A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (4 page)

Yes. They die— half brother to man-slaying Hector, and his charioteer; under the dusty battle-din before Bios, 'mighty, mightily fallen: forgetful of his horsemanship.' All time past, the conflict and the heartbreak (he looked at the amphitheatre, a skeleton lifted up to witness): frozen. He looked at her: her eyes were more still than the waiting instant between the flash and the thunder. No. Not frozen; for that is death. No death here: rather the tenseness of sinew that is in the panther before the leap: Can Grande's tomb, as this morning, in broad sunshine. Below, under the Gothic canopy carved in stone, the robed figure, lying in state, of the great condottiere, submissive, supine, with pious hands clasped upon his breast as in prayer,
'requiescat in pace?, 'Domine, in manus tuas',
etc., weak childhood come back like a song's refrain, sightless eyes facing upwards. But above, high upon that canopy, the demonic equestrian figure of him in the April sap of his furious youth, helmed and harnessed, sword aloft, laughing on his caparisoned horse that seems itself to be informed with a secret kindred laughter, to say ha! ha! among the trumpets: a stirring together of the warring mights and glories, prides, overthrowings, and swiftnesses, of all worlds, to one flame; which takes on, of its mere eternity and only substantiality, as ice will scorch or fire freeze, the semblance of a death-like stillness.

All this in a few seconds of time: apocalyptically. Lessingham answered her: 'Signora, if I were God Omnipotent, I should be master of it. And, being master, I would not be carried by it like a tripper who takes a ticket for a cruise. I would land where I would; put in to what ports I liked, and out again when I would; speed it up where I would, or slow it down. I would wind it to my turn.'

'That,' she said, ‘
would be a very complicated arrangement. One cannot deny it would be a pleasure. But the French precision, I fear, would scarcely apply itself so fitly, were that the state of things.'

‘
You would hardly have me do otherwise?'

Slowly drawing off her right-hand glove,
she smiled her secular smile. ‘I
think, sir, (in my present mood), that I would desire you, even so, to play the game according to its strict rules.'

'O,' said Lessingham. 'And that, (if it is permissible to enquire), in order to judge my skill? or my patience?'

Her fingers were busied about her little gold-meshed bag, finding a lira for her wine: Lessingham brought out a handful of coins, but she gracefully put aside his offer to pay for it. 'I wonder?' she said, looking down as she drew on her crimson glove again: 'I wonder? Perhaps my answer is sufficient, sir, if I say—Because it amuses me.' She rose. Lessingham rose too. 'Is that sufficient?' she said.

Lessingham made no reply. She was tall: Mary's height to an inch as he looked down at her: incredible likenesses to Mary: little turns of neck or hand, certain looks of the eye, that matter of the mouth (a thing surely unknown before a living woman). Unlike Mary, she was dark: jet-black hair and a fair clear skin. 'Good night, sir', she said, and held out her hand. As if bred up in that gracious foreign courtesy, he bowed: raised it to his lips. Strangely, be made no motion to follow her; only as she turned away, watched her gait and carriage, inhumanly beautiful, till she was vanished among the crowd. Then he put on his hat again and slowly sat down again at his table.

So he sat, half an hour more, may be: a spectator: looking at faces, imagining, playing with his imaginations: a feeling of freedom in his veins: that strange glitter of a town at night, offering boundless possibilities. In that inward-dreaming mood he was unconscious of the clouding over of the stars and the closeness of the air, until rain had begun in big drops and the whole sky was split with lightning which unleashed the loud pealing thunder. Hastening back drenched to his hotel with collar turned up and with the downpour splashing again in a million jets from the flooded pavement, he, as in a sudden intolerable hunger, said in himself: 'It is long enough: I will not wa
it five months. Home to-morrow.’

