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There was no answer. Supervius looked at the ceiling. ‘You are a harsh stepfather, when his own people would have him back, to wish to put him out again; and with our help, God save the mark!’ Emmius raised an eyebrow, then fell to tracing with his pen-point little jags and stars on the paper before him. Keriones repeated his question. ‘Briefly so,’ said Supervius, and thrust out his jaw.
‘Will you stand upon that, my Lord Emmius Parry?’ said the prince. And, upon Emmius’s shrugging his shoulders and saying, ‘At least it conveniently brings us back to a base on which we can, maybe, by further debate frame some mean toward agreement’, ‘Then,’ said the prince, gathering up his papers, ‘our work is but waste work, for we will not for our part any longer endure this thing.’
Supervius opened his mouth for some damageful rejoinder, but his brother, checking him with a hand upon his arm, made for both: ‘I pray you yet have patience awhile. Nor I nor my brother desire troubles in the land. But if, spite of that, troubles be raised, we are not unprepared; men may wisely beware how they stamp upon our peaceful stockinged feet, be it in the north there or nigher home.’
‘You think to cow us,’ said Keriones violently, ‘with threats of war? seeing that by fraud, art and guile you can no further? But you shall find that neither are we unprepared. Neither are we without friends to fight beside us, if needs must, in our just quarrel. Yea, friends right high and doubtable: out of Fingiswold, if you goad us to that. We will call in King Mardanus to aid us.’
There was a silence. One or two startled as if a rock had fallen from the sky. The Lord Emmius smiled, drumming delicately on the table with his fingers. ‘Our words, of both sides,’ he said at last, ‘out-gallop our thoughts: sign we are hungry. These be not matters to be swept up in a rage, as boys end a game of marbles. Let’s dine and forget ’em awhile. Then, with minds refreshed, chance our invention may devise a picture shall please us all.’
Kresander said beneath his breath, but Supervius, as catching the sense of it, reddened to the ears, ‘He that shaketh hands with a Parry, let him count the fingers a receiveth back again.’
But Keriones, his brow clearing (as though that rude discourtesy, contrariwise to its sense and purpose, wrought in him but to second Emmius’s pleasant words and with potenter force than theirs), said to Emmius, ‘You have counselled well, my lord. Truly, he that will argue matters of state on an empty belly hath his guts in his brains.’
While they waited for dinner, there were brought in spice-plates and wines. Emmius said, ‘I pray you do me that favour as to taste this wine. I brought it north on purpose for our entertainment. It is of Meszria, of their famousest vintage: a golden wine of Armash.’ With his own hand he filled round the goblets from the jewelled silver flagon. ‘Prince Kresander, I’ll pledge you first: I know not why, unless ’tis because you and I have, of all of us, journeyed farthest to this meeting-place.’ With that, he drained his cup: ‘To our soon agreement.’ Kresander, flushing in the face with an awkward look, drained his. And now, carousing deep healths, the whole company pledged one another.
They dined lightly on what the inn afforded: capon, neats’ tongues, bacon pies, sallets, and round white cheeses pressed in the hill-farms above Killary. These things, with much quaffing down of wine, soon warmed them to quips and merriment, so that, dinner being done, they came again, with minds cleared and blood cooled, to their chief matter subject.
‘Ere we begin,’ said Emmius, ‘I would say but this. With what intent came we to this place, if not to seek agreement? Yet we spent the morning upon a dozen prickly questions, most of them not worth the reward paid to a courtesan for a night’s lodging, and yet each enough by itself to stir up the gall of some or other of us and set us by the ears. How were it now if we set about it another way: talk first on those matters whereon we are at one? And, most worth of all, this: that we will have no foreign hand meddling in Rerek. That is an old tried maxim, profitably observed by us in all our private differences whatsoever, and by our fathers, and fathers’ fathers.’
‘Your lordship has well and truly said,’ said Kresander; ‘as myself, most of all, should feel the mischief, were outlanders to come in upon us from that quarter. So much the more, then, behoveth some not to bring things to that pass that others may think it a less evil to fetch in help from without than to abide the injustices put upon them within the land.’
