THE SILVER STALLION






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                         BOOKS _by_ MR. CABELL

_Biography_:

      BEYOND LIFE
      FIGURES OF EARTH
      THE SILVER STALLION
      DOMNEI
      CHIVALRY
      JURGEN
      THE LINE OF LOVE
      THE HIGH PLACE
      GALLANTRY
      THE CERTAIN HOUR
      THE CORDS OF VANITY
      FROM THE HIDDEN WAY
      THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER’S NECK
      THE EAGLE’S SHADOW
      THE CREAM OF THE JEST
      STRAWS AND PRAYER-BOOKS

_Scholia_:

      THE LINEAGE OF LICHFIELD
      TABOO
      THE JEWEL MERCHANTS

                         ---------------------

      JURGEN AND THE LAW
           (_Edited by Guy Holt_)




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                          The Silver Stallion


                        _A Comedy of Redemption_


                                   by


                          JAMES BRANCH CABELL

[Illustration]


                “_Now, the redemption which we as yet
            await (continued Imlac), will be that of
            Kalki, who will come as a Silver Stallion:
            all evils and every sort of folly will perish at
            the coming of this Kalki: true righteousness
            will be restored, and the minds of men will
            be made clear as crystal._”




                     _Robert M. McBride & Company_
                         NEW YORK      MCMXXVI


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                COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY JAMES BRANCH CABELL

                         FIRST PUBLISHED, 1926

                     _First Printing, April, 1926_
                     _Second Printing, April, 1926_
                      _Third Printing, May, 1926_
                      _Fourth Printing, May, 1926_






                        PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
                      QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
                              RAHWAY, N.J.


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                                   TO

                             CARL VAN DOREN


             Could but one luring dream rest dead forever
           As dreamers rest at last, with all dreams done,
           Redeemers need not be, and faith need never
           Lease, for the faithful, homes beyond the sun.

             Victoriously that dream—above the sorrow
           And subterfuge of living,—still lets fail
           No heart to heed its soothing lure.... _To-morrow
           Dreams will be true, and faith and right prevail._

             _Out of the bright—and, no, not vacant!—heavens
           Redeemers will be coming by and by,
           En route to make our sixes and our sevens
           Neat as a trivet or an apple-pie._




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               In this volume the text of Bülg has not
               been followed over-scrupulously: but it
               is hoped that, in a book intended for
               general circulation, none will deplore
               such excisions and euphemisms, nor even
               such slight additions, as seemed to make
               for coherence and clarity and decorum.

               The curious are referred to the pages of
               _Poictesme en Chanson et Légende_ for a
               discussion of the sources of _The Silver
               Stallion_; and may decide for themselves
               whether or not Bülg has, in Codman’s
               phrase, “shown” these legends to be
               “spurious compositions of 17th century
               origin.” For myself, I here confess to
               finding the evidence educed, alike, a bit
               inadequate and, as far as goes my purpose,
               wholly immaterial. These chronicles, such
               as they are, present the only known record
               of the latter days of champions whose
               youthful exploits have long since been
               made familiar to English readers of
               Lewistam’s _Popular Tales of Poictesme_:
               authentic or not, and irrespective of
               whether such legends cannot be quite
               definitely proved to have existed earlier
               than 1652, here is the sole account we
               have anywhere, or are now likely ever to
               receive, of the changes that followed in
               Poictesme after the passing of Manuel the
               Redeemer.

               It is as such an account—which for my
               purpose was a desideratum,—that I have put
               _The Silver Stallion_ into English.





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THE LORDS THAT POICTESME HAD IN DOM MANUEL’S TIME


_These ten were of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion_:

_¶ Dom Manuel_, Count of Poictesme, held Storisende and Bellegarde, the
town of Beauvillage and the strong fort at Lisuarte, with all Amneran
and Morven.

_¶ Messire Gonfal of Naimes_, Margrave of Aradol, held Upper Naimousin.

_¶ Messire Donander of Évre_, the Thane of Aigremont, held Lower
Naimousin.

_¶ Messire Kerin of Nointel_, Syndic and Castellan of Basardra, held
West Val-Ardray.

_¶ Messire Ninzian of Yair_, the High Bailiff of Upper Ardra, held
Val-Ardray in the East.

_¶ Messire Holden of Nérac_, Earl Marshal of St. Tara, held Belpaysage.

_¶ Messire Anavalt of Fomor_, the Portreeve and Warden of Manneville,
held Belpaysage Le Bas.

_¶ Messire Coth of the Rocks_, Alderman of St. Didol, held Haut
Belpaysage.

_¶ Messire Guivric of Perdigon_, Heitman of Asch, held Piemontais.

_¶ Messire Miramon of Ranec_, Lord Seneschal of Gontaron, held
Duardenois.


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Likewise there were the fiefs of Dom Meunier, Count of Montors, Dom
Manuel’s brother-in-law. Meunier was not of this fellowship: he held
also Giens. Here his wife ruled over Lower Duardenois.

_¶ Othmar Black-Tooth_, whom some called Othmar the Lawless, long held
Valnères and Ogde, until Manuel routed him: thereafter these villages,
with the most of Bovion, stayed masterless.

_¶ Helmas the Deep-Minded_, after a magic was put upon him in the year
of grace 1255, held, in his fashion, the high place at Brunbelois: but
the rest of Acaire, once Lorcha had been taken and Sclaug burned, was no
man’s land. Also upon Upper Morven lived disaffected persons in defiance
of all law and piety.

                               —_Poictesme en Chanson et Légende._ G. J.
                                     Bülg. Strasburg, 1785. [Pp. 87-88.]


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                                CONTENTS


                 BOOK ONE: LAST SIEGE OF THE FELLOWSHIP

                                                         PAGE
                 I Child’s Talk                             3
                II Economics of Horvendile                  7
               III How Anavalt Lamented the Redeemer       17
                IV Fog Rises                               21


                  BOOK TWO: THE MATHEMATICS OF GONFAL

                 V Champion at Misadventure                27
                VI The Loans of Power                      31
               VII Fatality the Second                     39
              VIII How the Princes Bragged                 42
                IX The Loans of Wisdom                     46
                 X Relative to Gonfal’s Head               49
                XI Economics of Morvyth                    56


                    BOOK THREE: TOUPAN’S BRIGHT BEES

               XII The Mage Emeritus                       61
              XIII Economics of Gisèle                     67
               XIV The Changing That Followed              73
                XV Disastrous Rage of Miramon              76
               XVI Concerns the Pleiades and a Razor       78
              XVII Epitome of Marriage                     81
             XVIII Koshchei is Vexed                       87
               XIX Settlement: in Full                     90


                       BOOK FOUR: COTH AT PORUTSA

                XX Idolatry of an Alderman                 97
               XXI The Profits of Pepper Selling          104
              XXII Toveyo Dances                          110
             XXIII Regrettable Conduct of a Corpse        113
              XXIV Economics of Yaotl                     119
               XXV Last Obligation upon Manuel            122
              XXVI The Realist in Defeat                  128


                    BOOK FIVE: “MUNDUS VULT DECIPI”

             XXVII Poictesme Reformed                     133
            XXVIII Fond Motto of a Patriot                138
              XXIX The Grumbler’s Progress                141
               XXX Havoc of Bad Habits                    145
              XXXI Other Paternal Apothegms               149
             XXXII Time Gnaws at All                      153
            XXXIII Economics of Coth                      158


                     BOOK SIX: IN THE SYLAN’S HOUSE

             XXXIV Something Goes Wrong: and Why          171
              XXXV Guivric’s Journey                      175
             XXXVI The Appointed Enemy                    178
            XXXVII Too Many Mouths                        182
           XXXVIII The Appointed Lover                    186
             XXXIX One Warden Left Uncircumvented         190
                XL Economics of Glaum-Without-Bones       194
               XLI The Gratifying Sequel                  203


                    BOOK SEVEN: WHAT SARAÏDE WANTED

              XLII Generalities at Ogde                   207
             XLIII Prayer and the Lizard Maids            213
              XLIV Fine Cordiality of Sclaug              219
               XLV The Gander Also Generalizes            222
              XLVI Kerin Rises in the World               229
             XLVII Economics of Saraïde                   232
            XLVIII The Golden Shining                     237
              XLIX They of Nointel                        239


                    BOOK EIGHT: THE CANDID FOOTPRINT

                 L Indiscretion of a Bailiff              247
                LI The Queer Bird                         250
               LII Remorse of a Poor Devil                260
              LIII Continuation of Appalling Pieties      263
               LIV Magic That was Rusty                   267
                LV The Prince of Darkness                 270
               LVI Economics of Ninzian                   277


                       BOOK NINE: ABOVE PARADISE

              LVII Maugis Makes Trouble                   283
             LVIII Showing that Even Angels May Err       287
               LIX The Conversion of Palnatoki            290
                LX In the Hall of the Chosen              293
               LXI Vanadis, Dear Lady of Reginlief        297
              LXII The Demiurgy of Donander Veratyr       300
             LXIII Economics of Sidvrar                   305
              LXIV Through the Oval Window                308
               LXV The Reward of Faith                    314


                       BOOK TEN: AT MANUEL’S TOMB

              LXVI Old Age of Niafer                      317
             LXVII The Women Differ                       324
            LXVIII Radegonde is Practical                 332
              LXIX Economics of Jurgen                    335
               LXX All Ends Perplexedly                   349


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                     HEREWITH BEGINS THE HISTORY OF
                   THE BIRTH AND OF THE TRIUMPHING OF
                   THE GREAT LEGEND ABOUT MANUEL THE
                    REDEEMER, WHOM GONFAL REPUDIATED
                   AS BLOWN DUST, AND MIRAMON, AS AN
                   IMPOSTOR, AND WHOM COTH REPUDIATED
                  OUT OF HONEST LOVE: BUT WHOM GUIVRIC
                     ACCEPTED, THROUGH TWO SORTS OF
                   POLICY; WHOM KERIN ACCEPTED AS AN
                    HONORABLE OLD HUMAN FOIBLE, AND
                 NINZIAN, AS A PATHETIC AND SERVICEABLE
                      JOKE; WHOM DONANDER ACCEPTED
                  WHOLE-HEARTEDLY (TO THE ETERNAL JOY
                   OF DONANDER), AND WHO WAS ACCEPTED
                   ALSO BY NIAFER, AND BY JURGEN THE
                 PAWNBROKER, AFTER SOME LITTLE PRIVATE
                     RESERVATIONS: AND HEREINAFTER
                     IS RECORDED THE MANNER OF THE
                       GREAT LEGEND’S ENGULFMENT
                           OF THESE PERSONS.




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                                BOOK ONE

                      LAST SIEGE OF THE FELLOWSHIP

     _“They shall be, in the siege, both against Judah and against
                              Jerusalem.”_
                          —ZECHARIAH, xii, 2.




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                    —Et la route, fait elle aussi un
                    grand tour?

                    —Oh, bien certainement, étant
                    donné qu’elle circonvient à la
                    fois la destinée et le bon sens.

                    —Puisqu’il le faut, alors! dit
                    Jurgen; d’ailleurs je suis
                    toujours disposé à goûter
                    n’importe quel breuvage au moins
                    une fois.

                         —LA HAULTE HISTOIRE DE JURGEN.




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                                  _1._
                             _Child’s Talk_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THEY relate how Dom Manuel that was the high Count of Poictesme, and was
everywhere esteemed the most lucky and the least scrupulous rogue of his
times, had disappeared out of his castle at Storisende, without any
reason or forewarning, upon the feast day of St. Michael and All the
Angels. They tell of the confusion and dismay which arose in Dom
Manuel’s lands when it was known that Manuel the Redeemer—thus named
because he had redeemed Poictesme from the Northmen, through the aid of
Miramon Lluagor, with a great and sanguinary magic,—was now gone, quite
inexplicably, out of these lands.

For whither Manuel had gone, no man nor any woman could say with
certainty. At Storisende he had last been seen by his small daughter
Melicent, who stated that Father, mounted on a black horse, had ridden
westward with Grandfather Death, on a white one, to a far place beyond
the sunset. This was quite generally felt to be improbable.

Yet further inquiry had but made more deep the mystery as to the manner
of Dom Manuel’s passing. Further inquiry had disclosed that the only
human eyes anywhere which had, or could pretend to have, rested upon Dom
Manuel after Manuel had left Storisende were those of a little boy
called Jurgen, the son of Coth of the Rocks. Young Jurgen, after having
received from his father an in no way unusual whipping, had run away
from home, and had not been recaptured until the following morning. The
lad reported that during his wanderings he had witnessed, toward dusk,
upon Upper Morven, a fearful eucharist in which the Redeemer of
Poictesme had very horribly shared. Thereafter—so the child’s tale
ran,—had ensued a transfiguration, and a prediction as to the future of
Poictesme, and Dom Manuel’s elevation into the glowing clouds of
sunset....

Now, these latter details had been, at their first rendering, blubbered
almost inarticulately. For, after just the initiatory passages of this
supposed romance, the parents of Jurgen, in their first rapturous relief
at having recovered their lost treasure, had, of course, in the manner
of parents everywhere, resorted to such moral altitudes and to such
corporal corrections as had disastrously affected the putative small
liar’s tale. Then, as the days passed, and they of Poictesme still
vainly looked for the return of their great Dom Manuel, the child was of
necessity questioned again: and little Jurgen, after sulking for a
while, had retold his story without any detected deviation.

It certainly all sounded quite improbable. Nevertheless, here was the
only explanation of the land’s loss tendered anywhere by anybody: and
people began half seriously to consider it. Say what you might, this
immature and spanked evangelist had told a story opulent in details
which no boy of his age could well, it seemed, have invented. Many
persons therefore began sagely to refer to the mouths of babes and
sucklings, and to nod ominously. Moreover, the child, when yet further
questioned, had enlarged upon Manuel’s last prediction as to the future
glories of Poictesme, to an extent which made incredulity seem rather
unpatriotic; and Jurgen had amplified his horrific story of the manner
in which Manuel had redeemed his people from the incurred penalties of
their various sins up to and including that evening.

The suggested inference that there was to be no accounting anywhere for
one’s unavoidable misdemeanors up to date,—among which Dom Manuel had
been at pains to specify such indiscretions as staying out all night
without your parents’ permission,—was an arrangement which everybody,
upon consideration, found to be more and more desirable. Good-hearted
persons everywhere began, with virtually a free choice thus offered
between belief and disbelief, to prefer to invest a little, it well
might be, remunerative faith in the story told with such conviction by
this sweet and unsullied child, rather than in the carping comments of
materialists,—who, after all, could only say, well out of earshot of
Coth of the Rocks, that this young Jurgen was very likely to distinguish
himself thereafter, either in the pulpit or upon some gallows.

Meanwhile one woeful fact was, in any case, undeniable: the saga of that
quiet, prospering grand thief of a Manuel had ended with the
inconsequent, if the not actually incredible, tales of these two little
children; and squinting tall gray Manuel of the high head had gone out
of Poictesme, nobody could say whither.


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                                  _2._
                       _Economics of Horvendile_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


AND meanwhile too the Redeemer’s wife, Dame Niafer, had sent a summoning
to each of the nine lords that, with Manuel, were of the Fellowship of
the Silver Stallion: and all these met at Storisende, as Niafer
commanded them, for a session or, as they more formally called it, a
siege of this order.

Now this fellowship took its name from the banner it had fought under so
destroyingly. Upon that sable banner was displayed a silver stallion,
which was rampant in every member and was bridled with gold. Dom Manuel
was the captain of this fellowship; and it was made up of the nine
barons who, under Manuel, had ruled Poictesme. Each had his two stout
castles and his fine woodlands and meadows, which he held in fealty to
Dom Manuel: and each had a high name for valor.

Four of these genial murderers had served, under the Conde de Tohil
Vaca, in Manuel’s first and utterly disastrous campaign against the
Northmen: but all the nine had been with Manuel since the time of the
great fighting about Lacre Kai, and throughout Manuel’s various troubles
with Oribert and Thragnar and Earl Ladinas and Sclaug and Oriander, that
blind and coldly evil Swimmer who was the father of Manuel; and in all
the other warrings of Manuel these nine had been with him up to the end.

And the deeds of the lords of the Silver Stallion had fallen very little
short of Manuel’s own deeds. Thus, it was Manuel, to be sure, who killed
Oriander: that was a family affair. But Miramon Lluagor, the Seneschal
of Gontaron, was the champion who subdued Thragnar and put upon him a
detection and a hindrance: and it was Kerin of Nointel—the Syndic and,
after that, the Castellan of Basardra,—who captured and carefully burned
Sclaug. Then, in the quelling of Othmar Black-Tooth’s rebellion, Ninzian
of Yair, the High Bailiff of Upper Ardra, had killed eleven more of the
outlaws than got their deaths by Manuel’s sword. It was Guivric of
Perdigon, and not Manuel, who put the great Arabian Al-Motawakkil out of
life. And in the famous battle with the Easterlings, by which the city
of Megaris was rescued, it was Manuel who got the main glory and, people
said, a three nights’ loan of the body of King Theodoret’s young sister;
but capable judges declared the best fighting on that day was done by
Donander of Évre, then but a boy, whom Manuel thereafter made Thane of
Aigremont.

Yet Holden of Nérac, the Marshal of St. Tara, was the boldest of them
all, and was very well able to hold his own in single combat with any of
those that have been spoken of: Coth of the Rocks had not ever quitted
any battle-field except as a conqueror: and courteous Anavalt of Fomor
and light-hearted Gonfal of Naimes—who had the worst names among this
company for being the most cunning friends and coaxers of women,—these
two had put down their masculine opposers also in gratifyingly large
numbers.

In fine, no matter where the lords of the Silver Stallion had raised
their banner against an adversary, it was in that place they made an end
of that adversary: for there was never, in any time, a hardier gang of
bullies than was this Fellowship of the Silver Stallion in the season
that they kept earth noisy with the clashing of their swords and
darkened heaven with the smoke of the towns they were sacking, and when
throughout the known world men had talked about the wonders which these
champions were performing with Dom Manuel to lead them. Now they were
leaderless.

These heroes came to Storisende; and with Dame Niafer they of course
found Holy Holmendis. This saint was then very lately come out of
Philistia, to console the Countess in her bereavement. But they found
with her also that youthful red-haired Horvendile under whom Dom Manuel,
in turn, had held Poictesme, by the terms of a contract which was not
ever made public. Some said this Horvendile to be Satan’s friend and
emissary, while others declared his origin to lurk in a more pagan
mythology: all knew the boy to be a master of discomfortable strange
magics such as were unknown to Miramon Lluagor and Guivric the Sage.

This Horvendile said to the nine heroes, “Now begins the last siege of
the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion.”

Donander of Évre was the youngest of them. Yet he spoke now, piously and
boldly enough. “But it is our custom, Messire Horvendile, to begin each
siege with prayer.”

“This siege,” replied Horvendile, “must nevertheless begin without any
such religious side-taking. For this is the siege in which, as it was
prophesied, you shall be both against Judah and against Jerusalem, and
against Thebes and Hermopolis and Avalon and Breidablik and all other
places which produce Redeemers.”

“Upon my word, but who is master here!” cried Coth of the Rocks,
twirling at his long mustachios. This gesture was a sure sign that
trouble brewed.

Horvendile answered: “The master who held Poictesme, under my whims, has
passed. A woman sits in his place, his little son inherits after him. So
begins a new romance; and a new order is set afoot.”

“Yet Coth, in his restless pursuit of variety, has asked a wholly
sensible question,” said Gonfal, the tall Margrave of Aradol. “Who will
command us, who now will give us our directions? Can Madame Niafer lead
us to war?”

“These things are separate. Dame Niafer commands: but it is I—since you
ask,—who will give to all of you your directions, and your dooms too
against the time of their falling, and after that to your names I will
give life. Now, your direction, Gonfal, is South.”

Gonfal looked full at Horvendile, in frank surprise. “I was already
planning for the South, though certainly I had told nobody about it. You
are displaying, Messire Horvendile, an uncomfortable sort of wisdom
which troubles me.”

Horvendile replied, “It is but a little knack of foresight, such as I
share with Balaam’s ass.”

But Gonfal stayed more grave than was his custom. He asked, “What shall
I find in the South?”

“What all men find, at last, in one place or another, whether it be with
the aid of a knife or of a rope or of old age. Yet, I assure you, the
finding of it will not be unwelcome.”

“Well,”—Gonfal shrugged,—“I am a realist. I take what comes, in the true
form it comes in.”

Now Coth of the Rocks was blustering again. “I also am a realist. Yet I
permit no upstart, whether he have or have not hair like a carrot, to
give me any directions.”

Horvendile answered, “I say to you—”

But Coth replied, shaking his great bald head: “No, I will not be
bulldozed in this way. I am a mild-mannered man, but I will not tamely
submit to be thus browbeaten. I believe, too, that Gonfal was
insinuating I do not usually ask sensible questions!”

“Nobody has attempted—”

“Are you not contradicting me to my face! What is that but to call me a
liar! I will not, I repeat, submit to these continued rudenesses.”

“I was only saying—”

But Coth was implacable. “I will take directions from nobody who storms
at me and who preserves no dignity whatever in our hour of grief. For
the rest, the children agree in reporting that, whether he ascended in a
gold cloud or traveled more sensibly on a black horse, Dom Manuel went
westward. I shall go west, and I shall fetch Dom Manuel back into
Poictesme. I shall, also, candidly advise him, when he returns to ruling
over us, to discourage the tomfooleries and the ridiculous rages of all
persons whose brains are overheated by their hair.”

“Let the West, then,” said Horvendile, very quietly, “be your direction.
And if the people there do not find you so big a man as you think
yourself, do not you be blaming me.”

These were his precise words. Coth himself conceded the coincidence,
long afterward....

“I, Messire Horvendile, with your permission, am for the North,” said
Miramon Lluagor. This sorcerer alone of them was upon any terms of
intimacy with this Horvendile. “I have yet upon gray Vraidex my Doubtful
Castle, in which an undoubtable and a known doom awaits me.”

“That is true,” replied Horvendile. “Let the keen North and the cold
edge of Flamberge be yours. But you, Guivric, shall have the warm wise
East for your direction.”

That allotment was uncordially received. “I am comfortable enough in my
home at Asch,” said Guivric the Sage. “At some other time, perhaps— But,
really now, Messire Horvendile, I have in hand a number of quite
important thaumaturgies just at the present! Your suggestion is most
upsetting. I know of no need for me to travel east.”

“With time you will know of that need,” said Horvendile, “and you will
obey it willingly, and you will go willingly to face the most pitiable
and terrible of all things.”

Guivric the Sage did not reply. He was too sage to argue with people
when they talked foolishly. He was immeasurably too sage to argue with,
of all persons, Horvendile.

“Yet that,” observed Holden of Nérac, “exhausts the directions: and it
leaves no direction for the rest of us.”

Horvendile looked at this Holden, who was with every reason named the
Bold; and Horvendile smiled. “You, Holden, already take your directions,
in a picturesque and secret manner, from a queen—”

“Let us not speak of that!” said Holden, between a smirk and some alarm.

“—And you will be guided by her, in any event, rather than by me. To you
also, Anavalt of Fomor, yet another queen will call resistlessly by and
by, and you, who are rightly named the Courteous, will deny her nothing.
So to Holden and to Anavalt I shall give no directions, because it is
uncivil to come between any woman and her prey.”

“But I,” said Kerin of Nointel, “I have at Ogde a brand-new wife whom I
prize above all the women I ever married, and far above any mere crowned
queen. Not even wise Solomon,” now Kerin told them, blinking, in a sort
of quiet scholastic ecstasy, “when that Judean took his pick of the
women of this world, accompanied with any queen like my Saraïde: for she
is in all ways superior to what the Cabalists record about Queen Naäma,
that pious child of the bloodthirsty King of Ammon, and about Queen
Djarada, the daughter of idolatrous Nubara the Egyptian, and about Queen
Balkis, who was begotten by a Sheban duke upon the person of a female
Djinn in the appearance of a gazelle. And only at the command of my dear
Saraïde would I leave home to go in any direction.”

“You will, nevertheless, leave home, very shortly,” declared Horvendile.
“And it will be at the command and at the personal urging of your
Saraïde.”

Kerin leaned his head to one side, and he blinked again. He had just Dom
Manuel’s trick of thus opening and shutting his eyes when he was
thinking, but Kerin’s mild dark gaze in very little resembled Manuel’s
piercing, vivid and rather wary consideration of affairs.

Kerin then observed, “Yet it is just as Holden said, and every direction
is preëmpted.”

“Oh, no,” said Horvendile. “For you, Kerin, will go downward, whither
nobody will dare to follow you, and where you will learn more wisdom
than to argue with me, and to pester people with uncalled-for
erudition.”

“It follows logically that I,” laughed young Donander of Évre, “must be
going upward, toward paradise itself, since no other direction whatever
remains.”

“That,” Horvendile replied, “happens to be true. But you will go up far
higher than you think for; and your doom shall be the most strange of
all.”

“Then must I rest content with some second-rate and commonplace
destruction?” asked Ninzian of Yair, Who alone of the fellowship had not
yet spoken.

Horvendile looked at sleek Ninzian, and Horvendile looked long and long.
“Donander is a tolerably pious person. But without Ninzian, the Church
would lack the stoutest and the one really god-fearing pillar it
possesses anywhere in these parts. That would be the devil of a
misfortune. Your direction, therefore, is to remain in Poictesme, and to
uphold the edifying fine motto of Poictesme, for the world’s benefit.”

“But the motto of Poictesme,” said Ninzian, doubtfully, “is _Mundus vult
decipi_, and signifies that the world wishes to be deceived.”

“That is a highly moral sentiment, which I may safely rely upon you
alike to concede and prove. Therefore, for you who are so pious, I shall
slightly paraphrase the Scripture: and I declare to all of you that
neither will I any more remove the foot of Ninzian from out of the land
which I have appointed for your children; so that they will take heed to
do all which I have commanded them.”

“That,” Ninzian said, looking markedly uncomfortable, “is very
delightful.”


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                                  _3._
                  _How Anavalt Lamented the Redeemer_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THEN Madame Niafer arose, black-robed and hollow-eyed, and she made a
lament for Dom Manuel, whose like for gentleness and purity and loving
kindliness toward his fellows she declared to remain nowhere in this
world. It was an encomium under which the attendant warriors stayed very
grave and rather fidgety, because they recognized and shared her grief,
but did not wholly recognize the Manuel whom she described to them.

And the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was decreed to be disbanded,
because of the law of Poictesme that all things should go by tens
forever. There was no fighting-man able to fill Manuel’s place: and a
fellowship of nine members was, as Dame Niafer pointed out, illegal.

It well might be, however, she suggested, with a side glance toward
Holmendis, that some other peculiarly holy person, even though not a
warrior— At the same instant Coth said, with a startling and astringent
decisiveness, “Bosh!”

His confrères felt the gross incivility of this interruption, but felt,
too, that they agreed with Coth. And so the fellowship was proclaimed to
be disbanded.

Then Anavalt of Fomor made a lament for the passing of that noble order
whose ranks were broken at last, and for Dom Manuel also Anavalt raised
a lament, praising Manuel for his hardihood and his cunning and his
terribleness in battle. The heroes nodded their assent to this more
intelligible sort of talking.

“Manuel,” said Anavalt, “was hardy. It was not wise for any enemy to
provoke him. When that indiscretion was committed, Manuel made himself
as a serpent about the city of that enemy, girdling his prey all round:
he seized the purlieus of that city, and its cattle, and its boats upon
the rivers. He beleaguered that city everywhere, he put fire to the
orchards, he silenced the mill-races, he prevented the plowers from
plowing the land; and the people of that city starved, and they ate up
one another, until the survivors chose to surrender to Dom Manuel. Then
Manuel raised his gallows, he whistled in his headsmen, and there were
no more survivors of that people.”

And Anavalt said also: “Manuel was cunning. With a feather he put a
deception upon three kings, but the queens that he played his tricks on
were more than three, nor was it any feather that he diddled them with.
Nobody could outwit Manuel. What he wanted he took, if he could get it
that way, with his strong hand: but, if not, he used his artful head and
his lazy, wheedling tongue, and his other members too, so that the
person whom he was deluding would give Manuel whatever he required. It
was like eating honey, to be deluded by Manuel. I think it is no credit
for a private man to be a great rogue; but the leader of a people must
know how to deceive all peoples.”

Then Anavalt said: “Manuel was terrible. There was no softness in him,
no hesitancy, and no pity. That, too, is not a virtue in a private
person, but in the leader of a people it may well be a blessing for that
people. Manuel so ordered matters that no adversary ever troubled
Poictesme the second time. He lived as a tyrant over us; but it is
better to have one master that you know the ways of than to be always
changing masters in a world where none but madmen run about at their own
will. I do not weep for Manuel, because he would never have wept for me
nor for anybody else; but I regret that man of iron and the protection
he was to us who are not ruthless iron but flesh.”

There was a silence afterward. Yet still the heroes nodded gravely. This
was, in the main, a Manuel whom they all recognized.

Dame Niafer, however, had risen up a little way from her seat, when the
pious gaunt man Holy Holmendis, who sat next to her, put out his hand to
her hand. After this she said nothing: yet it was perfectly clear the
Countess thought that Anavalt had been praising Manuel for the wrong
sort of virtues.

A fire was kindled with that ceremony which was requisite. The banner of
the great fellowship was burned, and the lords of the Silver Stallion
now broke their swords, and they cast these fragments also into this
fire, so that these swords might never defend any other standard. It was
the youth of these nine men and the first vigor and faith of their youth
which perished with the extinction of that fire: and they knew it.

Thereafter the heroes left Storisende. Each rode for his own home, and
they made ready, each in his own fashion, for that new order of
governance which with the passing of Dom Manuel had come upon Poictesme.


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                                  _4._
                              _Fog Rises_

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NOW Guivric and Donander and Gonfal rode westward with their attendants,
all in one company, as far as Guivric’s home at Asch. And as these three
lords rode among the wreckage and the gathering fogs of November, the
three talked together.

“It is a pity,” said Gonfal of Naimes, “that, while our little Count
Emmerick is growing up, this land must now be ruled by a lame and sallow
person, who had never much wit and who tends already to stringiness.
Otherwise, in a land ruled over by a widow, who is used to certain
recreations, one might be finding amusement, and profit too.”

“Come now,” said loyal Donander of Évre, “but Madame Niafer is a chaste
and good woman who means well!”

“She has yet another quality which is even more disastrous in the ruler
of any country,” returned Guivric the Sage.

“And what hook have you found now to hang a cynicism on?”

“I fear more from her inordinate piety than from her indifferent looks
and her stupid well-meaningness. That woman will be reforming things
everywhere into one gray ruin.”

“Indeed,” said Gonfal, smiling, “these rising fogs have to me very much
the appearance of church incense.”

Guivric nodded. “Yes. Had it been possible, I believe that Madame Niafer
would have preserved and desecrated the fellowship by setting in Dom
Manuel’s place that Holy Holmendis who is nowadays her guide in all
spiritual matters; and who will presently, do you mark my prophesying,
be making a sanctimonious hash of her statecraft.”

“He composed for her, it is well known,” said Gonfal, “the plaint which
she made for Dom Manuel.”

“That was a cataloguing of ecclesiastic virtues,” Guivric said, dryly,
“which to my mind did not very immediately suggest the tall adulterer
and parricide whom we remember. This Holmendis has, thus, already
brought hypocrisy into fashion.”

“He will be Niafer’s main counselor,” Gonfal speculated. “He is a
pushing, vigorous fellow. I wonder now—?”

Guivric nodded again. “Women prefer to take counsel in a bedchamber,” he
stated.

“Come, Guivric,” put in pious young Donander of Évre. “Come now,
whatever his over-charitable opinion of our dead master, this Holmendis
is a saint: and we true believers should speak no ill of the saints.”

“I have nothing against belief, nor hypocrisy either, within reason, nor
have I anything against saints, in their proper place. It is only that
should a saint—and more particularly, a saint conceived and nurtured and
made holy in Philistia,—ever come to rule over Poictesme, and over the
bedchamber of Dom Manuel,” said Guivric, moodily, “that saint would not
be in his proper place. And our day, my friends, would be ended.”

“It is already ended,” Gonfal said, “so far as Poictesme is concerned:
these fogs smell over-strongly of church incense. But these fogs which
rise about Poictesme do not envelop the earth. For one, I shall fare
south, as that Horvendile directed me, and as I had already planned to
do. In the South I shall find nobody so amusing as that fine great
squinting quiet scoundrel of a Manuel. Yet in the South there is a quest
cried for the hand of Morvyth, the dark Queen of Inis Dahut; and, now
that my wife is dead, it may be that I would find it amusing to sleep
with this young queen.”

The others laughed, and thought no more of the light boastfulness of
this Gonfal who was the world’s playfellow. But within the month it was
known that Gonfal of Naimes, the Margrave of Aradol, had in truth
quitted his demesnes, and had traveled southward. And he was the first
of this famous fellowship, after Dom Manuel, to go out of Poictesme, not
ever to return.

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                                BOOK TWO

                       THE MATHEMATICS OF GONFAL

              “_He multiplieth words without knowledge._”
                            —JOB, xxxv, 16.




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                                  _5._
                       _Champion at Misadventure_

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NOW the tale is of how Gonfal fared in the South, where the people were
Fundamentalists. It is told how the quest was cried; and how, in the
day’s fashion, the hand of Morvyth, the dark Queen of Inis Dahut and of
the four other Isles of Wonder, was promised to the champion who should
fetch back the treasure that was worthiest to be her bridal gift. Eight
swords, they say, were borne to the altar of Pygé-Upsízugos, to be
suitably consecrated, after a brief and earnest address, by the Imaun of
Bulotu. Eight appropriately ardent lovers raised high these swords, to
swear fealty to Queen Morvyth and to the quest of which her loveliness
was the reward. Thus all was as it should be, until they went to sheathe
these swords. Then, one champion among the company, striking his elbow
against his neighbor, had, rather unaccountably, the ill luck to drop
his sword so that it pierced his own left foot.

The horns sounded afterward, through the narrow streets and over the
bronze and lacquer roofs, and seven of Queen Morvyth’s suitors armed and
rode forth to ransack the world of its chief riches for a year and a
day.

He who did not ride with the others was Gonfal of Naimes. It was three
months, indeed, before his wound was so healed that Gonfal could put
foot to stirrup. And by that time, he calculated regretfully, the riches
of the world must have been picked over with such thoroughness that it
would hardly be worth while for a cripple to be hobbling out to make
himself ridiculous among unsympathetic strangers. His agony, as he
admitted, under this inclement turn of chance, was well-nigh
intolerable; yet nothing was to be gained by blinking the facts: and
Gonfal was, as he also admitted, a realist.

Gonfal, thus, remained at court through the length of a year, and lived
uneventfully in the pagan Isles of Wonder. Gonfal sat unsplendidly snug
while all his rivals rode at adventure in the meadows that are most
fertile in magic and ascended the mountains that rise beyond
plausibility in the climates most favorable to the unimaginable. But
Gonfal’s sufficing consolation appeared to be that he sat, more and more
often, with the Queen.

However, the Margrave of Aradol, alone of Morvyth’s suitors, had
overpassed his first youth; the aging seem to acquire a sort of
proficiency in being disappointed, and to despatch the transaction with
more ease: and so, Queen Morvyth speculated, the Margrave of Aradol
could perhaps endure this cross of unheroic tranquillity—even over and
above his natural despair, now he had lost all hope of winning her,—with
an ampler fortitude than would have been attainable by any of the
others.

Besides, their famousness was yet to be won, their exploits stayed, as
yet, resplendent and misty magnets which drew them toward the future.
But this Gonfal, who had come into Inis Dahut after so much notable
service under Manuel of Poictesme and the unconquerable banner of the
Silver Stallion, had in his day, the young Queen knew, been through
eight formal wars, with any amount of light guerrilla work. He had slain
his satisfactory quota of dragons and usurpers and ogres, and, also some
years ago, had married the golden-haired and starry-eyed and
swan-throated princess who is the customary reward of every champion’s
faithful attendance to derring-do.

Now, in the afternoon of Gonfal’s day, with his princess dead, and with
the realms that he had shared with her all lost,—and with his overlord
Count Manuel too departed from this world, and with the banner of the
Silver Stallion no longer followed by any one,—now this tall Gonfal went
among his fellows in Inis Dahut a little aloofly. Yet the fair-bearded
man went smilingly, too, as one who amuses himself at a game which he
knows to be not very important: for he was, as he said, a realist, even
in the pagan Isles of Wonder.

And Morvyth, the dark Queen of the five Isles of Wonder, was annoyed
by the bantering ways of her slow-spoken lover; she did not like these
ways: she would put out of mind the question whether this man was
being bitterly amused by his own hopeless infatuation or by
something—incredible as that seemed,—about her. But that question
would come back into her mind: and Morvyth, with an habitual light
lovely gesture, would tidy the hair about her ears, and would go again
to talk with Gonfal, so that she might, privately and just for her own
satisfaction, decide upon this problem. Besides, the man had rather
nice eyes.


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                                  _6._
                          _The Loans of Power_

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NOW, when the year was over, and when the bland persistent winds of
April had won up again out of the South, the heroes returned, each with
his treasure. Each brought to Morvyth a bridal gift as miraculous as the
adventures through which it had been come by: and all these adventures
had been marvelous beyond any easy believing.

Indeed, as the Queen remarked, in private, their tales were hardly
credible.

“And yet, I think, these buoyant epics are based upon fact,” replied
Gonfal. “Each of these men is the shrewd, small and ill-favored third
son of a king. It is the law that such unprepossessing midgets should
prosper, and override every sort of evil, in the Isles of Wonder and all
other extra-mundane lands.”

“But is it fair, my friend, is it even respectful, to the august and
venerable powers of iniquity, that these whippersnappers—?”

Gonfal replied: “Nobody contends, I assure you, that such easy conquests
are quite sportsmanlike. Nevertheless, they are the prerogatives of the
third son of a king. So, as a realist, madame, I perforce concede that
fortune, hereabouts, regards these third sons with a fixed grin of
approval. Even foxes and ants and ovens and broomsticks put aside their
customary taciturnity, to favor these royal imps with invaluable advice:
all giants and three-headed serpents must, I daresay, confront them with
a half-guilty sense of committing felo-de-se: and at every turn of the
road waits an enamored golden-haired princess.”

Now not every one of these truisms appeared, to the dark eyes of
Morvyth, wholly satisfactory.

“Blondes do not last,” said Morvyth, “and I am a queen.”

“That is true,” Gonfal admitted. “I am not certain every third prince
prospers with a queen. I can recall no authority upon the point.”

“My friend, there is not any doubt that these dauntless champions have
prospered everywhere. And it is another trouble for me now to decide
which one has fetched back the treasure that is worthiest to be my
bridal gift.”

Gonfal pursed up his remarkably red and soft-looking lips. He regarded
the young Queen for a brief while, and throughout that while he wore his
odd air of considering an amusing matter which was of no great
importance.

“Madame,” Gonfal then said, “I would distinguish. To be worthiest, a
thing must first be worthy.”

At this the slender brows of Morvyth went up. “But upon that ebony
table, my friend, are potent magics which control all the wealth of the
world.”

“I do not dispute that. I merely marvel—as a perhaps unpractical
realist,—how such wealth can be termed a gift, when it at utmost is but
a loan.”

“Now do you tell me,” commanded Morvyth, “just what that means!”

But Gonfal before replying considered for a while the trophies which
were the increment of his younger, smaller and more energetic rivals’
heroism. These trophies were, indeed, sufficiently remarkable.

Here, for one thing,—fetched from the fiery heart of the very dreadful
seven-walled city of Lankha, by bustling little Prince Chedric of Lorn,
after an infinity of high exploits,—was that agate which had in the
years that are long past preserved the might of the old emperors of
Macedon. Upon this strange jewel were to be seen a naked man and nine
women, portrayed in the agate’s veinings: and this agate assured its
wearer of victory in every battle. The armies of the pagan Isles of
Wonder would be ready, at the first convenient qualm of patriotism or
religious faith, to lay waste and rob all the wealthiest kingdoms in
that part of the world, should Morvyth choose that agate as her bridal
gift.

