by E R Eddison
‘Perhaps I am thought-sick. Who knows? But are you indeed so ignorant as know not that you are my thing, my poppet, my creature? Whatsoever you do or enterprise, it is because I will it. You act and think because I cause you so to do: not because you wish to. Tell me,’ he said, after a pause, ‘do you not find it tedious?’
‘Tedious indeed, this manner of speech of your highness’s which I suppose proceeded from melancholy and filthy blood. No answer upon any matter, but only put-offs.’
‘Try, dear Rosma, to do something. I care not what, so but it be something that shall surprise me: hurt me or pleasure me, ’tis all a matter: do something of your own. To open my heart to you, as wedded lovers ought to do, I am sick unto weariness of for ever climbing mountains safed with a dozen ropes held by a dozen safe men: sick and weary of the remembrance that, venture how I may, I can never fall.’
He pulled a stroke or two: then let her drift. The sun was now touching the hill-tops in the north-west, a flattened red ball of incandescence. The tide had turned, and from every shore came faintly the noise of birds quarrelling and feeding on the ebb. A cool wind sprang up to blow down the firth. The Queen muffled her cormorant-feather cloak about her. She spoke: ‘Was this the language your highness held to the lords in council this afternoon? Must a troubled them as it troubleth me.’
‘A foolish question,’ he replied, backing water, turning, and beginning to pull slowly home against wind and tide. ‘I told you beforehand of my decision. And I told it to them in the like terms.’
‘Comfortable words indeed. This blind drifting on the rocks in the matter of Rerek: this devilish folly in the treatment of your son.’
‘My son? Which one?’
‘Your son, I said. There are other names for bastards.’
‘I have always admired the refinedness of your language,’ said the King. ‘’Tis a great charm in you. Pity, though, that you are so prone to repeating of yourself. You never give me the pleasures of disappointment: even as, set a fowl’s egg under a goose or a turkey, the same chick hatcheth out. Will you not modulate, merely for change sake? Find some new word of opprobriousness for (shall I say?) your stepson?’
‘Why would you not suffer Styllis come south with us, ’stead of leave him mewed up in Rialmar? Would a been the fitting, kingly, natural course: most of all in these days when my bloody cousin do threaten, and (’cause of your strange enduring of his packing underboard) scarce troubleth to hide the threat. You forbade me the council: shameful usage of me that am yet, by mine own right, Queen in Meszria. And that was ’cause you were stubborn-set to hold by your pernicious purpose and cram it down their throats who durst not dispute with you to question it; for you knew, had I been there, I’d not a swallowed it thus tamely. Have your heir at your side, one would a thought, ready to take the reins if by evil hap (which kind Heaven pray forfend) aught untoward should befall your highness’s person.’
The King, while she so spoke, seemed sunk again into his study, watching while he rowed, as a God might watch from remote heaven, the red glory overspread the spaces of the sky from the going down of the sun. Coming now out of that contemplation, he said in mockery: ‘This is your country. If there should need a successor to my throne, why might it not be you? You are hampered by no sexly weakness: as fit as any man living to undertake it. Think you not so? Better than any man, I think: except perhaps—’
As if in that unfinished sentence her mind had supplied a loathed name, the features of Rosma’s face, channelled and passion-worn with the years but yet wearing uncorroded their harsh Tartarean beauty, took on now, in the red sunset light, a menace and a malevolence as it had been the face of the Queen of hell.
‘Styllis,’ said King Mezentius, still playing with her, idly, as a man might with some splendid and dangerous beast over whom he delights to feel his mastery: ‘Styllis (I will say crudely to you, in case you be a little blinded by your motherly affections towards him) is as yet somewhat raw. It is a great spot to his good estimation (and I think you taught him this trick) to despise and scorn any man other than himself: an unhappy habit of mind in a king. Your Meszrian lords are proud: jealous upholders of privilege. Set him, unfledged and unexperienced, amongst ’em, and—’
Here she broke in upon him, her accents cold and level. ‘Well, why delay to cut him off from the succession? One more ill deed would scarcely be noted, I should think.’
‘How if I postpone his succession till he be come of years twenty-five? Make you, in that interim, Queen. Regent? All’s one to me. As for the world, Post me diluvium.’