She, in the mean while (if, indeed, as between World and World it is legitimate to speak of 'before' and 'after'), had, in a dozen paces after Lessingham's far-drawn gaze had lost her, stepped from natural present April into natural present June—from that night-life of Verona out by a colonnade of cool purple sandstone onto a daisied lawn, under the reverberant white splendour of midsummer noonday.

II

Memison: King
Mezentius

Coming
now beyond the lawn, that lady paused at the lily-pond under a shade of poplar-trees: paused to look down for a minute into depths out of which, framed between the crimson lilies and the golden, looked up at her
,
her own mirrored face. The curves of her nostrils hardened: some primal antiquity seemed suddenly to inform the whole presence of her, as if this youth and high summer-season of her girlhood were, in her, no season at all: not a condition, bearing in its own self its own destiny to depart and make place for future ripenesses, of full bloom, fading and decay; but a state unchanging and eternal. Her throat: her arm:^the line of her hair, strained back from the temples to that interweaving of darkness with sleek-limbed darkness, coiled, locked, and overlaid, in the nape of her neck: the upward growth there, daintily ordered as black pencillings on the white wings of a flower-delice, of tiny silken hairs shading the white skin; her lips, crystal-cold of aspect, clear cut, red like blood, showing the merest thread-like glint of teeth between; these things seemed to take on a perfection terrible, because timeless.

The lord Chancellor Beroald, from his seat beneath an arbour of honeysuckle leftwards some distance from where she stood, watched her unseen. In his look was nothing of that worship, which in dumb nature seemed: rather an appraising irony which, setting profession beside performance, fact beside seemin
g, sucks from their antic steps

not present entertainment only, but knowledge that settles to power.

‘I
s your husband in the palace?' he said presently.

'How should I know?'

‘I
had thought you had come that way.'

'Yes. But scarcely from taking an inventory.'

'Ha, so there the wind sits?'

He stood up as she came towards him, and they faced each other in silence. Then, light as the stirring of air in the overarching roof of poplar leaves above them, she laughed: held out a hand to him, which he after a pause dutifully, and with some faint spice of irony to sauce the motion, kissed;

'Your ladyship has some private jest?'

She sat down, elegantly settling herself on the rose-coloured marble bench, and elegantly drawing down, to smell to, a spray of honeysuckle. The black lashes veiled her eyes, as she inhaled from eight little branching horns of crimson, apricot-gold, and creamy colour, the honeysuckle's sweetness. Then, letting go the trailing flower, she looked round
at him sitting now beside her. ‘I
was diverted,' she said, 'by your look, my noble brother. That look you had, I remember, when you enveigled me to fall in with your pretty plan touching my former husband.'

'As we mount the hill,' said the Chancellor, 'the prospect opens more large. That was beginnings.'

'O, I spoke not of beginnings: not with that Borgian look." Piazza steps in Krestenaya.'

'Leave this talk,' said the Chancellor.

'Having yourself, before, fobbed him off on me like a base coin, to serve your own turn,' said she; 'and, soon as well rid of him, teased me to taking of this Morville: so much the better alliance for you, as being by some distant removes able to claim kinship with the Parrys. You think, I suppose, that, holding in me the Queen of Spades, you shall always be able to command the Ace to take knaves with?'

'Fie, sister!'

'Fie, brother! And you shall see, I'll play cards for love, not for policy. And next time you shall need to play me the King of Hearts, to be worth my Ace to trump him.'

'What's this?' said the King behind them: 'chancellors with kings i' their hands? That was ever ruin, sure, whether to him that held or him that was holden.'

'Serene highness,' said the Chancellor, rising and turn
ing about to face his master: ‘
you do know me: I ne'er play cards.'