And yet Gonfal, as he now put it aside, spoke rather sadly, and said
only, “Bunkhum!” in one or another of the foreign tongues which he had
acquired during his mundivagant career of knight-errantry.

Gonfal then looked at an onyx. It was the onyx of Thossakan. Its wearer
had the power to draw out the soul of any person, even of himself, and
to imprison that soul as a captive inside this hollowed onyx; and its
wearer might thus trample anywhither resistlessly. Beyond the somber
gleaming of this onyx showed the green lusters of an emerald, which was
engraved with a lyre and three bees, with a dolphin and the head of a
bull. Misfortune and failure of no sort could enter into the house
wherein was this Samian gem. But the brightest of all the ensorcelled
stones arrayed upon the ebony table was the diamond of Luned, whose
wearer might at will go invisible: and to this Cymric wonder Gonfal
accorded the tribute of a shrug.

“This diamond,” said Gonfal then, “is a gift which a well-balanced
person might loyally tender to his queen, but hardly to his prospective
wife. I speak as a widower, madame: and I assure you that Prince Duneval
of Orc we may dismiss from our accounting, as a too ardent lover of
danger.”

Morvyth thought this very clever and naughty and cynical of him, but
smilingly said nothing. And Gonfal touched the offering of pompous
little Thorgny of Vigeois. This was the gray sideritis, which, when
bathed in running waters and properly propitiated, told with the weak
voice of an infant whatever you desired to learn. The secrets of war and
statecraft, of all that had ever happened anywhere, and of all arts and
trades, were familiar to the wearer of the gray sideritis. And Gonfal
touched, more gingerly, the moonstone of Naggar Tura, whose cutting edge
no material substance could resist, so that the strong doors of an
adversary’s treasure house, or the walls of his fortified city, could be
severed with this gem just as a knife slices an apple.

Yet equally marvelous, in another fashion, was this moonstone’s
neighbor, a jewel of scarlet radiancy streaked with purple. All that was
needed to ensure a prosperous outcome of whatsoever matter one had in
hand could be found engraved upon this stone, in the lost color called
tingaribinus. For the wearer of this stone—a fragment, as the most
reputable cantraps attested, of the pillar which Jacob raised at
Beth-El,—it was not possible to fail in any sort of worldly endeavor.

Yet Gonfal put this too aside, speaking again in a foreign language
unfamiliar to Morvyth, and saying, “Hohkum!”

And then, but not until then, Gonfal answered Queen Morvyth.

“I mean,” he said, “that with my own eyes I have seen that sturdy knave
Dom Manuel attain to the summit of human estate, and thence pass,
bewilderingly, into nothingness. I mean that, through the virtues of
these amulets and periapts and other very dreadful manifestations of
lithomancy, a monarch may retain, for a longer season than did Manuel,
much money and acreage and all manner of power, and may keep all these
fine things for a score or for two-score or even for three-score of
years. But not for four-score years, madame: for by that time the riches
and the honors of this world must fall away from every mortal man; and
all that can remain of the greatest emperor or of the most dreadful
conqueror will be, when four-score years are over, picked bones in a
black box.”

And Gonfal said also: “Such is now the estate of Alexander, for all that
he once owned this agate. Achilles, who wore the sideritis and was so
notable at Troy, is master of no larger realm. And to Augustus and
Artaxerxes and Attila—here to proceed no further in the alphabet,—quite
similar observations apply. These men went very ardently about this
earth, the vigor of their misconduct was truly heroic, and the sound of
their names is become as deathless as is the sound of the wind. But once
that four-score years were over, their worldly power had passed as the
dust passes upon the bland and persistent wind which now is come up out
of the South to bring new life into Inis Dahut, but to revive nothing
that is dead. Just so must always pass all worldly honors, as just such
dust.”

Then Gonfal said: “Just so—with my own eyes,—I have seen Dom Manuel
tumbled from the high estate which that all-overtrampling rogue had
purchased and held so unscrupulously; and I have seen his powerfulness
made dust. These occasional triumphs of justice, madame, turn one to
serious thinking.... Therefore it seems to me that these questing
gentlemen are offering you no gift, but only a loan. I perforce
consider—as a realist, and with howsoever appropriate regret,—that the
conditions of the quest have not been fulfilled.”

The Queen deliberated his orotundities. And she regarded Gonfal with a
smile which now was like his smiling, and which appeared not very
immediately connected with the trituration they were speaking of.

Morvyth said then: “That is true. Your mathematics are admirable, in
that they combine resistlessly the pious and the platitudinous. There is
no well-thought-of Fundamentalist in Inis Dahut, nor in any of the Isles
of Wonder, who will dare dispute that the riches of this world are but a
loan, because that is the doctrine of Pygé-Upsízugos and of all endowed
religions everywhere. These over-busy, pushing ugly little pests that
ride impertinently about the world, and get their own way in every
place, have insulted me. By rights,”—the Queen said, rather
hopefully,—“by rights, I ought to have their heads chopped off?”

“But these heroic imps are princes, madame. Thus, to pursue your very
natural indignation, would entail a war with their fathers: and to be
bothered with seven wars, according to my mathematics, would be a
nuisance.”

Morvyth saw the justice of this; and said, with ever so faint a sighing:
“Very well, then! I approve of your mathematics. I shall pardon their
impudence, with the magnanimity becoming to a queen; and I shall have
the quest cried for another year and another day.”

“That,” Gonfal estimated, still with his odd smiling, “will do nicely.”

“And, besides,” she added, “now you will have a chance with the others!”

“That,” Gonfal assented, without any trace of a smile or any other token
of enthusiasm, “will be splendid.”

But Morvyth smiled as, with that habitual gesture, she tidied her hair:
and she sent for her seven heroic lovers, and spoke to them, as she
phrased it, frankly.


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                                  _7._
                         _Fatality the Second_

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THUS all was to do again. The champions pulled rather long faces, and
the lower orders were disappointed in missing the gratis entertainments
attendant on a royal marriage. But the clergy and the well-thought-of
laity and the leading tax-payers applauded the decision of Queen Morvyth
as a most glorious example in such feverish and pleasure-loving days of
soulless materialism.

So again the eight lovers of Morvyth met in the cathedral, to have their
swords appropriately consecrated by the Imaun of Bulotu. And that
beneficent and justly popular old prelate, after he had cut the throats
of the three selected children, began the real ceremony with a prayer to
Pygé-Upsízugos, as to Him whose transformations are hidden in all
temples patronized by the best-thought-of people, and saying, as was
customary and polite:

“The height of the firmament is subservient unto thee, O Pygé-Upsízugos!
thy throne is very high! the ornaments upon the seat of thy blue
trousers are the bright stars which never diminish! Every man makes
offering unto that portion of thee which is revealed, and thou art the
Sedentary Master commemorated in heaven and upon earth. Thou art a
shining noble seated above all nobles, permanent in thy high station,
established in thy stern sovereignty, and the callipygous Prince of the
Company of Gods.”

Nobody quite believed this, of course, but in Inis Dahut, as in all
other places, the Fundamentalists took a proper pride in their tribal
deity, and, whenever they could spare time for religious matters, made
as much of him as possible. So they now tendered to Pygé-Upsízugos a
fine offering of quails and cinnamon and bullocks’ hearts, and they
raised the Hymn of the Star Spangled Buttock in the while that the two
ewers containing the blood of the children were placed upon his altar.

Thus everything at first went nicely enough. But when the company of
Morvyth’s lovers, with all their swords drawn, had approached the altar,
for the consecrating, and in the while that they ascended the smooth
porphyry steps, then limping Gonfal stumbled or else he slipped. He thus
dropped his sword. The tall champion, clutching hastily at this sword as
it fell, caught up the weapon by the newly sharpened blade; and he
grasped it with such rather unaccountable vigor that he cut open his
right hand to the bone, and cut also the muscles of his fingers.

“Decidedly,” said Gonfal, with a wried smile, “there is some fatality in
this; and the quest of Morvyth is not for me.”

He spoke the truth, for his sword-bearing days were over. Gonfal must
seek for a physician and bandages, while his rivals’ swords were being
consecrated. The Queen noted his going, and, from a point midway between
complacence and religious scruples, said under her breath, “One must
perforce somewhat admire this realist.”

She heard, from afar, a dwindling resonance of horns and knew that once
more the seven heroic lovers of Queen Morvyth had ridden forth to
ransack the world of its chief riches. But fair-bearded Gonfal stayed in
the pagan Isles of Wonder, and beneath the same roof that covered
Morvyth, and cared for no riches except the loveliness of Morvyth, whom
he saw daily. And with time the hurt in his hand was cured, but the
fingers on that hand he could not ever move again. And for the rest, if
people whispered here and there, the susurrus was a phenomenon familiar
enough to the economy of court life.


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                                  _8._
                       _How the Princes Bragged_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW, when the year was over, and the south wind was come again into Inis
Dahut, the seven lovers returned, bringing with them yet other prodigies
acquired by heroic exploits.

Here, for example, was the effigy of a bird carved in jade and
carnelian.

“With the aid of this inestimable bird,” explained Prince Chedric of
Lorn,—who, upon a very dreadfully inhabited peninsula, if one elected to
believe him, had wrested this talisman from Morskoï of the Depths,—“you
may enter the Sea Market, and may go freely among a folk that dwell in
homes builded of coral and tortoise-shell, and tiled with fishes’
scales. Their wisdom is beyond the dry and arid wisdom of earth: their
knowledge derides the fictions which we call time and space: and their
children prattle of mysteries unknown to any of our major prophets and
most expert geomancers.”

“Ah, but,” cried Prince Balein of Targamon, “but I have here a
smoke-colored veil embroidered with tiny gold stars and ink-horns; and
it enables one to pass through the ardent gateway of Audela, the country
that lies behind the fire. This is the realm of Sesphra: there is no
grieving in this land, and happiness and infallibility are common to
everybody there, because Sesphra is the master of an art which corrodes
and sears away all error, whether it be human or divine.”

Prince Duneval of Orc said nothing. His mutely tendered offering was a
small mirror about three inches square. Morvyth looked into this mirror:
and what she saw in it was very little like a sumptuous dark young girl.
She hastily put aside that gleaming and over-wise counselor: and the
Queen’s face was troubled, because there was no need to ask what mirror
Duneval had fetched to her from out of Antan.

But Thorgny of Vigeois did not love silence. And he was the next suitor.

“Such knickknacks as I notice at your feet, my princess,” stated Thorgny
of Vigeois, “have their merits. Nobody denies their merits. But I, who
may now address you with the frankness which ought to exist between two
persons already virtually betrothed, I bring that sigil which gave
wisdom and all power to Apollonius, and later to Merlin Ambrosius. It
displays, as you observe, an eye encircled with scorpions and stags
and”—he coughed,—“with winged objects which do not ordinarily have
wings: and it controls the nine million spirits of the air. I need say
no more.”

“I need to,” said Prince Gurguint. “I say that I have here the shining
triangle of Thorston. And to say that, is to say a great deal more than
Thorgny has said. For this triangle is master of the wisdom of the
Duergar and of all peoples that dwell underground. Moreover, madame,
when this triangle is inverted—thus,—it enables you to bless and curse
at will, to converse with dead priests, and to control the power and the
seven mysteries of the moon.”

“To such hole and corner wisdom, to such cave-men devices, and more
especially to your lunar vaporings, I cry out like a bird upon the
house-tops, and I cry, Cheap, cheap!” observed Prince Clofurd. “For I
have here, in this shagreen case, the famous and puissant and
unspeakably sacrosanct ring of Solomon, to whose wearer are subject the
Djinns and the ass-footed Nazi-keen and fourteen of Jahveh’s most
discreet and trustworthy seraphim.”

Prince Grimauc said: “Solomon had, in his archaic way, his wisdom, a
good enough sort of workaday wisdom, but yet a limited wisdom, as it was
meted out to him by the god of Judea: but I have here an altar carved
from a block of selenite. Within this altar you may hear the moving and
the dry rustlings of an immortal. Let us not speak of this immortal:
neither the sun’s nor the moon’s light has ever shone upon him, and his
name is not lovable. But here is the Altar of the Adversary; and the
owner of this little altar may, at a paid price, have access to the
wisdom that defies restraint and goes beyond the bounds permitted by any
god.”

Such were the gifts they brought to Morvyth. And, for reasons of at
least two kinds, the Queen found difficulty in saying which of these
offerings was the worthiest to be her bridal gift.


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                                  _9._
                         _The Loans of Wisdom_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


BUT Gonfal, when the Queen consulted him in private, as she was now apt
to do about most matters, tall handsome Gonfal shrugged. He said that,
to his finding,—as a, no doubt, unpractical realist,—her lovers had,
once more, fetched back no gifts, but only loans of very dubious value.

“For I have seen Dom Manuel purchase a deal of just such wisdom from
unwholesome sources: and I have seen too what came of it when the
appointed season was at hand for that gray knave to be stripped of his
wisdom. Just so, madame, must every sort of wisdom be reft away from
everybody. These wise men that had all this knowledge in the old time,
do they retain it now? The question is absurd, since the dirt that once
was Solomon keeps no more sentiency than does the mud which formerly was
Solomon’s third under-scullion. Indomitable persons have, before to-day,
won to the wisdom of Audela or of the Sea Market; and that Freydis with
whom Dom Manuel lived for a while in necromantic iniquity, and that
unscriptural Herodias who was Tana’s daughter, these women, once,
attained to the wisdom of Antan: but might they carry any of this wisdom
into the grave?”

“I see,” said Morvyth, reflectively; and she smiled.

“Equally,” Gonfal continued, “where now is your Thorston or your Merlin?
All which to-day remains of any one of these thaumaturgists may well, at
this very instant, be passing us as dust in that bland and persistent
wind which now courses over Inis Dahut: but the mage goes undiscerned,
unhonored, impotent, and goes as the wind wills, not as he elects. Ah,
no, madame! These quaint, archaic toys may for a little while lend
wisdom and understanding: but, none the less, within four-score of
years—”

“Oh, have done with your arithmetic!” she begged of him. “It serves
handily, and I approve of your mathematics. I really do consider it is
perfectly wonderful, sweetheart, how quickly you realists can think of
suitable truisms. But, just the same, I begin to dislike that wind: and
I would much rather talk about something else.”

“Let us talk about, then,” Gonfal said, “the different way I feel
concerning you, as compared with all other women.”

“That is not a new topic. But it is invariably interesting.”

So they discussed this matter at some length. Then they went on to other
matters. And Morvyth asked Gonfal if he was sure that he respected her
just as much as ever, and Morvyth tidied her hair, and she summoned the
Imaun of Bulotu, and sent also for Masu the prime minister.

“The wisdom of this world is as a dust that passes,” said Morvyth. “The
wise men that had wisdom in the old time, do they retain it now?”

She then repeated the rest of Gonfal’s observations with applaudable
accuracy.

And her hearers did applaud, in unfeigned emotion. “For this prying into
matters which Pygé-Upsízugos has not seen fit to reveal has always
seemed to me unwholesome,” remarked the prime minister.

“In fact, the claims of science, so-called—” began the Imaun; and spoke
for the usual twenty minutes.

All was thus settled edifyingly. The offerings of the kings’ sons were
decreed to be no true gifts; the quest was cried again; and once more
the seven champions rode forth. There was no thought of tall Gonfal
going with the little heroes, for a cripple who could not bear a sword
was not fitted to ransack the treasures of the world. Instead,
fair-bearded Gonfal stayed in Inis Dahut, and lived uneventfully in the
pagan Isles of Wonder. And if people now talked outright, a queen can
never hope to go wholly free of criticism.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _10._
                      _Relative to Gonfal’s Head_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


IT followed through the two mischances already recorded that, when
spring came again, and when once more the south wind was coursing over
Inis Dahut, Gonfal of Naimes sat, as it happened, with his handsome head
in Morvyth’s lap, and waited for her less ill-starred lovers to return.

“What gifts, I wonder, will they be bringing me,” Queen Morvyth said,
“at about this time to-morrow?”

And Gonfal, without moving, sighed stupendously, and answered: “To me,
madame, they will be bringing bitter gifts. For, whosoever wins in this
quest, I lose: and whatsoever he may bring to you, to me he brings
disseverance from content, and to me he brings a poignant if brief
period of loneliness before you decide to have my head off.”

Now she caressed that head maternally. “Why, but what a notion!” said
Morvyth, now that the man himself spoke of the nearing social duty whose
imminence had for some while been fretting her. “As if, sweetheart, I
would ever think of such a thing!”

“Undoubtedly, that will happen, madame. Marriage entails many
obligations, not all of them pleasant. Queens in particular have to
preserve appearances, they have to ensure the discretion of those whom
they have trusted.”

“That,” she said, sorrowfully, “is what the dear old Imaun has been
telling me,—lately, you know. And Masu talks about what a married woman
owes to religion and setting a fine moral example.”

Then Gonfal, still smiling up at her, went on: “And yet it seems an odd
thing, delight of my delights, that I shall leave you—for the
headsman,—without any real regret. For I am content. While my shrewd
fellows rode about the world to seek and to attain to power and wisdom,
I have elected, as an unpractical realist, to follow after beauty. I
have followed, to be sure, in the phrase of that absurd young Grimauc,
at a paid price, yet, at that price, I have won, maimed and foredoomed,
to beauty. And I am content.”

The Queen put on the proper air of diffidence. “But what, my friend,
what, after all, is mere beauty?”

And he replied with the neatness which she always rather distrusted.
“Beauty, madame, is Morvyth. It is not easy to describe either of these
most dear and blinding synonyms, as how many reams of ruined paper
attest!”

She waited, still stroking him: and in her mind was the old question,
whether it was possible that, even now, this man was laughing at her?

She said: “But would it not grieve you unendurably, sweetheart, to see
me the wife of another man? And so, would it not be really a kindness—?”

But the obtuse fellow did not chivalrously aid in smoothing her way to
that nearing social duty. Instead, he replied, oddly enough:

“The Morvyth that I see, and in my manner worship, can be no man’s wife.
All poets learn this truth in their vexed progress to becoming
realists.”

For yet another while the young Queen was silent. And then she said:

“I do not quite understand you, my dear, and probably I never shall. But
I know that through your love of me you have twice maimed yourself, and
have, as though it were a trifle, put aside your chance of winning honor
and great wealth and all that gentle persons most prize—”

“I am,” he replied, “a realist. To get three utterly pleasant years one
pays, of course. But realists pay without grumbling.”

“My dearest,” the Queen continued,—now breathing quicklier, and with the
sort of very happy sobbing which she felt the occasion demanded,—“you
alone of all the men who have talked and postured so much, you alone
have given me whole-hearted and undivided love, not weighing even your
own knightly honor and worldly fame against the utterness of that love.
And while of course, just as the Imaun says, if I were ever to marry
anybody else, as I suppose I did promise to do,—in a way, that
is,—still, it is not as if I cared one snap of my fingers about
appearances, and I simply will not have it cut off! For such utterly
unselfish love as yours, dear Gonfal, is the gift which is worthiest to
be my bridal gift: and, no matter what anybody says, it is you who shall
be my husband!”

“Ah, but the cried quest, madame!” he answered, “and your promise to
those seven other idiots!”

“I shall proclaim to those detestable third sons, and to the Imaun, and
to Masu, and to everybody,” the Queen said, “a very weighty and indeed a
sacred truth. I shall tell them that there is no gift more great than
love.”

But the tall man who now stood before her shared in nothing in the
exaltedness of her sentiments; and his dismay was apparent. “Alas,
madame, you propose an enormity! for we are all so utterly the slaves of
our catchwords that everybody would agree with you. There is no hope in
‘what anybody may say.’ Imbeciles everywhere will be saying that you
have chosen wisely.”

Morvyth now sat peculiarly erect upon the ivory couch. “I am sure, I am
really quite sure, Gonfal, that I do not understand you.”

“I mean, madame, that—while of course your offer is all that is most
kind and generous,—that I must, here again, in mere honesty, I must
distinguish. I mean that I think you know, as well as I do, love is not
a gift which any man can give nor any person hope long to retain. Ah,
no, madame! we shrug, we smilingly allow romanticists their catchwords:
meanwhile it remains the veriest axiom, among realists like you and me,
that love too is but a loan.”

“So you have come back,” the Queen remarked, with an approach to
crossness, “to your eternal loans!”

He slightly flung out both hands, palms upward. “Love is that loan, my
dear, which we accept most thankfully. But at the same time let us
concede, as rational persons, the impermanence of all those materials
which customarily provoke the erotic emotions.”

“Gonfal,” the young Queen said, “now you talk stupidly. You talk with a
dangerous lack of something more important than discretion.”

“My love, I talk, again, as a widower.” Then for a while he said
nothing: and it appeared to Morvyth that this incomprehensible ingrate
had shivered. He said: “And still, still, I talk of mathematical
certainties! For how can you hope to remain in anything a lovable
object? In a score of years, or within at most two-score, you will have
become either fat or wrinkled, your teeth will rot and tumble out, your
eyes will blear; your thighs will be most unenticingly mottled, your
breath will be unpleasant, and your breasts will have become flabby
bags. All these impairments, I repeat, my dear, are mathematical
certainties.”

To such horrid and irrelevant nonsense the Queen replied, with dignity,
“I am not your dear; and I simply wonder at your impudence in ever for
one moment thinking I was.”

“Then, too,” the ill-mannered wretch had gone on, meditatively, “you
have not much intelligence. That is very well for the present, because
intelligence in youth, for some reason or another, is bad for the hair
and muddies the complexion. Yet an aging woman who is stupid, such as
Madame Niafer or such as another woman whom I remember, is also quite
unendurable.”

“But what,” she asked him, rationally, “have I to do with stupid old
women? I am Morvyth, I am Queen of the Isles of Wonder. I have the
secrets which control all wealth and—if I should ever take a fancy to
such things,—all wisdom too. There is no beauty like my beauty, nor any
power like my power—”

“I know, I know!” he returned,—“and for the present I of course adore
you. But nevertheless, did I fall in with your very dreadful suggestion,
and permit you to place me, quite publicly, at your dear side, upon the
terraced throne of Inis Dahut,—why, then, within a terribly brief while,
I would not mind your being stupid, I would not actually notice your
dilapidated looks, I would accept all your shortcomings complacently.
And I would be contented enough with you, who, once, were the despair
and joy of my living. No, Morvyth, no, my child! I, who was once a poet
of sorts, could not again endure to live in contentment with a stupid
and querulous woman who was unattractive to look at. And, very
certainly, within two-score of years—”

But a queenly gesture had put a check to such wild talk, and Morvyth too
had arisen, saying:

“Your arithmetic becomes tiresome. One can afford to honor truisms in
their proper place, and about suitable persons: but there is, and always
must be, a limit to the scope of such trite philosophy. Your audience is
over, Messire Gonfal. And it is your last audience, because I consider
you quite unutterably a beast.”

He kissed the imperious little hand which dismissed him. “You at all
events, my dear,” he stated, “are quite unutterably human.”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _11._
                         _Economics of Morvyth_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THIS it came about, to the Imaun’s vast relief,—and, as it seemed to the
pious kindly old man, perhaps in direct answer to his prayers that this
matter might be settled agreeably all around and without any
unpleasantness,—that the next day at noon, just as the seven champions
were returning with their gifts, an attendant brought to Queen Morvyth
the severed head of Gonfal.

This was in the vaulted hall of Tothmes, whose building was a famous
tale, and of whose splendors travelers, come homeward, spoke without
real hope to be believed. There Morvyth waited, crowned, upon the
terraced throne: and without, on that bright April morning, the trumpets
sounded through the narrow streets and over the bronze and lacquer
roofs, proclaiming that the mightiest and most shrewd of champions were
riding toward Inis Dahut from all kingdoms of the earth, through their
desire of the young Queen of the Isles of Wonder whose beauty was the
marvel of the world, and a legend in far lands not known to her even by
their names.

Thus Morvyth sat: and at her feet one placed the severed head of Gonfal.
There was blood on the fair beard: but still the lips were smiling,
pallidly, over something of no great importance. And in her mind was the
old question, whether it was possible that—even now,—this man was
laughing at her? Or, was it possible, she wondered (as she of a sudden
recollected that first talk of theirs), that blondes did sometimes last
very damnably? and that some little washed-out fly-by-night princess of
nowhere in particular might thus get, in one way or another, even from
her grave, the better of a great queen?

Well, but there was no need for a great queen to think as yet about
graves, and their most unpleasant contents. For Morvyth sat high, as
yet, superb and young and all powerful, in this fine palace of hers,
about which so many lovers sighed, and the bland winds of April went
caressingly.... Nobody denied that this very tiresome wind would every
year be coming up from the South,—the lovely girl reflected, as she fell
meditatively to prodding with her toe at what remained of Gonfal,—nor
that, just so, this most persistent wind would be coursing over Inis
Dahut, when there was no Morvyth and no palace in this place any
longer.... Nobody denied, and nobody except insane and very rude persons
thought at all seriously about, such truisms.

It was enough, for really pious people, that in youth one had the loan
of a bright sheltering against the ruthless and persistent wind which
bore everything away as dust: if one felt a bit low-spirited now and
then, it was not for any especial cause: and Morvyth—that, as yet, for
her permitted season, was Queen of the five Isles of Wonder,—could hear
the trumpets and the heralds proclaiming the entry of Prince Chedric of
Lorn....

He, then, was the first to return of those perfectly detestable little
meddlers who out of love for her had, now for a third time, ransacked
the riches of the world: and he had rather nice eyes. Morvyth tidied her
hair.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                               BOOK THREE

                          TOUPAN’S BRIGHT BEES

 “_The bee that is in the land of Assyria shall rest upon all bushes._”
                           —ISAIAH, vii, 18.




------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _12._
                          _The Mage Emeritus_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW the tale is no more of Gonfal, who was the first to perish of the
lords of the Silver Stallion. The tale instead tells that, in the while
of Gonfal’s adventuring in Inis Dahut, yet three other champions of the
fellowship had left the Poictesme which under Dame Niafer’s rule was
altering day by day. Coth of the Rocks, indeed, had ridden westward
within the same month that Gonfal departed for the South. There was
never any profitable arguing with Coth: and so, when he declared his
intention of fetching back Dom Manuel into the Poictesme which women and
holy persons and lying poets—as Coth asserted,—were making quite
uninhabitable, nobody did argue. Coth blustered westward, unmolested and
unreasoned with: and for that while no more was heard of him.

And it was in the May of this year that Kerin of Nointel, the Syndic and
Castellan of Basardra, disappeared even more unaccountably than Dom
Manuel had done, for about Kerin’s passing there were not even any
rumors. Kerin, so far as anybody could learn, had vanished in the
darkness of the night season just as unaidedly as that darkness itself
had vanished in turn, and with just as slight vestigial traces of his
passing. The desolation of Kerin’s young wife, Dame Saraïde, was such
that dozens upon dozens of lovers might not content her for her
widowhood, as was immediately shown: and of Kerin also, for that while,
no more was heard.

And Miramon Lluagor, too, that under Manuel had been the Lord Seneschal
of Gontaron, had now gone out of Poictesme,—sedately and unmysteriously
departing, with his wife and child seated beside him upon the back of an
elderly and quite tame dragon, for his former home in the North. It was
there that Miramon had first encountered Dom Manuel in the days when
Manuel was only a swineherd. And it was there that Miramon Lluagor hoped
to pass the remainder of as long a life as his doom permitted him, in
such limited comfort as might anywhere be possible for a married man.

Otherwise, he could foresee, upon the brighter side of his appointed and
appalling doom, nothing which was likely to worry him. For Miramon
Lluagor had very wonderfully prospered at magic, he was, as they say,
now blessed with more than any reasonable person would ask for: and the
most clamant of these superfluities appeared to him to be his wife.

They tell how Miramon was one of the Léshy, born of a people that was
neither human nor immortal, telling how his ancestral home was builded
upon the summit of the mountain called Vraidex. To Vraidex Miramon
Lluagor returned, after the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had been
disbanded, and Miramon had ceased to amuse himself with the greatness of
Manuel and with the other notions of Poictesme.

They narrate that this magician dabbled no more in knight-errantry, for
which the Seneschal of Gontaron—who through his art was also lord of the
nine kinds of sleep and prince of the seven madnesses,—had never shown
any real forte. He righted no more wrongs, in weather as often as not
unsuited to a champion subject to rheumatism, and he in no way taxed his
comfort to check the prospering of injustice. Instead, he now
maintained, upon the exalted scarps of Vraidex, the sedate seclusion
appropriate to a veteran sorcerer, in his ivory tower carved out of one
of the tusks of Behemoth; and maintained also a handsome retinue of
every sort of horrific illusion to guard the approaches to his Doubtful
Palace; wherein, as the tale likewise tells, this mage resumed his
former vocation, and once more designed the dreams for sleep.

Thus it was that, upon the back of the elderly and quite tame dragon,
Miramon returned to his earlier pursuits and to the practice of what
he—in his striking way of putting things,—described as art for art’s
sake. The episode of Manuel had been, in the lower field of merely
utilitarian art, amusing enough. That stupid, tall, quiet posturer, when
he set out to redeem Poictesme, had needed just the mere bit of
elementary magic which Miramon had performed for him, to establish
Manuel among the great ones of earth. Miramon had, in consequence, sent
a few obsolete gods to drive the Northmen out of Poictesme, while Manuel
waited upon the sands north of Manneville and diverted his leisure by
contemplatively spitting into the sea. Thereafter Manuel had held the
land to the admiration of everybody but more particularly of
Miramon,—who did not at all agree with Anavalt of Fomor in his
estimation of Dom Manuel’s mental gifts.

Yes, it had been quite amusing to serve under Manuel, to play at being
lord of Gontaron and Ranec, and to regard at close quarters this tall
grave gray cockeyed impostor, who had learned only not to talk.... For
that, thought Miramon, was Manuel’s secret: Manuel did not expostulate,
he did not explain, he did not argue; he, instead, in any time of
trouble or of uncertainty, kept quiet; and that quiet struck terror to
his ever-babbling race, and had earned for the dull-witted but shrewd
fellow—who was concealing only his lack of any thought or of any plan,—a
dreadful name for impenetrable wisdom and for boundless resource.

“Keep mum with Manuel!” said Miramon, “and all things shall be added to
you. It is a great pity that my wife has not the knack for these little
character analyses.”

Yes, the four years had been an amusing episode. But dreams and the
designing of dreams were the really serious matters to which Miramon
returned after this holiday outing in carnage and statecraft.

And here, too,—as everywhere,—his wife confronted him. Miramon’s
personal taste in art was for the richly romantic sweetened with
nonsense and spiced with the tabooed. But his wife Gisèle had quite
other notions, a whole set of notions, and her philosophy was that of
belligerent individualism. And the sorcerer to keep peace, at least in
the intervals between his wife’s more mordantly loquacious moments, must
of necessity design such dreams as Gisèle preferred. But he knew that
these dreams did not express the small thoughts and fancies which
harbored in the heart of Miramon Lluagor, and which would perish with
the falling of his doom unless he wrought these fancies into dreams
that, being fleshless, might evade carnivorous time.

He was preëminent among the dream-makers of this world, he was the
dreaded lord (because of his retinue of illusions) over all the country
about Vraidex: but, in his own home he was not dreaded, he, very
certainly, was not preëminent. And Miramon hungered for the lost freedom
of his bachelorhood.

His wife also was discontent, because the ways of the Léshy appeared to
this mortal woman indecorous. The dooms that were upon the Léshy seemed
not entirely in good taste, to her who had been born of a race about
whom destiny appeared not to bother. In fact, it was a continual
irritation to Gisèle that her little boy Demetrios was predestinate to
kill his father with the charmed sword Flamberge. This was a doom Gisèle
found not the sort of thing you cared to have imminent in your own
family: and she felt that the sooner the gray Norns, who weave the fate
of all that live, were spoken to quite candidly, the better it would be
for everybody concerned.

She was irritated by the mere sight of Flamberge. So her thinking was
not of silk and honey when, after polishing the sword as was her usage
upon Thursday morning, she came into Miramon’s ivory tower to hang the
fatal weapon in its right place.

With Miramon under the green tasseled canopy sat one whom Gisèle was not
unsurprised to see there. For closeted with Miramon to-day was Ninzian,
the High Bailiff of Yair and Upper Ardra, who was the most famous for
his piety of all the lords of the Silver Stallion. The dreadful need and
the peculiar reason which Ninzian had for being pious and philanthropic
were matters not known to everybody: but Miramon Lluagor knew about
these things, and therefore he made appropriate use of Ninzian. Indeed,
upon this very afternoon, the two were looking at that which Ninzian had
fetched out of the land of Assyria, and had procured for the sorcerer,
at a price.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _13._
                         _Economics of Gisèle_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW Madame Gisèle also was looking at that which Ninzian had procured
for her husband at a price. She looked at it—upon the whole—with
slightly less disfavor than she afterward looked at the two men.

“A good day and a grand blessing to you, Messire Ninzian!” said Madame
Gisèle: and she extended her hand, along with her scouring-rag, for him
to kiss, and she inquired about his wife Dame Balthis, pleasantly
enough. She spoke then, in a different tone, to Miramon Lluagor. “And
with what are you cluttering up the house now?”

“Ah, wife,” replied Miramon, “here, very secretly fetched out of the
land of Assyria, are those bees about whom it is prophesied that they
shall rest upon all bushes. Here are the bright bees of Toupan, a
treasure beyond word or thinking. They are not as other bees, for theirs
is the appearance of shining ice: and they crawl fretfully, as they have
crawled since Toupan’s downfall, about this cross of black stone—”

“That is a very likely story for you to be telling me, who can see that
the disgusting creatures have wings to fly away with whenever they want
to! And, besides, who in the world is this Toupan?”

“He is nobody in this world, wife, and it is wiser not to speak of him.
Let it suffice that in the time of the Old Ones he made all things as
they were. Then Koshchei came out of Ydalir, and took the power from
Toupan, and made all things as they are. Yet three of Toupan’s servitors
endure upon earth, where they who were once lords of the Vendish have
now no privilege remaining save to creep humbly as insects: the use of
their wings is denied them here among the things which were made by
Koshchei, and the charmed stone holds them immutably. Oho, but, wife,
there is a cantrap which would free them, a cantrap which nobody has as
yet discovered, and to their releaser will be granted whatever his will
may desire—”

“This is some more of your stuff and nonsense, out of old fairy tales,
where everybody gets three wishes, and no good from any of them!”

“No, my love, because I shall put them to quite practical uses. For you
must know that when I have found out the cantrap which will release the
bees of Toupan—”

Gisèle showed plainly that his foolishness did not concern her. She
sighed, and she hung the sword in its accustomed place. “Oh, but I am
aweary of this endless sorcery and piddling with vain dreams!”

“Then, wife,” said Miramon, “then why are you perpetually meddling with
what you do not understand?”

“I think,” Ninzian observed at once, for Ninzian too was married, “I
think that I had best be going.”

But Gisèle’s attention was reserved for her husband. “I meddle, as you
so very politely call it, because you have no sense of what is right and
proper, and no sense of morals, and no sense of expediency, and, in
fact, no sense at all.”

Miramon said, “Now, dearest—!”

Ninzian was hastily picking up his hat.

And Gisèle continued, with that resistless and devastating onflow which
is peculiar to tidal waves and the tongue of her who speaks for her
husband’s own good.

“Women everywhere,” Gisèle generalized, “have a hard time of it: but in
particular do I pity the woman that is married to one of you moonstruck
artists. She has not half a husband, she has but the tending of a baby
with long legs—”

“It is so much later than I thought, that really now—” observed Ninzian,
ineffectively.

“—And I might have had a dozen husbands—”

Miramon said, “But, surely, no woman of your well-known morality, my
darling—”

“—I might, as you very well remember, have married Count Manuel
himself—”

“I know. I can recall how near you came to marrying him. He was a dull,
a cold-blooded and a rather dishonest clod-hopper: but the luck of
Manuel Pig-Tender did not ever desert him,” said Miramon, sighing, “not
even then!”

“I say, I might have had my pick of a dozen really prominent and
looked-up-to warriors, who would have had the decency to remember our
anniversary and my birthday, and in any event would never have been in
the house twenty-four hours a day! Instead, here I am tied to a
muddle-head who fritters away his time contriving dreams that nobody
cares about one way or the other! And yet, even so—”

“And yet, even so—as you were no doubt going on to observe, my
dearest,—even so, since your soliloquy pertains to matters in which our
guest could not conceivably be interested—”

“And yet,” said Gisèle, with a heavier and a deadlier emphasis, “even
so, if only you would be sensible about your silly business I could put
up with the inconvenience of having you underfoot every moment. People
need dreams to help them through the night, and nobody enjoys a really
good dream more than I do when I have time for it, with the million and
one things that are put upon me. But dreams ought to be wholesome—”

“My darling, now, as a matter of esthetics, as a mere point of fact—”

“—But dreams ought to be wholesome, they ought to be worth while, they
ought to teach an uplifting moral, and certainly they ought not to be
about incomprehensible thin nonsense that nobody can half way
understand. They ought, in a word, to make you feel that the world is a
pretty good sort of place, after all—”

“But, wife, I am not sure that it is,” said Miramon, mildly.

“Then, the more shame to you! and the very least you can do is to keep
such morbid notions to yourself, and not be upsetting other people’s
repose with them!”

“I employ my natural gift, I express myself and none other. The
rose-bush does not put forth wheat, nor flax either,” returned the
sorcerer, with a tired shrug. “In fine, what would you have?”

“A great deal it means to you,—you rose-bush!—what I prefer! But if I
had my wish your silly dream-making would be taken away from you so that
we might live in some sort of reputable and common-sense way.”

All the while that she reasoned sensibly and calmly with her husband for
his own good, Gisèle had feverishly been dusting things everywhere, just
to show what a slave she was to him, and because it irritated Miramon to
have his personal possessions thus dabbed at and poked about: and now,
as she spoke, Gisèle slapped viciously with her scouring-rag at the
black cross. And a thing happened to behold which would have astonished
the innumerous mages and the enchanters who had given over centuries to
searching for the cantrap which would release the bees of Toupan. For
now without any exercise of magic the scouring-rag swept from the stone
one of the insects. Koshchei, who made all things as they are, had
decreed, they report, that these bright perils could be freed only in
the most obvious way, because he knew this would be the last method
attempted by any learned person.

Then for an instant the walls of the ivory tower were aquiver like blown
veils. And the bee passed glitteringly to the window and through the
clear glass of the closed window, leaving a small round hole there, as
the creature went to join its seven fellows in the Pleiades.


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                                 _14._
                      _The Changing That Followed_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW, when this eighth bright bee had joined its seven fellows in the
Pleiades, then Toupan, afloat in the void, unclosed his ancient
unappeasable eyes. Jacy returned to his aforetime estate in the moon:
all plants and trees everywhere were withered, and the sea also lost its
greenness, and there were no more emeralds. And the Star Warriors and
the Wardens of the Worlds were troubled, and They cried out to Koshchei
who had devised Them and who had placed Them in Their stations to remain
in eternal watchfulness over all things as they are.

Koshchei, for reasons of his own, did not reply.

Then Jacy whispered to Toupan: “Now is the hour of thy release, O
Toupan! now is the hour that Koshchei falls. For among the things that
are there stays no verdancy anywhere, and without green things nobody
can keep health and strength.”

Toupan answered: “I am diminished. My bones have become like silver, and
my members have turned into gold, and my hair is like lapis-lazuli.”

“Thine eyes remain unchanged,” said the slow whispering of Jacy. “Send
forth thine eyes, O Toupan, against the work of Koshchei, who has
blasphemed against the Old Ones, and who has created things as they
are.”

“Though he acknowledge both of these misdoings, why need my eyes be
troubled—as yet?”

Then Jacy said, “Send forth thine eyes, O Toupan, so that we Old Ones
may rejoice in the dreadfulness of thy overlooking!”

Toupan answered: “I was before the Old Ones. My soul was before thought
and time. It is the soul of Shu, it is the soul of Khnemu, it is the
soul of Heh: it is the soul of Night and of Desolation, and there is a
thinking about my soul which looks out of the eyes of every serpent. My
soul alone keeps any knowledge of that dark malignity which everywhere
encompasses the handiwork of Koshchei who made things as they are. Why
need my soul be troubled, therefore,—as yet?”