‘I know,’ said the Queen, ‘what underlieth this mockery and mummery. You are resolved in very deed, though you dare not do it by open means, to leave all to your bastard. But,’ she said, the voice of her speech quivering now as with slow-burning anger, ‘beware of me. Twenty-five years you have used me for your tool and chattel. But of all things there cometh an end at last.’
The King laughed in his beard. ‘An end? That is vulgar, but questionable, doctrine. Howsoever,’ he said, suddenly serious, so that Rosma’s baleful eyes lowered their lashes and she turned aside her face. ‘I will promise you this. When I die, the best man shall have the Kingdom. If that be Styllis, by proof of his abilities, good. But upon no other condition. I made this Triple Kingdom: alone, I made it: and out of worse confusion and unhandsomeness than of civil wars. It is mine to order and to dispose of how I will. And I will dispose of it into the hand of no man save into his only who shall be able to take it, and wield it, and govern it.’
‘I marvel what madness or devil hath so distract your mind,’ she said, slowly, looking him in the face again. ‘You are likely to do a thing the whole world must weep for.’
‘Care not you for that, madam. It sits awkwardly on you (I could a said unbecomingly) to pretend tenderness for the misfortunes of others. You have acted too many murders in your day, for that to ring true. And devised as many more that I have prevented your performing. Better than you, I know what I am about.’
‘And I know what your bastard is about: the sole occupation he is fit for. Wallowing in his strumpet’s bed in Velvraz Sebarm.’
‘His private concerns are his own. Not yours. Not mine, even,’ replied the King, narrowing his eyes upon her. ‘But if it shall comfort you to know, I heartily commend all that he is doing. In truth, as a good Father ought, I prepared the opportunity for him myself.’ He added, after a pause: ‘Tonight he and my Lady Fiorinda are to sup with us in Sestola.’
Rosma drew back her head with the indignation of an adder about to strike. ‘Then I keep my chamber. I have an objection to sitting at table with a whore.’
He rowed on in silence. On his left, and behind him over Sestola, night was rising fast. To larboard the sun had set in an up-piled magnificence of blood-red and iron clouds. Astern, above the Queen’s head as she sat facing the rise of night, her face no longer to be discerned in this growing dusk, Antares began to open a red eye flashing with green sparkles in a rift of clear sky in the south. The wind was fallen again. The King, with eyes on that star of bale, rested on his oars: seemed to listen to the stillness.
Queen Rosma began to speak again: soberly, reining up her displeasure. ‘You are wrong in many matters besides this. For example (to go back to that immediate matter which, from what you have said to me, you so lightly and so headily disposed of at the council this evening), you are deadly wrong about Rerek.’
She paused, waiting. The King made no reply, sitting motionless watching the raging lights of the Scorpion’s heart.
‘But sure, all’s effectless when I speak to you of this,’ she said. ‘You never heed me.’
He began to row: meditatively, a stroke or two, to keep a little way on her against the strengthening ebbtide: then rest on the oars again: then another few strokes, and so on. They were by this time but a mile short of Sestola. ‘But I am all ears,’ he said, again in his baiting, scorning, humour. ‘This is a business you have at least some knowledge of. He is your cousin german,
and you have, in the days before I took you in hand, shown a pretty thoroughness in dealing with your kinsfolk: Lebedes: Beltran. ’Tis confessed, they were but nephews by affinity, and he of your own blood, a Parry: not a mere instrument of yours, a lover, as they were. Come, speak freely: you would have me murder him? Or, better, commission you for the kindly office? But I am not minded to let him go the way of your lesser ruffians. Me he will never bite at again. And I enjoy him. Much as, dear Rosma, I enjoy you. Or have enjoyed,’ he added, with a strange unaccustomed note of sadness or longing in his voice.
‘But you are mortal,’ said Rosma. ‘And when you shall be dead, he will bite at Styllis.’
‘We are all mortal. A most profound and novel maxim.’
‘I think,’ she replied quietly, ‘your highness is perhaps an exception. Were you of right flesh and blood, you would take some respect to the welfare or illfare of your son.’
‘Do not trouble your head with the business. All is provided.’
‘You are unsupportable,’ she said, her anger again bursting its bonds. ‘You are took with my father’s disease: Meszria.’
‘Well? And was it not you, madam, brought me that rich dowry?’