Emmius said, ‘Our private differences it is for us to untangle and set in order as we have had wont to: not by war, nor by threat of war, but by wise policy, giving a little back when need be, between ourselves. They cannot, unless we have ta’en leave of our sober wits, to be let hunt counter to that cardinal trending of our politic.’
‘What of Kessarey?’ said Keriones. ‘Was not that by war-stirring or war-threat? What of Telia? Nay, I cry you mercy, finish your say, my lord. I desire our agreement as much as you desire it.’
‘As much as that?’ Alvard said, behind his hand. ‘Mich ’em God dich ’em! Fine agreement there, then!’
‘Kessarey,’ replied Emmius Parry, ‘was anciently of Laimak; we but fetched it back where it belonged. Telia, by full franchise and liberties, chose their governor. We are here not to treat of things over and done with, but of this late unhappy accident in Lailma.’
‘Good,’ said Prince Keriones. ‘There’s yet comfort, if you say that. Afore dinner, it seemed you would have but one way in Lailma, and that your own way.’
‘No, no. I never said so. I never thought so.’
‘My Lord Supervius said it.’
Supervius shook his head. ‘I would not be taken altogether thus. Some way, there’s ne’er a doubt, we shall patch matters together.’
‘As for Lailma,’ said Emmius, ‘we shall be easily set at one, so we but hold by that overruling maxim of no foreign finger. If we are to treat, it must be upon that as our platform. We can affirm that, my lords? that, come what may, we will have no foreign finger in Rerek?’
‘I have been waiting these many minutes,’ said Supervius, looking across the table with a cold outfacing stare, ‘to hear Prince Keriones say yea to that principle.’
The prince frowned: first time since dinner. ‘It is a principle I have resolutely stood upon,’ he said, ‘since first I had say in the affairs of this land. And that’s since I first had a beard to my chin; at which time my Lord Supervius Parry was but a year or two out of’s swaddling-clothes. And will you thus ridiculously pretend that I and my friends would go about to undo this wholesome rule and practice? When in truth it is you who, seeking to perturbate these towns in our detriment and to undercreep my might and title in Lailma, hope so to drive us into a corner where we have the choice but of two things: either to give way to you at every turn and so be made at last your under-men in Rerek, either else (if we will maintain our right) to take a course which you may cry out against as violating the very principle we ourselves have made our policy and have urged upon you.’
Emmius said, ‘Nay, pray you, my lords, let’s stick to our tacklings. Mutual imputations of working underhand do but put true matters aback. Let’s pledge ourselves to Prince Keriones’s policy: this knotty question of Lailma we shall then easily undo. Are we accorded so far?’
‘No,’ answered Keriones. ‘And, in frank plainness, for this reason. You have levies of armed men (we know this by our espials) in a readiness to march north and set upon us. I say not we are afeared of what you may do to us, but we mean not to tie our own hands and so fall in your hazard. Let’s talk, if you please, of Lailma. But if in that obstinacy my Lord Supervius remains, then we sit out. And then will we assuredly bring in Fingiswold to help us, and the rebuke and damage of that will be yours, not ours.’
‘It will be your very deed,’ said Supervius, ‘sprung from your own fury, howsoever you colour it.’
‘O, no hot respectless speeches, brother,’ said Emmius. ‘These matters must be handled with clear eyes, not in a swimming of the brain.
‘Prince Keriones,’ he said then, sharpening his eyes upon him, ‘this is a very peremptory sentence plumped down of you. Well, I also will speak plain, and without offence. We have offered to treat with you upon your own avouched basis of no foreign finger. You will not engage yourselves so far. Upon this, then, we set up our rest, I and my brother. We accept that basis. More, we are minded to enforce it. The fortress of Megra, lying upon your (and our) northern border, and longing to Fingiswold, is threat enough. It is (with all humility) for you princes to govern well your realms and give example to the cities upon your confines: so do we with ours. I have friends and affines in the southland, but I would think scorn to call upon King Kallias to prop me. If you call upon King Mardanus, I will march with my brother to defend that northern frontier thus betrayed by you. And I think we can be upon you, and deal with you, before you have time to bring in your foreign succours; as in common prudence indeed we must, since you have so threatened us, unless you give us security of peace. That is to say, material pledges: fair words, spoken or written, can by no means suffice us now.