But Jacy said again: “Give aid now to the Old Ones! Already thy bees go
forth, that shall rest upon all bushes, and already no verdancy remains.
Send forth thine eyes now, also, in which there is the knowledge denied
to Koshchei!”

And Toupan answered: “The time of my release is not yet at hand.
Nevertheless, between now and a while, when yet another bee is loosed, I
shall bestir my soul, I will send forth my eyes, so that all may
perceive the dreadfulness of my overlooking.”

At that the Star Warriors and the Wardens of the Worlds cried out again
to Koshchei.

Then Koshchei answered Them: “Have patience! When Toupan is released I
perish with You. Meanwhile I have made all things as they are.”


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                                 _15._
                      _Disastrous Rage of Miramon_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW also, when this eighth bright bee had joined its fellows in the
Pleiades, in that same instant Miramon Lluagor, as he stood appalled in
his ivory tower, was aware of a touch upon his forehead, as if a damp
sponge were passing over it. Then he perceived that, with the petulant
voicing of his damnable wife’s desire, he had forthwith forgotten the
secret of his preëminence.

Something he could yet recall, they say, of the magic of the Purin and
the cast stones, of the Horse and the Bull of the Water, and most of the
lore of the Apsarasas and the Faidhin remained to him. He could still
make shift, he knew, to control the roving Lamboyo, to build the fearful
bridge of the White Ladies, or to contrive the dance of the Korred. He
retained his communion with Necksa and Paralda, those sovereign
Elementaries. He kept his mastery of the Shedeem who devastate, of the
Shehireem who terrify, and of the Mazikeen who destroy. Nor had he lost
touch with the Stewards of Heaven,—of whom at this period Och had the
highest power and was customarily summoned by Miramon Lluagor, for a
brief professional consultation, every Sunday morning at sunrise.

But such accomplishments, as Miramon despairingly knew, were the stock
in trade of mere hedge wizards, they were the rudiments of any fairly
competent sorcerer anywhere: and that supreme secret which had made
Miramon Lluagor the master of all dreams was gone away from him
completely.

He was very angry. He was the angrier for that he saw, just for an
instant, a sort of frightened and bewildered remorse in his wife’s
foolish face, and he desperately foreknew himself to be upon the brink
of comforting her.

“Accursed woman!” Miramon cried out, “now indeed has your common-sense
completed what your nagging began! This is the doom of all artists that
have to do with well-conducted women. Truly has it been said that the
marriage-bed is the grave of art. Well, I have put up with much from
you, but this settles it, and I will not put up with your infatuation
for a reputable and common-sense way of living, and I wish you were in
the middle of next week!”

With that he caught the soiled scouring-rag from the hand of Gisèle, and
he slapped at one of the remaining bees, and he brushed it from the
black cross. And this bee departed as the other had done.


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                                 _16._
                  _Concerns the Pleiades and a Razor_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


WHEN this bright bee had departed as the other had done before him, then
Toupan moved his wings, and he made ready to overlook the work of
Koshchei: and in the instant that Toupan moved, the worlds in that part
of the universe were dislodged and ran melting down the sky. It was
Gauracy who swept all the fragments together and formed a sun
immeasurably larger than that which he had lost, and an obstreperous mad
conflagration which did not in anything conform with the handiwork of
Koshchei.

And Gauracy then shouted friendlily to Toupan, “Now is the hour of thy
release, O Toupan! now is the hour of the return of the Old Ones, now is
the hour that Koshchei falls!”

Toupan answered: “The hour of my release is not yet come. But this is
the hour of my overlooking.”

Then Gauracy bellowed, as he swept yet other worlds into the insatiable
flaming of his dreadful sun, “I kindle for you a fine light to see by!”

And now the gods who were worshiped in those worlds which remained,
these also cried out to Koshchei. For now, in the intolerable glare of
Gauracy’s malefic sun, they showed as flimsy and incredible inventions.
And the gods knew, moreover, that, if ever the last remaining bee were
freed from the cross, the dizain of the Pleiades would be completed, and
Toupan would be released, and the power of the Old Ones would return;
and that a day foretold by many prophets, the day upon which every god
must shave with a razor that is hired, would be at hand; and that, with
the falling about of this very dreadful and ignominious necessity, the
day of the divine contentment of all gods in any place would be over,
forever.

Meanwhile the eyes of Toupan went forth, among the Star Warriors and the
Wardens of the Worlds. It was They who, under Koshchei, had shaped the
earths and the waters, and who had knit together the mountains, and who
had fashioned all other things as they are. It was They who had woven
the heavens, and who had placed the soul of every god within him. They
were the makers of the hours and the creators of the days and the
kindlers of the fires of life, and They were powers whose secret and
sustaining names were not known to any of the gods of men. Yet now the
eyes of Toupan went among the Star Warriors and the Wardens of the
Worlds, and Toupan regarded them one by one; and wheresoever the old
eyes of Toupan had rested there remained no world nor any Warden
watching over it, but only, for that instant, a very little spiral of
thin sluggish vapor.

And those of Them who were not yet destroyed cried piteously to
Koshchei, who had devised Them and who had placed Them in Their stations
to keep eternal watchfulness over all things as they are.

Now there is no denying that, in the manner of artists, Koshchei had
cleared his throat, and had fidgeted a little, in the while that Toupan
was overlooking Koshchei’s handiwork. But when the Wardens and the Star
Warriors cried out to him for aid, then Koshchei, lifting never a
finger, said only:

“Eh, sirs, have patience! For I made all things as they are; and I know
now it is my safeguard that I made them in two ways.”


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                                 _17._
                         _Epitome of Marriage_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


BUT Miramon, in his ivory tower upon Vraidex, knew only that his wish
had been granted, for Gisèle had gone just as a bubble breaks, and she
was now somewhere in the middle of next week.

“And a good riddance, too!” said Miramon. He turned to Ninzian, that
smiling large philanthropist. “For did you ever see the like of such
outrageousness as her outrageousness!”

“Oh, very often,” replied this Ninzian, who too was married. Then
Ninzian asked, “But what will you do next?”

Said Miramon, “I shall wish to have back the secret and the solace of my
art.”

But to Ninzian this seemed less obvious. “You can do that, readily
enough, by releasing the third bee which my devices have procured for
you out of the land of Assyria. Yes, Miramon, you can in this manner get
back your art, but thus also you will be left defenseless against the
doom which is appointed. So, friend, by my advice you will, instead,
employ the cantrap as you at first intended, and you will secure for
yourself eternal life by wishing that Flamberge may vanish from this
world of men.”

And Ninzian waved toward the sword with which according to the
foreordainment of the Norns great Miramon Lluagor was to be killed by
his own son.

The fallen sorcerer answered, “Of what worth is life if it breed no more
dreams?” And Miramon said also, “I wonder, Ninzian, just where is the
middle of next week?”

Sleek Ninzian spoke, secure in his peculiar erudition. “It will fall
upon a Wednesday, but nobody knows whence. Olybrius states it is now in
Aratu, where all that enter are clothed like a bird with wings, and have
only dust and clay to eat in the unchanging twilight—”

“She would not like that. She had always a delicate digestion.”

“Whereas Asinius Pollio suggests, not unplausibly, that it waits beyond
Slid and Gjold, in the blue house of Nostrand, where Sereda bleaches the
unborn Wednesdays, under a roof of plaited serpents—”

“Dear me!” said Miramon, disconsolately rubbing at his nose, “now that
would never suit a woman with an almost morbid aversion to reptiles!”

“—But Sosicles declares it is in Xibalba, where Zipacna and Cabrakan
play at handball, and the earthquakes are at nurse.”

“She would be none the happier there. She does not care for babies, she
would not for one moment put up with a fractious young earthquake, and
she would make things most uncomfortable for everybody. Ninzian,”—and
Miramon cleared his throat,—“Ninzian, I begin to fear I have been a
little hasty.”

“It is the frailty of all you artists,” the man of affairs replied. “So
my advice, about Flamberge, is not to the purpose?”

“Well, but, you see,” said Miramon, very miserably, “or perhaps I ought
to say that, while of course, still, when you come to look at it more
carefully, Ninzian, what I really mean is that the fact is, as it seems
to me—”

“The fact is,” Ninzian returned, with a depressed but comprehending
smile, “you are a married man. So am I. Well, then, you have one wish
remaining, and no more. You can at will desire to have back again the
control of your lost magics or you can have back your wife to control
you—”

“Yes,” Miramon agreed, forlornly.

“And indeed,” sleek Ninzian went on, with that glib optimism reserved
for the dilemmas of one’s friends, “indeed it is in many ways a splendid
thing for you to have the choice clear cut. Nobody can succeed alike at
being an artist and a husband. I hold no brief for either career,
because I think that art is an unreasonable mistress, and I think also
that a wife is amenable to the same description. But I am certain no man
can serve both.”

Miramon sighed. “That is true. There is no marriage for the maker of
dreams, because he is perpetually creating finer women than earth
provides. The touch of flesh cannot content him who has arranged the
shining hair of angels and modeled the breasts of the sphinx. The woman
that shares his bed is there of course, much as the blanket or the
pillow is there, and each is an aid to comfort. But what has the maker
of dreams, what has that troubled being who lives inside the creature
which a mirror reveals to him, to do with women? At best, these animals
provide him with models to be idealized beyond the insignificant truth,
somewhat as I have made a superb delirium with only a lizard to start
on. And at worst, these animals can live through no half-hour without
meddling where they do not understand.”

Now Miramon kept silence. He was fingering the magic colors with which
he blazoned the first sketches of his dreams. Here was his white, which
was the foam of the ocean made solid, and the black he had wrung from
the burned bones of nine emperors. Here was the yellow slime of Scyros,
and crimson cinnabaris composed of the mingled blood of mastodons and
dragons, and here was the poisonous blue sand of Puteoli. And Miramon,
who was no longer a potent sorcerer, considered that loveliness and
horror which a moment ago he had known how to evoke with these pigments,
he who had now no power to lend life to his designs, and who kept just
skill enough it might be to place the stripings on a barber’s pole.

And Miramon Lluagor said: “It would be a sad happening if I were never
again to sway the sleeping of men, and grant them yet more dreams of
distinction and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth
and urbanity. For whether they like it or not, I know what is good for
them, and it affords to their starved living that which they lack and
ought to have.”

And Miramon said also: “Yet it would be another sad happening were my
poor wife permitted eternally to scold the shivering earthquakes in the
middle of next week. What does it matter that I do not especially like
her? There is a great deal about myself that I do not like, such as my
body’s flabbiness and the snub nose which makes ludicrous the face I
wear: but do I hanker to be transformed into a sturdy man-at-arms? do I
view the snout of an elephant with covetousness? Why, but, Ninzian, I am
astonished at your foolish talking! What need have I of perfection? what
would I have in common with anybody who was patient with me and thought
highly of my doings?”

Miramon shook his head, with some sternness. “No, Ninzian, it is in vain
that you pester me with your continuous talking, for I am as used to her
shortcomings as I am to my own shortcomings. I regard her tantrums with
the resignation I extend to inclement weather. It is unpleasant. All
tempests are unpleasant. Ah, yes, but if life should become an endless
clear May afternoon we could not endure it, we who have once been lashed
by storms would cross land and sea to look for snow and pelting hail.
Just so, to have Gisèle about keeps me perpetually fretted; but now that
she is gone I am miserable. No, Ninzian, you may spare your talking, you
need say no more, for I simply could not put up with being left to live
in comfort.”

Ninzian had heard him through without impatience, because they were both
married men. Now Ninzian, shrugging, said, “Then do you choose, Miramon,
for your wife and no more dreams, or for your art and loneliness?”

“Such wishing would be over-wasteful,” Miramon replied, as he dusted
away the third bee. “Since I can bear to give up neither my wife nor my
art, no matter how destroyingly they work against each other, I wish for
everything to be put back just where it was an hour ago.”

The third bee flew in a wide circle, and returned to the cross. The
knowledge which Miramon had lost was put back into his mind.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _18._
                          _Koshchei is Vexed_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


EVEN as the knowledge which Miramon had lost was put back into his mind,
just so did life reawaken in all else which had perished in that hour.
Gauracy’s baleful sun was gone, and the dislodged and incinerated
worlds, with all their satellites, were revolving trimly in their proper
places, undamaged. And the gods who were worshiped in these worlds now
made a celestial rejoicing, because once more there were only seven
Pleiades. The Old Ones had sunk back into their sleeping; things, for
the while, stayed as they are; and even Toupan now seemed harmless
enough....

For the eyes were closed wherein lurked tireless and unappeasable
malignity, and a remembrance of all that which was before Koshchei’s
time, and an undivulged foreknowledge which withered Toupan shared with
brisk little Koshchei alone. Nobody could speak certainly about this:
yet it was whispered that both of these well knew that, in the end, the
Old Ones would return, and that only Toupan knew in what manner and at
what hour....

But above the gods who in the multitudinous heavens and paradises were
now rejoicing over their regained omnipotence, far higher than these
junketing gods stood the Star Warriors and the Wardens of the Worlds,
each in the appointed place, and each once more set in eternal
watchfulness over all things as they are. And the Star Warriors and the
Wardens of the Worlds said, soberly, to Koshchei:

“Sir, your protection is established. You are protected as the guide of
the things which exist and of the things which are not yet created. You
are protected as a dweller in the realm which goes round about Those who
are over Hidden Things. For now the Old Ones sleep again, and not any
new thing anywhere shall ever gain the mastery over you, who are our
only master: and all things as they are stay yours forever.”

Koshchei replied, rather absent-mindedly: “What need was there to worry?
Did I not make my creatures male and female? and did I not make the tie
which is between them, that cord which I wove equally of love and of
disliking? Eh, sirs, but that is a strong cord, and though all things
that are depend upon it, my weaving holds.”

They answered him, “Your weaving holds, sir, assuredly: yet you do not
rejoice, as we rejoice.”

“Why, but,” said Koshchei, “but I do so hate flat incivility! And after
overlooking my handiwork, the fellow might very well have said something
intelligent. Nobody minds an honest criticism. Just to say nothing—and
in that rather marked way, you know,—is stupid!”

For Koshchei also, they relate, was, in his fashion, an artist.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _19._
                         _Settlement: in Full_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


BUT that lesser artist, Miramon Lluagor—once more a potent sorcerer, in
his ivory tower, and once more preëminent among the dream-makers of this
world,—knew nothing of how he had played havoc with the handiwork of
Koshchei who made things as they are. Miramon only knew that upon the
black stone cross were buzzing fretfully three bees, who had now no
luster and no power to grant wishes to anybody; and that his wife Gisèle
also was making noises, not fretfully but in a tearing rage.

“A pretty trick that was to play on me!” she said. “Oh, but I pity the
woman that is married to an artist!”

“But why do you perpetually meddle without understanding?” he replied,
as fretful as the accursed bees, as angry as the intolerable woman....

And they went on very much as before....

They went on very much as before, because, as Miramon put it, the Norns,
for all their strength, had not been able to contrive for him any doom
more inflexible than he, like every other married man who holds his
station unmurderously, had contrived out of his weakness. The way of
Miramon Lluagor’s death, said he, was set and inescapable, because he
was one of the Léshy: but the way of his life he blushed to find quite
equally set and inescapable, because he was also a husband. In brief, he
detested this woman; she pestered his living, she hampered his art, and
with her foolish notions about his art she had, now, frittered away his
immortality: but he was rather fond of her, too, and he was used to her.

Miramon, in any event, fell back upon his famous saying that the secret
of a contented marriage is to pay particular attention to the wives of
everybody else; and from this axiom he derived what comfort he could. He
might, he reflected, have been married to that sallow, crippled,
flat-faced Niafer, who in the South was upsetting all the familiar
customs of Poictesme with her unrelenting piety, and who was actually
imposing upon her associates that sort of reputable and common-sense way
of living which Gisèle at worst only talked about. Niafer, indeed,
seemed to be becoming wholly insane; for very curious tales reached
Miramon as to the nonsense which this woman, too, was talking, about—of
all mad fancies!—how that cockeyed husband of hers was to return by and
by, in another incarnation.... Or Miramon, instead of his lost comrade
Kerin of Nointel, might have been married to that chit of a Saraïde who
had managed so artfully to dispose of her husband, in some undetected
manner or another, and who was now providing poor Kerin with such a host
of extra-legal successors.... Yes, Miramon would reflect (in Gisèle’s
absence), he might—conceivably at least,—have been worse off. Yet, a bit
later, with her return, this possibility would seem more and more
dubious.

And—in fine,—they went on very much as before. And Miramon Lluagor was
preëminent among the dream-makers of this world, and he was a dreaded
lord: but in his own home he was not dreaded, and he, very certainly,
was not preëminent.

Then, when the time was due, fell the appointed doom of Miramon, and he
was slain by his son Demetrios with the charmed sword Flamberge. For
this thing, people say, had long ago been agreed upon by the Norns, who
weave the fate of all that live: to them it could not matter that
Miramon Lluagor was preeminent among the dream-makers of this world,
because the Norns do not ever sleep: and no sorcerer, through whatsoever
havoc and upsetment of Koshchei’s chosen economy, has, in the end, power
to withstand the Norns.

Then Demetrios went far oversea into Anatolia; and he married Callistion
there, and in yet other ways he won a fine name for his hardihood and
shrewdness. And in the years that followed, he prospered (for a while)
without any check, and, because of a joke about Priapos, he pulled down
one emperor of heathenry, to raise up in his stead another emperor with
superior taste in humor. Demetrios held wide power and much land, and
was a ruthless master over all the country between Quesiton and
Nacumera. He was supreme there, as upon Vraidex Miramon Lluagor had been
supreme. It was the boast of Demetrios that he feared nobody in any of
the worlds beneath or above him, and that boast was truthful.

Yet none of these preëminencies could avail Demetrios, when the time was
due, and when the doom of Demetrios fell in that manner and that instant
which the Norns had agreed upon, and when he who had put his father out
of life with the great sword was, in his turn, put out of life with a
small wire. For this thing also, people say, had been appointed by Urdhr
and Verdandi and Skuld as they sat weaving under Yggdrasill beside the
carved door of the Sylan’s House: and to this saying the didactic like
to add that no warrior, through whatsoever havoc and upsetment of human
economy, has, in the end, power to withstand the Norns.

Now it was this Demetrios who married, among many other women, Dom
Manuel’s oldest daughter Melicent, as is narrated in her saga.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                               BOOK FOUR

                            COTH AT PORUTSA

 “_Their land also is full of idols: they worship the work of their own
                                hands._”
                            —ISAIAH, ii, 8.




------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _20._
                       _Idolatry of an Alderman_

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NOW the tale is again of Coth, and of how Coth went blustering westward
to fetch back Dom Manuel into his Poictesme, which, as Coth asserted,
skinny women and holy persons and lying poets were making quite
uninhabitable. It is probable that Coth thus more or less obliquely
referred to the Countess Niafer herself, as well as to Holy Holmendis
and to pious Ninzian and to the most virtuous but not plump Madame
Balthis, the wife of Ninzian, since these three nowadays were the
advisers of Dame Niafer in everything. It is certain that, even in these
early days, Dom Manuel had already become a legend; and the poets
everywhere were rehearsing his valor and his wisdom and his noble
excellencies in all the affairs of this life.

But Coth of the Rocks twirled his mustachios, and he disapprovingly
shook his great bald head, and he went very quickly away from all these
reformings of Poictesme and of the master whom his heart remembered and
desired. Coth of the Rocks traveled westward, without any companion,
faring alone by land and sea. Coth broke his journeying, first, at
Sorcha, and he companioned there with Credhê of the Red Brown Hair: he
went thence to the Island of Hunchback Women, and it was in that island
(really a peninsula) he had so much pleasure, and deadly trouble too,
with a harlot named Bar, the wife of Ögir. But in neither of these
realms did Coth get any sure news of Dom Manuel, although there was a
rumor of such a passing. Then, at Kushavati, in a twilit place of
rustling leaves and very softly chiming little bells, Coth found, with
the aid of Dame Abonde, the book of maps by which he was thereafter to
be guided.

Coth journeyed, in fine, ever westward, with such occasional stays to
rest or copulate or fight as were the natural concomitants of travel. In
some lands he found only ill-confirmed reports that such a person as Dom
Manuel had passed that way before him: in other lands there was no
report. But Coth had reason, after what Abonde had showed him in that
secluded place under the rustling leaves, to put firm faith in his maps.

So he went on, always westward, with varied and pleasant enough
adventures befalling him, at Leyma, and Skeaf, and Adrisim. He had great
sorrow at Murnith, in the Land of Marked Bodies, on account of a
religious custom there prevalent and of the girl Felfel Rhasif Yedua;
and—at Ran Reigan,—the one-legged Queen Zélélé held him imprisoned for a
while, in her harem of half a hundred fine men. Yet, in the main, Coth
got on handily, in part by honoring the religious customs everywhere,
but chiefly by virtue of his maps and his natural endowments. These last
enabled him amply to deal with all men who wanted a quarrel and with all
women whom he found it expedient to placate and to surprise: and as far
as to Lower Yarold, and even to Khaikar the Red, his maps served
faithfully to guide him, until Coth perforce went over the edge of the
last one, into a country which was not upon any map; and in this way
approached, though he did not know it, to the city of Porutsa.

Thus, it was near Porutsa that Coth found a stone image standing in a
lonely field which was overgrown with pepper plants. Among these plants,
charred thighbones and ribs and other put-by appurtenances of mankind
lay scattered everywhither rather dispiritingly: and before the image
were the remnants of yet other burnt offerings, upon a large altar
carved everywhere with skulls.

This image represented a seated and somewhat scantily clothed giant
carved of black stone: from its ears hung rings of gold and silver; its
face was painted with five horizontal yellow stripes; and a great
gleaming jewel, which might or might not be an emerald, was set in its
navel. Such was the limited apparel of this giant’s person. But in the
right hand of the image were four arrows, and the left hand held a
curious fan made of a mirror surrounded by green and yellow and blue
feathers. Coth had never before seen such an idol as this.

“However, in this unknown region,” Coth reflected, “there are,
doubtless, a large number of unknown gods. They may not amount to much,
but Dame Abonde has taught me that in religious matters a traveler loses
nothing by civility.”

Coth knelt. He tendered fealty, and he prayed to this image for
protection in his search for his lost liege-lord. Coth heard a voice
saying:

“Your homage is accepted. Your prayers are granted.”

Coth looked upward, still kneeling. Coth saw that the huge black image
regarded him with living eyes, and that the mouth of this image was now
of moving purple flesh.

“Your prayers are granted, full measure,” the image continued, “because
you are the first person of your pallid color and peculiar clothing to
come over the edge of the map and worship me. Such enterprise in piety
ought to be rewarded: and I shall reward it, prodigally. Bald-headed man
with long mustaches, I promise you, upon the oath of the Star Warriors,
even by the Word of the Tzitzi-Mimé, that you shall rule over all the
country of Tollan. So that is settled: and now do you tell me who you
are.”

“I am Coth of the Rocks, the Alderman of St. Didol. I followed Dom
Manuel of Poictesme, about whom the poets nowadays are telling so many
outrageous lies. I followed him, that is, until he rode westward to a
far place beyond the sunset. Now I still follow him, since to do that
was my oath: and I have come into the West, not to rule over this
outlandish place, but to get news of my master, and to fetch him back
into Poictesme.”

“You will get no such news from me, for I never heard of this Manuel.”

“Why, then, whatever sort of deity can you be!”

“I am Yaotl, the Capricious Lord, the Enemy upon Both Sides. This is my
Place of the Dead: but I have everywhere power in this land, and I shall
have all power in this land when once I have driven out the Feathered
Serpent.”

“Then let me tell you, Messire Yaotl, you might very profitably add to
this power at least such knowledge as is common to the run of civilized
persons. It is not becoming in any deity never to have heard of my
liege-lord Dom Manuel, who was the greatest of all captains, and who
founded the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, of which I had the honor
to be a member. Such ignorance appears strange in anybody. In a deity it
is perfectly preposterous.”

“I was only saying—”

“Stop interrupting me! What sort of god are you, who break in upon the
devotional exercises of people when they are actually upon their knees!
It is my custom, sir, whenever I go into a foreign country, to be civil
to the gods of that country; and I am thus quite familiar with the
behavior appropriate to a deity in such circumstances. When people pray
to you, you ought to exhibit more repose of manner and a certain
well-bred reticence.”

“Oh, go away!” said the image of Yaotl, “and stop lecturing me! Go up
into Porutsa yonder, where the Taoltecs live, and where it may be they
have heard of your Dom Manuel, since the Taoltecs also are fools and
worship the Feathered Serpent. And when you are emperor over the country
of Tollan, do you come back and pray to me more civilly!”

Coth rose up from his kneeling, in strong indignation. “I tendered
fealty in the liberal sense appropriate to religious matters. It was but
a bit of politeness recommended by Dame Abonde, and I did not mean a
word of it—”

The image replied: “Nobody cares what you meant, it matters only what
you have sworn. I have accepted your sworn homage; and the affair is
concluded.”

“—And upon no terms,” Coth continued, “would I consent to be emperor of
this outlandish place. For the rest, do you instantly tell me what you
meant by saying ‘the Taoltecs also are fools,’ because I do not
understand that ‘also.’”

“But,” said the image, wearily, “but you will have to be emperor, now
that I have sworn it upon the oath of the Star Warriors. I do not deny
that I spoke hastily: even so, I did say it, with an unbreakable oath;
and, here likewise, the affair is concluded.”

Coth replied, “Stuff and nonsense!”

“You are now,” continued the image of Yaotl, “under my protection: and
as a seal of this, I must put upon you three refrainments. We will make
them very light ones, since this is but a matter of form. I will order
you to refrain from such things as no sane person would ever dream of
doing in any event; and thus nobody will be discommoded.”

Coth cried out, “Bosh!”

“So you must not infringe upon divine privileges by going naked in
public; you must avoid any dealings with green peppers such as you see
over yonder, for the reason that they are sacred to my worthless
stepson, the Flower Prince; and the third refrainment which I now put
upon you I shall not bother to reveal, because you are certain to find
this abstinence even more easy to observe than the others. I have
spoken.”

“I know well enough that you have spoken! But you have spoken
balderdash. For if you for one moment think I am going to be bullied by
you and your idiotic refrainments—!”

But Coth saw that the image had closed its eyes, and had tranquilly
turned back in all to stone, and was not heeding him any longer.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _21._
                    _The Profits of Pepper Selling_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


COTH was goaded, by such incivility, from indignation into a fine rage.
He addressed the idol at some length, in terms which no person, whether
human or divine, could have construed as worshipful. He gathered from
the plants about him an armful of green peppers, he took off all his
clothes, and he left them there in a heap upon the altar that was carved
with skulls. He went up into the city of Porutsa stark naked and sat
down in the market-place, crying, “Who will buy my green peppers!”

None of the Taoltecs hindered him, because the hill people, from Uro and
Hipal and Thiapas, were used to come into Porutsa almost thus lightly
clad; and it was evident enough that this fair-skinned stranger, with
the bare, great, round, pink head, came unarmed with anything except the
equipments of nature.

Coth sold his peppers, and went striding about the market-place
inquiring for news of Dom Manuel, but none of these charcoal- and
copper-colored persons seemed ever to have heard of the gray champion.
When the market for that day was over, Coth went up into the hills about
Tzatzitepec, in company with a full-bosomed, brown-eyed, delicious girl
who had been selling water-cresses in the market-place: she proved
brisk; and Coth spent four days with her to their mutual contentment.

On the fifth day he returned, still naked as his mother bore him, to the
market-place in Porutsa; and there he again sold green peppers, so that
this brow-beating Yaotl might have no least doubt as to the value which
Coth set on this god’s patronage.

And all went well enough for a while. But by and by seven soldiers came
into the market-place, and so to where Coth had just disposed of the
last bunch of peppers; and the leader of these soldiers said, “Our
Emperor desires speech with you.”

“Well,” Coth returned, “I am through with my day’s work, and I can
conveniently spare him a moment or two.”

He went affably with these soldiers, and they led him to the Emperor
Vemac. “Who are you?” said the Emperor, first of all, “and what is your
business in Porutsa?”

“I am an outlander called Coth of the Rocks, a dealer in green peppers,
and I came hither to sell my green peppers.”

“But why do you come into my city wearing no blanket and no loin-cloth
and, in fact, nothing whatever except a scowl?”

“That is because of a refrainment which was put upon me by an impudent
black rascal who carried arrows and a fan with a mirror in it, and who
called himself Yaotl.”

“Blessed be the name of that god!” said the pious Emperor Vemac,
“although we worship the Feathered Serpent, and not the Capricious
Lord.”

Then Vemac went on to explain that he had an only daughter, who five
days earlier had observed Coth, first from the windows of the palace,
and later had gone down veiled into the market-place in order to regard
at closer quarters this virtually pink person. She had returned,
astounded and in some excitement, to demand of her father that he give
her this queerly colored and greatly gifted seller of peppers to be her
husband. Vemac granted her request, because he never denied his daughter
anything, and ardently desired a grandson: but when they sent to look
for the pink-colored pepper vendor with the great and hairless,
pink-colored head, he was nowhere to be found.

The Princess Utsume had taken this disappointment, with its attendant
delay of her nuptials, rather hard. In fine, said Vemac, the girl had
fallen sick with love, six physicians had been able to do nothing for
her, and nobody could heal her, she declared, except that beautifully
tinted and in all ways magnificent pepper vendor.

“Well, you must tell the poor girl that I already have a wife,” said
Coth, “even over and above an understanding with a seller of
water-cresses.”

“I do not,” Vemac submitted, “see what that has to do with it. In Tollan
a man is permitted as many wives as he cares to have, within, of course,
reason.”

“Marrying does not come under the head of reason,” said Coth.

“Then, as the husband of my only child,” said Vemac, “you will rule over
Tollan along with me.”

“Oh! oh!” said Coth. For, since he had punctiliously disobeyed Yaotl in
everything, he knew this must be a coincidence, and it seemed a very
strange coincidence.

“And, finally,” said Vemac, “if you are hard-headed about this really
excellent opening in life for a green pepper vendor, we shall have to
persuade you.”

“But how,” asked Coth, reservedly, “how would you persuade me?”

Vemac raised his brown hand. His persuaders came, masked, and bringing
with them their implements and a stalwart male slave. They demonstrated
their methods of persuasion; and after what remained of the slave was
quiet at last, Coth also for a while remained quiet.

“Of two evils,” Coth said then, “one should choose the more familiar. I
will marry.”

He let them take him and bathe him and trim his long mustachios and dye
his body black and perfume him and set upon his great bald head a
coronal of white hens’ feathers. A red cloth was wrapped about his
loins, upon his feet a priest put painted sandals with little golden
bells fastened to them, and about Coth’s scented body was placed a
mantle of yellow netting very beautifully fringed.

“Now,” said Vemac, “when you have had supper, do you go in there and
comfort my daughter in her sickness!”

Coth obeyed, and found the princess—who proved to be in an unmitigatedly
brunette fashion a most charming girl,—recumbent and weeping in a
solidly built double-bed. Coth hung upon a peg in the wall his coronal
of white hens’ feathers, he coughed, and he looked again at the weeping
princess.

Coth said: “By such an attachment to me, my dear, I am touched. An
attachment to me, in this land of half-men, is indicative of sound
sense.” He coughed again, perhaps to hide his emotion, and he added: “An
attachment to me is moving. So do you move over!”

She, still weeping, made room for him. He sat down upon the bed and
began to comfort her. She in turn began to express her appreciation of
this comforting. He hung upon a peg in the wall a mantle of yellow
netting, and a red loin-cloth.

In the morning no trace whatever remained of the Princess Utsume’s
illness except a great and agreeable fatigue. And in the forenoon Coth
was married to the Princess Utsumé and escorted to the temple of the
Feathered Serpent, and there given the imperial name Toveyo, and he was
crowned as the co-ruler along with Vemac over all Tollan.

Yet afterward a rather curious ceremony—called, as his brown loving
bride informed Toveyo, the Feast of Brooms,—was enacted by the clergy
and the entire populace of Porutsa, in order to ensure for the marriage
of their princess fertility.

“I feel that this ceremony is superfluous,” Utsumé said, still yawning.
“But this ceremony was divinely ordained by the Goddess of Dirt; and I
feel, too, my wonderful pink darling, that it is becoming for persons of
our exalted rank to encourage all true religious sentiment, and
generally to consent that the will of the gods be done.”

Meanwhile these rites had opened with the beheading of a quite handsome
young woman, from whose body the skin was then removed, in two sections,
like a horrid corselet and trousers. As such they were worn each by a
priest during the rest of the ceremony: and about this Feast of Brooms
the less said, the better, but to the newly christened Toveyo a great
deal of it seemed morbid and even a bit immodest.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _22._
                            _Toveyo Dances_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


TOVEYO’S first official act was to send ambassadors to the kings in that
neighborhood—to Cocox and Napaltzin and Acolhua, the second of that
name,—but none of these could give him any news of Dom Manuel. Meanwhile
Coth cherished his wife and dealt with other persons also according to
his nature.

Of his somewhat remarkable behavior in the war with Cacat and Coät, of
how in one of his rages he destroyed a bridge with all the people on it,
and of how he killed ten of his subjects with a gardener’s hoe, there is
in this place no need to speak. But it came about unavoidably that,
before Coth’s honeymoon was over, a deputation from the Taoltecs was
beseeching Vemac to have this son-in-law of his unostentatiously
assassinated.

“For there is really,” they said, “no standing him and his tantrums.”

“Such,” Vemac replied, “has been my own experience. I am afraid, though,
that if we kill him my daughter will be put out, for she seems to have
discovered about him some feature or another feature of great and
unfailing attractiveness.”

“It is better, majesty, that she should weep than that we all be driven
mad. The man’s pride and self-conceit are unbearable.”

“Nobody knows that better than I do. He hectors me in my own palace,
where I am not accustomed to be overrun by anybody except my daughter.
In such a position we must be politic. We must first see that this
Toveyo is belittled in my daughter’s eyes. Afterward, if I know her as
well as I think I do, she will consent to let us get rid of him.”

One of the darker Taoltecs, who called himself Tal-Cavêpan, said then:
“This all-overbearing Toveyo is now in the market-place. Follow me, and
you shall see him belittled in his wife’s eyes and in the eyes of
everybody!”

They followed, inquiring among themselves who might be this huge
Tal-Cavêpan, that he spoke so boldly. Nobody remembered having seen him
before. Meanwhile Tal-Cavêpan went up to where Coth and his royal wife
Utsumé were chaffering with a Yopi huckster over some melons.
Tal-Cavêpan clapped his hand to Coth’s shoulder and bore down with this
hand. Coth became smaller and smaller, so that presently Tal-Cavêpan
stooped and picked up the nuisance whom they called Toveyo, and thus
displayed to the Taoltecs their blustering oppressor as a pink midget
not more than four inches high, standing there in the palm of
Tal-Cavêpan’s black hand.

“Dance, majesty! dance, dreadful potentate!” said Tal-Cavêpan. And Coth
danced for them. All the while that he danced, he swore very horribly,
and his little voice was like the cheeping of a young bird.

The people crowded about him, because no such wonder-working had ever
before been seen in Porutsa. Tal-Cavêpan cried merrily to Vemac the
Emperor, “Is not this capering son-in-law of yours belittled in his
wife’s eyes and in the eyes of everybody?”

Vemac called out to his guards, “Kill this sorcerer!”

His soldiers obeyed the Emperor. But the Princess Utsumé caught up her
tiny husband and thrust him into the bosom of her purple gown, out of
harm’s way, the while that Tal-Cavêpan was being enthusiastically
despatched.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _23._
                   _Regrettable Conduct of a Corpse_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW the huge body of Tal-Cavêpan lay where it had fallen, and it
instantly began to corrupt, and from it arose a most astounding stench.
“Take that devil carrion out of my city!” Vemac commanded his guards,
“lest it breed a pestilence in Porutsa.”

But when they attempted again to obey the Emperor, they found the body
was so heavy that no force could raise it from the ground. So the
Taoltecs of necessity left this corpse in their market-place. And a
pestilence, in the form of a small yellow whirlwind, went stealthily
about the city; and many hundreds died.

Those who yet remained in life, now that they were not able to help
themselves, prayed for help from the Feathered Serpent, and, at each of
the seven holy stations, sacrificed to him suckling children decked with
bands and streamers of properly colored paper. But the pestilence
continued.

The Taoltecs then made a yet handsomer oblation, of plump and really
valuable slaves and of captive warriors, each one of whom had been duly
painted with blue-and-gilt stripes; and they offered the hearts of all
these to their older and somewhat outmoded gods, to the Slayer with the
Left Hand and to the Maker of Sprouts. Then, as the pestilence grew
worse, they became desperate, and they experimentally decapitated and
flayed eight of the lesser nobility in honor of the new god called
Yaotl, the Capricious Lord, the Enemy upon Both Sides.

Forthwith the dead Tal-Cavêpan raised up what was left of his
countenance, and he said: “Fasten to me ropes woven of black and of red
cords, you worshipers of the Feathered Serpent! And when fifty of you
have done so-and-so,”—he stipulated very exactly what they were to do,
each to the other,—“then do you drag my body to the Place of the Dead,
which is Yaotl’s place; and there let my body be burned upon his altar.
So shall this pestilence be ended.”

The Taoltecs obeyed. Fifty of them, forming a circle, shamefacedly did
the abomination which was required, and fifty of them tugged at the
parti-colored ropes: but still the corpse could not be moved.
Tal-Cavêpan spoke again, saying, “Fetch Vemac, that Emperor who decreed
my death!”

Vemac came, and along with him, came his daughter.

“Hail, Vemac, son of Imos, of the line of Chan, and of the race of
Chivim!” said the corpse. “It appears that these puny sons of nobodies,
enfeebled by their long worship of the Feathered Serpent, are not
able—after one little act of homage to the Capricious Lord,—to remove me
from this city. It is therefore necessary that their broad-shouldered
and heavenly descended Emperor draw my body to the Place of the Dead,
and there burn my body upon the altar of Yaotl.”

“What will become of me in the Place of the Dead?” Vemac asked.

The corpse smiled. “From that holy place the Emperor will depart on a
long journey. His son-in-law will thereafter reign, as was foretold,
over all Tollan. For the Emperor Vemac will be traveling afar, he will
be journeying between two mountains and beyond the lair of the snake and
the crocodile, even to the Nine Waters, which he will cross upon the
back of a red dog. Nor will the Emperor Vemac ever return from that
journeying.”

Vemac shivered a little. But he said:

“It is right that an emperor should die rather than his people perish. I
will not degrade my body, but your body I will draw to the Place of the
Dead; and I will abide what follows.”

Now Coth cried out, like the cheeping of a bird, from where he sat in
the bosom of his wife’s gown. “This sort of talk is very well, but what
assurance have we that this dung-pile is speaking the truth?”

The corpse answered: “To you, Toveyo, I swear that when the Emperor of
Tollan has drawn my body to the Place of the Dead, the pestilence will
cease: and I swear too that the Emperor will never return. Thus shall
his son-in-law reign in his stead, precisely as was foretold.”

“Oho!” said Coth, “so it is as I thought, and nobody guarantees the
affair but you! Well, now, upon my word, do you take us for buzzards or
for scavengers, that we should in any way be bothering about what
emanates from you! By what oath can garbage swear, that anybody should
heed it!”

The great corpse stirred restively under the midget’s piping taunts. But
the voice of Tal-Cavêpan said only, “I swear by the oath of the Star
Warriors, even by the Word of the Tzitzi-Mimé.”

“Ah, ah!” said Coth. “Put me down, dear little wife!” Then Coth, the
very tiny pink mannikin, strutted toward the evil-smelling black corpse,
and brown Utsumé followed fondly after him. Coth posed in a majestic
attitude, resting one elbow upon his wife’s instep, and twirling at his
mustachios. Coth said:

“You have sworn to these things, Yaotl, by that unbreakable oath of
yours which first started all this trouble. Very well! I am co-emperor
of Tollan. I am as much emperor as Vemac is: and it is I who will draw
you to the burning you have richly earned; and it is I whom your oath
will prevent from ever returning into this infernal Porutsa, where such
uncalled-for liberties are taken with a person’s size, and the people
are very much too fond of dancing.”