‘Yes. But hardly foreseeing you would bestow it, and all besides, upon your bastard.’
‘It was got by you with blood and horror,’ said the King. ‘Be reasonable. I have kept my bargain with you. I have set you in a state and in a majesty you had not before dreamed of, upon the throne of the Three Kingdoms in Rialmar. Do not fall into ingratitude.’
‘O monstrous perversion. You have made me your instrument, your commodity, your beast. What profit to me though my chains be of gold, when I am kept kennelled and tied like a ban-dog?’
‘You forget the benefits I have done you. I have kept your hands, these twenty-one years now, clean of blood: ever since your slaying of your lover Beltran, who begat two children upon you. This also you shall know: that them, too, I saved alive, when, being an unmerciless dam, you would a devoured them at birth.’
This he said resting on his oars. In the hush, Rosma caught her breath: then, in a shaken voice, ‘You never told me this. It is a lie. They are dead.’
‘They are alive, my Queen. And famous. You have spoke with them. But, like the unnatural mother you are, you know not your own whelps.’
‘It is a lie.’
‘When did I ever lie to you?’ said the King. ‘And, my dearly loved she-wolf, you have (to do you plain justice) never in all your life lied to me.’
As by tacit consent, no further word went betwixt them till they were come to land. It was almost night now. A row of cressets burning on the edge of the jetty threw a smoky glare over the welter of restless waters and up the dark face of the sea-wall of Sestola, against whose cyclopean foundations those waters, piling up with the down-come of the tide, swarmed and gurgled, surged and fell, without violence on this calm summer night, but as if in tranquil rumination of what, and they please, seas can do and wall and rock stand against. The King leapt ashore: his men steadied the boat while he reached hand to the Queen. The uncertain and palpitating glare, save where its constant shooting forth and retracting again of tongues of light touched face or form or stone or black gleaming water, made trebly dark the darkness. She stepped lightly and easily up, and stood for a minute statue-like and remote, gazing seaward, not at her Lord. Whether for the altering light, or for some cause within herself, she seemed strangely moved, for all she stood so calm and majestical: seemed, almost, a little softened of mood: as it were Persephone in dark contemplation, without regrets or hopes, overlooking her sad domain and that bitter tree of hell. The King might see, in her eye, as he came closer and stood unnoted at her side, something very like the leavings of tears. ‘The setting is a good foil for the jewel,’ he said in her ear. ‘Is this the hithermore bank of Styx? Or stand we already o’ the farther side?’
Rosma silently put her arm in his and, with a dozen torches, behind and before, to light their footsteps, they took their way up the rock-hewn stairs: so to the keep and the King’s privy lodging. ‘I am coming in,’ she said, as he paused in the entrance. The King shot a glance at her, then stepped back to let her pass. Without sound on the rich woven carpet she crossed the room and stopped, her back to him, surveying herself in the mirror by the light of two branched candlesticks that stood on the table at her either hand. ‘It is near suppertime,’ she said. ‘We must change our clothes;’ and still abode there without moving.
The King said, ‘We have understood each other. Twenty-five years. A demi-jubilee. Few wedded lovers can say that, as we can. Was it because we have wisely and frugally held to our alliance as princes, and not been lovers?’
Rosma, very still and proud in her posture before the looking-glass, answered in tones startlingly gentle: almost tender: ‘I do not think so.’
‘No?’ He was seated in a chair now, behind her, taking off his boots.
‘I’, said she, ‘have been a lover.’
‘Well, Beltran you loved, I readily believe. None other, I think.’
‘“None other” is not true.’
‘Your first child by him,’ said the King, ‘was (to speak home) the child of your lust. The second, sixteen years later, child again of your lust, but also of your love. And, as that, the unsightable wonder of the world: of more worlds than this, could your wolf-eyes avail to look upon such glories.’
The Queen bit her lip till it slowly began to bleed.
‘And there was like a diversity of conception,’ he said, ‘between these two children of you and me.’
With that, a great catch of her breath: then silence. The King looked up. But her back was towards him and, from where he sat, he could not see her face in the mirror. She said, in a choking voice, ‘Beltran loved me. That second time, I knew it. He loved me.’
‘Yes. Unluckily for him. For you devoured him. I am not for your devouring.’