‘So much, since I would be honest, you left me no choice but to say. But surely it is not a thing unpossible or unlikely, that’—
Here Kresander could contain no longer. ‘We had better never have come hither,’ he shouted, and smote the table with his fist. ‘This meeting was but to mock us and dally the matter off while they sharpened their swords against us. I’m for home.’ He pushed back his chair and was half risen, but Kariones pulled him down again, saying, ‘Wait. We will hear this out.’
Supervius, while his brother had been speaking, had broke the seal of a letter brought hastily in by his secretary. Keriones and Alvard watched him read it, as if themselves would read in his face something of its purport. But his face, haughty and imperturbable, showed not so much as a hairsbreadth movement of nostril or eyelid as he scanned the letter, neither at Kresander’s outburst.
‘Tongues can outbrawl swords,’ said Emmius, chilling cold of voice; ‘but that is for rude beasts, not for men that be reasonable. I pray you, let me finish my say. And first, by your leave,’ as Supervius put the letter into his hands. He read it, folded it again thoughtfully, gave it back: his face like his brother’s, not to be unciphered. ‘Let us,’ he said, ‘as great statesmen, hold fast by our common good, of all of us, which is peace in Rerek. History hath remembered the ruins of many estates and powers which have gone down in civil strife or, albeit victorious, got in the end but a handful of smoke to the bargain. Let us live as friends. I unfeignedly wish it: so do my brothers and all that adhere to our interest. But others must do their part. This is my counsel: that we, of both sides, agree to go home, keep truce for a month, then meet again and, as I hope, determine of some new assured basis for our unluckily shaken friendship. Where shall we meet?’ he said, turning to his brother.
‘Why, if it shall please your excellencies to kill two birds with one stone and add merry-making to crown our peace-making,’ said Supervius, ‘what happier meeting-place than Megra? upon the twentieth day of September, which is appointed there for the feast of my betrothal’ – he paused, gathering their eyes – ‘to the Princess Marescia of Fingiswold. Nay, read it if you please: I had it but five minutes since.’ And with a wolvish look he tossed the letter upon the table.
II (#ulink_249c8366-6bd9-5dad-9ef1-7fb601469190)
FOUNDATIONS IN FINGISWOLD (#ulink_249c8366-6bd9-5dad-9ef1-7fb601469190)
IT was eight months after that meeting in Mornagay: mid-March, and mid-afternoon. Over-early spring was busy upon all that grew or breathed in the lower reaches of the Revarm. Both banks, where the river winds wide between water-meadows, were edged with daffodils; and every fold of the rising ground, where there was shelter from north and east for the airs to dally in and take warmth from the sunshine, held a mistiness of faint rose-colour: crimp-petalled blossoms, with the leaf-buds scarcely as yet beginning to open, of the early northern plum. Higher in the hillsides pasque-flowers spread their tracery of soft purple petal and golden centre. A little downstream, on a stretch of shingle that lay out from this right bank into the river, a merganser drake and his wife stood preening themselves, beautiful in their whites and bays and iridescent greens. It was here about the high limit of the tides, and from all the marshland with its slowly emptying creeks and slowly enlarging flats (for the ebb was well on its way) of mud and ooze, came the bubbling cascade of notes as curlew answered curlew amid cries innumerable of lesser shore-birds; plover and sandpiper, turnstone and spoonbill and knot and fussy redshank, fainter and fainter down the meanderings of the river to where, high upon crags which rose sudden from water-level to shut out the prospect southwards, two-horned Rialmar sat throned.
Anthea spoke: ‘I have examined it, honoured sir: scented it, as you bade me, from every airt.’