“But,” said the corpse, “I meant the other emperor!”

Coth answered: “Bosh! Nobody cares what you meant, it matters only what
you have sworn.”

“But,” said the corpse, “but, you pernicious pink shrimp—!”

Coth replied, “I do not deny that you spoke lightly: even so, you did
swear it, by an unbreakable oath; and the affair is concluded.”

Coth caught at the parti-colored ropes with tiny fingers. But as he
tugged, Coth began to grow. The harder he pulled, the greater became his
stature, in order that the honor of the Capricious Lord might stay
undisgraced, and Yaotl not be evicted from Porutsa by a midget. And now
the corpse moved. Now the Taoltecs saw hauling doggedly at those black
and red ropes a full-grown if somewhat short-legged champion, with a
remarkably large and glistening pink head: before him went a little
yellow whirlwind, and behind him dragged a dreadful black corruption.
Thus Coth passed through the east gate of their city.

“The will of the gods be done!” said Vemac,—“especially when it is in
every way a very good riddance.” Nobody dissented with his pious
utterance. “Let the city gates be closed!” said Vemac then. “Put new
bolts on them, lest that son-in-law of mine be coming back to us against
the will of the gods. And you, my dear Utsumé, since you alone are
losing anything, howsoever happily, by this business, you shall have
another husband, of less desultory dimensions, and, in fact, you may
have as many husbands as you like, my darling, to raise up an heir for
us in Porutsa and an emperor to come after me and rule over all Tollan.”

Utsumé replied: “I have reason to believe, my revered father, that the
matter of an heir has been attended to. I shall regret my pink Toveyo
and his great natural gifts, which were to me as a tireless fountain of
delights. And I shall honor his memory by always marrying somebody as
near like him as it may be possible to find in this degenerate country.
Meanwhile I quite agree with you that it is becoming for persons of our
exalted rank to encourage all true religious sentiment, and generally to
consent that the will of the gods be done.”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _24._
                          _Economics of Yaotl_

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IN the Place of the Dead, Yaotl sat up and scratched his nose
reflectively. The Capricious Lord had put off the putrid appearance of
Tal-Cavêpan. He now had the seeming which is his in the heaven called
Tamo-Anchan: and as he sat opposite the black stone idol there was no
difference between Yaotl and the image of Yaotl. At the god’s navel also
shone a green jewel, his face was striped with yellow, and from his ears
hung rings of gold and silver. Otherwise he wore nothing at all, but in
one hand he carried arrows, and in his other hand was the scrying-stone
with long feathers of three differing colors set about it.

“I will now,” said Yaotl, “reveal to you the third refrainment which was
put upon you. It was that you must never obey my commands in anything.”

“That,” Coth replied, hotly, “is not a fair refrainment. It gives me no
chance to treat you as you deserve. It is a refrainment which strikes
directly at the doctrine of free will. It is a treacherous and vile
refrainment! For if you will consider just for a moment,—you black and
very dull-witted dancing-master!—even you will see that, by commanding
any self-respecting person to do the exact contrary of your most absurd
and tyrannical wishes—”

“I had considered that,” said Yaotl, dryly. “It was quite necessary I
should retain some little protection for my real wishes in the lands
over which I exercise divine power.” Now the Capricious Lord fell into a
silence, out of which by and by bubbled a chuckle. “Well, you tricked me
neatly enough, just now, when I was in train to make you the sole ruler
over this country. And I was going to have a rather pleasant forenoon,
too, with that Vemac! Still, I did make you an emperor: and I have kept
in everything the oath of the Star Warriors. So the affair is concluded:
I am released from my oath; and you may now return to that home of
yours, where people have, in some unimaginable fashion, learned how to
put up with you.”

“I shall not give over my searching of the West,” Coth answered,
stubbornly, “until I have found my liege-lord, whom I intend to fetch
back into Poictesme.”

“But that will never do, because we really must preserve hereabouts some
sort of order and rule! And no man nor any deity can hope for actual
ease in Tollan as long as you are blustering about like a bald-headed
pink hornet.... So do you let me think the thought of the Most High
Place of the Gods, and take counsel with the will of Teotex-Calli. About
this Dom Manuel of yours, for instance—”

Yaotl sat quite still for a moment, thinking and looking into the
scrying-stone. And his thought, which was the thought of the Most High
Place of the Gods of Tollan, took form there very slowly as a gray
smoke; and a little by a little this pallid smoke assumed the appearance
of a tall gray man, clad all in silvery gray armor, and displaying upon
his shield the silver emblem of Poictesme: and Coth knelt before his
master, in Yaotl’s Place of the Dead.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _25._
                     _Last Obligation upon Manuel_

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“COTH” said the voice of Manuel, “most stubborn and perverse of all that
served me! Coth, that must always serve me grudgingly, with so much of
grumbling and of ill grace and of more valor! So, is it you, Coth, is it
you, bald-headed, gruff growler!”

Coth answered: “It is I, master, who am come to fetch you back into
Poictesme. And I take it very ill, let me tell you quite frankly, sir,
that you should be expressing any surprise to see me in my place and
about my proper duty! I follow, as my oath was, after the captain of the
Fellowship of the Silver Stallion. They tell me that the fellowship is
dissolved by your wife’s orders. Well, we both know what wives are. We
know, moreover, that my oath was to follow you and to serve you. So I
take it that such surprise in the matter comes from you most
unbecomingly: and that much, master or not, I wish you distinctly to
understand.”

And Manuel said: “You follow me across the world and over the world’s
rim because of that oath, you pester these gods into summoning me from
my last home, and then you begin forthwith to bluster at me! Yes, this
is Coth, who serves me just as he did of old. What of the others who
swore with you, Coth?”

“They thrive, master. They thrive, and they listen to small poets
caterwauling about you, in those fine fiefs and castles which you gave
them.”

“But you only, the least honored and the most rebellious of my barons,
have followed me even to this far Place of the Dead! Coth, yet you also
had your lands and your two castles.”

“Well, they will keep! What do you mean by hinting that anybody will
dare in my absence to meddle with my property! Did I not pick up an
empire here with no trouble at all! You are casting reflections, sir,
upon my valor and ability, which, I must tell you quite frankly, and for
your own good—!”

But Manuel was speaking, rather sadly. “Coth, that which you have done
because of your given word was very nobly done, and with heroic
unreason. Coth, you are heroic, but the others are wise.”

“Master, there was an oath.” Coth’s voice now broke a little. “Master,
it was not only the oath. There was a great love, also, in a worsening
land, where lesser persons ruled, and there remained nobody like
Manuel.”

But Manuel said: “The others are wise. You follow still the Manuel who
went about Poictesme. Now in Poictesme all are forgetting that Manuel,
and our poets are busied with quite another Manuel, and my own wife has
builded a great tomb for that other Manuel.... Coth, that is always so.
It is love, not carelessness, which bids us forget our dead, so that we
may love them the more whole-heartedly. Unwelcome memories must be
recolored and reshaped, the faults and blunders and the vexing ways
which are common to all men must be put out of mind, and strange
excellencies must be added, until the compound in nothing resembles the
man that is dead. Such is love’s way, Coth, to keep love immortal....
Coth, oh, most bungling Coth!” said Manuel, very tenderly, “you lack the
grace even to honor your loved dead in a decorous and wise fashion!”

“I follow the true Manuel,” Coth replied, “because to do that was my
oath. There was involved, I cannot deny it, sir, some affection.” Coth
gulped. “I, for the rest, am not interested in these new-fangled, fine
lies they are telling about you nowadays.”

Then there was silence. A small wind went about the pepper plants; and
it seemed to whisper of perished things.

Now Manuel said: “Coth, I repeat to you, the others are wise. I have
gone, forever. But another Manuel abides in Poictesme, and he is
nourished by these fictions. Yearly he grows in stature, this Manuel who
redeemed Poictesme from the harsh Northmen’s oppression and lewd
savagery. Already this Manuel the Redeemer has become a most notable
hero, without fear or guile or any other blemish: and with each
generation he will increase in virtue. It is this dear Redeemer whom
Poictesme will love and emulate: men will be braver because this Manuel
was so very brave; and men, in one or another moment of temptation, will
refrain from folly because his wisdom was so well rewarded;
and—sometimes, at least,—a few men will refrain from baseness, too,
because all his living was stainless.”

“I,” Coth said, heavily, “do not recall this Manuel.”

“Nor do I recall him either, old grumbler. I can remember only one who
dealt with each obligation as he best might, and that was always rather
inefficiently. I remember many doings which I would prefer not to
remember. And I remember a soiled struggler who reeled blunderingly from
one half-solved riddle to another, thwarted and vexed, and hiding very
jealously his hurt.... Well, it is better that such a person should be
forgotten! And so I come from my last home to release you from your oath
of service. I release you now, forever, dear Coth, and I now bid you do
as all the others have done, and I now lay upon you my last orders. I
order that you too forget me, Coth, as those have forgotten who might
have known me better than you did.”

Coth said, with a queer noise which was embarrassingly like a sob: “I
cannot forget the most dear and admirable of earthly lords. You are
requiring, sir, the impossible.”

“Nevertheless, it is necessary that you too—bald realist!—should serve
this other Manuel; and should forget, as your fellows have forgotten,
that muddied and not ever quite efficient bull-necked straggler who has
gone out of life and vigor and out of all persons’ memory. For now is
come upon me my last obligation: it is that the figure which I made in
the world shall not endure anywhere in any particle; and I accept this
obligation also, and I submit to the common lot of all men, without
struggling any longer.”

Coth said, “Return to us, dear master! return, and with the brave truth
do you make an end of your people’s bragging and vain lies!”

But Manuel said: “No. For Poictesme has now, as every land must have,
its faith and its legend, to lead men more nobly and more valorously
than ever any living man may do. I, who was strong, had not the strength
to beget this legend: but it has been created, Coth, it has been created
by the folly of a woman and the wild babble of a frightened child; and
it will endure.”

Coth replied, brokenly: “But, master, we are men of this world, a world
made of dirt. Oh, my dear master, we pick our way about that dirt as we
best can! The results need surprise nobody. The results are rather
often, in a pathetic fashion, very admirable. Should this truth be
disregarded for a vainglorious dream!”

And Manuel answered: “The dream is better. For man alone of animals
plays the ape to his dreams.”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _26._
                        _The Realist in Defeat_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


HERE Yaotl ended thinking, and put aside the scrying-stone. And his
thought was no longer of Manuel, and nothing was apparent in the Place
of the Dead save Yaotl and the image of Yaotl and Coth standing there,
in the apparel of an emperor, alone and small and remarkably subdued
looking, between the vast black naked twins.

“It would appear,” said Yaotl, “that some men are no more tractable than
are the gods when the affair concerns a keeping of oaths. And so Toveyo
will be remembered in this land for a long while.”

And Coth answered, rather drearily: “Yes; it is such fools as you and I,
Messire Yaotl, who create unnecessary trouble everywhere. Well, I also
am now released from my oath! And my master has spoken bitter good
sense. The famousness of Manuel is but a dream and a loud jingling of
words which happen to sound well together; it is a vanity and a great
talking by his old wife and my gray peers: and yet, this nonsense, it
may be, will hearten people, and will serve all people always, better
than would the truth. And my faith is a foolishness, in that, because of
a mere oath,—like your Star Warriors’ Word of the Thingumajigs, sir,—I
have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every
person is nourished by one or another lie.”

“Each to his creed,” said Yaotl. “So do men choose between hope and
despair.”

“Yet creeds mean very little,” Coth answered the dark god, still
speaking almost gently. “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best
of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect
for neither label. I merely know that, at the end of all my journeying,
there remains for me only to settle down, in my comfortable castles
yonder in Poictesme, and to live contentedly with my fine-looking wife
Azra and with my son Jurgen,—that innocent dear lad, whom his old
hypocrite of a father will by and by, beyond any doubt, be exhorting to
imitate a Manuel who never lived! And I know, too, that this is not the
ending which I would have chosen for my saga. For I also, I suppose,
must now decline into fat ease and high thinking, and I would have
preferred the truth.” Coth meditated for a while: he shrugged: and he
laughed without hilarity. “Capricious Lord, I pray you, what sort of
creatures do men seem to the gods?”

“Let us think of more pleasant matters,” Yaotl replied. “For one, I am
already thinking of the way in which I can most speedily get you, O
insatiable grumbler, again to your far home, and out of my too long
afflicted country.”

He turned his naked huge back toward Coth, as Coth supposed, to indulge
in meditation. Coth, was, however, almost instantly disabused, by a
miracle.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                               BOOK FIVE

                          “MUNDUS VULT DECIPI”

     “_Not only in this world, but also in that which is to come._”
                           —EPHESIANS, i, 21.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _27._
                          _Poictesme Reformed_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW the tale, for one reason and another, does not record the miracle
which Yaotl performed. The Gods of Tollan were always apt to be misled
by their queer notions of humor. Instead, the tale is of that Poictesme
to which—borne by that favorable if malodorous wind which Yaotl provided
and aimed,—Coth now perforce returned alone.

During the years of Coth’s absence there had been many changes.
Nominally it was the Countess Niafer who ruled over this land, but she
in everything seemed to be controlled by St. Holmendis of Philistia.
About the intimacy between the Countess and her lean but sturdy adviser
there was now no longer any gossip nor shrugging: people had grown used
to this alliance, just as they were becoming reconciled to the reforms
and the prohibitions which were its fruitage.

For now that Manuel was gone, Coth found, the times were changing for
the better at a most uncomfortable rate. To Coth of the Rocks these days
seemed to breed littler men, who, to be sure, if you cared about such
kickshaws, lived more decorously than had lived their fathers, now that
this overbearing St. Holmendis had come out of Philistia with his
miracles: for this sacrosanct person would put up with no irregularity
anywhere, and would hardly so much as tolerate the mildest form of
wonder-working by anybody else. Even Guivric the Sage, who in the elder
and more candid times had attended to all of Dom Manuel’s conjuring, now
found it expedient to restrict his thaumaturgies to a wholly
confidential practice.

For the rest, you could go for days now without encountering a warlock
or a fairy; the people of Audela but rarely came out of the fire to make
sport for and with mankind; and, while many persons furtively brewed
spells at home, all traffic with spirits had to be conducted secretly.
In fine, Poictesme was everywhere upon its most sedate behavior, because
there was no telling when Holy Holmendis might be dealing with you for
your own good; and the cowed province, just as Guivric had prophesied,
stayed subject nowadays to a robustious saint conceived and nurtured and
made holy in Philistia.

But yet another unsettling influence was abroad, nefariously laboring to
keep everybody sanctimonious and genteel,—Coth said,—for over the entire
land Coth found, and fretted under, the all-enveloping legend of Manuel
the Redeemer. Coth found the land’s most holy place, now, to be that
magnificent tomb which, in Coth’s absence, the Countess Niafer had
reared at Storisende to the memory of her husband. And that this
architectural perjury was handsome enough, even Coth admitted.

The intricately carved lower half of the sepulchre displayed eight
alcoves in each of which was sealed the relic of one or another saint.
The upper portion was the pedestal of a very fine equestrian statue of
Dom Manuel with his lance raised, and in full armor, but wearing no
helmet, so that the hero’s face was visible as he sat there, waiting, it
seemed, and watching the North. Thus Manuel appeared to keep eternal
guard against whatever enemy might dare molest the country which he had
once redeemed from the Northmen. And there was never a more splendid
looking champion than was this mimic Manuel, for the armor of this
effigy was everywhere inset with jewels of every kind and color.

How Madame Niafer, who was, moreover, by ordinary a notably parsimonious
person, had ever managed to pay for all these gems nobody could declare
with certainty, but it was believed that Holy Holmendis had provided
them through one or another pious miracle. Coth of the Rocks voiced an
exasperated aspersion that they were paste; and declared paste gems to
be wholly appropriate to the mortuary imposture. In any event, the
Redeemer of Poictesme had been accorded the most magnificent sepulchre
these parts had ever known.

And Coth found all this jewelry and tortured stone-work, as a work of
art, to be wholly admirable, if you cared for such kickshaws. But as a
tomb he considered it to lack at least one essential feature, in that it
was empty.

Yet to most persons the emptiness of the great tomb was its peculiar
sanctity. This spacious and proud glittering void was, to most persons,
a perpetual reminder that Dom Manuel had ascended into heaven while yet
alive, uncorrupted by the ignominy of death, and taking with him every
heroic bone and bit of flesh, and every tiniest sinew, unmarred. That
miracle—no more, to be sure, than the great Redeemer’s just due—most
satisfactorily and most awfully accounted for the lack of any corpse, as
surely as the lack of a corpse was the firm proof of the miracle;
sublime verities here interlocked: and that miracle had been set above
cavil when it was first revealed, by Heaven’s wisdom, through the
unsullied innocence of a little child, lest in this world, men and women
being what they are, by any scoffer the testimony of an adult evangelist
might be suspected.

Coth, after hearing these axioms,—so unshakably established as axioms
during the seven years of Coth’s absence,—would look meditatively at his
young Jurgen, to whose extreme youth and comparative innocence this
revelation had been accorded. The boy was now nearing manhood, he fell
short in many respects of the virtues appropriate to an evangelist, and
he confessed to remembering very faintly now that tremendous experience
of his infancy. That hardly mattered, though, Coth would reflect, when
Poictesme at large was so industriously preserving and embroidering the
tale which the dear brat had brought down from Upper Morven to explain
away an over-night truancy from home.

“There is but one Manuel,” Coth would remark, to himself, “and—of all
persons!—my Jurgen is his prophet. That kickshaw creed seems to content
everybody, now that the rogue no longer bothers to provide an excuse for
staying out all night.”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _28._
                       _Fond Motto of a Patriot_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


EVERYWHERE, indeed, during the while of Coth’s vain adventuring after
the real Manuel, the legend had grown steadily. Coth found it wholly
maddening to hear of the infallible and perfect Redeemer with whom he
had formerly lived in daily converse of a painstakingly quarrelsome and
uncivil nature: and he found too that, of his confrères of the Silver
Stallion who yet remained in Poictesme, Ninzian and Donander at least
were beginning to lie about Manuel with as pious a lack of restraint as
anybody. Guivric the Sage, of course, would chillily assent to
whatsoever the best-thought-of people affirmed, because the
self-centered old knave did not ever really bother about what other
persons thought: whereas Holden and Anavalt sought, rather markedly, to
turn the conversation to other topics. These aging champions had, in
fine, encountered, in this legend as to their former glories and
privileges, an unconquerable adversary with which they, each according
to his nature, were of necessity compromising.

For Manuel the great Redeemer, who had first carnally redeemed Poictesme
in battle with the Northmen, and later had redeemed Poictesme in more
exalted fields, when at his passing he had taken all his people’s sins
upon his proud gray head,—this Manuel was to return and was to bring
again with him the golden age which, everybody now asserted, had existed
under Manuel’s ruling of Poictesme. That was the sweet and
reason-drugging allure of the legend, that was the prediction
transmitted by Coth’s young scapegrace, who nowadays had averted so
whole-heartedly from prophecy to petticoats. There was no sense in
arguing against such vaticinatory fanfaronade, since it promised to all
inefficient persons that which they preferred to believe in. Everywhere
in the world people were expecting the latter coming of one or another
kickshaw messiah who would remove the discomforts which they themselves
were either too lazy or too incompetent to deal with; and nobody had
anything whatever to gain by electing for peculiarity among one’s fellow
creatures and a gloomier outlook.

Even Coth saw that. So the bald realist looked over his cellar and the
later produce among his vassals in the way of likely girls; he gave such
orders as seemed best in the light of both inspections; and he settled
down as comfortably as might be to the task of making old bones in this
land of madmen. He might at least look forward to the requisite creature
comforts to be derived from these bins and amiable spry bedfellows. His
Azra was no more trying than most wives; and his young Jurgen, after
all, might turn out better than seemed probable.

So Coth in the end let maudlin imbeciles proclaim whatsoever they
elected about the glorious stay upon earth and the second coming of
Manuel the Redeemer, and Coth answered them at worst with inarticulate
growlings. But that the old bear’s love for Poictesme remained unchanged
was evinced by the zeal with which he now caused his two homes
superabundantly to be adorned with the arms of Poictesme, so that at
every turn your eye fell upon the rampant silver stallion and the land’s
famous motto, _Mundus vult decipi_. Such patriotism showed, said
everybody, that, for all his fault-finding, Coth’s heart was in the
right place.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _29._
                       _The Grumbler’s Progress_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


AND the tale is still of Coth, telling how he avoided Niafer’s court,
and the decorums and the pieties which were in fashion there, and how he
debauched reasonably in his own citadels.

He fought no more, but he did not lack for other pleasures. He hunted in
the Forest of Acaire; and, in his rich coat of fox fur, he rode
frequently with hounds and falcons about the plains of the Roigne. He
maintained an excellent pit in which wild boars and bears contended and
killed one another for his diversion. When the weather was warm he
drank, and he amused himself at dice and backgammon in his well-ordered
orchard: in winter he sat snug under the carved hood of his huge
fireplace; and it was thus that for his health’s sake he was cozily
cupped and bled, while the Alderman of St. Didol drank quietly and
insatiably.

Then, too, it amused Coth now and then to execute a vassal or so upon
his handsome gallows,—that notorious gallows supported with four posts,
although his rank as Alderman entitled him to only two posts,—because
this bit of arrogance, in the matter of those two extra posts, was a
continuous great source of anger to his nominal sovereign, Madame
Niafer. But his main recreation, after all, Coth found in emulating
those very ancient and most famous monarchs Jupiter and David in a
constant change of women; and the fine girls of Poictesme remained as
always a lively joy to him.

And daily, too, the Alderman of St. Didol squabbled with his wife and
son; and, since he could discover profuse grounds everywhere for
fault-finding, was comfortable enough.

To his sardonic bent it was at this period amusing to note how staidly
Poictesme thrived by virtue of the land’s faith in Poictesme’s Redeemer,
who had removed all troubles and obligations in the past, and who by and
by would be coming again, no doubt to wipe similarly clean the moral
slate; so that there was no real need to worry about the future, nor
about any little personal misdemeanor (which had not become
embarrassingly public), since this would of course be included in the
general amnesty when Manuel returned to take charge of his people’s
affairs.

And yet there was another and more troubling side. The younger, here and
there, were beginning, within moderation, to emulate that Manuel who had
never lived. For Coth saw that too. He saw young persons—here and
there,—displaying traits and customs strange if not virtually unknown to
the old reprobate’s varied experience. Civility, for one thing, was
rather sickeningly pandemic: you saw fine strapping lads, differing in
opinion about this, that or the other, who, instead of resorting
sensibly to a duel, stopped—who positively sat down side by side—to
examine each the other’s point of view, and after that, as often as not,
talked themselves out of fighting at all. That was because of the fame
of Manuel’s uniform civility, which, indeed, the rogue had displayed,
and had made excellent profit of.

But you saw, too, people pardoning and even befriending persons who had
affronted or injured them, and doing this because of the fame of
Manuel’s loving kindliness toward his fellows: everywhere you saw that
wholly groundless notion flowering also into a squeamishness about
taking any other person’s property away from him, even when you really
wanted it. You saw bodily sound young men avoiding, or at any rate
stinting, the normal pleasures of youth, alike among their peers and in
bed, because of the famousness of Dom Manuel’s sobriety and chastity:
and you saw milksops, in fine, giving up all the really intelligent
vices because of that slanderous rumor about Manuel’s addiction to the
virtues.

It was not, either—not altogether,—that the young fools thought they had
much to gain by these eccentricities. They had, somehow, been tempted
into emulation by this nonsense about Manuel’s virtues. And then they
had—still somehow, still quite unexplainably,—found pleasure in it. Coth
granted this rather forlornly: these young people were getting a calm
and temperate, but a positive, gratification out of being virtuous.
There must, then, lurk somewhere deep hidden in humanity a certain trend
to perverse delight in thus denying and curbing its own human appetites.
And since the comparatively intelligent and unregenerate persons were
all profiting by their fellows’ increased forbearance, altogether
everybody was reaping benefit.

This damnable new generation was, because of its insane aspiring,
happier than its fathers had been under the reign of candor and
common-sense. This moonstruck legend of Manuel was bringing, not to be
sure any omnipresent and unendurable perfection, but an undeniable
increase of tranquillity and contentment to all Poictesme. Coth saw that
too.

He remembered what his true liege-lord had said to him in the Place of
the Dead: and Coth admitted that, say what you might as to the Manuel
who had really lived, the squinting rascal did as a rule know what he
was talking about.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _30._
                         _Havoc of Bad Habits_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NEWS as to court affairs and the rest of the province came now to Coth,
in his two lairs at Haut Belpaysage, belatedly and rarely. Yet at this
time he heard that Anavalt the Courteous had gone out of Poictesme with
as little warning as the other lords of the Silver Stallion had accorded
their intimates when Gonfal and Kerin and Miramon, and Coth himself, had
each gone out of the land after Manuel’s passing.

These overnight evasions appeared to be becoming a habit, Coth said to
his wife Azra, so you had best cherish me in the night season while you
may, instead of shrieking out nonsense about my hands being so cold. She
replied with an uxorial generality as to sore-headed bears and
snapping-turtles and porcupines, which really was not misplaced. And it
was not for a long while that any tidings were had of Anavalt the
Courteous, and the riddle of his evasion was unraveled,[1] but at the
last the news came as to the end which Anavalt had found near a windmill
in the Wood of Elfhame, in his courtship of the mistress of that
sinister and superficial forest.

Footnote 1:

  Among other places, in a volume called _Straws and Prayer-Books_.

“At his age, too! and with a woman too thin to keep him warm!” said
Coth. “It simply shows you, my dear son, what comes of lecherous habits,
and I trust you may profit by it, for the world is very full of such
deceits.”

And Coth, for his Jurgen’s benefit, piously indicated the motto which
you encountered at well-nigh every turn in Coth’s two homes, along with
the stallion rampant in every member.

Nevertheless, Coth was unhappier than he showed. He had loved Anavalt in
the days when these two had served together under the banner of the
Silver Stallion. It seemed to Coth that in dark Elfhame a handsome and
fine-spoken and kindly rascal had been trapped and devoured rather
wastefully. Nor was it cheering to consider that, now, but five of the
great fellowship remained alive.... Meanwhile, in rearing a son
judiciously, one must preserve the proper moral tone.

And Coth heard also, at about this time, of the magic which had been put
upon King Helmas the Deep-Minded, that monarch whom, as people said, Dom
Manuel in the old days had bamboozled into giving Manuel a fine start in
life. Coth heard of how this magic had been put upon Helmas by his own
daughter Mélusine, and of the notable transfer of the king’s castle and
person and entire entourage from out of Albania to the high place at
Brunbelois, in the impenetrable Forest of Acaire, where the ill-fated
court of Helmas now all stayed enchanted, people said.

And Coth drew the moral. “It shows you what parents may expect of their
children,” he remarked, with a malevolent glance toward his adored
Jurgen. “It shows you what comes of this habit of indulging children.”

“Now, Father—” said the boy.

“Stop storming at me! How dare you attempt to bulldoze me, sir! Do you
take me for another Helmas!”

“But, Father—”

“Get out of my sight, you quarrelsome puppy! I will not be thus
deafened. Get back to that Dorothy of yours! You care for nobody else,”
said jealous old Coth.

“Now, Father—”

“And must you still be arguing with me! Do you think there is no end to
my patience? What is there to argue about? The puppy follows the bitch.
That is natural.”

“But, Father, how can you—!”

“Get out of my sight before I break every bone in your body! Get back to
that cold sanctimonious court and to your hot wench!” said Coth.

Yet all the while that he spoke with such fluency Coth’s heart was
troubled. Of course, in rearing a son judiciously, one must preserve the
proper moral tone. Nevertheless, Coth felt, at heart, that he might be
taking the wrong way with the boy, and was being almost brusque.

But Coth was Coth. That was his doom. He had only one way.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _31._
                       _Other Paternal Apothegms_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW Jurgen went very often to court, since the boy at twenty-one was
fathoms deep in love with Count Manuel’s second daughter, whom they
called Dorothy la Désirée. Coth saw her but once: and, even over and
above his rage at the thought of sharing Jurgen with anybody, Coth was
honestly moved, in the light of his considerable boudoir experience, to
uncivil prophecy. He was upon this occasion, in the main hall at
Bellegarde, with dozens of persons within earshot, most embarrassingly
explicit with Jurgen, alike as to the quality of Jurgen’s intelligence
and the profession which Coth desired no daughter-in-law of his to
practice.

The two quarreled. That nowadays was no novelty. The difference was that
into this quarrel Jurgen put all his heart. So the insolent,
overbearing, bulldozing young scoundrel was packed off to serve under
the Vidame de Soyecourt: and before the year was out Coth heard that
this Dorothy la Désirée was married to Guivric’s son Michael.

“This Michael is but the first served at an entertainment preparing for
the general public,” was Coth’s epithalamium.

And many rumors came back to Haut Belpaysage as to Jurgen’s doings in
Gâtinais, and, while they all seemed harmless enough, not all were
precisely what a father would have elected to hear. Coth considered, for
example, that Jurgen had acted with imprudence in thus hastily making
Coth a grandfather with the assistance of the third wife of the Vidame
de Soyecourt. Husbands had a sad way of being provoked by such
offspring, upon the wholly illogical ground that the provocation was not
mutual. Still, young people needed their diversions, and husbands, to
Coth’s experience, were not a dangerous tribe. What really fretted a
somewhat aging Alderman, however, was that such stories reached him
casually, and that from Jurgen himself he heard nothing.

Yet other gossip came too from the court at Bellegarde and Storisende,
as to how Manuel’s oldest daughter, Madame Melicent, was now betrothed
to King Theodoret, and how upon the eve of her marriage she had
disappeared out of Poictesme: and she was next heard of as living in
unchristian splendor far oversea, as—if you elected to put it more
gracefully than Coth did,—the wife of Miramon Lluagor’s son and
murderer, Demetrios.

“Why not?” said Coth. “Why should not snub-nosed Miramon’s swarthy lad
be having his wenches when convenient? Parricide is no bar to
fornication. They are sins committed with quite different weapons. And,
for the rest, all sons are intent to do what this one has succeeded in
doing. How, for that matter, did Dom Manuel, that famous Redeemer of
yours, deal with his own father Oriander the Swimmer?”

That, it was hastily explained to him by his wife Azra, was but a part
of the great Redeemer’s abnegation and self-denial. That was the
atonement, and the immolation of his only beloved father, in order to
expiate the gross sins of Poictesme—

“To expiate the sins of one person by killing another person,” replied
Coth, “is not an atonement. It is nonsense.”

Well, but, it was furthermore explained, this atonement was a great and
holy mystery; and, as such, it should be approached with reverence
rather than mere rationality. Yet this high mystery of the atonement
must undoubtedly symbolize the fact that, in order to attain perfection,
Manuel had put off the ties of his flesh—

To which Coth answered, staring moodily at his wife Azra: “I saw that
fight. He put off those ties of his flesh, and Oriander’s head from his
body, with such pleasure as Manuel showed in no other combat. And all
sons are like him. Have we not a son? Why do you keep pestering me?”

“I only meant—”

“Stop contradicting me!” But very swiftly Coth added, with a sort of
gulp, “—my dear.”

For Coth was changing. He hunted no more, he had closed up his bear-pit.
He seemed to prefer to be alone. Azra would very often find him huddled
in his chair, not doing anything, but merely thinking: and then he would
glare at her ferociously, without speaking; and she would go away from
him, without speaking, because she also thought too frequently about
their son for her own comfort.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _32._
                          _Time Gnaws at All_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THEN Emmerick came of age, and Madame Niafer’s rule was over, men said,
because the Count would be swayed in all things by his cousin, the
Bishop Ayrart of Montors, the same that afterward was Pope.

“The young church rat drives out the old one,” said Coth. “Now limping
Niafer must learn to do without a night-light and to sleep without a
halo on her pillow.”

But Ayrart’s supremacy was not for long, and Holy Holmendis remained
about the court, after all, because, at just this time, lean Holden the
Brave appeared at Storisende with a beautiful young gray-eyed stranger
whom he introduced as the widow of Elphànor, King of Kings. People felt
that for this Radegonde thus to be surviving her husband by more than
thirteen centuries was a matter meritorious of explanation, but neither
she nor Holden offered any.

The history of the love which had been between Radegonde and Holden is
related elsewhere[2]: at this time it remained untold. But now, at this
love’s ending, Radegonde found favor in the small greedy eyes of Count
Emmerick, and she married him, nor was there ever at any season
thereafter during the lifetime of Radegonde a question as to what
person, howsoever flightily, ruled over Poictesme and Emmerick. And
Radegonde—after a very prettily worded but frank proviso as to the
divine right of princes, which rendered them and their wives responsible
to Heaven directly, and to nobody else, as she felt sure dear Messire
Holmendis quite understood,—Radegonde thereafter favored Holmendis and
his wonder-working reforms, among the appropriate class of people,
because she considered that his halo was distinctly decorative, and that
a practicing saint about the court lent it, as she phrased the matter,
an air.

Footnote 2:

  See note upon page 145.

Coth heard of these things; and he nodded his great dome-shaped head
complacently enough. “A tree may be judged by its fruit. Now in England
Dom Manuel’s long-legged bastard by Queen Alianora has returned his
young wife to the nursery. He is to-day, they tell me,—in the approved
fashion of all sons,—junketing about foreign courts with the Lord of
Bulmer’s daughter. He, in brief, while the Barons steal England from
him, is intent upon begetting his own bastards—”

“But you also, my husband—”

“Do you stop deafening me with your talk about irrelevant matters! In
Philistia, Dom Manuel’s most precious bantling by Queen Freydis is
working every manner of pagan iniquity, and has brought about the
imprisonment, in infamous Antan, of his own mother, after having lived
with her for some while in incest—”

“Nevertheless—”

“Azra, you have, as I tell you for your own good, a sad habit, and a
very ill-bred habit also, of interrupting people, and that habit is
quite insufferable. A tree, I repeat to you, may be judged by its fruit!
Everybody knows that. Now, in our Poictesme, the increase of Dom
Manuel’s body has, thus far, produced two strumpets and a guzzling
cuckold—”

“But, even so—”

“You are talking nonsense. A tree, I say to you, may be judged by its
fruit! I consider this exhibit very eloquently convincing as to the true
nature of our Redeemer.”

Azra now answered nothing. And Coth fell to looking at his motto, rather
gloomily.

“It was not that I meant,” he said, heroically, by and by, “to be rude,
my dear. But I do hate a fool, and, in particular, an obstinate fool.”

Here too it must be recorded that upon the night of Radegonde’s marriage
old Holden had the ill taste to die. That it was by his own hand, nobody
questioned, but the affair was hushed up: and Count Emmerick’s married
life thus started with gratifyingly less scandal than it culminated in.

Coth heard of this thing also. He looked at his motto, he recalled the
love which he had borne for Holden in the times when Coth had not yet
given over loving anybody: and he mildly wondered that Holden, at his
age, should still be clinging to the fallacy that one wench was much
more desirable than another. By and large, thought Coth, they had but
one use, for which any one of them would serve, if you still cared for
such kickshaws. For himself, he was growing abstemious; and as often as
not, found it rather a nuisance when any of his vassals married, and the
Alderman of St. Didol was expected to do his seignorial duty by the new
made wife. Things everywhere were dwindling and deteriorating.

Even the great Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was wearing away, thus
steadily, under the malice and greed of time. Donander of Évre was
to-day the only one of Manuel’s barons who yet rode about the world, now
and then, in search of good fighting and fine women. All the best of the
fellowship were gone from life: the hypocrites and the fools alone
remained, Coth estimated modestly. For he and that boy Donander were, at
least, not hypocrites....

And very often, too, Coth would look at his wife Azra, and would
remember the girl that she had been in the times when Coth had not yet
given over loving anybody. He rather liked her now. It was a felt loss
that she no longer had the spirit to quarrel with anything like the
fervor of their happier days: not for two years or more had Azra flung a
really rousing taunt or even a dinner plate in his direction: and Coth
pitied the poor woman’s folly in for an instant bothering about that
young scoundrel of a Jurgen, who had set up as a poet, they said, and—in
the company, one heard, of a grand duchess,—was rampaging everywhither
about Italy, with never a word for his parents. Coth, now, did not worry
over such ingratitude at all: not less than twenty times a day he
pointed out to his wife that he, for one, never wasted a thought upon
the lecherous runagate.

His wife would smile at him, sadly: and after old Coth had been
particularly abusive of Jurgen, she would, without speaking, stroke her
husband’s knotted, stubby, splotched hand, or his tense and just not
withdrawing cheek, or she would tender one or another utterly
uncalled-for caress, quite as though this illogical and broken-spirited
creature thought Coth to be in some sort of trouble. The woman, though,
had never understood him....

Then Azra died. Coth was thus left alone. It seemed to him a strange
thing that the Coth who had once been a fearless champion and a crowned
emperor and a contender upon equal terms with the High Gods, should be
locked up in this quiet room, weeping like a small, punished, frightened
child.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _33._
                          _Economics of Coth_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


IN the months that followed, Coth wore a puzzled and baffled look. His
servants reported that he talked to himself almost incessantly. But it
was incoherent, uncharacteristic stuff, without any quarreling in it,
they said.... Coth at the last had well-nigh given over fault-finding.
He was merely puzzled.

For life, somehow, in some as yet undetected fashion, seemed to have
cheated him. It was not possible that, with fair play everywhere, life
would be affording you, as the sum and harvest of all, no more than
this. No sort of pleasure remained: girls left, and for that matter
found, you wholly frigid; wine set you to vomiting. You wanted, as if in
a cold cemetery of desires, one thing alone, nowadays.

Yet the son Jurgen whom Coth’s tough heart remembered and desired was
still frolicking about the pleasant and famous places of the world, with
no time to waste in sedate Poictesme: and Coth rather suspected that,
even now, in this sick unimaginable loneliness, were Jurgen to return, a
feebly raging Coth would storm at the lad and turn him out of doors. For
that was Coth’s way. He had only one way.... He reflected, now, Jurgen
was no longer a lad: it well might be, indeed, that pock-marked,
greasy-headed roisterer had ended living, with some husband’s dagger in
his ribs. The last news heard of Jurgen, though, was that he was making
songs in Byzantium with the aid of a runaway abbess, who at least had no
husband. And in any event, Jurgen would not ever return, because Coth
had come between the boy that had been and the leering, high-nosed
strumpet at Asch, who was reported to be rivaling even that poor Kerin’s
widow, Saraïde, in the great number of her co-partners in lectual
exercise.

“A pert pirate in all men’s affairs, a mere cockboat sailing under the
Jolly Roger!” was Coth’s verdict, as repeated by an eavesdropping page.
“This Madame Dorothy has had in her more”—he mumbled so that something
was lost—“than there are trees in Acaire. All the trees in Acaire are
judged by their fruits. This Dorothy is a very betraying fruit from the
rank tree of the Redeemer. This Dorothy has inherited from Dom Manuel
such lewdness as is advantageously suited to a warrior, but misbecomes a
young woman. It seems rather a pity that this light wagtail should ever
have come between me and Jurgen.”

Coth said this without any raging. He was merely puzzled.

For all, everywhere, appeared to have failed and deserted him. This Coth
had been in his day a hero: and none of that far-off adventuring seemed
much to matter now, nor could he quite believe that these things had
happened to the tired old fellow who went muttering about the lonely
Château des Roches, and was kept alive with slops of gruel and
barley-water. This tremulous frail wreckage was not, assuredly, the Coth
who had killed single-handed the three Turks at Lacre Kai, and who had
kidnapped the fat King of Cyprus and in the sight of two armies had hung
the crown of yet another king on the thorn-bush at Piaja, and who had
been himself an emperor, and who had held the White Tower at Skeaf
against the Comprachos, and who had put that remarkable deception upon
the enamored one-legged tyrant of Ran Reigan, and who had shared in so
many other splendid rough-and-tumble happenings.

There had been a host of women in these happenings, fine women, not to
be had at anybody’s whistle like the tow-headed Dorothys whom these
sanctimonious times were spawning everywhere to come between a father
and a boy with no real harm in him. And none of these dear women
mattered now.... Besides, it was not true to say that Jurgen had no real
harm in him. Jurgen had been violent and headstrong from the very first:
that was another pity, but Jurgen had taken after his mother in this,
old Coth reflected, and his mother had always been injudicious alike in
pampering and in rebuking Jurgen, with the result that Jurgen was
nowadays a compendium of all iniquity.