The King laughed. ‘
Nor I: save now and then with the Devil; and that's now and then both good and needful.' Well six foot tall stood the Chancellor, clean of build and soldier-like; but the King, in black-bearded majesty, with eagle eyes, from under his black bonnet plumed with black eagle's feathers, looked down to him. The Duchess of Memison on the King's arm was as the beauty of an autumn evening leaning on night: a beauty of clouds and fire, of red-gold effulgence of sunset shining low through pine-tops and fern-fronds, when a little mist steals along the hillside and homing wild-duck stream high against the west. That Dark Lady, still seated, still with her back towards them, had but reached a jewelled hand to the honeysuckle to draw it down again to smell to.

'My Lady Fiorinda.'

She turned, saw, and rose, all duty and obedience, yet with the self-ordered unhasting haste of a foam-footed wave of the sea in calm June weather. 'Your gentle pardon, not to have known your highness' voice. Madam, your grace's humble servant.'

'I have pardoned worse than that,' said the King, 'in a Valkyrie.'

'In a Valkyrie? Am I that?'

'Answer her, madam.'

'O,' said the Duchess, 'she is none of mine. Let her answer for herself.'

'None of-yours? and in lovely Memison? where the very birds do fly to you at your becking? By whose doing but by yours should I have met her this morning, on a white horse, galloping, at the first spring of day as I rode up through your oak-groves.'

'As to speak of Valkyries,' said Fiorinda: 'I had supposed rather that your highness thought my horse had ta'en command of me: so swift as you rode me down and had him by the bridle.'

The King met her eyes, green and hard. 'It is best way,' he said, 'with a Valkyrie: safer treat Goddess as woman than woman as Goddess. And, as to speak of pardon: tell me not, mistress! You knew. And studied so to sit on: note whether I'd call you.'

She stood silent, looking down, as a statue unconcerned save that from the faint lifting, like the wings of a sea-swallow in flight, of her slender black eye-brows and from some subtle change about her mouth, there seemed to be shed about her a coldness as of the waste between the worlds.

'I have procured a place for you,' said the King: lady of the bedchamber to the Duchess. Will you thank me for it?'

She looked up, and first at the Duchess. 'I
’
ll thank both, and offend none. And, so please your serenity, I'll ask my husband's leave first'

'No need,' said the
King.
'That's asked and given this hour since. And now attend me, Beroald.' He said apart to the Duchess, looking into her green eyes across her fingers as he raised her hand to his hps, 'You see, madonna: I will do your way.'

The Chancellor? O I am glad,' said she, and it was as if some benediction came and went like a breath of honeysuckle among common garden sweetnesses.

'Then, ladies, give us leave for an hour. 'Fore God, matters of state, here in Memison, serve as salt pilchards and fumadoes 'twixt the wines, lest too much sweetness quite cloy us. Even as lovely Memison and your dear acquaintance, madam, are my noonday shadow and greenery in the desert of great action.'

'And yourself,' said the Duchess, 'Lord of us and all; and yet slave yourself to that same desert.'

'Of one thing only, in earth or heaven, am I slave.' 'And 'tis?'

'Of my own self will,' said the King, laughing at her. 'Come Chancellor.'

They two walked away slowly, over the lawn and through under that colonnade to another lawn, a hundred and fifty paces in length, may be, and forty across, with the long eastward-facing wall of the castle to bound it on the further side. Fair in the midst of that lawn they now began to pace the full length of it back and forth with slow and deliberate strides; and whiles they talked, whiles they seemed, falling silent, to weigh the matter. Low was their talk, and in that open sun-smitten place no danger of eavesdropping; unless the blackbird that hopped before them, jerking his tail, should listen and understand their discourse; or the martin, skimming to and fro in flashes of black and silver, still coming and returning again to her nest in the colonnade.

'I have eggs on the spit, Beroald.'

'I know,' said the Chancellor, very soberly.

‘
How should you know? I never told you.'

1 can smell them, even through this air of lilies.'

'Beroald, I have resolved to employ you in a matter I did mean, until this morning, none should have hand in but myself only. Am I well advised, think you?'

'If your serenity mean, well advised in undertaking of the thing, how can I answer, knowing not for certain what it is?'