Doctor Vandermast was sat a little above her on the rib of rock which, grown over with close-lying twigs and leaf-whorls of the evergreen creeping daphne, made for these two a dry and a cushioned resting-place. His left hand, palm-upward in white beard, propped his chin. His gaze was south, in a contemplation which seemed to look through and behind the immediate things of earth and sky, as through windows giving upon less alterable matters. Nothing moved, save when here and there, in a sparkle of black and white, a flock of shy golden-eye took wing, upstream or downstream, or a butterfly flight of terns rose and fell, drifting on air toward the unseen headwaters of the Midland Sea.
‘Rialmar town?’ said the doctor, at last, without shifting his gaze.
‘No. This whole new world. I have quartered it over, pole to pole, so as I could (if you desired me) give you an inventory. And all since day dawning.’
‘What make you of it? In a word?’
‘Something fair and free,’ she answered. ‘Something immeasurably old. As old as myself.’
‘Or as young?’
‘Or as young.’
‘But a minute ago you called it new?’ He looked down now, into this girl’s staring yellow eyes: eyes whose pupils were upright slits that opened upon some inward quivering of incandescence, as of iron fired beyond redness; and his gaze grew gentle. ‘And you are becharmed by it: like a bee of the new brood come out to dance before the hive on a still sunshiny evening and taste open air for the first time and find your landmarks.’
Anthea laughed: a momentary disclosing of pointed teeth that transshaped, as with leap and vanishing again of lightning, the classic quietude of her features. ‘I knew it all before,’ she said. ‘Yet for all that, it is as new and unexperimented as last night’s snowfall on my high glaciers of Ramosh Arkab. A newness that makes my heckles rise. Does it not yours?’
He shook his head: ‘I am not a beast of prey.’
‘What are you, then?’ she said, but without waiting for an answer. ‘There is a biting taste to it: a scent, a stirring: and up there, especially. In the Teremnene palace.’ She lifted her nose towards the royal seat-town upon its solitary heights, as if even down wind her eager sense tasted its quality.
Vandermast said, ‘There is a child there. You saw it no doubt? A boy.’
‘Yes. But no past ordinary novelty in that. Unless perhaps that when, changing my smooth skin for my furred, I slunk in and made teeth at it behind the nurse’s back, it was not scared but gave me a look, so that I went out and glad to be gone. And, now I think on it, ’twas that first set me scenting this newness at every corner. Beyond all, in the Queen.’ She looked at him, paused, then asked suddenly. ‘This Queen. Who in truth is she?’
He made no reply.
‘Tell me, dear master,’ she said, drawing herself closer by a most unhuman self-elongating of body and limbs and rubbing her cheek, as might some cattish creature, against his knee.
He said, ‘You must not ask questions when you know the answer.’
Anthea sat back on her heels and laughed. Upon the motion, her hair, loosely bound up with a string of clouded zircon stones of that translucent blue which is in the lip of an ice-cave looked up to from within, fell, in tumbled cataracts as of very sunlight, down about her shoulders and, in one of its uncoiling fulvid streams, over her breast. ‘She Herself does not know the answer. I suppose, in this present dress of Hers, She is asleep?’
‘In this present dress,’ said the ancient doctor, ‘She is turned outward from Herself. You may, if you choose, conceive it as a kind of sleep: a kind of forgetting. As the sunshine were to forget itself in the thing it shines on.’
‘In that lion-cub of hers? I cannot understand such a forgetting in Her.’
‘No, my oread. Nor I would not wish you able to understand it, for that were to maculate the purity of your own proper nature.’
‘And you would wish me be as I am?’
‘Yes,’ answered he. ‘You, and all true beings else.’
The girl, silent, putting up her hair, met his look unsmilingly with her unquiet, feline, burning eyes.
‘We will go on,’ said the doctor, rising from his seat.
Anthea with a lithe and sinuous grace rose to follow him.
‘Whither?’ she asked as they came southward.
‘Up to Teremne. We will look upon these festivities.’