And the Manuel too whom Coth had loved was gone now, and was utterly
ousted from every person’s memory by that glittering tomb at Storisende,
where a Manuel who had never lived was adored as a god is worshiped. Yet
that, also, seemed not to matter. It was preposterous. But all the world
was preposterous: and nothing whatever could be done about it, by a
tired muttering old man.

People, no doubt, were living more quietly and more decorously because
of this fictitious Manuel whom they loved and this gaunt ranting
Holmendis whom they feared. But that too, to Coth, seemed not to matter.
People nowadays were such fools that their doings and the upshot of
these doings were equally unimportant, Coth estimated. If they succeeded
in worming their way into heaven by existing here as spiritlessly as
worms, Coth had not any objection, since he himself was bound for hell
and for the company of his peers in a more high-hearted style of living.

Coth fell a little complacently to thinking about hell, and about the
fine great sinners who would make room for him there, on account of the
Coth that had been, and about the genial flames in which nobody was
pestered by milksops prattling about their damned Redeemer. And
Manuel—the real Manuel, that squinting swaggering gray rogue whose
thefts and bastards and killings had been innumerous,—that Manuel would
be there too, of course; and he and Coth would make very excellent mirth
over those reforms which had ensnared all the milksops into heaven, even
at the high price of spoiling the Poictesme of Coth’s youth.

For those elder heroic days were quite over. Of the great fellowship
there remained, beside the hulk that was Coth, only Guivric and Donander
and Ninzian. Donader of Évre was now, they said, in the far kingdom of
Marabon, combining the pleasures of knight-errantry with a pious
pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas. And while Coth had always admired
Donander as a fighting-machine, in all other respects Coth considered
him a deplorable young fool, nor, after holding this opinion steadfastly
for twenty-five years, was Coth prepared to change it. Ninzian was a
sleek hypocrite, a half-hearted fellow who had stinted himself to one
poor pale adultery with a pawnbroker’s wife; and who flourished in the
sanctimonious atmosphere of these abominable times because he truckled
to Holmendis nowadays just as formerly he had toadied to Manuel. That
prim and wary Guivric, whom people called the Sage, Coth had always most
cordially detested: and when Coth heard—from somebody, as he cloudily
remembered, but it was too much trouble to recall from whom,—that old
Guivric too was now departed from Poictesme, it seemed not to matter.

Perhaps, Coth speculated, one of those troubled-looking servants had
told him Guivric was dead. Almost everybody was dead. And in any event,
it did not matter about Guivric. Nothing really mattered any longer....

All that Coth had ever loved was gone out of life. Gray Manuel, the most
superb and admirable of earthly lords (howsoever often the man had
needed a little candid talking to, for his own good), and peevish
tender-hearted wise Miramon, and courteous Anavalt, and pedantic
innocent Kerin (who had been used to blink at you once or twice, like
the most amiable of owls, before he gave his opinion upon any subject),
and Holden, the most brave where all were fearless, and indolent gay
Gonfal, whom you might even permit, within limits, to rally you, because
Gonfal was the world’s playmate,—all these were gone, the dearest of
comrades that any warrior had ever known, in that lost, far-off season
when the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had kept earth noisy with the
clashing of their swords, and had darkened heaven with the smoke of the
towns they were sacking, and when throughout the known world men had
talked about the wonders which these champions were performing with Dom
Manuel to lead them.

And so many splendid women too were gone: these days produced only your
flibbertigibbet Melicents and Dorothys and such trash. There were no
women nowadays like Azra, nor like Gunnhilda, nor like Muirnê of the
Marshes,—or like plump, ardent, brown Utsumé, or like Orgeleuse, that
proud lady of Cyprus, who had yet yielded in the end, or like Azra....
And Coth, chewing meditatively at nothingness, with sunken and toothless
lips, thought also about great-hearted Dame Abonde, and about little
Fleurette, and about Azra, and about Credhê, that jolly if remarkably
exigent Irish girl, and about tall Asgerda, and about Azra, and about
Bar, that treacherous but very lovely sea-wife, and about Oriande, and
about poor Felfel Rhasif Yedua, who had given all the hair of her body
and afterward her life, to preserve his life, and about Azra.

He remembered the girl that Azra had been, and he thought without any
joy about the scores of other delectable persons which Coth had known,
amorously and intricately, so very long ago. All these women were gone
out of living: one or two of them might perhaps as yet pretend to
survive in the repulsive skins of shriveled old lean ugly hags, and in
some remote chimney-corner or another might as yet be mumbling—with
sunken and toothless lips, like his own lips,—over nothingness; for
nothingness was now their portion too; and those close-kissing,
splendid, satiated, half-swooning girls whom Coth remembered, with
indelicate precision, now no longer existed anywhere.

And Jurgen, the unparalleled of babies, and that cuddling little lad
prattling his childish lies about Dom Manuel and ascents into heaven and
other nonsense to ward off a spanking, and that fine upstanding boy just
graduating into pimples in whom Coth had so exulted when Coth returned
from Tollan and the throne of Tollan,—his Jurgen in dozens upon dozens
of stages of growth,—now every one of these dear sons was gone. There
remained only a dissolute and heartless wastrel bellowing rhymed
nonsense and rampaging about the world wherever the grand duchesses and
the abbesses made most of him. Coth looked at his motto.

Life then, at utmost, after all the prizes of life had been gained, and
you were a looked-up-to and prosperous alderman, amounted to just this.
It profited nothing that you had been a tender and considerate father,
or a dutiful and long-suffering son who had boxed your father’s jaws,
when you last parted from him, only after considerable provocation,—or a
loving and faithful husband to the full extent of human frailty, or a
fearless champion killing off brawny adversaries like flies, or even an
emperor crowned with that queer soft gold of Tollan and dragging black
corrupted gods about the public highways. In the end you were, none the
less, a withered hulk, with no more of pride nor any hope of pleasure
nor any real desire alive in you; and you felt cold always, even while
you nodded here beside the fire; and there was not anybody to talk to,
except those perturbed-looking servants who never came very near you....

If you had only had a son, now, matters might be different.... Then Coth
recollected that he did, in point of fact, have a son, somewhere. It had
slipped his mind for the instant. But old people forget things, and he
was very old. Yes, a fine lad, that: and he would be coming in for
supper presently—extremely late for supper, with his hat shoved a great
way back on his black head, and with his boots all muddy,—and Azra would
scold him.... Only, it seemed to Coth that Azra, or somebody, was dead.
That was a pity, but it was too much trouble to remember all the pity
and the dying that was in the world; it was a great deal too much
trouble for an old man to keep these wearying matters quite straight in
his mind. And, besides, everybody died; there was for all an end of all
adventuring: and nothing whatever could be done about it.

Well, but at least one more adventure was yet to come, for the Coth who
could make no wheedling compromise with the fictions by which fools live
and preserve alike their foolish hopes and their smirking amenities. He
had, he felt, been sometimes rather brusque with these fools. But all
that was over, too. They went their way; and he was going his. And, once
that last adventure had been achieved, you might hope to settle down
comfortably with the swaggering and great-hearted sinners, and to be
stationed not too far from that gray squinting sinner who had been the
most dear and admirable of earthly lords; and to foregather with all
such fine rogues eternally among the genial and robustious flames, in
which there was no more loneliness and no more cold and no more
pettifogging talk about some Redeemer or another paying your scot, and
where no more frightened servants would be spying on you always....

The adventure came unheralded, for Coth died in his sleep, having
outlived the wife of his youth by just four months.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 BOOK SIX

                           IN THE SYLAN’S HOUSE

 “_Is it time for you to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house lie
                                 waste?_”
                              —HAGGAI, i, 4.


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                                 _34._
                    _Something Goes Wrong: and Why_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW the tale is of Guivric of Perdigon, more generally called the Sage,
who in the days after Anavalt went into Elfhame was chief of the lords
of the Silver Stallion who yet remained in Poictesme. And the tale tells
how it appeared to Guivric of Perdigon that something was going wrong.

He had not anything tangible to complain of. There was, indeed, no baron
in Poictesme more powerful and honored than was Guivric the Sage. He had
no need to bother over any notions about Manuel which in no way affected
the welfare of Guivric of Perdigon, and he had no quarrel with the more
staid and religious ordering of matters which now prevailed in
Poictesme. Guivric had, howsoever frostily, adapted himself to these
times, and in them a reasonably staid and religious Guivric had, thus,
thrived.

As Heitman of Asch, he still held as rigorously as he had held in
Manuel’s heyday, the fertile Piemontais between the Duardenez river and
Perdigon. He had money and two castles, he lived in comeliness and
splendor, he had wisdom and a high name and the finest vineyards
anywhere in those regions. He had every reason to be proud of his tall
prospering son Michael, a depressingly worthy young warrior, whose
superabundant virtues, modeled with so much earnestness after the Manuel
of the legend, caused Guivric to regard the amours of Michael’s wife
(and Manuel’s daughter) with quiet and unregenerate amusement. And
Guivric got on with his own wife as well, he flattered himself, as any
person could hope to do upon the more animated side of deafness.

Yet something, this prim and wary Guivric knew, was somewhere going
wrong. Things, even such prosaic common things as the chair he was
seated in, or his own hands moving before him, were becoming dubious and
remote. People spoke with thinner voices: and their bodies flickered now
and then, as if these bodies were only appearances of colored vapor. The
trees of Guivric’s flourishing woodlands would sometimes stretch and
flatten in the wind like trails of smoke. The walls of Guivric’s fine
home at Asch, and of his great fort at Perdigon also, were acquiring, as
their conservative owner somewhat frettedly observed, a habit of moving,
just by a thread’s width, when you were not quite looking at them; and
of shifting in outline and in station as secretively as a cloud alters.

Instability and change lurked everywhere. Without any warning well-known
faces disappeared from Guivric’s stately household: the men-at-arms and
the lackeys who remained seemed not to miss them, nor indeed ever to
have known of those vanished associates.

And Guivric found that the saga which the best-thought-of local bards
had compiled and adorned, under his supervision, so as to preserve for
posterity’s benefit the glorious exploits and the edifying rewards of
Guivric the Sage, was dwindling alike in length and in impressiveness.
Overnight a line here and there, or a whole paragraph, would drop out
unaccountably, an adventure would lose color, or an achievement would
become less clear-cut: and the high and outrageous doings in which
Guivric had shared as a lord of the Silver Stallion, these began, in
particular, to become almost unrecognizable. At this rate, people would
soon have no assurance whatever that Guivric the Sage had lived in
unexampled heroism and respectability and had most marvelously prospered
in everything.

And it was all quite annoying. It was as though Guivric, or else each
one of his possessions and human ties, were wasting away into a phantom:
and neither alternative seemed pleasant to consider.

Guivric locked fast the doors of the brown room in which now for so many
years he had conducted his studies and his thaumaturgies. He set out a
table, the top of which was inscribed with three alphabets. He put on a
robe of white: about his withered neck he arranged a garland of purple
vervain such as is called herb-of-the-cross. From seven rings he
selected—because this day was a Sunday,—the gold ring inset with a
chrysolite upon which was engraved the figure of a lion-headed serpent.

When this ring had been hung above the table, with a looped red hair
plucked long ago from the tail of a virgin nightmare, and when the wan
Lady of Crossroads had been duly invoked, then Guivric lighted a taper
molded from the fat of Saracen women and of unweaned dogs, and with the
evil flaming of this taper he set fire to the looped hair. The red hair
burned with a small spiteful sizzling: the gold ring fell. The ring
rolled about upon the table, it uncoiled, it writhed, it moved
glitteringly among the characters of three alphabets, passing like a
tortured worm from one ideograph to another, and it revealed to Guivric
the dreadful truth.

The Sylan whom people called Glaum-Without-Bones was at odds with
Guivric. This was not a matter which anybody blessed with intelligent
self-interest could afford to neglect.


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                                 _35._
                          _Guivric’s Journey_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


CERTAINLY Guivric the Sage, who cared only for himself, did not neglect
this matter. The prim and wary man armed, and rode eastward, beyond
Megaris; and fared steadily ever further into the East, traveling beyond
the Country of Widows and the fearful Isle of the Ten Carpenters. Then,
at Oskander’s Well, Guivric put off material armor. He put off even his
helmet, and in its stead he assumed a cap of owl feathers. He passed
through arid high pastures, beyond the wall of the Sassanid, he rubbed
lemon juice upon his horse’s legs and rode unmolested through the broad
and shallow lake, and thus came to the Sylan’s House. And all went well
enough at first.

Guivric had feared, for one thing, that the Norns would forbid his
entering into the mischancy place: but when he had tethered safely the
fine horse which Guivric was never again to ride upon, he found that the
gray weavers did not hinder him. They had not ever, they said, planned
any future for Guivric: and it was all one to them whether he fared
forward to face his own destruction or intrepidly went back to living
with his wife.

“But do you not weave the sagas and the dooms of all men?” he asked of
them.

“Not yours,” lean Skuld replied, looking up at him with pallid little
cold bright eyes.

Guivric thus passed the haggard daughters of Dvalinn; and the proud man
went onward, disquieted but unhindered. And in the gray anteroom beyond,
were the progenitors of Guivric disporting themselves, each in the
quaint manner of his bygone day, and talking with uneager and faded
voices about the old times.

Since none of these ancestors had ever heard or thought of Guivric, they
gave scant attention to him now. And to see them was upsetting, somehow.
One of these strangers had Guivric’s high thin nose, and another just
his long thin hands, and another his prim mouth, and another his
excellent broad shoulders. Guivric could recognise all these fragments
of himself moving at random about the gray room. He knew that, less
visibly but quite as really, his tastes and his innate aversions—his
little talents and failings and out-of-date loyalties, his quickness at
figures, his aptitude for drawing, his tendency to catch cold easily,
and his liking for sweets and highly seasoned foods,—were all passing
about this gray room.

A compost of odds and ends had been patched together from these
unheeding persons; that almost accidental patchwork was Guivric: the
thought was humiliating. There was, he reflected, in this gray room
another complete Guivric, only this other Guivric was not entire, but
moved about in scattered fragments. That thought, appeared to a
peculiarly self-centered person like Guivric, rather uncomfortable.

So Guivric went beyond his ancestors. Without delay the proud man passed
stiffly by the inconsiderate people whose casual amours had created him,
and had given him life and all his qualities, without consulting his
preference or his convenience, or even thinking about him.


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                                 _36._
                         _The Appointed Enemy_

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HE came to a door beside which a saturnine castrato sat drowsing over a
scythe. Guivric caught him intrepidly by the forelock; and tugging at
it, thus forced the gaunt warden in his pain to cry out, “Enough!”

“For time enough is little enough,” said Guivric, “and when you are
little enough, I can go safely by without killing time here. And that I
shall certainly do, because to spare time is to lengthen life.”

“Come, come now,” grumbled the ancient warden, “but these tonsorial
freedoms and this foolish talking seem very odd—”

“Time,” Guivric answered him, “at last sets all things even.”

Then Guivric walked widdershins in a complete circle about the old
eunuch; and so went on into a room hung with black and silver: and in
this place was a young and beautifully fashioned boy, with the bright
unchanging gaze of a serpent.

The boy arose; and, putting aside a rod upon which grew black poppies,
each with a silver-colored heart, he said to Guivric, “It is needful
that you should hate.”

Now, at the sight of this stranger, Guivric was filled with an
inexplicable wild rapture; and after shaping the sign of the River Horse
and of the Writing of Lo, he demanded of this young man his name.

But the other only answered: “I am your appointed enemy. There is
between us an eternal hatred; and should our bodies encounter we would
contend as heroes. But something has gone wrong, our sagas have been
perverted, and our spirits have been ensnared into the Sylan’s House,
and all our living wears thin.”

“Come, come, my enemy!” cried Guivric, “hatred—since, as you tell me,
this is hatred,—is throbbing in me now as a drum beats: and I would that
we two might encounter!”

“That may not be,” replied the young man. “I am only a phantom in the
Sylan’s House. I live as a newborn child in Denmark, I drowse as yet in
swaddling cloths, dreaming at this instant about my appointed enemy. Yet
in the life which you now have you will not ever go to Denmark: and by
the time that I am grown, and am able to wield a sword and to contrive
mischief against you, and to beset you everywhere with my lewd
perversities, the body which you now have will have been taken away from
you.”

“I am sorry,” Guivric said, “for in all my life, even in the rough old
times of that blundering Manuel— I mean, of course, that, although I was
privileged to share in the earthly labors of the Redeemer, in all my
life I have never hated before to-day. I have merely disliked some
persons, somewhat as I dislike cold veal or house-flies, without real
ardor. And very often these persons could be useful to me, so that,
through many little flatteries and small falsehoods, I must keep on
their good side. But I perceive now that, throughout the living which my
neighbors applaud and envy, I have needed some tonic adversary to exalt
my living with a great and heroic loathing.”

“I know, dear adversary! And I know too that all the life which I now
have must run slack because of an unfed lusting for my appointed enemy.
But affairs will go more grandly by and by, if ever we get out of the
Sylan’s House.”

“Heyday,” said Guivric, masterfully, “I am not going out! Instead, I am
going in, even to the heart of this mischancy place; and you must go
with me.”

But the lad shook his lovely evil head. “No: for, now that the Sylan is
about to become human, they tell me, at the heart of the Sylan’s House
is to be found pity and terror; and both of these must remain forever
unknown to me.”

“Well, but why?” said Guivric, “why need those two cathartics which
Aristotle most highly recommends remain forever unknown to you in
particular?”

“Ah,” replied the boy, “that is a mystery. I only know it is decreed—and
is decreed, for that matter, in the name of Eloim, Muthraton, Adonay,
and Semiphoras,—that my rod here as it was first raised up in Gomorrah
should possess quite other virtues than the rods of Moses and of Jacob.”

“Oh, in Gomorrah! So it was in that wicked city of the plain of Jordan,
my spoiled child, that they first spared the rod! I see. For is not that
rod to be used—thus?”

And Guivric showed with a discreet but obvious gesture what he meant.

The lad fearlessly answered him.


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                                 _37._
                           _Too Many Mouths_

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SO Guivric quitted his appointed enemy. And at the next door sat a
discomfortable looking dyspeptic, crowned and wearing an old shroud, and
huddled up, as if by spasms of pain, upon a tombstone, very neatly
engraved with the arms and the name and the parentage and the titles of
Guivric of Perdigon. Only the date and the manner of Guivric’s decease
remained as yet vacant. And the crowned toiler put aside his chisel, and
he grinned at Guivric rather pitiably.

“I really must be more careful,” observed this second warden, groaning
and fidgeting and shaking his fleshless head, but of necessity grinning
all the while, because he had no lips. “I am decreed, you see, to keep
no measure in my diet; I must eat sheep as well as lambs; and afterward
I find out only too plainly that there is not any medicine for death.”

Guivric, without a word of condolence, took out of his pocket a handful
of coins, and he selected from among the thalers and pistoles a newly
minted mark. This coin he tendered to the second warden, and the
tomb-maker accepted lovingly this shining mark. Then Guivric walked
widdershins in a circle about this warden also: and when the king of
terrors had been thus circumvented, Guivric went forward into the next
room. A sweet and piercing and heavy odor now went with Guivric, and
clung to him, and it was like the odor of embalming spices.

This room was hung with white and gold; and in this room a plump and
naked man, wearing only a miter, was praying to nine gods. He arose and,
after brushing off his reddened knees, he said to Guivric, “It is
needful that you should believe.”

“I wish to believe,” replied Guivric. “Yet when I ask— Well, but you
know what always happens.”

“Such, my dear errant son, is the accustomed punishment of unhallowed
curiosity. It should, equally, be looked for and overlooked. The
important thing is to believe.”

Guivric smiled rather bleakly now, beneath his cap of owl feathers. He
said, like one who repeats a familiar ritual, “What should I believe?”

Upon the arms and upon the chest and upon the belly, and everywhere upon
the naked body of the mitered man, opened red and precise-looking
mouths, and each mouth answered Guivric’s question differently, and in
the while that they all spoke together no one of these answers was
clear. The utmost which Guivric could distinguish in the confusion was
some piping babblement about Manuel the Redeemer. Then the mouths ended
their speaking, and closed, and became invisible. The mitered man now
seemed like any other benevolent gentleman in the middle years of a
well-fed existence, and he was no longer horrible.

“You see,” said Guivric, with a shrug. “You see what always happens. I
ask, and I am answered. Afterward I am impressed by the unusual
phenomena, and I am slightly nauseated: but I, none the less, do not
know which one of your countless mouths I should put faith in, and so
bribe it to smile at me and prophesy good things.”

“That does not matter at all, my son. You have but to believe in
whatsoever divine revealment you prefer as to what especial Redeemer
will come to-morrow, and then you will live strongly and happily, you
will go no longer as a phantom in the Sylan’s House.”

“Heyday!” said Guivric, “but it is you who are the phantom, and not I!”

The other for a moment was silent. Then he too shrugged. “With secular
opinions as to such unimportant and wholly personal matters no belief is
concerned.”

“I,” Guivric pointed out, “do not think this an unimportant matter. At
all events, each one of your mouths speaks to me with the same authority
and resonance: and in consequence, I can hear none of them.”

“Well, well!” said the plump mitered man, resignedly, “that sometimes
happens, they tell me, when the Sylan is at odds with anybody. But, for
one, I keep away from the Sylan, now that the Sylan is about to become
human, because I suspect that at the heart of the Sylan’s House abides
that which is too pitiable and too terrible for any of my mouths to
aid.”

“I do not know about your aiding such things or any other things,”
replied Guivric. “But I do know that, even though you dare not accompany
me, I intend to match my thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic; and
that we shall very shortly see what comes of it.”


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                                 _38._
                         _The Appointed Lover_

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NOW at the next door sat a fierce and jealous destroyer, with a waned
glory about his venerable Semitic head. The upper half of him was like
amber, his lower parts shone as if with a fading fire. He seemed forlorn
and unspeakably outworn. He looked without love at Guivric, saying,
“AHIH ASHR AHIH.”

“No deity could put it fairer than that, sir,” replied Guivric. “I
respect the circumstance. Nevertheless, I have made a note of your
number, and it is five hundred and forty-three.”

Then about this warden also Guivric walked widdershins, in a complete
circle.

“Issachar is a large-limbed ass,” said Guivric, soberly. “He has become
a servant under taskwork. Yet his is the circumambulation.”

Whereafter Guivric still went onward, into the next room: and Guivric’s
feet now glittered each with a pallid halo, for in that instant he had
trodden very near to God, and glory clung to them.

And in this room, which was hung with green and rose-color, white
pigeons were walking about and eating barley. In the midst of the room a
woman was burning violets and white rose-petals and olive wood in a new
earthen dish. She arose from this employment, smiling. And her
loveliness was not a matter of mere color and shaping, such as may be
found elsewhere in material things: rather, was this loveliness a light
which lived and was kindly.

Now this dear woman too began, “It is needful—”

“I think it is not at all needful, madame, to explain what human faculty
you would exhort me to exercise.”

Guivric said this with a gallant frivolity: and yet he was trembling.

And after a while of looking at him somewhat sadly, the woman asked, “Do
you not, then, remember me?”

“It is a strange thing, madame,” he answered, “it is a very strange
thing that I should so poignantly remember you whom I have not ever seen
before to-day. For I am shaken by old and terrible memories, I am
troubled by the greatness of ancient losses not ever to be atoned for,
in the exact moment that I cannot, for the life of me, say what these
memories and these losses are.”

“You have loved me,—not once, but many times, my appointed lover.”

“I have loved a number of women, madame,—although I have of course
avoided giving rise to any regrettable scandal. And it has been very
pleasant to love women without annoying the prejudices of their
recognized and legitimate proprietors. It enables one to combine
physical with mental exercise. But this is not pleasant. To the
contrary, I am frightened. I am become as a straw in a wide and rapid
river: I am indulging in no pastime: that which is stronger than I can
imagine is hurrying me toward that of which I am ignorant.”

“I know,” she answered. “Time upon time it has been so with us. But
something has gone wrong—”

“What has happened, madame, is that the Sylan is at odds with me; and
covets, so my dactyliomancy informed me, some one thing or it may be two
things which I possess.”

“The Sylan is about to become human. That is why your saga has been
perverted, and that is the reason of your having been ensnared as a
phantom into the Sylan’s House—”

“Eh, then, and do you also, madame, dismiss me as a phantom!”

“Why, but of course no person’s body may enter into this mischancy
place! The body which I have to-day, my appointed lover, is that of a
very old woman in Cataia, nodding among my body’s many children and
grandchildren, and dreaming of the love this life has denied to me. It
is a blotched and shriveled body, colored like a rotting apple: and the
bodies which we now have may not ever encounter. So all our living wears
thin, and the lives that we now have must both be wasted tepidly, as a
lukewarm water is poured out: and there is now no help for it, now that
the Sylan is at odds with you.”

“I go to match my thaumaturgies against his magic,” said Guivric
stoutly.

“You go, my dearest, to face that thing which is most pitiable and
terrible of all things that be! You go to face your own destruction!”

“Nevertheless,” said Guivric, “I go.”

Yet still he looked at this woman. And Guivric’s thin hard lips moved
restively. He sighed. He turned away and went on silently. His face
could not be seen under his cap of owl feathers, but his broad shoulders
sagged a little.


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                                 _39._
                    _One Warden Left Uncircumvented_

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BESIDE the next door lay a huge white stallion. And as Guivric
approached this door, it opened. Through the brown curtains came that
ambiguous young man called Horvendile, with whom Guivric, off and on,
had held considerable traffic during a forty years’ practice of
thaumaturgies.

The stallion now arose, before Guivric could walk widdershins about him,
and the stallion went statelily away. And Horvendile gazed after the
superb beast, rather wistfully.

“He, too,” said Horvendile, “goes as a phantom here. Is it not a pity,
Guivric, that this Kalki will not come in our day, and that we shall not
ever behold his complete glory? I cry a lament for that Kalki who will
some day bring back to their appointed places high faith and very ardent
loves and hatreds; and who will see to it that human passions are never
in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech and action. Ohé, I
cry a loud lament for Kalki! The little silver effigies which his
postulants fashion and adore are well enough: but Kalki is a horse of
another color.”

“I did not come into this accursed place to talk about horses and
nightmares,” replied Guivric, “but to attend to the righting of the
wrongs contrived by one Glaum-Without-Bones, who is at odds with me, and
who has perverted my saga.”

Now Horvendile reflected for an instant. He said, “You have then, after
so many years, come of your own will into the East, just as I
prophesied, to face the most pitiable and terrible of all things?”

Guivric answered, guardedly, “I cannot permit my saga to be perverted.”

Horvendile said then: “Nevertheless, I consider the saga of no lord of
the Silver Stallion to be worth squabbling over. Your sagas in the end
must all be perverted and engulfed by the great legend about Manuel. No
matter how you may strive against that legend, it will conquer: no
matter what you may do and suffer, my doomed Guivric, your saga will be
recast until it conforms in everything to the legend begotten by the
terrified imaginings of a lost child. For men dare not face the universe
with no better backing than their own resources; all men that live, and
that go perforce about this world like blundering lost children whose
rescuer is not yet in sight, have a vital need to believe in this
sustaining legend about the Redeemer: and the wickedness and the
foolishness of no man can avail against the foolishness and the fond
optimism of mankind.”

“These aphorisms,” Guivric conceded, “may be judicious, they may be
valuable, they may even have some kernel somewhere of rational meaning.
But, in any case, they do not justify my living’s having been upset and
generally meddled with by a lecherous and immodest Sylan who goes about
wearing not even a skeleton.”

Horvendile replied: “I can see no flaw in your way of living. You are
the chief of Emmerick’s barons now that Anavalt is gnawed bones in
Elfhame: you have wealth and rather more than as much power as Emmerick
himself, now that your son is Emmerick’s brother-in-law, and poor
Emmerick is married to a widow. You are a well-thought-of thaumaturgist,
and you are, indeed, excelled in your art by nobody since Miramon
Lluagor’s death. And you have also, they tell me, a high name for wisdom
and for learning now that Kerin has gone down under the earth. What more
can anybody ask?”

“I ask for much more than for this sort of cautious and secondary
excellence.” Guivric seemed strangely desperate. He spoke now, with a
voice which was not in anything prim and wary, saying, “I ask for the
man whom I can hate, for the priest whom I can believe, and for the
woman whom I can love!”

But Horvendile shook his red curls, and he smiled a little cruelly.
“Successful persons, my poor careful Guivric, cannot afford to have any
of these luxuries. And one misses them. I know. The Sylan too is, in his
crude and naïve way, a successful person. He is now almost human. He
cherishes phantoms, therefore, and I suspect these phantoms have been
troubling you with their nonsense, since it is well known that all
illusions haunt the corridors of this mischancy place into which
phantoms alone may enter.”

“Yet I have entered it,” Guivric pointed out.

“Yes,” Horvendile said, non-committally.

“And I now enter,” Guivric stated, “to the heart of it, to match my
thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic.”


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                                 _40._
                   _Economics of Glaum-Without-Bones_

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THEN Guivric passed through this door likewise; and so, with glowing
feet and with an odor of funereal spices, Guivric came into the room in
which was the Sylan. Glaum-Without-Bones looked up from his writing,
tranquilly. Glaum said nothing: he merely smiled. All was quiet.

Guivric noticed a strange thing, and it was that this room was hung with
brown and was furnished with books and pictures which had a familiar
seeming. And then he saw that this room was in everything like the brown
room at Asch in which now for so many years he had conducted his studies
and his thaumaturgies; and that in this mischancy place, for all his
arduous traveling beyond the Country of Widows and the fearful Isle of
the Ten Carpenters and the high Wall of the Sassanid, here you still
saw, through well-known windows, the familiar country about Asch and the
gleaming of the Duardenez river, and beyond this the long plain of
Amneran and the tall Forest of Acaire. And Guivric saw that this
Glaum-Without-Bones, who sat there smiling up at Guivric, from under a
cap of owl feathers, had in everything the appearance of the aging man
who had so long sat in this room; and that Glaum-Without-Bones did not
differ in anything from Guivric the Sage.

Guivric spoke first. He said:

“This is a strong magic. This is a sententious magic. They had warned me
that I would here face my own destruction, that I would here face the
most pitiable and terrible of all things: and I face here that which I
have made of life, and life of me. I shudder; I am conscious of every
appropriate sentiment. Nevertheless, sir, I must venture the suggestion
that mere, explicit allegory as a form of art is somewhat obsolete.”

Glaum-Without-Bones replied: “What have I to do with forms of art? My
need was of a form of flesh and blood. I had need of a human body and of
human ties and of a human saga of the Norn’s most ruthless weaving. We
Sylans have our powers and our privileges, but we are not the children
of any god; and so, when we have lived out our permitted centuries, we
must perish utterly unless we can contrive to become human. Therefore I
had sore need of all human discomforts, so that a soul might sprout in
me under oppression and chastening, and might, upon fair behavior, be
preserved in eternal bliss, and not ever perish as we Sylans perish.”

“Everybody has heard of these familiar facts about you Sylans,” returned
Guivric, impatiently, “and it is your stealing, in this shabby fashion,
of my own particular human ties that I consider unheard-of—”

“Yes, yes,” said Glaum, with some complacence, “that was done through a
rare magic, and through a strong magic, and through a magic against
which there is no remedy.”

“That we shall see about! For what has happened to me is not fair—”

“Of course it is not,” Glaum assented. “The doom which is now upon you
is no fairer than the doom which was upon me yesterday, to perish
utterly like a weed or an old tom-cat.”

“—And so I have come hither to match my resistless thaumaturgies against
your piddling magic, and to compel you to restore to me your
pilferings—”

“I shall restore to you,” Glaum stated, “nothing. And I have taken all.
Your saga is now my saga, your castles are my castles, your son is my
son, and your body is my body. Inside that body I intend to live
self-mortifyingly and virtuously, for some ten years or so; and then
that body will die: but by that time a soul will have sprouted in me, an
immortal soul which, you may be certain, I shall keep stainless, because
I at least know how to appreciate such a remunerative bit of property.
Thus, when your tomb becomes my tomb, that soul will of course ascend to
eternal bliss.”

“But what,” said Guivric, scornfully, “what if I do not consent to be
robbed of the salvation assured to me by sixty years of careful and
respectable living? and what if I compel you—?”

“I think that, in your sorry case, you should not speak of compelling
anybody to do anything. Nor is it altogether my doing that your house is
now the Sylan’s House. Self-centered and self-righteous man, you had no
longer any strength nor real desires, but only many little habits.
Nothing at all solid remained really yours, not even when I first set
about my magicking. Oho, and then you were an easy prey! and the human
ties you held so lightly slipped very lightly away from you who had so
long been living without any love or hatred or belief. For throughout
that over-comfortable while the strength and the desire had been oozing
out of you, and all your living wore thin. I had only to complete the
emaciation. And in consequence”—Glaum gestured, rather gracefully, with
Guivric’s long thin hands,—“in consequence, you go as a phantom.”

Guivric saw this was regrettably true. He saw it was as a slight grayish
mist, through which he was looking down unhindered at the familiar rug
behind him, that he now wavered and undulated in the midst of this room
in which he had for so many years pursued his studies without a hint of
such levity. Yet nothing was changed. Guivric of Perdigon still sat
there, behind the oak table with copper corners. Guivric of Perdigon
kept his accustomed place, palpable and prim and wary, as vigorous as
could be hoped for at his age, and honored and well-to-do, and, in fine,
with nothing left to ask for, as men estimate prosperity.

And the living of this Guivric was reasonably assured of going on like
that, for year after year, quite comfortably, and with people everywhere
applauding, and with nothing anywhere alluring you toward any rash
excesses in the way of emotion. It was from this established and
looked-up-to sort of living that a nefarious Sylan was planning to oust
Guivric the Sage; and to leave Guivric a mere phantom, a thing as
transitory and as disreputable—and of course, in a manner of speaking,
as free too, and as lusty and as ageless,—as the Sylan’s self had been
only yesterday.... For those abominable thieves and ravishers of maidens
did not grow old and vigorless and tired: instead, when the appointed
hour had struck, they vanished....

“Well, well!” said Guivric, and he now flickered into a sitting posture,
more companionably. “This sort of eviction from every human tie is
unexpected and high-handed and deplorable and so on. But we ought, even
when all else is being lost, to retain composure.”

The Sylan let him talk....

And Guivric went on: “So, you are indissuadably resolved, at the cost of
any possible conflict between my thaumaturgies and your magic, to leave
me just a disembodied intelligence! Do you know, Messire Glaum, I cannot
quite regard it as a compliment, that you refuse to take over my
intelligence! Yet you, no doubt, prefer your own intelligence—”

The Sylan let him talk....

But Guivric had paused. For the Sylan’s intelligence had, after all,
enabled Glaum to acquire—through howsoever irregular methods,—the utmost
that a reasonable mind could look for in the way of success and comfort
and of future famousness long after Glaum-Without-Bones had ascended to
the eternal bliss assured by a careful and respectable past. The Sylan’s
intelligence had gained for him the very best that any man could hope
for. There was thus no firm ground, after all, upon which any human
being could disrespect the Sylan’s intelligence.... It was only that
these Sylans, always so regrettably lewd and spry, did not ever grow old
and tired and vigorless: they did not ever, except of their own
volition, become disgustingly smug-looking old prigs: instead when the
appointed hour had struck, they vanished....

“—For your intelligence appears to me a very terrible sort of
intelligence,” Guivric continued, “and I have no doubt that your magic
is upon a plane with it. My little thaumaturgies could have no chance
whatever against such magic and such intelligence. Oh, dear me, no! So I
concede my helplessness, Messire Glaum, without mounting the high and
skittish horse of virtuous indignation. I avoid the spectacle of an
unseemly wrangle between fellow artists: and, in asking you to restore
to me the customary rewards of a thrifty and virtuous and in every way
prosperous existence, I can but appeal to your mercy.”

“I,” said the Sylan, “have none.”

“So I had hoped”—here Guivric coughed. “Anguish, sheer anguish, sir,
deprives me of proper control of my tongue. For I had of course meant to
say,” Guivric continued, upon a more tragic note,—“so I had hoped in
vain! Now every hope is gone. Henceforward you are human, and I am only
an unhonored vague Sylan! Well, it is all very terrible; but nothing can
be done about it, I suppose.”

“Nothing whatever can be done about it,—unless you prefer to court
something worse with those thaumaturgies of yours?”

Guivric was pained. “But, between fellow artists!” he stated. “Oh, no,
dear Glaum, that sort of open ostentatious rivalry, for merely material
gains, seems always rather regrettably vulgar.”

“Why, then, if you will pardon me,” the Sylan submitted, in Guivric’s
most civil manner when dealing with unimportant persons, “I shall ask to
be excused from prolonging our highly enjoyable chat. Some other time,
perhaps— But I really am quite busy this morning: and, besides, our wife
will be coming in here any minute, to call me to dinner.”

“I shall not intrude.” Vaporously arising, Guivric now smiled, with a
new flavor of sympathy. “A rather terrible woman, that, you will find!
And, Lord, how a young Guivric did adore her once! Nowadays she is one
of the innumerous reasons which lead me to question if you have been
quite happily inspired, even with the delights of heaven impendent. You
see, she is certainly going to heaven. And Michael too,—do you know, I
think you will find Michael, also, something of a bore? He expects so
much of his father, and when those expectations seem imperiled he does
look at you so exactly like a hurt, high-minded cow! Now it is you who
will have to live up to his notions, and to the notions of that fond,
fretful, foolish woman, and it is you who will be bothered with an
ever-present sense of something lost and betrayed—! But you will live up
to their idiotic notions, none the less! And I do not doubt that, just
as you say, the oppression and the chastening will be good for you.”

The Sylan answered, sternly, “Poor shallow learned selfish fool! it is
that love and pride, it is their faith and their jealousy to hide away
your shortcomings, it is the things you feebly jeer at, which will
create in me a soul!”

“No doubt—” Then Guivric went on hastily, and in a tone of cordial
encouragement. “Oh, yes, my dear fellow, there is not a doubt of it! and
I am sure you will find the birth-pangs well rewarded. Heaven, everybody
tells me, is a most charming place. Meanwhile, if you do not mind, just
for a minute, pray do not contort my face so unbecomingly until after I
am quite gone! To see what right-thinking and a respectably inflated
impatience with frivolity can make of my face, and has so often made of
my face,” reflected Guivric, as he luxuriously drifted out of the
familiar window like a smoke, “is even now a little humiliating. But,
then, the most salutary lessons are invariably the most shocking.”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _41._
                        _The Gratifying Sequel_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THUS the true Guivric passed beyond the knowledge of men: and the false
Guivric gathered up his papers and took off his cap of owl feathers and
prepared for dinner.

The wife and the son of Guivric from that time forth delighted in his
affection and geniality: and it was observed, for another wonder, that
Guivric of Perdigon had, with increasing age, graduated from a cool
reserve about religious matters into very active beneficence and piety.
The legend of Manuel had nowhere, now, a more fervent adherent and
expounder, because Glaum nourished his sprouting soul with every sort of
religious fertilizer. Nor was his loving-kindness confined to talking
about itself, for the good works of Glaum were untiring and remarkably
free-handed, since he had everything to gain by being liberal with
Guivric’s property.

The old gentleman thus became a marked favorite with Holy Holmendis: and
indeed it was Glaum who at this time, when Guivric’s ancient comrade
Kerin of Nointel came back into Poictesme, chiefly assisted Holmendis in
converting Kerin to the great legend of Manuel.

In fine, Glaum lived, without detection, in Guivric’s body; and
preserved it in unquestioned virtue, since a well-to-do nobleman is,
after sixty, subject to very few temptations which cannot be gratified
quietly without scandal. He died in the assurance of a blessed
resurrection, which he no doubt attained.