'I mean,' said the King, and there was a tartness in his voice, 'is it well advised to open, even to you, a business of so much peril and import?'

The Chancellor paused. Then, 'That is a question,' he said, 'my Lord the King, that neither you nor I can answer. The event only can answer it.'

‘
You say, then, the event must show whether I be a
fool to trust you? whether you be, as I think, a man of mettle, and a man of judgement, and my man?'

'Your highness hath spoke my thought with your own mouth.'

'As cold as that?'

'Well, there is this besides,
’
said the Chancellor: that you were always my furtherer; and I, having looked on this world for five times seven years, have learnt this much of wisdom, to "bo
w to the bush I get bield frae” '

'A fair-weather friend could say that,' said the King, searching his face. 'But we are to put into a sea we cannot sound.'

The Chancellor replied, ‘I
can say no more; save that, if this be action indeed, as your highness (as I have ever known you) counteth action, then, choosing me or any other man, you have but a weak staff to lean unto.'

'Enough. Beroald, my eye is on the Parry.' 'So are lesser eyes.' 'These four years.'

'Since his crashing for y
ou of Valero's rebellion in the
March of Ulba. You have taken your time.'

'I would let him run on in his course of spending.
’

'Yet remember,' said the Chancellor, 'his policy is that

of the duck: above water
, idle and scarce seen to stir;
but under water, secretl
y and speedily swimming towards
his purpose.'

The King said,
‘I
know an otter shall pluck down yonder duck by the foot when least she doubts it'

It will need civil war now to bring him in.
’

'He is my Vicar in Rerek. Will it not argue a feeble statecraft if I, that have reigned twenty-five years in troubles and disquietudes, cannot now command my own officer without I make war against him?'

'Your serenity may have information we know not of. But most certain it is that, ever since the overthrow of those attempts in the Marches made him higher crested, he hath used your royal commission as his grappling-iron to grapple to his private allegiance the whole mid kingdom 'twixt Megra and the Zenner. I say not he meaneth openly to outbeard the sovereign himself. I think not so. But waiteth his time.'

They took a turn in silence. Then said the King, letting his right fore-arm, that had lain loosely about the Lord Beroald's neck, slip back till the hand shut strong upon his shoulder: 'You remember we lately found a league in hand 'mongst some discontented spirits in Rerek and the Marches, which practice, though the branches on't were easily cut off, yet was it thought to have a more dangerous and secret root. I myself have since, by divers ways, as many lines meet in the dial's centre, come nearer to the truth. There be five or six, instruments of his: names, were I to name 'em you'd ne'er believe me: so many showing friends, so many unshowing enemies. I have letters, enough to satisfy me. Advise me: what shall I do?'

'Summon them before you, himself and all, and let them answer the matter. If their answer be not sufficient, take off their heads.'

'What? When the cry "Puss, puss, where art thou?" were next way to fright 'em to open rebellion? Mend your counsel, my lord Chancellor: this serves not.'

'Serene highness, I am a man of law, and should meddle no further than my commission. Yet is it the platform and understanding of all law that the King, just cause arising, may lawfully act without the law? You are our great pilot, on whom all we cast our eyes and seek our safety. For security of your person, it were good this Vicar were made away. This then is my counsel: assure yourself well of your forces, and, that done, strike: and at unawares.'

The King laughed in his great black beard. 'You have confirmed my very resolve, and so shall it be. But with two provisoes. First, I'll not, like an unskilful boor, kill my good hawk 'cause she turns haggard: I'll tame my Horius Parry, not end him.'

Tm sorry, then,' said the Chancellor. 'He is a buzzard: he is of bad carry: you can make him do nothing.'

'Who are you, to prescribe and measure my ability?'

It should not be for my honesty to flatter you. Moreover, your highness hath proved him a man that neither believeth anything that
another man speaketh, nor speak
eth anything himself worthy to be believed.'