In the old Teremnene palace which, like an eagle’s nest, crowns the summit ridge of the south-eastern and loftier of the twin steep rock bastions called Teremne and Mehisbon, on and about which has grown up as by accretion of ages Rialmar town, is a little secret garden pleasaunce. It lies square between walls and the living rock, in good shelter from the unkinder winds but open to the sun, this side or that, from fore-noon till late evening. No prying windows overlook it: no intrusive noises visit it of the world’s stir without: a very formal garden artificially devised with paved walks of granite trod smooth by the use of centuries, and with flights of steps going down at either side and at either end to an oval pond in the midst, and upon a pedestal in the midst of that pond a chryselephantine statue of Aphrodite as rising from the sea. At set paces there were parterres of tiny mountain plants: stonecrop, houseleek, rock madwort, mountain dryas, trefoils, and the little yellow mountain poppy; and with these that creeping evening primrose, which lifts up wavy-edged four-lobed saucers of a spectral whiteness, new every night at night-fall, to bloom through the hours of dark and fill the garden with an overmastering sharp sweetness. And at full morning they droop and begin to furl their petals, suffused now with pink colour which were white as a snowdrop’s, and lose all their scent, and the thing waits lifeless and inert till night shall return again and wake it to virgin-new delicacy and deliciousness. This was Queen Stateira’s garden, furnished out anew for her sake seven years ago by Mardanus her lord, who in those days made little store of gardens, but much of his young new-wedded wife.
Shadows were lengthening now, as afternoon drew towards evening. In one of the deep embrasures of the east wall which look down the precipice sheer eight hundred feet, to the river mouth and the harbour and so through skyey distances to the great mountain chains, so blanketed at this hour with cloud that hard it was to discern snowfield from cloudbank, leaned King Mardanus in close talk with two or three about him. No wind stirred in the garden, and the spring sunshine rested warm on their shoulders.
Away from them at some twenty yards’ remove, by the waterside, upon a bench of lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl, sat the Queen. The brightness of the sun shining from behind her obscured her features under a veiling mystery, but not to conceal an ambiency of beauty that lived in her whole frame and posture, an easefulness and reposefulness of unselfregarding grace. The light kindled to flame the native fire-colours in her hair, and the thrown shadow of that statue touched the furred hem of her skirt and the gold-woven lace-work on her shoe.
Over against her on the same bench the Lady Marescia Parry, only child of Prince Garman of Fingiswold, and so cousin german to the King, faced the sun. She was at this time in the twenty-fourth year of her age: of a dazzling whiteness of skin: her eyes, busy, bold and eager, of a hot chestnut brown: her nose a falcon’s, her yellow hair, strained back from her high forehead by a thin silver circlet garnished with stone and pearls, fell loose and untressed about her back and powerful shoulders, in fashion of a bride’s.
The Queen spoke: ‘Well, cousin, you are wedded.’
‘Well wedded, but not yet bedded.’
‘’Las, when mean you to give over that ill custom of yours?’
‘Ill custom?’
‘Ever to speak broad.’
‘O, between kinsfolk. Tell me unfeignedly, what thinks your highness of my Supervius? Is a not a proper man?’
‘He belieth not his picture. And since ’twas his picture you fell in love with, and he with yours, I dare say you have gotten the husband of your choice.’
The Princess smiled with her lips: cherry-red lips, lickerous, and masterful. ‘And by right of conquest,’ she said. ‘That sauceth my dish: most prickingly.’
‘Yet remember,’ said the Queen, ‘we wives are seldom conquerors beyond first se’nnight.’
‘I’ll talk to your highness of that hereafter. But I spake not of conquest upon him. My blood tells me there’s fire enough in the pair of us to outburn such cold-hearth rivalries as that. Dear Gods forfend I should e’er yield myself chattel to the man I wed: but neither could I be fool enough to wed with such a man as I could bring down to be chattel of mine. Nay, I spoke of my parents; ay, and (with respect) of yourself, and of the King.’
‘Your conquest there,’ replied the Queen, ‘is measure of our love of you.’