As for the true Guivric, nothing more was ever quite definitely known of
him. It was remarked, however, that for many years thereafter an amorous
devil went invisibly about the hill country behind Perdigon. The girls
of Valnères and Ogde reported that by three traits alone could the
presence of this demon be detected: for one thing, he diffused a sweet
and poignant odor, not unlike that of an embalmer’s spiceries; and, for
another, the soles of his feet had been observed, after dusk, to be
luminous. A third infallible sign of his being anywhere near you they,
with blushes and some giggling, declined to reveal.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                               BOOK SEVEN

                          WHAT SARAÏDE WANTED

                     “_None shall want her mate._”
                          —ISAIAH, xxxiv, 16.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _42._
                         _Generalities at Ogde_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW the tale tells that it was in the winter after Guivric’s encounter
with the Sylan that Kerin of Nointel returned into Poictesme to become
yet another convert to the great legend of Manuel; and tells also of how
for the first time men learned why and in what fashion Kerin had gone
out of Poictesme.

Therefore the tale harks back to very ancient days, in the May month
which followed the passing of Manuel, and the tale speaks of a season
wherein it appeared to Kerin of Nointel that he could understand his
third wife no better than he had done the others. But for that perhaps
unavoidable drawback to matrimony, he was then living comfortably enough
with this Saraïde, whom many called a witch, in her ill-spoken-of,
eight-sided home beside the notorious dry Well of Ogde. This home was
gray, with a thatched roof upon which grew abundant mosses and many
small wild plants; a pair of storks nested on the gable; and elder-trees
shaded all.

It was a very quiet and peaceful place, in which, so Kerin estimated,
two persons might well have lived in untroubled serenity, now that the
Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was disbanded, and a younger Kerin’s
glorious warfaring under Dom Manuel was done with forever.

Mild-mannered, blinking Kerin, for one, did not regret Dom Manuel’s
passing. The man had kept you fighting always, whether it was with the
Easterlings or the Northmen, or with Othmar Black-Tooth or with old
yellow Sclaug or with Manuel’s father, blind Oriander. It was a life
which left you no time whatever for the pursuit of any culture. Kerin
liked fighting, within moderation, with persons of admitted repute. But
Kerin, after four years of riding into all quarters of the earth at the
behest of this never-resting Manuel, was heartily tired of killing
strangers in whom Kerin was in no way interested.

So, upon the whole, it was a relief to be rid of Manuel and to be able
once more to marry, and to settle down at Ogde in the eight-sided house
under the elder-trees. Yet, even in this lovely quietude, the tale
repeats, the third wife of Kerin seemed every night to bother herself,
and in consequence her husband, about a great many incomprehensible
matters.

Now of the origin of Saraïde nothing can here be told with profit and
decorum: here it is enough to say that an ambiguous parentage had
provided this Saraïde with a talisman by which you might know the truth
when truth was found. And one of the many things about Kerin’s wife
which Kerin could not quite understand, was her constant complaining
that she had not found out assuredly the truth about anything, and, in
particular, the truth as to Saraïde.

“I exist,” she would observe to her husband, “and I am in the main as
other women. Therefore, this Saraïde is very certainly a natural
phenomenon. And in nature everything appears to be intended for this,
that or the other purpose. Indeed, after howsoever hasty consideration
of the young woman known as Saraïde, one inevitably deduces that so much
of loveliness and wit and aspiration, of color and perfume and
tenderness, was not put together haphazardly; and that the compound was
painstakingly designed to serve some purpose or another purpose. It is
about that purpose I want knowledge.”

And Kerin would reply, “As you like, my dear.”

So this young Saraïde, whom many called a witch, had sought, night after
night, for the desired knowledge, in widely various surroundings, from
the clergy, from men of business, from poets, and from fiends; and had
wakened in her talisman every color save only that golden shining which
would proclaim her capture of the truth. This clear soft yellow ray, as
she explained to Kerin, would have to be evoked, if ever, in the night
season, because by day its radiance might pass unnoticed and her
perception of the truth be lost.

Kerin could understand the common-sense of this, at any rate. And so
young Saraïde was unfailingly heartened in all such nocturnal
experiments by the encouragement of her fond husband.

“And do not be discouraged, wife,” he would exhort her, as he was now
exhorting upon this fine spring evening, “for women and their belongings
are, beyond doubt, of some use or another, which by and by will be
discovered. Meanwhile, my darling, what were you saying there is for
supper? For that at least is a matter of real importance—”

But Saraïde said only, in that quick, inconsequential childish way of
hers, “O Kerin of my heart, I do so want to know the truth about this,
and about all other matters!”

“Come, come, Saraïde! let us not despair about the truth, either; for
they tell me that truth lies somewhere at the bottom of a well, and at
virtually the door of our home is a most notable if long dried well. Our
location is thus quite favorable, if we but keep patience. And sooner or
later the truth comes to light, they tell me, also,—out of, it may be,
the darkness of this same abandoned Well of Ogde,—because truth is
mighty and will prevail.”

“No doubt,” said Saraïde: “but throughout all the long while between now
and then, my Kerin, you will be voicing just such sentiments!”

“—For truth is stranger than fiction. Yes, and as Lactantius tells us,
truth will sometimes come even out of the devil’s mouth.”

Saraïde fidgeted. And what now came out of her own angelic mouth was a
yawn.

“Truth is not easily found,” her Kerin continued. “The truth is hard to
come to: roses and truth have thorns about them.”

“Perhaps,” said Saraïde. “But against banalities a married woman has no
protection whatever!”

“Yet truth,” now Kerin went on with his kindly encouragement, “may
languish, but can never perish. Isidore of Seville records the fine
saying that, though malice may darken truth, it cannot put it out.”

“Husband of mine,” said Saraïde, “sometimes I find your wisdom such that
I wonder how I ever came to marry you!”

But Kerin waved aside her tribute modestly. “It is merely that I, too,
admire the truth. For truth is the best buckler. Truth never grows old.
Truth, in the words of Tertullian, seeks no corners. Truth makes the
devil blush.”

“Good Lord!” said Saraïde. And for no reason at all she stamped her
foot.

“—So everybody, in whatsoever surroundings, ought to be as truthful as I
am now, my pet, in observing that this hour is considerably past our
usual hour for supper, and that I have had rather a hard day of it—”

But Saraïde had gone from him, as if in meditation, toward the curbing
about the great and bottomless Well of Ogde. “Among these general
observations, about devils and bucklers and supper time, I find only one
which may perhaps be helpful. Truth lies, you tell me, at the bottom of
a well just such as this well.”

“That is the contention alike of Cleanthes and of Democritos the
derider.”

“May the truth not lie indeed, then, just as you suggested, at the
bottom of this identical well? For the Zhar-Ptitza alone knows the truth
about all things, and I recall an old legend that the bird who has the
true wisdom used to nest in this part of Poictesme.”

Kerin looked over the stone ledge about the great and bottomless Well of
Ogde, peering downward as far as might be. “I consider it improbable,
dear wife, that the Zhar-Ptitza, who is everywhere known to be the most
wise and most ancient of birds and of all living creatures, would select
such a cheerless looking hole to live in. Still, you never can tell: the
wise affect profundity; and this well is known to be deep beyond the
knowledge of man. Now nature, as Cicero informs us, _in profundo
veritatem penitus abstruserit_—”

“Good Lord!” said Saraïde again, but with more emphasis. “Do you slip
down there, then, like a dear fellow, and find the truth for me.”

Saying this, she clapped both hands to his backside, and she pushed her
husband into the great and bottomless Well of Ogde.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _43._
                     _Prayer and the Lizard Maids_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THE unexpectedness of it all, alike of Saraïde’s assault and of the
astonishing discovery that you could fall for hundreds after hundreds of
feet, full upon your head, without getting even a bruise, a little
bewildered Kerin when he first sat up at the bottom of the dry well. He
shouted cheerily, “Wife, wife, I am not hurt a bit!” because the fact
seemed so remarkably fortunate and so unaccountable.

But at once large stones began to fall everywhere about him, as though
Saraïde upon hearing his voice had begun desperately to heave these
stones into the well. Kerin thought this an inordinate manner of
spurring him onward in the quest of knowledge and truth, because the
habitual impetuosity of Saraïde, when thus expressed with cobblestones,
would infallibly have been his death had he not sought shelter in the
opening he very luckily found to the southwest side. There was really no
understanding these women who married you, Kerin reflected, as after
crawling for a while upon hands and feet, he came to a yet larger
opening, in which he could stand erect.

But this passage led Kerin presently to an underground lake, which
filled all that part of the cavern, so that he could venture no farther.
Instead, he sat down upon the borders of these gloomy and endless
looking waters. He could see these waters because of the many ignes
fatui, such as are called corpse candles, which flickered and danced
above the dark lake’s surface everywhere.

Kerin in such dismal circumstances began to pray. He loyally gave
precedence to his own faith, and said, first, all the prayers of his
church that he could remember. He addressed such saints as seemed
appropriate, and when, after the liveliest representation of Kerin’s
plight, sixteen of them had failed, in any visible way to intervene,
then Kerin tried the Angels, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions,
Virtues, Powers, Principalities, and Archangels.

Yet later, when no response whatever was vouchsafed by any member of
this celestial hierarchy, Kerin inferred that he had, no doubt, in
falling so far, descended into heretical regions and into the nefarious
control of unchristian deities. So he now prayed to all the accursed
gods of the heathen that he could remember as being most potent in dark
places. He prayed to Aïdoneus the Laughterless, the Much-Receiving, the
People-Collecting, the Invincible and the Hateful; to the implacable
Kerês, those most dreadful cave-dwellers who are nourished by the blood
of slain warriors; to the gloom-roaming Erinnyes, to the Gray-Maids, to
the Snatchers, and, most fervently, to Korê, that hidden and very lovely
sable-vested Virgin to whom belonged, men said, all the dim underworld.

But nothing happened.

Then Kerin tried new targets for his praying. He addressed himself to
Susanoö, that emperor of darkness who was used to beget children by
chewing up a sword and spitting out the pieces; to Ekchuah, the Old
Black One, who at least chewed nothing with his one tooth; to the red
Maruts, patched together from the bits of a shattered divine embryo; to
Onniont, the great, horned, brown and yellow serpent, whose lair might
well be hereabouts; to Tethra, yet another master of underground places;
to Apep also, and to Set, and to Uhat, the Chief of Scorpions; to
Camazotz, the Ruler of Bats; to Fenris, the wolf who waited somewhere in
a cave very like this cave, against the oncoming time when Fenris will
overthrow and devour God the All-Mighty Father; and to Sraosha, who has
charge of all worlds during the night season.

And still nothing happened: and Kerin could see only endless looking
waters and, above them, those monotonously dancing corpse candles.

Kerin nevertheless well knew, as a loyal son of the Church, the efficacy
of prayer; and he now began, in consequence, to pray to the corpse
candles, because these might, he reflected, rank as deities in this
peculiarly depressing place. And his comfort was considerable when,
after an ave or two, some of these drifting lights came flitting toward
him; but his surprise was greater when he saw that each of the ignes
fatui was a living creature like a tiny phosphorescent maiden in
everything except that each had the head of a lizard.

“What is your nature?” Kerin asked, “and what are you doing in this cold
dark place?”

“Should we answer either of those questions,” one of the small monsters
said, in a shrill little voice, as though a cricket were talking, “it
would be the worse for you.”

“Then, by all means, do not answer! Instead, do you tell me if knowledge
and truth are to be found hereabouts, for it is of them that I go in
search.”

“How should we know? It was not in pursuit of these luxuries that we
came hither, very unwillingly.”

“Then, how does one get out of this place?”

Now they all twittered together, and they flitted around Kerin with
small squeakings. “One does not get out of this place.”

Kerin did not cry pettishly, as Saraïde would have done, “Good Lord!”
Instead, he said, “Dear me!”

“Nor have we any wish to leave this place,” said the small lizard-women.
“These waters hold us here with the dark loveliness of doom; we have
fallen into an abiding hatred of these waters; we may not leave them
because of our fear. It is not possible for any man to imagine the
cruelty of these waters. Therefore we dance above them; and all the
while that we dance we think about warmth and food instead of about
these waters.”

“And have you no food here nor any warmth, not even brimstone? For I
remember that, up yonder in Poictesme, our priests were used to
threaten—”

“We do not bother about priests any longer. But a sort of god provides
our appointed food.”

“Come, come now, that is much better. For, as I was just saying to my
wife, supper is a matter of vital importance, after a rather hard day of
it— But who is this sort of god?”

“We do not know. We only know that he has nineteen names.”

“My very dear little ladies,” said Kerin, “your information appears so
limited, and your brightness so entirely physical, that I now hesitate
to ask if you know for what reason somebody is sounding that far-off
gong which I can hear?”

“That gong means, sir, that our appointed food is ready.”

“Alas, my friends, but it is quite unbearable,” declared Kerin, “that
food should be upon that side of the dark water, and I, who have had
rather a hard day of it, should be upon this side!”

“No, no!” they reassured him, “it is not unbearable, for we do not mind
it in the least.”

Then the squeaking little creatures all went away from Kerin, flitting
and skimming and twinkling over broad waters which seemed repellently
cold and very dreadfully deep. Nevertheless, Kerin, in his
desperation,—now that no god answered his prayer, and even the ignes
fatui had deserted him, and only a great hungering remained with Kerin
in the darkness,—Kerin now arose and went as a diver speeds into those
most unfriendly looking waters.

The result was surprising and rather painful: for, as Kerin thus
discovered, these waters were not more than two feet in depth. He stood
up, a bit sheepishly, dripping wet, and rubbing his head. Then Kerin
waded onward in a broad shallow puddle about which there was no
conceivable need to bother any god.

Kerin thus came without any hindrance to dry land, and to a place where
the shining concourse of lizard-women had already begun to nibble and
tug and gulp. But Kerin, after having perceived the nature of their
appointed food, and after having shivered, walked on beyond this place,
toward the light he detected a little above him.

“For supper,” he observed, “is a matter of vital importance; and it
really is necessary to draw the line somewhere.”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _44._
                      _Fine Cordiality of Sclaug_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW Kerin seemed in the dark to be mounting a flight of nineteen stairs.
He came thus into a vast gray corridor, inset upon the left side with
nineteen alcoves: each alcove was full of books, and beside each alcove
stood a lighted, rather large candle as thick about as a stallion’s
body. And Kerin’s surprise was great to find, near the first alcove,
that very Sclaug with whom Kerin pleasurably remembered having had so
much chivalrous trouble and such fine combats before, some years ago,
this Sclaug had been killed and painstakingly burned.

Nevertheless, here was the old yellow gentleman intact and prowling
about restively on all fours, in just the wolflike fashion he had
formerly affected. But after one brief snarl of surprise he stood erect;
and, rubbing together the long thin hands which were webbed between the
fingers like the feet of a frog, Sclaug asked whatever could have
brought Kerin so far down in the world.

For Kerin this instant was a bit awkward, since he knew not quite what
etiquette ought to govern re-encounters with persons whom you have
killed. Yet Kerin was always as ready as anybody to let bygones be cast
off. So Kerin frankly told his tale.

Then Sclaug embraced Kerin, and bade him welcome, and Sclaug laughed
with the thin, easy, neighing laughter of the aged.

“As for what occurred at Lorcha, dear Kerin, do not think of it any more
than I do. It was in some features unpleasant at the time: but, after
all, you burned my body without first driving a stake through my
rebellious and inventive heart, and so since then I have not lacked
amusements. And as for this knowledge and truth of which you go in
search, here is all knowledge, in the books that I keep watch over in
this Naraka,—during the intervals between my little amusements,—for a
sort of god.”

Kerin scratched among the wiry looking black curls of Kerin’s hair, and
he again glanced up and down the corridor. “There are certainly a great
many of them. But Saraïde desired, I think, all knowledge, so near as I
could understand her.”

“Let us take things in the order of their difficulty,” replied Sclaug.
“Do you acquire all knowledge first, and hope for understanding later.”

The courteous old gentleman then provided Kerin with white wine and with
food very gratefully unlike that of the ignes fatui, and Sclaug placed
before Kerin one of the books.

“Let us eat first,” said Kerin, “for supper, in any event, is a matter
of vital importance, where knowledge and truth may turn out to be only a
womanish whim.”

He ate. Then Kerin began comfortably to read, after, as he informed
Sclaug, rather a hard day of it.

Now the book which Kerin had was the book written by the patriarch
Abraham in the seventy-first year of his age: and by and by Kerin looked
up from it, and said, “Already I have learned from this book one thing
which is wholly true.”

“You progress speedily!” answered Sclaug. “That is very nice.”

“Well,” Kerin admitted, “such is one way of describing the matter. But
no doubt other things are equally true: and optimism, anyhow, costs
nothing.”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _45._
                     _The Gander Also Generalizes_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


SO began a snug life for Kerin. The nineteen candles remained always as
he had first seen them, tranquilly lighting the vast windless corridor,
burning, but not ever burning down, nor guttering, nor even needing to
be snuffed: and Kerin worked his way from one candle to another, as
Kerin read each book in every alcove. When Kerin was tired he slept: all
the while that he waked he gave to acquiring knowledge: he had no method
nor any necessity of distinguishing between his daily and his nocturnal
studies.

Sclaug went out and came back intermittently, bringing food for Kerin.
Sclaug returned as a rule with blood upon his lips and chin. When Sclaug
was away, Kerin had to make the best—a poor best,—of the company of the
garrulous large gander which lived in the brown cage.

Then, also, unusual creatures, many of them not unlike men and women,
would come sometimes, during these absences of Sclaug,—whom, for some
reason or another, they seemed to dislike,—and they invoked the gander,
and paid his price, and ceremonies would ensue. Ever-busy Kerin could
not, of course, spare from his reading much time to notice these
ornithomantic and probably pagan rites. Yet he endured such
interruptions philosophically; because, at least, he reflected, they put
an end for that while to the gander’s perilously sweet and most
distracting singing.

And several years thus passed; and Kerin had no worries in any manner to
interrupt him except the gander. That inconsiderate bird insisted upon
singing, with a foolish, damnable sort of charm: and so, was continually
checking Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge, with anserine rhapsodies about
beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, and about a
variety of other unscientific matters.

“For life is very marvelous,” this gander was prone to remark, “and to
the wonders of earth there is no end appointed.”

“Well, I would not say that, precisely,” Kerin would reply,
good-temperedly looking up for the while from his book, “because geology
has made great progress of late. And so, Messire Gander, I would not say
quite that. Rather, I would say that Earth is a planet infested with the
fauna best suited to survive in this particular stage of the planet’s
existence. In any case, I finished long ago with earth, and with all
ordinary terrestrial phenomena, such as earthquakes, and the formation
of continents, and elevation of islands, and with stars and meteorics
and with cosmography in general.”

“—And of all creatures man is the most miraculous—”

“The study of anthropology is of course important. So I have learned too
about man, his birth and organization, his invention and practice of the
arts, his polities at large, and about the sidereal influences which
control the horoscope and actions of each person as an individual.”

“—A child of god, a brother to the beasts—!”

“Well, now, I question too the scientific value of zoömorphism: yet the
facts about beasts, I admit, are interesting. For example, there are two
kinds of camels; the age of the stag can be told by inspection of his
horns; the period of gestation among sheep is one hundred and fifty
days; and in the tail of the wolf is a small lock of hair which is a
supreme love charm.”

“You catalogue, poor Kerin,” said the gander; “you collect your bits of
knowledge as a magpie gathers shining pebbles; you toil through one book
to another book as methodically as a worm gnaws out the same advance:
but you learn nothing, in the wasted while that your youth goes.”

“To the contrary, I am at this very moment learning,” replied Kerin. “I
am learning about the different kinds of stone and marble, including
lime and sand and gypsum. I am learning that the artists who excelled in
sculpture were Phidias, Scopas and Praxiteles. The last-named, I have
just learned also, left a son called Cephisodotos, who inherited much of
his father’s talent, and made a notably fine Group of Wrestlers.”

“You and your wrestlers,” said the gander, “are profoundly absurd! But
time is the king of wrestlers; and he already prepares to try a fall
with you.”

“Now, indeed, those Wrestlers were not absurd,” replied Kerin. “And the
proof of it is that they were for a long while the particular glory of
Pergamos.”

At that the gander seemed to give him up, saying, after a little
hissing: “Very well, then, do you catalogue your facts about Pergamos
and stag-horns and planets! But I shall sing.”

Kerin now for a while regarded his fellow prisoner with a trace of mild
disapproval. And Kerin said:

“Yet I catalogue verities which are well proven and assured. But you,
who live in a brown cage that is buried deep in this gray and lonely
corridor, you can have no first-hand information as to beauty and
mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, you encourage people
in a business of which you are ignorant, and you sing about ardors and
raptures and, above all, about a future of which you can know nothing.

“That may very well be just why I sing of these things so movingly. And
in any event, I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create
to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to
destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me drunk with my very
potent music; they tread high-heartedly, in this gray corridor, and they
are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like
that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of
their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their
destinies.”

“Oh, but,” said Kerin, “but I finished long ago with the various schools
of morals, and I am now, as I told you, well forward in petrology. Nor
shall I desist from learning until I have come by all knowledge and all
truth which can content my Saraïde. And she, Messire Gander, is a
remarkably clear-sighted young woman, to whom the romantic illusions
which you provide could be of no least importance.”

“Nothing,” returned the gander, “nothing in the universe, is of
importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions
of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These
axioms—poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift!—are none the less valuable
for being quoted.”

“Nor are they, I suspect,” replied Kerin, “any the less generally quoted
for being bosh.”

With that he returned to his books; and the gander resumed its singing.

And many more years thus passed: overhead, the legend of Manuel had come
into being and was flourishing, and before its increase the brawling
bleak rough joyous times which Kerin had known, were, howsoever slowly,
passing away from Poictesme, not ever to return. Overhead, Count
Emmerick was ruling—inefficiently enough, but at least with a marked
bent toward the justice and mercy and kindliness imposed upon him by the
legend,—where Dom Manuel had ruled according to his own will alone.
Overhead, Dame Niafer and Holmendis were building everywhere their
shrines and convents and hospitals; and were now beginning, a little by
a little, to persecute, with the saint’s rather ruthless
miracle-working, the fairies and the demons and all other unorthodox
spirits aboriginal to this land; and were beginning, too, to extirpate
the human heretics who here and there had showed such a lack of
patriotism and of religious faith as to question the legend of Manuel
and the transcending future of Poictesme.

The need of doing this was a grief to Niafer and Holmendis, as well as a
troubling tax upon their hours of leisure: but, nevertheless, as
clear-headed philanthropists, they here faced honestly the requirements
of honest faith in any as yet revealed religion,—by which all
unbelievers must be regarded as lost in any event, and cannot be
permitted to continue in life except as a source of yet other immortal
souls’ pollution and ruin.

Meanwhile the gander also exalted the illusions of romance: and Kerin
read. His eyes journeyed over millions upon millions of pages in the
while that Kerin sat snug: and except for the gander’s perilously sweet
and most distracting singing, Kerin had no worries in any manner to
interrupt him, and no bothers whatever, save only the increasing
infirmities of his age.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _46._
                       _Kerin Rises in the World_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THEN old Sclaug said to Kerin, who now seemed so much older than Sclaug
seemed: “It is time for you and me to cry quits with studying: for you
have worked your way as a worm goes through every alcove in this place,
you have read every book that was ever written; and I have seen that
vigor which destroyed me destroyed. I go into another Naraka: and you
must now return, omniscient Kerin, into the world of men.”

“That is well,” said Kerin, “because, after all, I have been away from
home a long while. Yes, that is well enough, although I shall regret to
leave the books of that god of whom you told me,—and whom, by the way, I
have not yet seen.”

“I said, of a sort of god. He is not worshiped, I must tell you, by the
very learned nor by the dull. However!” Sclaug said, after a tiny
silence, “however, I was wondering if you have found in these books the
knowledge you were looking for?”

“I suppose so,” Kerin answered, “because I have acquired all knowledge.”

“And have you found out also the truth?”

“Oh, yes!” said Kerin, speaking now without hesitancy.

Kerin took down from its place the very first book which Sclaug had
given him to read, when Kerin was yet young, the book which had been
written—upon leaves of tree bark, with the assistance of a divine
collaborator,—by the patriarch Abraham when an horror of great darkness
fell upon him in the plain of Mamrê. This book explained the wisdom of
the temple, the various master-words of chance, the seven ways of
thwarting destiny, and one thing which is wholly true. And Kerin half
opened this book, at the picture of an old naked eunuch who with a
scythe was hacking off the feet of a naked youth gashed everywhere with
many small wounds; then turned to a picture of a serpent crucified; and,
shrugging, put by the book.

“—For it appears,” said Kerin, “that, after all, only one thing is
wholly true. I have found nowhere any other truth: and this one truth,
revealed to us here, is a truth which nobody will blame the patriarch
for omitting from his more widely circulated works. Nevertheless, I have
copied out every word of it, upon this bit of paper, to show to and make
glad the dear bright eyes of my young wife.”

But Sclaug replied, without looking at the proffered paper, “The truth
does not matter to the dead, who have done with all endeavor, and who
can change nothing.”

Then he told Kerin good-by; and Kerin opened the door out of which
Sclaug was used to go in search of Sclaug’s little amusements. When
Kerin had passed through this door he drew it to behind him: and in that
instant the door vanished, and Kerin stood alone in a dim winter-wasted
field, fingering no longer a copper door-knob but only the chill air.

Leafless elder-trees rose about him, not twenty paces before Kerin was
the Well of Ogde: and beyond its dilapidated curbing, a good half of
which somebody had heaved down into the well, he saw, through wintry
twilight, the gray eight-sided house in which he had been used to live
with the young Saraïde whom many called a witch.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _47._
                         _Economics of Saraïde_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


KERIN went forward, beneath naked elder boughs, toward his dear home;
and he saw coming out of the door of the gray house the appearance of a
man who vaguely passed to the right hand of Kerin in the twilight. But a
woman’s figure waited at the door; and Kerin, still going onward, came
thus, in the November twilight, again to Saraïde.

“Who is that man?” said Kerin, first of all. “And what is he doing
here?”

“Does that matter?” Saraïde answered him, without any outcry or other
sign of surprise.

“Yes, I think it matters that a naked man with a red shining about his
body should be seen leaving here at this hour, in the dead of winter,
for it is a thing to provoke great scandal.”

“But nobody has seen him, Kerin, except my husband. And certainly my own
husband would not stir up any scandal about me.”

Kerin scratched his white head. “Yes, that,” said Kerin, “that seems
reasonable, according to the best of my knowledge. And the word
‘knowledge’ reminds me, Saraïde, that you sent me in search of knowledge
as to why life is given to human beings, so that you might in the light
of this knowledge appropriately dispose of your youth. Well, I have
solved your problem, and the answer is, Nobody knows. For I have
acquired all knowledge. All that any man has ever known, I am now
familiar with, from the medicinal properties of the bark aabec to the
habits of the dragonfly called zyxomma: but no man, I find, has ever
known for what purpose life was given him, nor what ends he may either
help or hinder in any of his flounderings about earth and water.”

“I remember,” Saraïde said now, as if in a faint wonder. “I wanted,
once, when I was young and when the eye of no man went over me without
lingering, then I wanted to know the truth about everything. Yet the
truth does not really matter to the young, who are happy; and who in any
case have not the shrewdness nor the power to change anything: and it
all seems strange and unimportant now. For you have been a long time
gone, my Kerin, and I have lived through many years, with many and many
a companion, in the great while that you have been down yonder getting
so much knowledge from the bird who has the true wisdom.”

“Of whatever bird can you be talking?” said Kerin, puzzled. “Oh, yes,
now I also remember! But, no, there is nothing in that old story, my
darling, and there is no Zhar-Ptitza in the Well of Ogde. Instead, there
is a particularly fine historical and scientific library: and from it I
have acquired all knowledge, and have thus happily solved your problem.
Nor is that the end of the tale: for you wanted not merely knowledge but
truth also, and in consequence I have found out for you the one thing
which—according to Abraham’s divine collaborator, in a moment of
remarkable and, I suppose, praiseworthy candor,—is wholly true. And that
truth I have neatly copied out for you upon this bit of paper—”

But there was really no understanding these women who despatched you
upon hazardous and quite lengthy quests. For Saraïde had interrupted him
without the least sign of such delight and satisfaction, or even of
pride in her husband’s exploits, as would have seemed only natural. And
Saraïde said:

“The truth does not matter to the aged. Of what good is the truth to you
or to me either, now that all the years of our youth are gone, and
nothing in our living can be changed?”

“Well, well!” observed Kerin, comfortably, and passing over her defects
in appreciation, “so the most of our lifetime has slipped by since I
slipped over that well-curbing! But how time flies, to be sure! Did you
say anything, my dear?”

“I groaned,” replied Saraïde, “to have you back again with your frayed
tags of speech and the desolation of your platitudes: but that does not
matter either.”

“No, of course not: for all is well, as they say, that ends well. So out
with your talisman, and let us quicken the golden shining which will
attest the truth I have fetched back to you!”

She answered rather moodily: “I have not that talisman any longer. A man
wanted it. And I gave it to him.”

“Since generosity is a virtue, I have no doubt that you did well. But to
what man, Saraïde, did you give the jewel that in youth you thought was
priceless?”

“Does that matter, now? and, indeed, how should I remember? There have
been so many men, my Kerin, in the tumultuous and merry years that are
gone by forever. And all of them—” Here Saraïde breathed deeply. “Oh,
but I loved them, my Kerin!”

“It is our Christian duty to love our neighbors. So I do not doubt that,
here again, you have done well. Still, one discriminates, one is guided,
even in philanthropy, by instinctive preferences. And therefore I am
wondering for what especial reason, Saraïde, did you love these
particular persons?”

“They were so beautiful,” she said, “so young, so confident in what was
to be, and so pitiable! And now some of them are gone away into the
far-off parts of earth, and some of them are gone down under the earth
in their black narrow coffins, and the husks of those that remain
hereabouts are strange and staid and withered and do not matter any
longer. Life is a pageant that passes very quickly, going hastily from
one darkness to another darkness with only ignes fatui to guide; and
there is no sense in it. I learned that, Kerin, without moiling over
books. But life is a fine ardent spectacle; and I have loved the actors
in it: and I have loved their youth and their high-heartedness, and
their ungrounded faiths, and their queer dreams, my Kerin, about their
own importance and about the greatness of the destiny that awaited
them,—while you were piddling after, of all things, the truth!”

“Still, if you will remember, my darling, it was you yourself who said,
as you no doubt recall, just as you shoved me—”

“Well! I say now that I have loved too utterly these irrational fine
things to have the heart, even now, to disbelieve in them, entirely: and
I am content.”

“Yes, yes, my dear, we two may both well be content. For we at last can
settle down and live serenely in this place, without undue indulgence in
philanthropy; and we two alone will know the one truth which is wholly
true.”

“Good Lord!” said Saraïde; and added, incoherently, “But you were always
like that!”


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                                 _48._
                          _The Golden Shining_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THEY went then, silently, from the twilight into the darkness of the
house which had been their shared home in youth, and in which now there
was no youth and no sound and no assured light anywhere. Yet a glow of
pallidly veiled embers, not quite extinct where all else seemed dead,
showed where the hearth would be. And Saraïde said:

“It is droll that we have not yet seen each other’s faces! Give me your
foolish paper, Kerin of my heart, that I may put it to some use and
light this lamp.”

Kerin, a bit disconsolately, obeyed: and Saraïde touched the low red
embers with the paper which told about the one thing which is wholly
true. The paper blazed. Kerin saw thus speedily wasted the fruit of
Kerin’s long endeavor. Saraïde had lighted her lamp. The lamp cast
everywhither now a golden shining: and in its clear soft yellow
radiancy, Saraïde was putting fresh wood upon the fire, and making tidy
her hearth.

After that necessary bit of housework she turned to her husband, and
they looked at each other for the first time since both were young.
Kerin saw a bent, dapper, not unkindly witch-woman peering up at him,
with shrewd eyes, over the handle of her broom. But through the burning
of that paper, as Kerin saw also, their small eight-sided home had
become snug and warm and cozy looking, it even had an air of durability:
and Kerin laughed, with the thin, easy, neighing laughter of the aged.

For, after all, he reflected, it could benefit nobody ever to
recognize—either in youth or in gray age or after death—that time, like
an old envious eunuch, must endlessly deface and maim, and make an end
of, whatever anywhere was young and strong and beautiful, or even cozy;
and that such was the one truth which had ever been revealed to any man,
assuredly. Saraïde, for that matter, seemed to have found out for
herself, somewhere in philanthropic fields, the one thing which was
wholly true; and she seemed, also, to prefer to ignore it, in favor of
life’s unimportant, superficial, familiar tasks.... Well, and Saraïde,
as usual, was in the right! It was the summit of actual wisdom to treat
the one thing which was wholly true as if it were not true at all. For
the truth was discomposing, and without remedy, and was too chillingly
strange ever to be really faced: meanwhile, in the familiar and the
superficial, and in temperate bodily pleasures, one found a certain
cheerfulness....

He temperately kissed his wife, and he temperately inquired, “My
darling, what is there for supper?”


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                                 _49._
                           _They of Nointel_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THUS, then, it was that, in the November following Guivric’s encounter
with the Sylan, Kerin of Nointel came back into Poictesme, to become yet
another convert to the great legend of Manuel.

Kerin was converted almost instantaneously. For when the news of Kerin’s
return was public, Holmendis soon came that way, performing very
devastating miracles en route among the various evil and ambiguous
spirits which yet lurked in the rural districts of Poictesme. The saint
was now without any mercy imprisoning all such detected immortals right
and left, in tree-trunks and dry wells and consecrated bottles, and
condemning them in such exiguous sad quarters to await the holy Morrow
of Judgment. With Holmendis, as his coadjutor in these praiseworthy
labors, traveled the appearance of Guivric the Sage.

And when St. Holmendis and Glaum-Without-Bones (in Guivric’s stolen
body) had talked to Kerin of Nointel about the great cult of Manuel the
Redeemer which had sprung up during Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge
underground, and had showed him the holy sepulchre at Storisende and
Manuel’s bright jewel-encrusted effigy, and had told about Manuel’s
ascent into heaven, then old Kerin only blinked, with mild, considerate,
tired eyes.

“It is very likely,” Kerin said, “since it was Manuel who gave to us of
Poictesme our law that all things must go by tens forever.”

“Now, what,” said Glaum, in open but wholly amiable surprise, “has that
to do with it?”

“I have learned that a number of other persons have entered alive into
heaven. I allude of course to Enoch, whose smell the cherubim found so
objectionable that they recoiled from him a distance of five thousand,
three hundred and eighty miles. I allude also to Elijah; to Eliezer, the
servant of Abraham; to Hiram, King of Tyre; to Ebed Melek the Ethiop; to
Jabez, the son of Prince Jehuda; to Bathia, the daughter of a Pharaoh;
to Sarah, the daughter of Asher; and to Yoshua, the son of Levi, who did
not go in by the gateway, but climbed over the wall. And I consider it
quite likely that Dom Manuel would elect to make of this company, as he
did of everything else, a tenth.”

Thereafter Holmendis said, rather dubiously, “Well—!” And Holmendis
talked again of Manuel....

“That too seems likely enough,” Kerin agreed. “I have learned that these
messengers from the gods to our race upon earth are sent with
commendable regularity every six hundred years. The Enoch of whom I was
speaking but a moment since was the first of them, in the six-hundredth
year after Adam. Then, as the happy upshot of a love affair between a
Mongolian empress and a rainbow, came into this world Fo-hi, six hundred
years after Enoch’s living; and six hundred years after the days of
Fo-hi was Brighou sent to the Hindoos. At the same interval of time or
thereabouts have since come Zoroaster to the Persians, and Thoth the
Thrice Powerful to the Egyptians, and Moses to the Jews, and Lao Tseu to
the men of China, and Paul of Tarsus to the Gentiles, and Mohammed to
the men of Islam. Mohammed flourished just six hundred years before our
Manuel. Yes, Messire Holmendis, it seems likely enough that, here too,
Manuel would elect to make a tenth.”

Then pious gentle old Glaum-Without-Bones began to speak with joy and
loving reverence about the glories of Manuel’s second coming....

“No doubt, dear Guivric: for I have learned that all the great captains
are coming again,” said Kerin, almost wearily. “There is Arthur, there
is Ogier, there is Charlemagne, there is Barbarossa, there is Finn, the
son of Cumhal,—there is in every land, in fine, a foreknowledge of that
hero who will return at his appointed time and bring with him all glory
and prosperity. Prince Siddartha also is to return, and Saoshyant, and
Alexander of Macedon, and Satan too, for that matter, is expected to
return, for his last fling, a little before the holy Morrow of Judgment.
Here again, therefore, I consider it quite likely that Dom Manuel may
elect to make a tenth.”

In short, the old fellow took Poictesme’s epiphany almost too calmly....
Glaum was satisfied, on the ground that a conversion was a conversion,
and an outing for all the angels in heaven. But it was apparent that
Holy Holmendis did not quite like the posture of affairs.... You could
not, of course, detect in this incurious receptiveness any skepticism;
nor could a person who went ten times too far in the way of faith be,
very rationally, termed an unbeliever. It was, rather, as if Kerin
viewed the truth without joy: it was as if Kerin had, somehow, become
over-familiar with the sublime truths about Manuel the Redeemer some
while before he heard them; and so, was hearing them, now at long last,
without the appropriate upliftedness and flow of spirits. Kerin merely
accepted these tremendous truths; and seemed upon the whole to be more
interested in life’s unimportant, superficial, familiar tasks, and in
his food.

Holmendis must have felt that the desiderata here were intangible. In
any event, he shook his aureoled head; and, speaking in the tongue of
his native Philistia, he said something to Glaum-Without-Bones—which
Glaum could not at all understand,—about “the intelligentsia,
so-called.” But Holmendis did not resort to any dreadful miracle by
which old Kerin might have been appalled into a more proper excitement
and joyousness....

Yet it was a very unbounded joy, and a joy indeed at which all beholders
wondered, to Kerin of Nointel, when he saw and embraced the fine son,
named Fauxpas, who had been born to Saraïde during the fifth year of
Kerin’s studies underground. For Kerin’s studies had informed him that
such remarkably prolonged gestations are the infallible heralds of one
or another form of greatness,—a fact evinced by the birth of Osiris and
of several other gods and of all elephants,—and he deduced that his son
would in some way or another rise to worldly preëminence.

And that inference proved to be reasonably true, since it was this
Fauxpas de Nointel who led Count Emmerick’s troops for him in the evil
days of Maugis d’Aigremont’s rebellion, and held Poictesme for Manuel’s
son until aid came from the Comte de la Fôret. For twelve years at least
this son of Kerin was thus preëminent among most of his associates, and
twelve years is a reasonable slice out of any man’s life. And the eldest
son of Fauxpas de Nointel was that Ralph who married Madame Adelaide,
the daughter of the Comte de la Fôret, and the granddaughter of Dom
Manuel, and who builded at Nointel the great castle with seven towers
which still endures.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                               BOOK EIGHT

                          THE CANDID FOOTPRINT

       “_They have reproached the footsteps of thine anointed._”
                          —PSALMS, lxxxix, 51.

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                                 _50._
                      _Indiscretion of a Bailiff_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW the tale tells that upon the day of the birth of the first son
begotten by Count Emmerick, in lawful marriage and with the aid of his
own wife Radegonde, there was such a drinking of healths and toasts as
never before was known at Storisende. The tale speaks of a most notable
banquet, at which twelve dishes were served to every two persons, with a
great plenty of the best wine and beer. In the minstrels’ gallery were
fiddlers, trumpeters and drummers, those who tossed tambourines, and
those who played upon the flute. Ten poets discoursed meanwhile of the
feats of Dom Manuel, and presented in even livelier colors the impendent
achievements of the Redeemer’s second coming into Poictesme with a
ferocious heavenly cortège. And meanwhile also the company drank, and
the intoxication of verse was abetted with red wine and white.

Since the poems were rather long, all this resulted in an entertainment
from which the High Bailiff of Upper Ardra went homeward hiccoughing and
even more than usually benevolent, and without any consciousness of that
misstep which had imperiled his continued stay on earth.

