well. He is much given to women: paints, and composes poems, and is often with his mother in Memison. He becomes more and more the centre of hopes of those Meszrians whose acceptance of the King is not only because they have no choice but because he has won all hearts, and who yet resent the King’s power in Meszria as embodied in the Admiral, the Chancellor, and the Earl. Of these three, Beroald is the least unpopular, because a Meszrian by birth; but they are jealous of his power and fearful of his strong hand, his pride and subtlety, and the far-laid nets of his intelligence system.

  Lessingham, accompanied by his friend and lieutenant Amaury, goes abroad in 772 (aged twenty) to seek adventure as a soldier of fortune in distant countries of the world. (He does not appear again in person in this book.) After the crushing of Akkama and the putting down of the rebellion in the Marches, the Three Kingdoms enjoy yet another five years of Pax Mezentiana (772-6).

  BOOK SIX

  LA ROSE NOIRE

  XXVIII

  ANADYOMENE

  IT was spring of the leaf now: mid-April of that year seven hundred and seventy-one, and these victories new in Rerek and the north. My lord Chancellor Beroald was with the King in Argyanna about the business of bringing in of Stathmar as King’s Captain there, the place being devolved, since the death of Lord Emmius Parry, to estate of fief royal under like government with the other key-fortresses.

  At home at Zemry Ashery the Chancellor’s young sister dwelt still sweetly, quite untraded in court ceremonies or the ways of men, but in the theoric of these matters liberally grounded through daily sage expositions and informations by Doctor Vandermast, who had these four years past been to her for instructor and tutor. To try her paces and put in practice the doctor’s principles and her own most will-o’-the-wisp and unexperimental embroiderings upon them, ready means lay to hand in converse with her brother: a merry war, sharping and training up the claws of her wit, and admiredly watering and firming at root the friendship between her and him, who was long become to her both father and mother in one. With the open countryside for nursery, Anthea and Campaspe for playmates, all living creatures of wood and farm and mountain for her familiars, and her fifteenth birthday at hand within a month or two, she was beginning day by day at this season, in tune with the rising of the world’s whole sap, to put on herself fresh beauties, fresh intimations and ambiguities of awakening power, while the sun mounted from Aries into Taurus.

  In a place of her own, a backwater private beside the river under Zemry Ashery, she was lazing herself today through the soft spring afternoon, upon a kind of hanging bed or hammock woven of daffodil-coloured silken cords and swung by ropes of silk from the boughs of one of the ancient alder-trees that have their roots deep in the marshy banks of that backwater. Overhead, these trees spread their canopy: bare of leaf, but with gold-brown catkins dangling, gold-edged against the unclouded blue, from every mesh of that network of tiny twigs. Ever and again a light zephyr ruffled the stillness and made these tassels swing delicately in the spice-laden, faintly salted, sweetness of the Meszrian spring-time. Here she reclined, with none save the trees and the water and the little living beings of the field to bear her company, and her own maiden thoughts.

  A heavy book lay in her lap, bound in quarto in sweet-smelling leather with hasps of gold set with ruby and pearl. Presently she took it up, lazily turned the leaves, and began to read in it at that page of Homer’s Hymn to Aphrodite where the Goddess, smitten by Zeus with sweet desire for Anchises, a mortal man, comes to Her own temple in Paphos and, shutting to the shining doors, makes the Graces wash and anoint Her with olive oil,

  Immortal, such as the Gods have upon Them that live forever;

  Ambrosial, fit for Her wear.

  And in the fair margin of the page was all this drawn and pictured, in colours of lapis lazuli and lamp-black and vermillion and incarnadine and leaf of gold and silver.

  Idly she read on:

  Nicely upon Her skin disposing Her beautiful raiment,

  Herself with gold adorning, laughter-loving Aphrodite

  Swept on Her way toward Troy, leaving sweet-perfum’d Cyprus:

  Swift so, high amid clouds, fulfilling Her journey.

  Thus came She to Ida, many-fountain’d mother of beast-kind,

  And so by straight path thorough the mountain; and here about Her

  Grey wolves fawning, and lions with eyes glad-glaring,

  And bears, and fleet-footed panthers of roe-deer’s flesh unsatiate,

  Went. She at that sight took pleasure, both bowels and spirit within Her.

  And cast in their breasts desire, till they, of one motion,

  Paired and lay with each other in shadowy mountain nest-beds.

  Fiorinda put down her book and lay back luxuriously, clasping her hands behind her head. Her hair, not plaited, but tied with a single gold-lace ribbon and having for its self-colour a jet-like blackness that held, where the sun caught it, shimmerings and sparks of heaven’s blue, rumpled its dark splendours against the satin cushion. In a confusion of twists and tendrils it strayed here over the cushion’s crimson, here past ivoried smoothness of neck and arm; one deep-convoluting tress reaching out, like as a many-headed hydra, its curling ends to shadow vine-like the white silk bosom of her gown, under which her ripening breasts gently with her breathing rose and fell.