‘Doubtless. But measure, besides, of mine own self will. Without that,’ here she glanced over her shoulder and leaned a little nearer, ‘I am apt to think your love of me (the King’s, at least) had played second fiddle to more deeper policies.’
The Queen said, ‘Well, fret not for that. You have had your way.’
Marescia lifted her superb white chin and her mouth smiled. ‘Truly, cousin,’ she said, managing her voice almost to a whisper, ‘I think you are to thank me, all of you. Put case I had fallen in with your fine design to match me to yonder outed Prince of Akkama. The man is well enough: personable, I grant: qualified out of all ho, I’d swear, to please a woman: but of what avail? With’s father dead, and himself, driven away by the usurper, a landless exile still sitting on your door-step here. How shall such an one be ever a king, or lord of aught save’s own empty imaginings and discontents? I swear the King (Gods send he live for ever) may get better purchase by this that, following my own natural lust o’ the eye, I have brought him, than by Aktor, be he ten times prince indeed. And Rerek, far nearer us in blood and custom. Wed with yonder foreign lick-dish! God’s dignity, I’d sleep in the byre sooner and breed minotaurs.’
Queen Stateira laughed: honest lovely laughter, bred of sweet blood and the life-breath fancy free; ‘Come, you’re too bitter.’
‘Aktor is in your highness’s books, I think.’
‘Why think that?’
‘Strange else, professing so much cousinly love to me, you should a wished me give my hand there.’
The Queen looked away. ‘To tell you true, dear Marescia, ’twas the King’s wish, and but therefore mine, as being my duty.’
‘Duty?’ said the Princess: ‘to be led blindfold by your husband? Go, they’ll ne’er call me perfect wife a those terms.’
There was a pause. Then Marescia, sitting back again, her voice now at its ordinary strength and pitch: ‘What is this prognosticator by the stars, this soothsayer, your highness keeps i’ the palace?’
‘What do you mean? I keep none such.’
‘O yes: a greybeard signior: long gaberdine, and capped magister artium: some compliment-monger, I would wager. Comes to me as I passed among the throng of guests not half an hour since on my Lord Supervius’s arm, gives me a stare o’ the eye turned all my backside to gooseflesh, and crieth out that I shall bear Supervius a son shall be greater than his father.’
‘Heaven hold fast the omen,’
‘And then to my Lord Emmius, whom I must now call brother-in-law: crieth out and saith that of the seed of Emmius Parry shall come both a queen of earth and a queen of heaven.’
‘And what will he cry out at me, think you?’ said the Queen.
‘Please you enter the hall of the Sea Horses, I can show him to you, and you may examine him.’
‘Dear my Lord,’ said Stateira, as the King and those about him, their business being it seemed concluded, approached her, ‘here’s diversion for you,’ and told him what Marescia had said. The King bluffly humouring it as child’s talk, assented.
‘Yonder standeth the old man: there, that tall, lanky one,’ Marescia said in the Queen’s ear, from behind, as they descended the great staircase into that vast hall and paused upon the last steps between the two sea-horses of dark blue rock-crystal well the height of a man’s shoulder, there to take their stand and survey the company that, upon sounding of trumpets to a sennet to proclaim the King’s presence, abode all motionless now and with all faces turned that way: ‘and the girl with beastly eyes,’ she said, ‘who is, I suppose his granddaughter. Or, may hap, his bona roba, if such a jack pudding have use or custom of such commodities.’
Supervius eyed his princess with the deepening satisfaction of a skilled rider who begins to know the paces of a new high-blooded but untried mare. ‘Speak within door, Marescia,’ said her father. The King sent a little page of his of six year old that was named Jeronimy, to bring the doctor before him.
When that was done, and Vandermast made his obeisance, the King surveyed him a while in silence: then said, ‘Who are you, old sir? Of my folk or an outlander?’
‘I am,’ answered he, ‘your serene highness’s life-long loyal faithful subject: my habitation many journeys from this, south on the Wold: my practice, that of a doctor in philosophy.’
‘And what make you here i’ the court?’