For Ninzian of Yair and Upper Ardra had not wholly broken with the
heroic cenatory ways of the years wherein Dom Manuel ruled over
Poictesme. This seemed the more regrettable because Ninzian, always a
pious and philanthropic person, had otherwise become with age
appropriately staid. He in theory approved of every one of the reforms
enacted everywhere by the Countess Niafer, and confirmed by the Countess
Radegonde; and, in practice, Ninzian was of course a staunch supporter
of his revered and intimate associate, St. Holmendis, in all the
salutary crusades against elves and satyrs and trolls and other
uncanonical survivals from unorthodox mythologies, and against the
free-thinking of persons who questioned the legend of Manuel, and in the
holy man’s hunting down of such demons and stringing up of such
heretics, and in all other devout labors. But there, nevertheless, was
no disputing that the benevolent and florid bailiff of Upper Ardra had
kept a taint of the robustious social customs of Dom Manuel’s worldly
heyday.

It followed that Ninzian evaded none of the toasts at Count Emmerick’s
banquet and left no friend unpledged. Instead, sleek Ninzian drank the
wines of Orléans, of Anjou and of Burgundy; of Auxerre and Beaune, and
of St. Jean and St. Porçain. He drank Malvoisin, and Montrose, and
Vernage, and Runey. He drank the wines of Greece, both Patras and
Farnese; he drank spiced beers; he drank muscatel; and he drank
hypocras. He did not ignore the cider nor the pear cider; to the sweet
white sparkling wine of Volnay he confessed, and he exhibited, an
especial predilection; and he drank copiously, also, of the Alsatian
sherry and of the Hungarian tokay.

Thereafter Ninzian went homeward with a pleasurable at-randomness, for
which—in a so liberal contributor to every pious cause and
persecution,—appropriate allowances were made by St. Holmendis and
everybody else except one person only. Ninzian was married.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _51._
                            _The Queer Bird_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THE next evening Ninzian and his wife were walking in the garden. They
were a handsome couple, and the high-hearted love that had been between
them in their youth was a tale which many poets had embroidered. It was
an affection, too, which had survived its consummation with so slight
impairment that Ninzian during the long while since he had promised
eternal fidelity was not known to have begotten but one by-blow. Even
that, as he was careful to explain, was by way of charity: for
well-thought-of rich old Pettipas, the pawnbroker at Beauvillage, had
lived childlessly with his buxom young second wife for nearly three
years before Ninzian, in odd moments, provided this deserving couple
with a young heiress.

But in the main Ninzian preferred his own lean and pietistic wife above
all other women, even so long after he had won her in the heyday of
their adventurous youth. Now they who were in the evening of life were
lighted by a golden sunset as they went upon a flagged walkway, made of
white and blue stones; and to either side were the small glossy leaves
and the crimson flowering of well-tended rose-bushes. They waited thus
for Holy Holmendis, their fellow laborer in multifarious forms of church
work and social betterment, for the saint had promised to have supper
with them. And Balthis (for that was the name of Ninzian’s wife) said,
“Look, my dear, and tell me what is that?”

Ninzian inspected the flower-bed by the side of the walkway, and he
replied, “My darling, it appears to be the track of a bird.”

“But surely there is in Poictesme no fowl with a foot so huge!”

“No. But many migratory monsters pass by in the night, on their way
north, at this time of year: and, clearly, one of some rare species has
paused here to rest. However, as I was telling you, my pet, we have now
in hand—”

“Why, but think of it, Ninzian! The print is as big as a man’s foot!”

“Come, precious, you exaggerate! It is the track of a largish bird,—an
eagle, or perhaps a roc, or, it may be, the Zhar-Ptitza paused here,—but
it is nothing remarkable. Besides, as I was telling you, we have already
in hand, for the edifying of the faithful, a bit of Mary Magdalene’s
haircloth, the left ring-finger of John the Baptist, a suit of Dom
Manuel’s underclothes, and one of the smaller stones with which St.
Stephen was martyred—”

But Balthis, he saw now, was determined not to go on in talk about the
church which Ninzian had builded in honor of Manuel the Redeemer, and
which Ninzian was stocking with very holy relics. Instead, she asserted
with deliberation, “Ninzian, I think it is fully as big as a man’s
foot.”

“Well, be it as you like, my pet!”

“But I will not be put off in that way! Do you tread beside it in the
flower-bed there, and, by comparing the print of your foot with the bird
track, we shall easily see which is the larger.”

Ninzian was not so ruddy as he had been. Yet he said with dignity, and
lightly enough, he hoped:

“Balthis, you are unreasonable. I do not intend to get my sandals all
over mud to settle any such foolish point. The track is just the size of
a man’s foot, or it is much larger than a man’s foot, or it is smaller
than a man’s foot,—it is, in fine, of any size which you prefer. And we
will let that be the end of it.”

“So, Ninzian, you will not tread in that new-digged earth?” said
Balthis, queerly.

“Of course I will not ruin my second-best sandals for any such foolish
reason!”

“You trod there yesterday in your very best sandals, Ninzian, for the
reason that you were tipsy. I saw the print you made there, in broad
daylight, Ninzian, when you had just come from drinking with a blessed
saint himself, and were reeling all over the neat ways of my garden.
Ninzian, it is a fearful thing to know that when your husband walks in
mud he leaves tracks like a bird.”

Now Ninzian was truly penitent for yesterday’s over-indulgence. And
Ninzian said:

“So, you have discovered this foible of mine, after all my carefulness!
That is a great pity.”

Balthis replied, with the cold non-committalness of wives, “Pity or no,
you will now have to tell me the truth about it.”

That task did, in point of fact, seem so appallingly unavoidable that
Ninzian settled down to it, with such airiness as would have warned any
wife in the world exactly how far to trust him.

“Well, my darling, you must know that when I first came into Poictesme,
I came rather unwillingly. Our friend St. Holmendis, I need not tell
you, was, even in the time of Dom Manuel’s incarnation in frail human
flesh, setting such a very high moral tone hereabouts, and the holy man
is so impetuous with his miracles when anybody differs with him on
religious matters, that the prospect was not alluring. But it was
necessary that my prince should have some representative here, as in all
other places. So I came, from—well, from down yonder—”

“I know you came from the South, Ninzian! Everybody knows that. But that
appears to me no excuse whatever for walking like a bird.”

“As if, my dearest, it could give me any pleasure to walk like a bird,
or like a whole covey of birds! To the contrary, I have always found
this small accomplishment in doubtful taste, it exposes one to continual
comment. But very long ago those who had served my prince with especial
distinction were all put upon this footing, in order that true demerit
might be encouraged, and that fine sportsmanship might be preserved, and
so that, also, our adversaries in the great game might be detecting us.”

Now Balthis fixed on him wide, scornful, terrible eyes. After a
breathless while she said:

“Ninzian, I understand. You are an evil spirit, and you came out of hell
in the appearance of a man to work wickedness in Poictesme!”

And his Balthis, as he saw with a pang of wild regret, was horribly
upset and grieved to know the thing which her husband had so long hid
away from her; and Ninzian began to feel rather ashamed of not having
trusted her with this secret, now it was discovered. At all events, he
would try what being reasonable might do.

“Darling,” said he, with patient rationality, “no sensible wife will
ever pry into what her husband may have been or done before she married
him. Her concern is merely with his misdemeanors after that ceremony;
and, I think, you have had no heavy reason to complain. Nobody can for
one moment assert that in Poictesme I have not led an appallingly
upright and immaculate existence.”

She said, indignantly: “You had fear of Holmendis! You came all this
long way to do your devil work, and then had not the pluck to face him!”

Ninzian found this just near enough the truth to be irritating. So he
spoke now with airy condescension.

“Precious, it is true the lean man can work miracles, but then, without
desiring to appear boastful, I must tell you that I have mastery of a
more venerable and blacker magic. Oh, I assure you, he could not have
exorcised or excommunicated or tried any other of his sacerdotal
trick-work upon me without sweating for it! Still, it seemed better to
avoid such painful scenes: for when one has trouble with these saints
the supporters of both sides are apt to intervene; the skies are
blackened and the earth shakes, and whirlwinds and meteors and
thunderbolts and seraphim upset things generally: and it all seems
rather boisterous and old-fashioned. So it really did appear more
sensible, and in better taste, to respect, at all events during his
lifetime, the well-meaning creature’s religious convictions—in which you
share, I know, my pet,—and, well!” said Ninzian, with a shrug, “to
temporize! to keep matters comfortable all around, you understand, my
darling, by evincing a suitable interest in church work and in whatever
else appeared expected of the reputable in my surroundings.”

But Balthis was not to be soothed. “Ninzian, this is a terrible thing
for me to be learning! There was never a husband who better knew his
place, and the only baby you ever upset me with is at the pawnbroker’s,
and Holy Church has not ever had a more loyal servitor—”

“No,” Ninzian said, quietly.

“—But you have been a hideous demon in deep hell, and the man that I
have loved is a false seeming, and the moment St. Holmendis ascends to
bliss you mean to go on with your foul iniquities. That is foolish of
you, because of course I would never permit it. But, even so—! Oh,
Ninzian, my faith and my happiness are buried now in the one grave, now
that all ends between us!”

Ninzian asked, still very quietly: “And do you think I will leave you,
my Balthis, because of some disarranged fresh earth? Could any handful
of dirt have parted us when because of my great love for you I fought
the seven knights at Évre—”

“What chance had the poor fellows against a devil!”

“It is the principle of the thing, my darling,—as well as the
mathematics. Also, as I was going on to observe, you would never have
been flinging mud in my face when for your sake I overthrew Duke Oribert
and his deplorable custom of the cat and the serpent, and cast the
Spotted Dun of Lorcha down from a high hill.”

She answered without pity: “You will be lucky to get out of this mud
with a whole skin. For it is on this evening of the month that St.
Holmendis hears my confession, and I must confess everything, and you
know as well as I do of his devastating miracles.”

Ninzian, having thus failed in his appeal to the better qualities of his
wife, forthwith returned to soliciting her powers of reason.

“Balthis, my sweet, now, after all, what complaint have you against me?
You cannot help feeling that the no doubt ill-advised rebellion in which
I was concerned in youth, unarithmeticable æons before this Earth was
thought of, took place quite long enough ago to be forgotten. Besides,
you know by experience that I am only too easily guided by others, that
I have never learned, as you so eloquently phrase it, to have any
backbone. And I do not really see, either, how you can want to punish me
to-day for iniquities which, you grant, I have not ever committed,
but—so you assume, without any warrant known to me—have just vaguely
thought of committing by and by, and it may be, not for years to come—my
adorable pouting darling—because this stringy Holmendis seems tough as
whit-leather—”

Ninzian’s stammered talking died away. He saw there was no moving her.

“No, Ninzian, I simply cannot stand having a husband who walks like a
bird, and is liable to be detected the next time it rains. It would be
on my mind day and night, and people would say all sorts of things. No,
Ninzian, it is quite out of the question. I will get your things
together at once, and you can go to hell or over to that giggling
ill-bred friend of yours at the pawnbroker’s nasty shop, just as you
elect: and I leave it to your conscience if, after the way I have worked
and slaved for you, you had the right to play this wrong and treachery
upon me.”

And Balthis said also: “For it is a great wrong and treachery which you
have played upon me, Ninzian of Yair, getting from me such love as men
will not find the equal of in any of the noble places of this world
until the end of life and time. This is a deep wound that you have given
me. Upon your lips were wisdom and pleasant talking, there was
kindliness in the gray eyes of Ninzian of Yair, your hands were strong
at sword-play, and you were the most generous of companions all through
the daytime and in the nighttime too. These things I delighted in, these
things I regarded: I did not think of the low mire, I could not see what
horrible markings your passing by had left to this side and to that
side.”

Then Balthis said: “Let every woman weep with me, for I now know that to
every woman’s loving is this end appointed. There is no woman that gives
all to any man, but that woman is wasting her substance at bed and board
with a greedy stranger, and there is no wife who escapes the bitter hour
in which that knowledge smites her. So now let us touch hands, and now
let our lips too part friendlily, because our bodies have so long been
friends, the while that we knew nothing of each other, Ninzian of Yair,
on account of the great wrong and treachery which you have played upon
me.”

Thus speaking, Balthis kissed him. Then she went into the house that was
no longer Ninzian’s home.


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                                 _52._
                       _Remorse of a Poor Devil_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NINZIAN sat on a stone bench which was carved at each end with a
crouching sphinx, and he waited there while the sunlight died away
behind the poplars. The moment could not but seem to anybody pregnant
with all danger. Holmendis was coming, and Holmendis would very soon be
hearing the confession of Balthis, and these saints were over-often the
prey of an excitability which damaged their cause.

That impetuous Holmendis was quite as apt as not to resort out of hand
to unbridled miracle-working, and with the fires of Heaven to annihilate
his leading fellow laborer in every exercise of altruistic
intermeddling,—without pausing, rationally, to reflect what an
annihilation the resultant scandal would be to Holmendis’ own party of
reform and uplift. Holmendis would no doubt be sorry afterward: but he
would get no sympathy from Ninzian.

And, meanwhile, Ninzian loved his wife so greatly that prolonged
existence without her did not tempt him. His wife, whoever she might be,
had always seemed peculiarly dear to Ninzian. And now, as he looked back
upon the exceeding love which he had borne his wife, in Nineveh and
Thebes and Tyre and Babylon and Rome and Byzantium, and in all other
cities that bred fine women, and as he weighed the evanescence of this
love which was evading him after these few thousand years, it seemed to
Ninzian a pitiable thing that his season of earthly contentment should
thus be cut off in its flower and withered untimelily.

And his conscience troubled him, too. For the fiend had not been
entirely candid with his Balthis, and Poictesme was not by any means the
stage of the complaisant easy-going fellow’s primal failure. So he now
forlornly thought of how utterly he had failed in his mission upon
Earth, ever since he first came to Mount Kaf to work evil among men, in
the time of King Tchagi, a great while before the Deluge; and he
considered with dismay the appalling catalogue of virtuous actions into
which these women had betrayed him.

For always the cause of Ninzian’s downfall had been the same: he would
get to talking indiscretion to some lovely girl or another, just through
his desire to be agreeable to everybody, and his devilish eloquence
would so get the better of her that the girl would invariably marry him
and ruthlessly set about making her husband a well-thought-of citizen.
Nor did it avail him to argue. Women nowhere appeared to have any
sympathy with Ninzian’s appointed labor upon Earth: they seemed to have
an instinctive bent toward Heaven and the public profession of every
virtue. Just as in the case of that poor Miramon Lluagor, Ninzian
reflected, Ninzian’s wife also did not care two straws about her
husband’s career and the proper development of his talents.

Then Ninzian on a sudden recollected the cause of the disturbance which
had been put upon his living. He drew his dagger, and, squatting on the
paved walkway, he scratched out that incriminating footprint.

He was none too soon.


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                                 _53._
                  _Continuation of Appalling Pieties_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


HE was none too soon, because Ninzian rose from this erasement just in
time to bump into no other than the energetic tough flesh of Holy
Holmendis, who in the cool of the evening was coming up the walkway; and
indeed, in rising, Ninzian jostled against the saint rather roughly. So
Ninzian apologized for his clumsiness, and explained that he was going
fishing the next day, and was digging for worms: and Ninzian was in a
bad taking, for he could not know how much this peppery and
over-excitable saint from out of Philistia had seen or suspected, or
might be up to the very next moment with one or another bull-headed
miracle.

But Holy Holmendis said friendlily that no bones were broken, and he
went on, with the soul-chilling joviality of the clergy, to make some
depressing joke about fishers of men. “And that is why I am here,” said
the saint, “for this evening Dame Balthis is to confess to me whatever
matters may be on her conscience.”

“Yes, yes,” said Ninzian, fondly, “but we both know, my dear and honored
friend, that Balthis has a particularly tender conscience, a conscience
which is as sensitive to the missteps of others as a sore toe.”

“That is how everybody’s conscience ought to be,” returned the saint:
and he went on to speak of the virtuous woman who is a crown to her
husband. And he made a contrast between the fine high worth of Balthis
and the shamelessness of that bad beggar-woman upon whom, just outside
the gate, the saint had put apoplexy and divine fire for speaking
over-lightly of the second coming of Manuel.

Ninzian fidgeted. He of course said sympathizingly that he would send
some servants to remove the blasted carcass, and that it ought to be a
lesson, and that there was no telling what the world was coming to
unless right-thinking persons took strong steps through the proper
channels. Nevertheless, he did not like the hard, pinched little mouth
and glittering, very pale blue eyes of this gaunt saint; and the nimbus
about the thick white hair of Holy Holmendis was beginning to shine
brighter and brighter as the dusk of evening thickened. Ninzian found it
uncomfortable to be alone with this worker of miracles; piety is in all
things so unpredictable: and Ninzian was unfeignedly glad when Balthis
came out of the loved house that was no longer Ninzian’s home, and when
Balthis held open the door for Holmendis to enter where Ninzian might
not come any more.

Yet, so tenacious is the charitableness of women, that even now, as
Holmendis went in, Dame Balthis tried to speak, for the last time,
sensibly and kindly with her husband.

“Pig with the head of a mule,” she said, in a lowered tone, “do you stop
looking at me like a sick calf, and go away! For I must confess in what
a state of sin I have been living, as a devil’s wife, and I have little
faith in your black magic, and you know as well as I do that there is no
telling what blasted tree-trunk or consecrated bottle or something of
that sort he may seal you up in until the holy Morrow of Judgment,
precisely as he has done all those other evil spirits.”

Ninzian replied, “I shall not ever leave you of my free will.”

“But, Ninzian, it is as if I were putting you into the bottle, myself!
For if I do not tell that spiteful old bag of bones”—she crossed
herself,—“I mean, that beloved and blessed saint, why, he would never
have the sense, or rather, I intended to say that his faith in his
fellow creatures is too great and admirable for him ever to suspect you,
and so you just see how it is!”

“Yes, my most cruel love,” said Ninzian, “it is quite as if you yourself
were thrusting me into a brazen bottle, for all that you know how
dependent I am on open-air exercise, and as if you were setting to it
the unbreakable seal of Sulieman-ben-Daoud with your own dear hands.
But, nevertheless—!”

He took her hand, and gallantly he kissed her finger-tips.

At that she boxed his jaws. “You need not think to make a fool of me!
no, not again, not after all these years! Oh, but I will show you!”

Then Balthis also went into the house where the gaunt saint was making
ready to hear her mensual confession.


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                                 _54._
                         _Magic That was Rusty_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


POOR-SPIRITED, over-easy-going Ninzian sat upon the stone bench, an
outcast now in his own garden: and he thought for a while about the
pitiless miracles with which this Holmendis had harried the fairies and
the elves and the salamanders and the trolls and the calcars and the
succubæ and all the other amiable iniquities of Poictesme; and about the
saint’s devastating crusades against moral laxity and free-thinking and
the curt conclusions which he had made with his ropes and his fires to
the existence of mere heresy. It seemed uncomfortably likely that in
dealing with a devil this violent and untactful Holmendis would go to
even greater lengths, and would cast off all compunction, if somehow
Ninzian could not get the better of him.

So Ninzian decided to stay upon the safe side of accident, by destroying
the fellow out of hand. Ninzian took from his pocket the stone ematille,
and he broke off a branch from a rose-bush. With the flowering rose
branch Ninzian traced a largish circle about his sleek person, saying,
“I infernalize unto myself the circumference of nine feet about me.”
Here the sign of Sargatanet was repeated by him thrice. Then Ninzian
went on, “From the east, Glavrab; from the west, Garron; from the
north—”

He paused. He scratched his head. The boreal word of power was Cabinet
or Cabochon or Capricorn or something of that kind, he knew: but what it
was exactly was exactly what Ninzian had forgotten. He would have to try
something else.

Ninzian therefore turned to the overthrowing of Holmendis by cold and by
heat. Ninzian said:

“I invoke thee who art in the empty wind, terrible, invisible,
all-potent contriver of destruction and bringer of desolation. I upraise
before thee that rod from which proceeds the life abhorrent to thee. I
invoke thee through thy veritable name, in virtue of which thou canst
not refuse to hear,—JOERBET-JOPAKER-BETH-JOBOLCHOSETH—”

But there he gave it up. That dreadful, jaw-cracking obscene appellation
had, Ninzian recollected, eleven more sections: but in bewildered
Ninzian’s mind they were all jumbled and muddled and hopelessly
confused.

After that a rather troubled High Bailiff rearranged his clothing; and
he now tried to get in touch with Nebiros, the Field-Marshal and
Inspector General of Hell. But again Ninzian was in his magic deplorably
rusty.

“_Agla, Tagla, Malthon, Oarios_—” he rattled off, handily enough,—and
once more he bogged in an appalling stretch of unrememberably difficult
words. Black magic was not an accomplishment in which you could stay
expert without continual practice; and Ninzian had regrettably neglected
all infernal arts for the last five centuries and over.

So in this desperate pinch he turned perforce to a simple abecedary
conjuration such as mere wizards used; and the High Bailiff of Upper
Ardra said, rather shame-facedly, “Prince Lucifer, most dreadful master
of all the Revolted Spirits, I entreat thee to favor me in the
adjuration which I address to thy mighty minister, Lucifugé Rofocalé,
being desirous to make a pact with him—”

And Ninzian got through this invocation at least, quite nicely, though
he a trifle bungled the concluding words from the Grand Clavicle.

This conjuration, however, worked a bit too well. For instead of the
hoped-for appearance of genial old Lucifugé Rofocalé endurably
disinfected of his usual odor, now came to Ninzian, from among the
sweet-smelling rose-bushes, the appearance of a proud gentleman in gold
and sable: and a rather perturbed Ninzian bowed very low before his
liege-lord, Lucifer, Prince over all the Fallen Angels.


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                                 _55._
                        _The Prince of Darkness_

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THE newcomer paused for an instant, as if he were reading what was in
the troubled mind of Ninzian, and then he said: “I see. Surkrag, whom
mortals hereabouts call Ninzian! O unfaithful servant, now must you be
punished for betraying the faith I put in you. Now is your requital
coming swiftly from this ravening saint, who will dispose of you without
mercy. For your conjuring would disgrace a baby in diapers; you have
forgotten long ago what little magic you ever knew; and when this
Holmendis gets hold of you with one hand and exorcises you with the
other, there will be hardly a cinder left.”

So did Ninzian know himself to stand friendlessly, between the wrath of
evil and the malignity of holiness, both bent upon his ruin. He said,
“Have patience, my prince!”

But Lucifer answered sternly: “My patience is outworn. No, Surkrag,
there is no hope for you, and you become shameless in perfidy as
steadily you go from good to better. Once you would have scorned the
least deviation from the faith you owe me: but a little by a little you
have made compromises with virtue, through your weak desire to live
comfortably with your wives, and this continual indulgence of women’s
notions is draining from you the last drop of wickedness. Not fifty
centuries ago you would have been shocked by a kindly thought. Twenty
centuries back and you at least retained a proper feeling toward the
Decalogue. Now you assist in all reforms and build churches without a
blush. For is there nowadays, my deluded, lost Surkrag! in candor, is
there any virtue howsoever exalted, is there a single revolting decency
or any form of godliness, before which your gorge rises? No, my poor
friend: you came hither to corrupt mankind, and instead they have made
you little worse than human.”

The Angel of Darkness paused. He had spoken, as became such a famous
gentleman, very temperately, without rage, but also without any
concealing of his sorrow and disappointment. And Ninzian answered,
contritely:

“My prince, I have not wholly kept faith, I know. But always the woman
tempted me with the droll notion that our sports ought to open with a
religious service, and so I have been now and then seduced into
marriage. And my wife, no matter what eyes and hair and tint of flesh
she might be wearing at the time, has always been bent upon having her
husband looked up to by the neighbors; and in such circumstances a poor
devil has no chance.”

“So that these women have been your ruin, and even now the latest of
them is betraying your secret to that implacable saint! Well, it is
honest infernal justice, for since the time of Kaïumarth you have gained
me not one follower in this place, and have lived openly in all manner
of virtue when you should have been furthering my power upon Earth.”

Thus speaking, Lucifer took his seat upon the bench. Then Ninzian too
sat down, and Ninzian leaned toward this other immortal, in the
ever-thickening dusk; and Ninzian’s plump face was sad.

“My prince, what does it matter? From the first I have let my fond wife
have her will with me, because it pleased her, and did no real good.
What do these human notions matter, even in so dear a form? A little
while and Balthis will be dead. A little while and there will be no Yair
nor Upper Ardra, and no shining holy sepulchre at Storisende, and all
Poictesme will be forgotten. A little while and this Earth will be an
icecold cinder. But you and I shall still be about our work, still
playing for the universe, with stars and suns for counters. Does it
really matter to you that, for the time this tiny trundling Earth exists
and has women on it, I pause from playing at the great game, to
entertain myself with these happy accidents of nature?”

Lucifer replied: “It is not only your waste of time that troubles me. It
is your shirking of every infernal duty, it is your cherubic lack of
seriousness. Why, do you but think how many thousand women have passed
through your fingers!”

“Yes, like a string of pearls, my prince,” said Ninzian, fondly.

“Is that not childish sport for you that used to contend so mightily in
the great game?”

But Ninzian now was plucking up heart, as the saying is, hand over fist.
“Recall the old days, my prince,” he urged, with the appropriate
emotional quaver, “when we two were only cherubs, with no bodies as yet
sprouted from our little curly heads! Do you recall the merry romps and
the kissing games we had as tiny angel-faces, sporting together so
lovingly among the golden clouds of heaven, without any cares whatever,
and with that collar of wings tickling so drolly one’s ears! and do you
let the memory move you, even to unmerited indulgence. I have contracted
an odd fancy for this inconspicuous sphere of rock and mud, I like the
women that walk glowingly about it. Oh, I concede my taste is
disputable—”

“I dispute nothing, Surkrag. I merely point out that lechery is nowhere
a generally received excuse for good works.”

“Well, but now and then,” said Ninzian, broadmindedly, “the most
conscientious may slip into beneficence. And, in any case, how does it
matter what I do on Earth? Frankly, my prince, I think you take the
place too seriously. For centuries I have watched those who serve you
going about this planet in all manner of quaint guises, in curious masks
which are impenetrable to any one who does not know that your preëminent
servitors tread with the footfall of a bird wherever they pass upon your
errands—”

“Yes, but—” said Lucifer.

“—For ages,” Ninzian continued, without heeding him, “I have seen your
emissaries devote much time and cunning to the tempting of men to commit
wickedness: and to what end? Man rises from the dust: he struts and
postures: he falls back into the dust. That is all. How can this midge
work good or evil? His virtue passes as a thin scolding: the utmost
reach of his iniquity is to indulge in the misdemeanor of
supererogation, by destroying a man or two men, whom time would very
soon destroy in any event. Meanwhile his sympathies incline—I know,—by a
hair-breadth or so, toward Heaven. Yes, but what does it matter? is it
even a compliment to Heaven? Ah, prince, had I the say, I would leave
men to perish in their unimportant starveling virtues, without raising
all this pother over trifles.”

Ninzian could see that he had made a perceptible impression: yet still,
dark Lucifer was shaking his head. “Surkrag, in abstract reason you may
be right: but warfare is not conducted by reason, and to surrender
anything to the Adversary, though it were no more than Earth and its
inhabitants, would be a dangerous example.”

“Come, prince, do you think how many first class constellations there
are to strive for, made up of stars that are really desirable
possessions! Turn that fine mind of yours to considerations worthy of
it, sir! Consider Cassiopeia, and the Bull, and the dear little
Triangle! and do you think about Orion, containing such sidereal
masterpieces as Bellatrix and Betelgeuse and Rigel, and the most
magnificent nebula known anywhere! Do you think also about that very
interesting triple sun which is called Mizar, in the Great Bear, a
veritable treasure for any connoisseur! and do you let me have this
Earth to amuse me!”

Now Lucifer did not answer at once. The bats were out by this time,
zigzagging about the garden: the air was touched with the scent of
dew-drenched roses: and somewhere in the dusk a nightingale had
tentatively raised its thrilling, long-drawn, plaintive voicing of
desire. All everywhere about the two fiends was most soothing. And the
Angel of Darkness laughed without a trace left in his manner of that
earlier reserve.

“No, no, old wheedler! one cannot neglect the tiniest point, in the
great game. Besides, I have my pride, I confess it, and to behold Earth
given over entirely to good would vex me. Yet, after all, I can detect
no unforgivable beneficence in your continuing to live virtuously here
with your seraglio for such a while as the planet may last. These little
holidays even freshen one for work. So, if you like, I will summon
Amaimon or Baälzebub, or perhaps Succor-Benoth would enjoy the sport,
and they will dispose of this two-penny saint.”

But Ninzian seemed hesitant. “My prince, I am afraid that some of those
officious archangels would be coming too; and one thing might lead to
another, and my wife would not at all like having any supernal battlings
in her own garden, among her favorite rose-bushes. No, as I always say,
it is much better to avoid these painful scenes.”

“Your wife!” said Lucifer, in high astonishment, “and is it that thin
faded pious wretch you are considering! Why, but your wife has
repudiated you! She has caught just your trick of treacherousness, and
so she has betrayed you to that flint-hearted saint!”

Ninzian in the dusk made bold to smile....


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                                 _56._
                         _Economics of Ninzian_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NINZIAN in the dusk made bold to smile at this sort of bachelor talk.
Lucifer really would be a bit more broad-minded, a shade less notably
naïve, if only the dear fellow had not stayed always so stubbornly
prejudiced against marriage, merely because it was a sacrament. All that
was required, alike to perfect him in some real knowledge of human
nature and to secure everybody’s well-being everywhere, Ninzian
reflected, was for Lucifer just once to marry some capable woman....

So Ninzian smiled. But Ninzian did not need to say anything, for at this
moment Balthis came to the door, and—not being able in the twilight to
see the Prince of Darkness,—she called out that supper was getting
stone-cold on the table, and that she really wished Ninzian would try to
be a little more considerate, especially when they had company.

And Ninzian, rising, chuckled. “My wife has been like that since Sidon
was a village. Time and again she has found me out; and never yet has
she let me off with a public exposure. Oh, if I could explain it, I
would perhaps care less for her. In part, I think, it means that she
loves me: in part, I fear—upon looking back,—it means that no really
conscientious person cares to entrust the proper punishment of her
husband to anybody else. Of course, all that is merely theory. What is
certain is that my wife’s confession has been conducted tactfully, and
that you and I are going in to talk solemn nonsense with St. Holmendis.”

But Lucifer once more was shaking his head. He said, with firmness:

“No, Surkrag. No, I am not squeamish, but I have no use for saints.”

“Well, prince, I would not be over-hasty to agree with you. For
Holmendis has some invaluable points. He is perfectly sincere, for one
thing, and for another, he is energetic, and for a third, he never
pardons any one who differs with him. Of course, he is all for having
men better than they were intended to be, and with his tales about that
second coming of Manuel he does frighten people.... For they have been
altering that legend, my prince, considerably. Nowadays, it is not only
glory and prosperity which Manuel is to bring back with him. He is to
return also, it seems, with a large cargo of excruciate punishments for
all persons who differ in any way with the notions of Holmendis and
Niafer.”

“Ah, the old story! It is really astounding,” Lucifer commented, in
frank wonder, “how one finds everywhere this legend of the Redeemer in
just this form. It seems an instinct with the creatures.”

“Well, but,” said Ninzian, tolerantly, “it gives them something to look
forward to. It promises to gratify all their congenital desires,
including cruelty. And, above all, it prevents their going mad, to
believe that somebody somewhere is looking out for them. In any
event,—as I was saying,—this gaunt Holmendis does frighten Poictesme
into a great deal of public piety. Still, there are always corners and
bedrooms and other secluded places, in which one strikes a balance, as
it were; and abstinence and fear make wonderful appetizers: so that, in
the long run of affairs, I doubt if you have anywhere upon Earth any
more serviceable friends than are these saints who will put up with
nothing short of their own especial sort of perfection.”

Lucifer was not convinced. “It is proper of course that you should
attempt to exculpate your friend and associate during the last twenty
years. Nevertheless, all these extenuatory sayings, about the
viciousness of virtue, are the habitual banalities of boyhood; and no
beardless cynic, even when addicted to verse, has ever yet been
permanently injured by them.”

“But,” Ninzian returned, “but here, I am not merely theorizing. I speak
with rather high authority. For you will be remembering, prince, that,
by the rules of our game, when any mortal has gained a hundred followers
for you, Jahveh is penalized to put him upon the same footing as the
rest of us. And, well, sir! you may see here in the mud, just where I
jostled Holmendis from the walkway—”

Lucifer made luminous his finger-tips, and held them like five candles
to the saint’s footprint. The Angel of Darkness bowed thereafter, with
real respect, toward heaven.

“Our Adversary, to do Him justice, keeps an honest score. Come, Surkrag,
now this is affecting! This very touchingly recalls that the great game
is being played by the dear fellow with candor and fine sportsmanship.
Meanwhile I must most certainly have supper with you; and the great game
is far from over, since I yet make a fourth with the fanatic, the woman
and the hypocrite.”

“Ah, prince,” said Ninzian, a little shocked, as they went into his
sedate snug home, “should you not say more tactfully, with us three
leaders of reform?”


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                               BOOK NINE

                             ABOVE PARADISE

    “_He was caught up into paradise; and heard unspeakable words._”
                        —II CORINTHIANS, xii, 4.

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                                 _57._
                         _Maugis Makes Trouble_

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NOW the tale speaks of the rebellion of Maugis, who was the son of
Donander of Évre, the Thane of Aigremont. For Count Manuel’s youngest
child, Ettarre, born after her father’s passing, was now come to the
full flowering of her strange beauty: and it was at this time—with the
result that two young gentlemen went out of their wits, four killed
themselves, and seven married,—that Ettarre was betrothed to Guiron des
Rocques, of the famous house of Gâtinais. And it was at this time also
that young Maugis d’Aigremont resorted to a more stirring solace than
might be looked for in imbecility or death or a vicarious bedfellow. He
seized and carried off Ettarre. His company of ten was pursued by Count
Emmerick and Guiron with twenty followers; and after a skirmish in
Bovion the girl was recaptured unharmed.

But Maugis escaped. And after that he went into open rebellion against
Count Emmerick’s authority, and occupied those fastnesses in the
Taunenfels which Othmar Black-Tooth had once held for a long while
against the assaults of Count Manuel himself.

History in fine appeared to honor banality by repeating itself, with the
plain difference that gaunt Maugis was equally a great captain and a
great lover and in every way more formidable than Othmar had been,
whereas Emmerick, elsewhere than at a banquet, was not formidable at
all. Moreover, Emmerick in these days lacked even any stronger kinsman
to lean upon, for his brother-in-law Heitman Michael was now in Muscovy,
the young Count of Montors was dead, and Ayrart de Montors had removed
to the court of King Theodoret. Emmerick had, thus, to lead his troops
only Fauxpas de Nointel and that unreasonable Guiron, who expected
Emmerick himself to lead them.

So Emmerick wavered; he made terms; he even winked at Guiron’s capture
by the pirates of Caer Idryn, in order to be rid of this troublesome
posturer who insisted upon dragging Emmerick into so much uncomfortable
fighting: and Maugis, since these terms did not include his possession
of Ettarre, soon broke them. Thus the warring that now arose in
Poictesme, between Maugis’ lust and Count Emmerick’s supineness, dragged
on for many wearying fevered years.

Then Madame Melicent returned from oversea with her second husband, the
Comte de la Fôret, a gentleman who remarkably lacked patience with
brigands and with shilly-shallying. This Perion de la Fôret took charge
of matters, with such resolution that out of hand Guiron was rescued
from his captivity, Maugis was overpowered and killed, the Ettarre whom
he had desired to his own hurt was married to Guiron, and Count Emmerick
gave a banquet in honor of the event. Such was this Perion’s
impetuosity.

It is of these matters that the tale speaks in passing. For the tale now
is of Donander of Évre, who was the father of Maugis, and who would not
break faith with that Emmerick who, howsoever unworthily, sat in the
place of that great master whom Donander had been privileged to serve
even in this mortal life. For Donander was the only one of the lords of
the Silver Stallion who accepted with joy and with unbounded faith the
legend of Manuel, and who in all his living bore testimony to it.

This Donander of Évre had been the youngest of the fellowship, he was at
this time but newly made a widower while yet in his forties, and
whatsoever he lacked in brilliance of wit he atoned for with his
hardiness in battle. Yet in this war he chose not to display his
prowess, since the fighting was between the son of Dom Manuel and the
son of Donander himself. He chose instead exile.

First, though, he went to Storisende; and, standing beside the holy
sepulchre, he looked up for some while at the serene great effigy of
Manuel, poised there in eternal watchfulness over Donander’s native
land, and bright with all the jewels of the world. Donander knelt and
prayed in this sacred place, as he knew, for the last time. Then
Donander, without any complaining, and without any grieving now for his
wife’s death, went out of Poictesme, a landless man; and he piously took
service under Prince Balein of Targamon (the same that twenty years ago
had wooed Queen Morvyth, a little before the evil times of her long
imprisonment and the cutting off of her head), who now was harrying the
pagan Northmen.

Thus it was that Donander also at the last went out of Poictesme, not by
his own election, to encounter the most strange of all the dooms which
befell the lords of the Silver Stallion after the passing of Dom Manuel.


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                                 _58._
                   _Showing that Even Angels May Err_

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THIS doom began its workings in the long field below Rathgor, when
Palnatoki rode forth and made his brag. “I am the champion of the
Ænseis. In the Northland there is nobody mightier than I; and if a
mightier person live elsewhere, it is not yet proven. Who is there in
this place will try a fall with me?”

Behind him the pagan army waited, innumerable, and terrible, and
deplorably ill-mannered. These shouted now:

“We cry a holmgang. Who will fight with Red Palnatoki, that is overlord
of the Swan’s bath, and that slew the giants in Noenhir?”

Then from the opposed ranks came clanking, and shining in full armor,
Donander of Évre. And he said:

“I, howsoever unworthy, messire, am the person who will withstand you. I
also have fought before this morning. Under Count Manuel’s banner of the
Silver Stallion I have done what I might. That much I will again do here
to-day, and upon every day between this day and the holy Morrow of
Judgment.”

After that the Christian army shouted: “There is none mightier than
Donander! Also, he is very gratifyingly modest.”

But Palnatoki cried out scornfully: “Your utmost will not avail this
morning! Behind me musters all the might of the Ænseis, that are the
most high of gods above Lærath, and their strength shall be shown here
through me.”

“Behind the endeavors of every loyal son of the Church,” Donander said,
“are the blessed saints and the bright archangels.”

“Indeed, Donander, that may very well be the truth,” replied Red
Palnatoki. “The old gods and the gods of Rome have met to-day; and we
are their swords.”

“Your gods confess their weakness, Messire Palnatoki, by picking the
better weapon,” Donander answered him, courteously.

With these amenities discharged, they fought. Nowhere upon earth could
have been found a pair of more stalwart warriors: each had no equal
anywhere existent between seas and mountains save in his adversary: so
neatly were they matched indeed that, after a half-hour of incredible
battling, it was natural enough they should kill each other
simultaneously. And then the unfortunate error occurred, just as each
naked soul escaped from the dying body.

For now out of the north came Kjalar, the fair guide of pagan warriors
to eternal delights in the Hall of the Chosen; and from the zenith sped,
like a shining plummet, Ithuriel to fetch the soul of the brave champion
of Christendom to the felicities of the golden city walled about with
jasper of the Lord God of Sabaoth. Both emissaries had been attending
the combat until the arrival of their part therein; both, as seasoned
virtuosi of warfare, had been delighted by this uncommonly fine fight:
and in their pleased excitement they somehow made the error of
retrieving each the other’s appointed prey. It happened thus that the
soul of Donander of Évre fared northward, asleep in the palm of Kjalar’s
hand, while Ithuriel conveyed the soul of Red Palnatoki to the heaven of
Jahveh.


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                                 _59._
                     _The Conversion of Palnatoki_

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ITHURIEL’S blunder, it is gratifying to record, did not in the outcome
really matter. For Christendom just then was at heated odds over points
of theology not very clearly understood in Jahveh’s heaven, where in
consequence no decisions were hazarded upon the merits of the
controversy; and the daily invoices of Christian champions and martyrs
of all sects were being admitted to blessedness as fast as they murdered
one another.