  After a while, the sun wheeling lower began to strike golden between the branches, full on the back-strained pure lovely throat of her: wrought marble to look upon, by the firmness of its contours, were it not for the fluttering pulse of blood in it. Her eyes were closed drooping their night-black fringes above high cheekbones which (and also something estranged and unreinable in the very lure of her lips, that were lightly parted now to the quickened coming and going of her breath) brought to mind, but faintly only and distantly, as things Olympian may things of earth, the features of her brother. Her nose, for its falcon-like keenness and mobility of wing and nostril, was her true maternal grandfather’s, Emmius’s; but delicatelier moulded, and with aphrodisian seductions ensweetening and ensphering to very heaven the Parry pride and hardness.

  There was a kindling might of summer rising now, against the common tide of nature at this hour of declining day and at this young season of the year; an invading heat, that heightened the musky moist scents of spring to an urgence beyond use and beyond imagination. In that warmth and that languor, she let her right hand reach down over the swung hammock’s edge. It touched the new growth of a narcissus: stiff, green, eager fingers, thrusting up through grass, out of the awakening earth beneath her. With this for hand-hold to begin with, then letting go and yielding herself to an almost imperceptible shifting of her weight back and forth under the gathering rhythm, she began to swing the couch she lay on: back and forth, without all effort, yet with slowly increasing power. The heavenly unnatured warmth, and these spring-scents stung to drunkenness with the summer-strangeness in the air about her, waxed and grew with the motion of that swinging till they seemed to swallow up the whole vast universe of sense and thought and being, dissolving her like a sweet in the goblet in an overwhelming Elysian languor.

  When at last she unclosed her eyelids, the sun was about setting: a flattened ball of incandescence that suffused the whole arch of the sky westwards with a blush of tremulous light. Not a breath stirred. She stood up, aery-delicate in the pallour of her silken gown, but bearing, in the light lilt and sway of her carriage, patent of some hitherto unthought-of power new born. The day-birds’ voices were hushed, save for here and there the call of a water-hen going t
o bed, or a dabchick’s trill of high bubbling notes, sweet naiad music trembling to silence. The nightingales had not yet begun their night-song. She looked about her, as to assure herself that no human presence was here to spy her solitude, then put off her shoes and stockings. Standing on the verge, her left hand upon a branch at shoulder-level to steady her, her right kilting her skirt, she dipped a foot into the darkening water. The cool of it warmed to the touch, as if some property within her had power to raise summer heats even in that inert element, home of newt and water-beetle and roach and char. Ripples travelling across the pool from her paddling foot broke the reflections. She stood back, both feet on the bank again. The ooze welled up luscious and warm between her toes through the grass-roots.

  The sun being gone now and the after-glow fast fading in the west, a bower of moonrise began to open from behind the hills eastward. In the midst of this presently the virgin-cold moon appeared. Yet still that unearthly warmth, spring-like in its newness, summer-like in its depth and potency, grew and strengthened. Fiorinda, as utterly surrendered up to these influences, surveyed for a while, now up, now down, the moon-drenched obscurities of land and sky, the ground and the sleepy waters at her feet, and night’s thousand eyes opening one by one. Then she laughed, in herself, very low, soundlessly. All the adoring earth seemed to laugh and open its arms to her.

  For the first time, with only the moon for tiring-maid, she began to put up her hair: braided it, then coiled and piled it high on her head; and finding her hair-ribbon unsufficient to hold it there, took off her girdle of white silk and margery-pearls to bind up the heavy tresses, with two brooches from the bosom of her gown to learn a new office as hair-pins. She leaned her out over the water, to have viewed herself so; but, with the moon behind her, could see nought to her purpose only but dark shadow outlined against a background of dusky blue twig-fretted sky and glimmer of star-images deep below all. Turning again, she saw where there sat, on a birch-tree’s limb not a dozen paces from her, the shape of a little owl, erect, clear-outlined against the moon. Suddenly it took wing and lighted without sound, upon her proffered wrist: a being that seemed without weight or substance, and the clasp of its claws upon her tender skin harmless as those sweet smarts that are fireworkers to pleasure. She raised her arm, to look level in its round fierce eyes; but it lowered its gaze. The trembling of it, sitting there, sent little shudders up her arm and through her whole body. With her free hand she stroked its feathers, then brought it near to her lips. Gentle as a turtle-dove with his mate, it fell to billing her, trembling in the doing of it, like a young untutored lover at first kiss of his mistress: then suddenly upon noiseless downy wing departed. In that sudden she was ware of Mistress Anthea standing beside her, regarding her from eyes coruscant with yellow fire, and holding up to her a looking-glass edged about with three rows of moon-stones that shone with their own light.