The Queen, turning without a word, was on that sudden on her knees at his feet, her face hidden in his lap. ‘I have loved you,’ she said, ‘immovable and unreachable, since that first hour of our meeting in Zayana: a more wasteful, more unfortunate, love than ever I had for Beltran. Why could you not have let me be? You ravished me of all: kingdom, freedom, Amalie, the one living being in all the world I tendered above myself. And this I have known: that Styllis was child of your policy, or call it your more hated pity: Antiope the child of your transitory, unaccountable, late-born, soon ended, love.’ She burst forth into a horrible tempestuous rage of weeping: terrible cries like a beast’s, trapped and in mortal pain. The King sat like a stone, looking down upon her, there, under his hand; her bowed neck, still fair, still untouched with contagion of the hungry years: her hair still black above it as the night-raven, and throwing back gleaming lights from its heavy braided and deep-wound coils: the unwithered lovely strength of back and shoulders, strained now and shaken amid gusts of sobbing and crying. When he lifted his gaze to the spaces of the roof-timbers beyond reach of the candle-light, all the shadowy room seemed as filled with the flowering of her mind into thoughts not yet come to birth: thoughts shawled as yet, may be, from her own inmost knowledge by the unshaping shawl of doubt and terror.
She stood up: dried her eyes: with a touch or two before the mirror brought her hair to rights, then faced him. He was risen too, at his full stature (so tall she was) barely looking down into her eyes. ‘You have lied to me at last,’ he said. ‘How dare you speak so to me of love, who do discern your secret mind, know you far better than you do know yourself, and know that you are innocent of the great name of love as is an unweaned child of wine? Nay, Rosma, I do love and delight in you for what you abidingly are: not for farding of your face with confections of love: which, in you, is a thing that is not.’
She replied upon him in a whisper scarce to be heard, as he, in their old way as between friends and allies, took her by the hand: ‘I did not lie.’ Then, as if the quality of that touch thrilled some poison quit
e to her heart, she snatched away her hand and said violently: ‘And I will tell you, which you well know, that this bastard of yours is the only child of your lasting love. And for that, spite of my love and longing, which like some stinking weed spreads the ranker underground for all my digging of it up – for that, I hate and abominate you; and Amalie, your whore; and Barganax, that filthy spawn whom (to your shame and mine and hers) you regard far more than your own life and honour. My curse upon you for this. And upon her. And upon him.’
XXXIX
OMEGA AND ALPHA IN SESTOLA
NIGHT was up now over Sestola: midsummer night, but estranged with a sensible power ominously surpassing that July night’s of last year, when the Duchess had entertained with a fish dinner in Memison guests select and few. The stars, by two hours further advanced than then, shone with a wind-troubled radiance dimmed by the spreading upwards of veiling obscurities between it and middle earth. The moon, riding at her full in the eastern sky, gave forth spent, doubtful, and waterish rays. On the lower air hung a gathering of laid-up thunder.
Queen Rosma, being come to her own chamber, made her women bestir them to such purpose that she was dressed and waiting some while before the due time appointed for supper. Her lodgings opened upon the westernmost end of the portico which ranges, a hundred and fifty paces and more in length, above the sheer face of the fortress on its southern, oceanward, side. She dismissed her girls and the Countess Heterasmene (now lady of the bedchamber), and, hankering perhaps for fresh air after the closeness of her room and of the King’s, went forth to take a turn or two on the paven way under the portico. Square pillars bear up the roof of it on either hand, both against the inner wall and upon the seaward side: at every third pace a pillar. This western half was lit only by the lamps which, hanging betwixt each pair of outer pillars, gave barely sufficient light for a man to pick his steps by. But midway along, from the open doors of the banqueting-chamber, there spread outwards like a fan a brilliant patch of light, and beyond it the uncurtained windows of the hall shed on the pavement bands of brightness, evenly spaced with darkness. With moody, deliberate tread the Queen came towards the light, sometimes halting, then moving onwards again. She was come within a few paces of the doors when, at sound of footsteps approaching from the farther end, she withdrew herself under thick shadow between wall and pillar and there waited. The Duke of Zayana and his lady, new landed and in a readiness for supper together in Sestola, were walking from the east, now in full illumination, now lost again in shadow between windows.