Moreover, Red Palnatoki was, by the articles of his stern Nordic creed,
a fatalist. When he discovered what had happened, and the strange
salvation which had been put upon him, his religion therefore assured
him that this too had been predestined by the wayward Norns, and he
piously made no complaining. The eternal life which he had inherited,
with no fighting in it for the present, and no stronger drink than milk,
was not up to human expectation, but the tall sea-rover had long ago
found out that few things are. Meanwhile he could, at any rate, look
forward to that promised last great battle, when those praiseworthy
captains Gog and Magog (with, as Palnatoki understood it, a considerable
company of fine fighting-men), would attack the four-square city, and
when Palnatoki would have again a chance really to enjoy himself in
defending the camp of the saints.

And meanwhile too, he was interested in those girls. It seemed at best
to any one with his religious rearing quite unaccountable to find women
in heaven, and this especial pair appeared to Palnatoki a remarkably
quaint choice for exceptional favoritism. He could only deduce they had
got in through some error similar to that which had procured his own
admission, particularly as he saw no other women anywhere about.

And Palnatoki reflected that the enceinte lady, with eagle’s wings and
the crown of little stars, whom the presumably pet dragon followed
everywhere with touching devotion, could not for as yet some months
repay cultivating. But that very pretty brunette, with the golden cup
and all those splendid clothes and with the placard on her forehead, who
had just ridden by upon that seven-headed scarlet monster, rather took
Palnatoki’s fancy. That girl was not, you could see, a prude; she had
come very near winking at him, if she, indeed, had not actually winked
in the moment she glanced back: so that the Great Whore of Babylon
(which, as they told him, was this second lady’s name) gave him, upon
the whole, something else to look forward to.

Without any sulking under his halo, Palnatoki bent resolutely to his
first harp-lesson; and, in place of protests, civilly voiced alleluias.

For, with two fine to-morrows to look forward to, Palnatoki was content
enough. And in Jahveh’s heaven, therefore, all went agreeably, and as
smoothly as Red Palnatoki at just this point goes out of this story.


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                                 _60._
                      _In the Hall of the Chosen_

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WHEN Donander of Évre awoke in the Northern paradise, he also was
content enough. It was a strange and not what you could call a cozy
place, this gold-roofed hall with its five hundred and forty mile-wide
doors: and the monsters, in the likeness of a stag and of a she-goat,
which straddled above the building perpetually feeding upon the lower
leaves of the great tree called Lærath, seemed to Donander preëminently
outlandish creatures, animals under whose bellies no really considerate
persons would have erected a residence. Yet, like Palnatoki, Donander of
Évre was an old campaigner, who could be tolerably comfortable anywhere.
Nor was to discover himself among pagans a novel experience, since in
his mortal life Donander had ridden at adventure in most corners of the
world, and rather more than half of his finest enemies and of his
opponents in many delightful encounters had been infidels.

“Excepting always their unfortunate religious heresies,” he was used to
concede, “I have no fault to pick with heathen persons, whom in the
daily and nocturnal affairs of life I have found quite as friendly and
companionable as properly baptized ladies.”

In fine, he got on well enough with the flaxen-haired spirits of these
Northern kings and skalds and jarls and vikingar. They stared, and some
guffawed, when he fitted out a little shrine, in which Donander prayed
decorously, every day at the correct hours, for the second coming of
Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of
Judgment. Yet, after all, these boreal ghosts conceded, in paradise if
anywhere a man should be permitted utterly to follow his own tastes,
even in imaginative eschatology. And when they talked their really
pathetic nonsense about being the guests of Sidvrar the Weaver and
Constrainer, and about living forever through his bounty thus happily in
the Hall of the Chosen, it was Donander’s turn to shrug. Even had there
been no other discrepancies, everybody knew that heaven had, not five
hundred and forty golden gates, but only twelve entrances, each carved
from a single pearl and engraved with the name of a tribe of Israel.

“Besides,” Donander asked, “who is this Weaver and Constrainer?
Certainly, I never heard of him before.”

“He is the King and Father of the Ænseis,” they told him. “He is
overlord of that unimaginable folk who dwell in Ydalir; and who do not
kill their deformed and weakling children, as we were used to do, but
instead cast from the ivory ramparts of Ydalir all such degenerate
offspring, to be the gods of races who are not blond and Nordic.”

Donander, as a loyal son of the Church, could only shake his head over
such nonsense, and the innumerous other errors by which these heathen
were being misled to everlasting ruin. Aloud, Donander repeated his
final verdict as to the pretensions of this Sidvrar, by saying again, “I
never heard of him.”

Nevertheless, Donander went without real discontent among the pleasures
of paradise, and he joined in all the local sports. In common with the
other dead, he ate the flesh of the inexhaustible boar, and with them he
drank of the strong mead which sustained them in perpetual tipsiness.
And he sedately rode out with the others every morning into the meadows
where these blessed pagan lords fought joyously among themselves until
midday. At noon a peal of thunder would sound, the slain and wounded
warriors were of a sudden revivified and cured of their hurts, and were
reunited to whatsoever arms and heads and legs the contestants had lost
in their gaming: and the company would return fraternally to the
gold-roofed hall, where they ate and drank and made their brags until
they slept.

“Yet perhaps our banquets might, messieurs,” Donander had suggested,
after a century or so of these rough-and-ready pleasures, “be not
unadvantageously seasoned with the delights of feminine companionship,
if only for dessert?”

“But it is one of our appointed blessings to have done with women and
their silly ways,” cried out the vikingar, “now that we have entered
paradise.”

And Donander, who had always been notable for his affectionate nature,
and who had served vigorously so many ladies par amours, seemed grieved
to hear a saying so unchivalrous. Still, he said nothing.

Thus much time passed; and the worlds were changed: but in the eyes of
Donander of Évre, as in the eyes of all who feasted in the Hall of the
Chosen, there was no knowledge nor any fear of time, because these
blessed dead lived now in perpetual tipsiness. And, as befitted a loyal
son of the Church, Donander, without any complaining, in the
surroundings which Heaven out of Heaven’s wisdom had selected for him,
awaited the second coming of Manuel and the holy Morrow of Judgment.


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                                 _61._
                   _Vanadis, Dear Lady of Reginlief_

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THEN, from the highest part of this paradise, and from the unimaginable
yew-vales of Ydalir which rise above the topmost branches of the tree
called Lærath, descended blue-robed Vanadis, the lady of Reginlief, dear
to the Ænseis. She had disposed of five inefficient husbands, in
impetuous mythological manners, but still a loneliness and a desire was
upon her; and with the eternal optimism of widowhood she came to look
for a sixth husband among these great-thewed heroes who jeered at women
and their wiles.

But Donander of Évre was the person who for two reasons found instant
favor in her eyes when she came upon Donander refreshing himself after
the pleasant fatigues of that morning’s combat, and about his daily bath
in the shining waters of the river Gipul. So did the dead call that
stream which flowed from the antlers of the monstrous stag who stood
eternally nibbling and munching above the Hall of the Chosen.

“Here is an eminently suitable person,” Vanadis reflected. Aloud, she
said, “Hail, friend! and does a stout fine fellow of your length and of
your thickness go languidly shunning work or seeking work?”

Stalwart Donander climbed out of the clear stream of Gipul. He came,
smilingly and with a great exaltation, toward the first woman whom he
had seen in seven hundred years. And, so constant is the nature of
woman, that divine Vanadis regarded Donander in just the reflective
wonder with which, more than seven hundred years ago, barbarian Utsumé
had looked at Coth in the market-place of Porutsa.

Donander said, “What is your meaning, madame?”

Vanadis replied, “I have a desire which, a fine portent has informed me,
agrees with your desire.”

Then Vanadis, with god-like candor, made wholly plain her meaning. And
since Donander’s nature was affectionate, he assented readily enough to
the proposals of this somewhat ardent but remarkably handsome young
woman, who went abroad thus unconventionally in a car drawn by two cats,
and who, in her heathenish and figurative way, described herself as a
goddess. He stipulated only that, so soon as he was dressed, they be
respectably united according to whatever might be the marriage laws of
her country and diocese.

The Ænseis were not used in such matters to stand upon ceremony.
Nevertheless, they conferred together,—Aduna and Ord and Hleifner and
Rönn and Giermivul, and the other radiant sons of Sidvrar. It was they
who good-humoredly devised a ceremony, with candles and promises and
music and a gold ring, and all the other features which seemed expected
by the quaint sort of husband whom their beloved Vanadis had fetched up
from the Hall of the Chosen. But her sisters took no part in this
ceremony, upon the ground that they considered such public preliminaries
to be unheard-of and brazen.

Thus was Donander made free of Ydalir, the land that is above Lærath and
all the other heavens and paradises: and after Donander’s seven hundred
years of celibacy, he and his bride got on together in her bright palace
lovingly enough. Vanadis found that she too, comparatively speaking, had
lived with her five earlier husbands in celibacy.


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                                 _62._
                   _The Demiurgy of Donander Veratyr_

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NOW the one change that Donander made an explicit point of was to fit
out in this palace of Reginlief a chapel. There he worshiped daily at
the correct hours, so near as one could calculate them in an endless
day, and there he prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the
welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.

“But, really, my heart,” his Vanadis would say, ineffectually, “you have
been dead for so long now! And, just looking at it sensibly, it does
seem such a waste of eternity!”

“Have done, my darling, with your heathen nonsense!” Donander would
reply. “Do I not know that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in
marriage? How then can heaven be this place in which two live so
friendlily and happily?”

Meanwhile, to the pagan priests wherever the Ænseis were adored, had
been revealed the sixth and the wholly successful marriage of blue-robed
Vanadis: her spouse had been duly deified: and new temples had been
builded in honor of the bright lady of Reginlief and of the Man-God,
Donander Veratyr, her tireless savior from vain desire and bodily
affliction. And time went stealthily as a stream flowing about and over
the worlds, and changing them, and wearing all away. But to Donander it
was as if he yet lived in the thrice-lucky afternoon on which he married
his Vanadis. For, since whatever any of the Ænseis desires must happen
instantly, thus Ydalir knows but one endless day; and immeasurably
beneath its radiance, very much as sullen and rain-swollen waters go
under a bridge upon which young lovers have met in the sunlight of
April, so passed wholly unnoted by any in Ydalir the flowing and all the
jumbled wreckage of time.

But it befell, too, after a great many of those æons which Ydalir
ignores and men cannot imagine, that Donander saw one of his smaller
brothers-in-law about a droll looking sport. Donander asked questions:
and he learned this dark brisk little Koshchei was about a game at which
the younger Ænseis were used to play.

“And how does one set about it?” Donander asked then.

“Why, thus and thus, my heart,” his wife replied. Fond Vanadis was glad
enough to find for him some outdoor diversion which would woo him from
that stuffy chapel and its depressing pictures of tortured persons and
its unwholesome fogs of stifling incense.

Then Donander broke away a bough from the tree called Lærath, saying
meanwhile the proper word of power. Sitting beside the fifth river of
Ydalir, he cut strips of bark from this bough, with the green-handled
knife which Vanadis had given him, and he cast these strips about at
random. He found it perfectly true that those scraps of barks which
touched the water became fish, those which he flung into the air became
birds, and those which fell upon the ground became animals and men.

He almost instantly, indeed, had enough creatures to populate a world,
but no world, of course, for them to animate and diversify. So Donander
destroyed these creatures, and placed one of the lighter weirds upon the
beetle Karu. That huge good-tempered insect fell at once to shaping a
ball of mud, and to carving it with mountains and plains and valleys.
Then Karu burrowed his way into the center of this ball of mud: and from
the hole into which Karu had entered came all kinds of living beings
needful for the animating and diversifying of a world; and these began
to breed and to kill one another and to build their appropriate lairs,
in nests and dens and cities.

This so excited another beetle, named Khypera, that he behaved in a
fashion not at all convenient to record; but many living creatures were
at once brought forth by his remarkable conduct, and plants and creeping
things and men and women, too, came out of the tears which Khypera let
fall.

That was the second demiurgy of Donander Veratyr. Then with a golden egg
Donander made another world: and from the entrails of a spider he drew
another; from the carrion of a dead cow he made a fifth world; and with
the aid of a raven Donander made yet one more. Thereafter he went on, in
turn attempting each method that any Ans had ever practiced.

These sports amused Donander for a long while and yet another while. And
Vanadis, apart from her natural pleasure in the augmented vigor he got
from so much open-air exercise, bright Vanadis smiled at his playing, in
the way of any wife who finds her husband occupied upon the whole less
reprehensibly than you would expect of the creature. And the sons of
Sidvrar also were used, as yet, to smile not unfriendlily when they
passed where Donander was busy with his toys. Even the sisters of
Vanadis only said that really of all things, and that of course they had
expected it from the very first. Thus everybody was content for a long
while and yet another while.

And throughout both these whiles Donander was pottering with his worlds,
keeping them bright with thunderbolts and volcanic eruptions, diligently
cleansing them of parasites with one or another pestilence, scouring
them with whirlwinds, and perpetually washing them with cloud-bursts and
deluges. His toys had constantly such loving care to keep them in
perfect condition. Meanwhile, his skill increased abreast with his
indulgence in demiurgy, and Donander thought of little else. He needed
now no aid from ravens and beetles. He had but, he found, to desire a
world, and at once his desire took form: its light was divided from its
darkness, the waters gathered into one place, the dry land appeared and
pullulated with living creatures, all in one dexterous complacent moment
of self-admiration.

His earlier made stars and comets and suns and asteroids Donander
Veratyr began destroying one by one, half vexedly, half in real
amusement at the archaic, bungling methods he had outgrown. In their
places he would set spinning, and glittering, and popping, quite other
planetary systems which, for the moment in any event, appeared to him
remarkably adroit craftsmanship. And everywhere upon the worlds which he
had made, and had not yet annihilated, men worshiped Donander Veratyr:
and in his pleasant home at Reginlief, high over Lærath and every other
heaven and paradise, Donander worshiped the god of the fathers and of
all the reputable neighbors of Donander of Évre; and in such pagan
surroundings as Heaven out of Heaven’s wisdom had selected for him,
awaited the second coming of Manuel and the holy Morrow of Judgment.


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                                 _63._
                         _Economics of Sidvrar_

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THEN of a sudden gleaming Sidvrar Vafudir, the Weaver and Constrainer,
came with his wolves frisking about him. He came with his broad-brimmed
hat pulled down about his eyes decisively. He came thus to his daughter,
blue-robed Vanadis, and he stated that, while patience was a virtue,
there was such a thing as overdoing it, no matter how little he himself
might care for the talking of idle busybodies, because, however long she
might argue, and always had done from childhood, being in this and in
many other undesirable respects precisely like her mother, even so, no
sensible Ans could ever deny her husband’s conduct was ridiculous: and
that, said Sidvrar Vafudir, was all there was to it.

“Do not bluster so, my heart,” replied Vanadis, “about the facts of
nature. All husbands are ridiculous. Who should be surer of this than I,
who have had six husbands, unless it be you, who as goat and titmouse
and birch tree have been the husband of six hundred?”

“That is all very well,” said Sidvrar, “in addition to not being what we
were discussing. This Donander of yours is now one of the Ænseis, he is
an Ans of mature standing, and it is not right for him to be making
worlds. That is what we were discussing.”

“Yet what divine hands anywhere,” asked Vanadis, “are clean of
demiurgy?”

“That is not what we were discussing, either. When you brats of mine
were children you had your toys, and you played with and you smashed
your toys. Nobody denies that, because you all did, from Rönn to Aduna,
and even little Koshchei used to be having his fling at such nonsense.
Now do you look at the very fine and sober fellow he is, with all his
pranks behind him, and do you ask Koshchei what he thinks of that
husband of yours! But instead, you prefer to wander away from what we
were discussing, because you know as well as I do that for children to
be playing at such games is natural enough, besides keeping the young
out of grave mischief, now and then. Though, to be sure, nothing does
that very long nor very often, as I tell you plainly, my Vanadis, for do
you look, too, as a most grievous example, at the wasteful and untidy
way you destroy your husbands!”

“Donander Veratyr I shall not ever destroy,” replied Vanadis, smiling,
“because of the loving human heart and the maddening human ways he has
brought out of his Poictesme, and for two other reasons.”

“Then it is I who will put an end, if not to him, at least to his
nonsense. For this Donander of yours is still playing with stars and
planets, and setting off his comets, and exploding his suns, and that is
not becoming.”

“Well, well, do you, who are the Father and Master of All, have your own
will with him, so far as you can get it,” Vanadis returned, still with
that rather reminiscent smile. She had now lived for a great while with
this sixth husband of hers, who had a human heart in him and human ways.


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                                 _64._
                       _Through the Oval Window_

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SIDVRAR went then from Vanadis to Donander. But the Constrainer found
there was no instant manner of constraining Donander Veratyr into a
conviction that Donander of Évre had died long ago, and had become an
Ans. People, Donander stated, did not do such things; when people died
they went either to heaven or to hell: and further reasoning with
Donander seemed to accomplish no good whatever. For Donander, as a loyal
son of the Church, now shrugged pityingly at the heathen nonsense talked
by his father-in-law. He stroked the heads of Sidvrar’s attendant
wolves, he listened to the Weaver and Constrainer with an indulgence
more properly reserved for the feeble-minded; and he said, a little
relishingly, that Messire Sidvrar would be wiser on the holy Morrow of
Judgment.

Then Sidvrar Vafudir became Sidvrar Yggr, the Meditating and Terrible.
Then Sidvrar fell about such magicking as he had not needed to use since
he first entered into the eternal yew-vales of Ydalir. Then, in a word,
Sidvrar unclosed the oval window in Reginlief that opened upon space and
time and upon the frozen cinders which once had been worlds and suns and
stars, and which their various creators had annihilated, as one by one
the Ænseis had put away their childhood and its playing.

Among such wreckage sped pretentiously the yet living worlds which
Donander had made. These toys, when seen thus closely through the magic
of the oval window, were abristle with the spires of the temples and the
cathedrals in which they that lived, as yet, upon these worlds were used
to worship. In all these churches men invoked Donander Veratyr. Through
that charmed window now, for the first time, came to his ears the outcry
of his clergy and laity: nowhere was there talk of another god, not even
where from many worlds arose the lecturing of those who explained away
their ancestors’ quaint notions about Donander the Man-God, the Savior
from Vain Desire, the Preserver from Bodily Affliction, and proved there
could not be any such person. And to Donander, looking out of the window
at Reginlief, all these things showed as a swarming of ants or as a
writhing of very small maggots about the worlds which he had made to
divert him: and in the face as in the heart of Donander awoke
inquietation.

“If this be a true showing,” Donander said, by and by, “show now that
Earth which is my home.”

After a while of searching, Sidvrar found for him the drifting clinker
which had once been Earth. Upon its glistering nakedness was left no
living plant nor any breathing creature, for the Morrow of Judgment was
long past, and Earth’s affairs had been wound up. Upon no planet did any
one remember the god whom Donander worshiped, now that Jahveh had ended
playing, and his toys were broken or put away. Upon many planets were
the temples of Donander Veratyr, and the rising smoke of his sacrifice,
and the cries of his worshipers as they murdered one another in their
disputing over points of theology which Donander could not clearly
understand.

Nor did he think about these things. Instead, Donander Veratyr, who was
the last of the Ænseis to play at this unprofitable sport of demiurgy,
was now remembering the days and the moon-lighted nights of his youth,
and the dear trivial persons whom he had then loved and revered. He did
not think about the two wives whom he had married upon Earth, nor about
his son Maugis, nor about any of the happenings of Donander’s manhood.
He thought of, for no reason at all, the shabby little village priest
who had confirmed him, and of the father and mother who had been
all-wise and able to defend one from every evil, and of the tall girl
whose lips had, once, and before any other lips, been sweeter than were
the joys of Ydalir. And he thought of many other futile things, all now
attested always to have been futile, which long ago had seemed so very
important to the boy that, in serving famous Manuel of Poictesme, had
postured so high-heartedly in one of the smallest provinces of an
extinct planet.

And Donander wrung immortal hands, saying, “If this be a true showing,
what thing have I become, who can no longer love or reverence anything!
who can have no care for any Morrow of Judgment! and to whom space
reveals only the living of these indistinguishable and unclean and
demented insects!”

The cry of his worshipers came up to him. “Thou art God, the Creator and
Preserver of all us Thy children! Thou art Donander Veratyr, in Whom is
our firm hope! Thou art the Man-God, That wilt grant unto us justice and
salvation upon the holy Morrow of Judgment!”

“Is it,” Donander said, “of Manuel that these little creatures speak?”

“We know not of any Manuel,” the universe replied to him. “We only know
that Thou art God, our Creator and Preserver.”

Then, after viewing again the vermin which swarmed about his worlds,
Donander said, like one a little frightened, “Is God thus?”

They answered him, fondly and reverently, “How can God be otherwise than
Thou art?”

At that Donander shuddered. But in the same moment he said, “If this be
a true showing, and if I be indeed a god, and the master of all things,
the human heart which survives in me wills now to create that to-morrow
for which these weaklings and I too have so long waited.”

Then Sidvrar pointed out, as patiently as outraged common-sense
permitted: “Still, still, you are talking nonsense! How can an Ans
create to-morrow?”

Donander asked, in turn, “Why not, if you be omnipotent?”

“It is because we are omnipotent. Thus in Ydalir there is but one day,
from which not even in imagination can any Ans escape. For, whatever any
of the Ænseis desires, even if it be a to-morrow, must instantly happen
and exist; and so must be to-day. That ought to be plain enough.”

“It is not plain,” Donander answered, “although, the way you put it, I
admit, it does sound logical. Therefore, if this indeed be the way of
omnipotence, and if none may escape his day, and if I be a trapped and
meager immortal, and the master only of those things which are to-day,
then now let all things end! For my heart stays human. To-day does not
know the runes of my heart’s contentment. My heart will not be satisfied
unless it enter into that morrow of justice and salvation which the
overlords of men, as you now tell me, cannot desire nor plan. So now, if
this be a true showing, now let all things end!”

Within the moment Donander saw that, while he was yet speaking, space
was emptied of life. Down yonder now were no more men and women
anywhere. None any longer awaited an oncoming day which was to content
one utterly with an assured bright heritage, divined in the dreams which
allured and derided all human living endlessly, and condemned the heart
of every man to be a stranger to contentment upon this side of
to-morrow. That ageless dream about to-morrow, and about the redeeming
which was to come—to-morrow—had passed, as the smoke of a little incense
passes; and with it had gone out of being, too, those whom it had
nourished and sustained. There were no more men or women anywhere.
Donander could see only many cinders adrift in a bleak loneliness: and
Donander of Évre must endure eternally as Donander Veratyr, a lonely and
uncomprehended immortal, among his many peers.

“So do you be sensible about it, my son-in-law,” said Sidvrar Vafudir,
when he had spoken the word of power which closed forever that cheerless
window, out of which nobody was ever to look any more,—“be sensible if
there indeed stay any root of intelligence in you. And do you
henceforward live more fittingly, as a credit to your wife’s family. And
do you put out of mind those cinders and those ashes and those clinkers
that were the proper sport of your youth. Such is the end of every wise
person’s saga.”


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _65._
                         _The Reward of Faith_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


THEREAFTER the King and Father of the Ænseis departed, well pleased with
the lesson taught that whippersnapper. And Donander also smiled, and he
looked contentedly about his pleasant quarters in the everlasting vales
of Ydalir.

“Still, not for a great deal,” Donander reflected, “would I be treading
in that old sorcerer’s sandals; and it is a fair shame that I should
have such a person for a father-in-law.”

For, as a loyal son of the Church, Donander did not doubt that the
wonders which Sidvrar had just shown to him could only be an illusion
planned with some evil spirit’s aid to tempt Donander away from
respectability and the true faith. In consequence Donander Veratyr, that
had been the Creator and Destroyer of all things except the human heart
which survived in him, went now into the chapel of Reginlief. There he
decorously said the prayers to which Donander was accustomed, and he
prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s
soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                BOOK TEN

                            AT MANUEL’S TOMB

  “_What hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre?_”
                           —ISAIAH, xxii, 16.




------------------------------------------------------------------------




               —Salut, ami, dit Jurgen, si vous êtes une
               créature de Dieu.

               —Votre protase est du bien mauvais grec,
               observa le Centaure, car en Hellade nous
               nous abstenions de semblables réserves.
               D’ailleurs mon origine vous intéresse
               certes moins que ma destination.

                         —LA HAULTE HISTOIRE DE JURGEN.




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                                 _66._
                          _Old Age of Niafer_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW the tale is of crippled old Dame Niafer, who had reformed the
Poictesme which her husband redeemed, and of the thinking which came
upon her in the last days of her life. Until latterly Niafer had not,
with at every turn so many things requiring to be done, had very much
time for thinking. But now there was nothing more ever to be done by
Madame Niafer. Radegonde saw to that.

The gray-eyed minx ruled everything and everybody. That was not pleasant
for her mother-in-law to behold, after Niafer herself had ruled over
Poictesme for some twenty years, and all the while had kept frivolity
and disorder out of fashion. No mother could, in the first place,
honestly enjoy seeing her own son thus hoodwinked and led into perpetual
dissipation at all hours of the night, by a wife who, at thirteen
hundred and some years of age, might reasonably be expected to know
better. In the second place, Niafer could have managed things, and very
certainly poor Emmerick, with immeasurably more benefit to everybody,
and to common-sense too.

All that warring with Maugis, for instance, had been a sad mistake. Now,
under my regency, the aged Countess would reflect with complacence,
there was grumbling here and there,—men being what they are, with no
least idea as to what is actually good for them,—but never any armed
revolt. When people were dissatisfied, you sent for them, they came, you
had a sensible talk, you found out what was really wrong, and you
righted matters to the utmost extent that such a righting seemed
judicious; you eked out the remainder with a little harmless
soft-soaping, and that was all there was to it. No warrior in his sane
senses would go to war with an intelligent old lady who esteemed him
such a particularly fine fellow.

Now, if at the very beginning, that poor Maugis—quite a nice-looking
child, too, until he lost flesh under that continual plotting and
throat-cutting, with parents you had known for years,—had been had in to
dinner, just with the family, then all that killing and burning and
being awakened at unearthly hours by the misguided boy’s night attacks
upon Bellegarde would have been avoided.

But Niafer, of course, had been allowed no say in the matter. She was
allowed no say in any matter by that woman, who topped off her ill-doing
by being always so insufferably pleasant and so considerate of Mother
Niafer’s comfort. And in this enforced idleness it was rather lonely now
that Holmendis was dead. Nearly seven years ago now that dependable and
always firm friend had gone crusading with St. Louis; and the pair of
them had passed from the ruins of Carthage to eternal glory with the aid
of dysentery. Niafer missed Holmendis a great deal, after the three
decades of close friendship and of the continuous intimacy about which
people said things of which the old Countess was aware enough and
utterly indifferent.

She had her children, of course. It was particularly nice to have
Melicent back again, after all these years of never quite really knowing
whether the child was managing her abductor tactfully, in that far-off
Nacumera. But the children had their own children now, and their own
affairs; and none of these possessions were they inclined to let Niafer
control, in the Poictesme wherein, for eighteen years, she had
controlled everything. For the rest, Dame Niafer knew that a prophecy
which had been made to her very long ago by the Head of Misery was now
being fulfilled: she had no place in the world’s ordering, she was but a
tolerated intruder into her children’s living, and nobody anywhere did
more than condone her coming.

Niafer did not blame her children. She instead admitted, with the vast
practicality not ever to be comprehended by any male creature, that
their behavior was sensible.

“I would meddle perpetually if they permitted it. I am very often a
nuisance, as it is. And so, that part of the prophecy about my weeping
in secret is quite plainly nonsense, since there is nothing whatever to
weep about, or even to be surprised at,” Dame Niafer stated cheerily.

And so, too, if sometimes, after one or another crossing of her still
pertinacious will, the dethroned old ruler of Poictesme would hobble
very quietly into her own rooms, and would remain there for a lengthy
while with the door locked, and would come out by and by with reddened
eyes, nobody noticed it particularly. For she, who in her prime had been
the most sociable of potentates, seemed nowadays to prefer upon the
whole to be alone. She was continually, without any ostentation, limping
away from any little gathering of her descendants. Mother was becoming
slightly queer: you shrugged, not at all unfondly, over the fact, and
put up with it. Grandmother would be there one moment laughing and
talking like everybody else; and the very next moment she was gone. And
you would find her, accidentally, in some quiet corner quite alone, bent
up a little, and not doing anything whatever, but just thinking....

Dame Niafer thought, usually, about her husband. Her lot had been the
most glorious among the lots of all women in that she had been Manuel’s
wife. That marvelous five years of living which she had shared with
Manuel the Redeemer was not an extensive section of her life, but it was
the one part which really counted, she supposed. It was only on account
of her human frailty that she remembered so many more things about
Holmendis, who was a mere saint, than she did about her Manuel. She
found it, nowadays, rather hard—and injudicious, too,—to recall any
quite definite details about her miraculous husband: there was only, at
a comfortable remoteness, a tall gray god in a great golden glowing. It
was all wonderful, and inspiring, and very sad, too, but noticeably
vague: and the tears which came into your eyes were pleasant, without
your knowing exactly what you were crying about.

That was the best way in which to think of her Manuel. A prying into
particulars, a dwelling upon any detail whatever, was injudicious. Such
a perhaps blasphemous direction of your thoughts suggested, for
instance, that matters were going to be a trifle awkward, just at first,
after that second coming of the Redeemer.

It was not, altogether, that Manuel would be a stranger to her, nor even
that omniscience, of course, knew all about Holmendis. In dealing with a
liberal patron of the Church it was the métier of omniscience to become
a little myopic. For that matter, Dom Manuel’s earthly past was not so
far gone out of his wife’s memory that he could be the only person to do
any talking about natural frailties. No, the drawback would be, rather,
that, when her Manuel had returned, in undiminished glory, you would
have to get accustomed to so many things, all over again.... Niafer
hoped that, in any event, at his second coming he would not bring back
with him that irritating habit of catching cold on every least occasion:
for you probably could not with decency rebuke a spiritual Redeemer for
his insistence upon keeping the rooms stuffy and shut up everywhere on
account of the draughts, any more than you could really look up to him
with appropriate reverence if he came snorting and sneezing all over the
place.... And if he for one single solitary moment expected to have, in
his reordering of human affairs, that Alianora and that Freydis of his
established anywhere near his lawful wife....

That mad contingency, however, was not at any time mentally provided
against, because at this point Niafer would turn away from this
undoubtedly blasphemous trend of speculation. Her Manuel was in all
things perfect. He would come again in unimaginable glory, and he would
exalt her, his chosen, his one bride, who was so utterly unworthy of
him, to the sharing of an eternal felicity which—after you got
accustomed to it, and really settled down, with a fresh growth of hair
and a complete set of teeth and all the other perquisites of unfading
youth,—would be quite pleasant. Details could wait. Details, the moment
you dwelt upon them, became upsetting. Details in any way relative to
those hussies were no doubt directly suggested by the powers of evil.

It was after such considerations that Niafer would go to pray beside the
tomb which she had builded in honor of Manuel.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _67._
                           _The Women Differ_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


NOW the tale tells that in the spring of the year old Niafer, thus
sitting beside her husband’s tomb, looked up and found another aged
woman waiting near her.

“Hail, Queen of England!” said Dame Niafer, with quite as much civility
as there was any need for.

“So!” said the other. “You would be his wife. Yes. I remember you, that
day near Wissant. But how could you be recognizing me?”

“Are there not tears in your old eyes? There is no other person living,
since that double-faced Freydis got her just deserts,” replied Niafer,
very quietly, “who would be shedding tears over my Manuel’s tomb. We two
alone remember him.”

“That is true,” said Alianora. And for no reason at all she smiled a
little. “One hears so much about him, too.”

“The world has learned to appreciate my husband,” Niafer assented. She
did not altogether approve of Madame Alianora’s smile.

Now the Queen said: “He was rather a dear boy. And I am not denying that
I cared a great deal about him once. But even so, my dear, this wonder
of the world that the poems and the histories are about, and that the
statues and the shrines commemorate, and that one, in mere decency, has
to pretend to remember!”

“I am sure I do not at all understand you, Madame Alianora.” And Niafer
looked without any love at this Queen of England who in the old days had
been upon terms of such regrettable intimacy with Dom Manuel.

But Alianora went on, with that provokingly pleasant air of hers: “No,
you would not understand the joke of it. You do not properly value the
work of your hands and of your imagining. But this legend which you in
chief, with the pride and the foolishness of Poictesme to back you, have
been quietly and so tirelessly fostering through all these years, has
spread through the known world. Our Manuel has become the peer of Hector
and of Arthur and of Charlemagne for his bravery and his wisdom and his
other perfections. Our Manuel is to come again, in all his former glory!
And I, who remember Manuel quite clearly—though I am not denying he has
had his successors in my good will and friendly interest,—well, in
perfect candor, my dear, I find these notions rather droll.”

To this sort of talking Niafer replied, sharply enough, “I do not know
of any reason in the world for you to be speaking of my husband as ‘our’
Manuel.”

“No, my dear, I am sure he took excellent care that you should never
know about such things. Well, but all that is over a great while ago.
And there is no need for us two to be quarreling over the lad that took
his pleasure with the pair of us, and with Queen Freydis too, and with
nobody knows how many other women, and who, to do him justice, gave to
each playfellow a fair half of that pleasure.”

This exposed unvenerable handsome old Alianora to the gaze of perturbed
decorum. “I do not think, madame, that you ought to be alluding to such
frivolous matters here at his tomb.”

“After all, though,” Alianora stated, “it is not as if he were really
buried in this place. You dreaming braggarts of Poictesme had not even a
corpse to start with, when you began on your fine legend. No: the entire
affair is pure invention; and is very neatly symbolized by this stately
tomb with nothing whatever inside it.”

“What, though, if Manuel had been truly buried here, what would this
world have been relinquishing to the cold grave?” said Freydis. For
Niafer saw that Freydis also was at hand. This Freydis was a witch woman
with whose connivance Dom Manuel had in the old days made unholy images
and considerable scandal.

“Nobody knows that,” continued Freydis. “Not even we who, as we said,
loved Manuel the Redeemer in his mortal life knew anything about Manuel.
What sort of being lived inside that squinting tall strong husk which
used to fondle us? I often wonder about that.”

“My dear creature,” said Alianora, “do you really think it particularly
matters? I am sure we never used to think about that especial question
at the time, because the husk was, in all conscience, enough to deal
with. Yes, you may say what you will about Manuel, but among friends
there is no harm in conceding that in some respects we three know him to
have been quite wonderful.”

It was then that the old Queen of England looked up toward the gleaming
statue of the man whom these three women had loved variously. Manuel
towered high above them, bedazzling in the May sunlight, serene,
eternally heroic, eternally in that prime of life which his put-by spent
bedfellows had long ago overpassed; and he seemed to regard exalted
matters ineffably beyond the scope of their mortal living and the
comprehension of frail human faculties. But wrinkled jovial Alianora
smiled up at this superb Redeemer fondly and just a little mockingly.

“You understood me,” Alianora said, “and I you. But we did not talk
about it.”

“I say that nobody understood Manuel,” replied Freydis. “I say it is a
strange thing that we three should be continuing the life of Manuel and
the true nature of the being who lived inside that husk, and that we
three should yet stay ignorant of what we are giving to the times that
are to come. For Manuel has already returned, and he will keep returning
again and yet again, without redeeming anything and without there being
any wonder about it—”

Alianora was interested. “But do you explain, my darling—!”

“Dead Manuel lives again in your tall squinting son—”

“Yes,—and do you just imagine, Freydis dear, what a reflection that is
to any mother, what with Manuel’s irregular notions about marriage—”

“—And in the four children that he had by Niafer,” Freydis continued.
“And in these children’s children our Manuel’s life will be renewed, and
after that in their grandchildren: and Manuel’s life and Manuel’s true
nature will thus go on, in many bodies, so long as men act foolishly by
day and wickedly at night. And in the images which I aided him to make
and to inform with fire from Audela, in these also, when these are set
to live as men among mankind,—and, to my fancy, no more reasonably than
my two elder children, Sesphra and Raimbaut, have lived already,—in
these also, will our Manuel live.”

“I see,” said Alianora: “and your explanation of his second and of,
indeed, his two thousandth coming seems to me, I confess, much the more
plausible. Yes, I see. Manuel has already returned; and he will return
again any number of times—”

Freydis said moodily, “And to whose benefit and pleasuring?”

“My darling Freydis! You may depend upon it that on each occasion two
persons will get a great deal of pleasure out of preparing the way for
him. And that,” said Alianora, “that and whatever else may befall
those persons who have Manuel’s proclivities and life in them will be
but another happening in the Biography of Manuel. We three have begun
a neverending set of comedies in which the life of Manuel will be the
main actor. We have, as one might say,—among friends, my
darlings,—collaborated with the dear boy to make an endless series of
Manuels, without any special reassurance that to do this was going to
give good and pleasure to anybody except—say what you will, my
dears,—it does always give to a hearty young woman. For we do not
know, even now, exactly what sort of a creature this Manuel was and,
thanks to our collaboration, will continue to be. Yes, now I see your
point, my dear Freydis; and it is really a curious one.”

Again, though, Alianora smiled up toward the statue of Manuel as though
there were some secret between them. And Niafer had no patience whatever
with the leering and iniquitous old hussy.

“The whole world knows,” said Niafer, indignantly, “what sort of person
my husband was, for my Manuel is famous throughout Christendom.”

“Yes,” Alianora assented, “he is famous as a paragon of all the
Christian virtues, and as the Redeemer whose return is to restore the
happiness and glories of his people: and it is upon that joke, my dear
Niafer, I was congratulating you a moment or two ago.”

“He is famous for his loyalty and valor and wisdom,” said Freydis. “I
hear of it. And I remember the tall frightened fool who betrayed me, and
whom at the last I spared out of mere pity for his worthlessness. And
still, I spare and I perpetuate and I foster his living, in my children,
because it is certain that a woman’s folly does not ever perish.”

“Nevertheless, I know how to avail myself of a woman’s folly,” said
Horvendile,—for now, Dame Niafer perceived, that queer, red-headed
Horvendile also was standing beside her husband’s tomb,—“and of the
babble of children, and of the unwillingness of men to face the universe
with no better backing than their own resources.”

Then Horvendile looked full at Niafer, with his young, rather cruel
smile. And Horvendile said:

“So does it come about that the saga of Manuel and the sagas of all the
lords of the Silver Stallion have been reshaped by the foolishness and
the fond optimism of mankind; and these sagas now conform in everything
to that supreme romance which preserves us from insanity. For it is just
as I said, years ago, to one of these so drolly whitewashed and ennobled
rapscallions. All men that live, and that go perforce about this world
like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight, have a
vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer, and
about the Redeemer’s power to make those persons who serve him just and
perfect.”

“It is you who are much worse than a rapscallion!” cried out Dame
Niafer. “You are as bad as these women here. But I will not listen to
any of you or to any more of your jealous and foul blasphemies—!”

Then Madame Niafer awakened, to find herself alone by the great tomb.
But real footsteps were approaching, and they proved to be those of a
person rather more acceptable to her than was that jeering Horvendile or
were those brazen-faced and thoroughly vile-minded women about whom Dame
Niafer had been dreaming.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _68._
                        _Radegonde is Practical_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


FOR at this point Madame Niafer was approached by Jurgen, the son of
Coth, who came to Manuel’s tomb upon a slight professional matter.
Jurgen—now some while reformed by the ruthless impairments of middle
age, and settled down into tempestuous matrimony with the daughter of
Ninzian (by the wife of well-to-do old Pettipas),—had since his marriage
brought new life and fresh connections into the business of his nominal
father-in-law; and was to-day the leading pawnbroker of Poictesme. It
was thus to Jurgen, naturally enough, that Count Emmerick’s wife,
Radegonde, had applied in these hard times which followed the long and
impoverishing war with Maugis d’Aigremont.

The Countess had been taking of Dom Manuel’s tomb what she described as
a really practical view. The tomb was magnificent and in every way a
credit to the great hero’s family. Still, as Radegonde pointed out to
her husband, that effigy of Manuel at the top was inset with scores of
handsome gems which were virtually being wasted. If—of course without
giving any vulgar publicity to the improvement—these jewels could be
replaced with bits of suitably colored glass, the visual effect would
remain the same, the tomb would be as handsome as ever, and nobody would
be the wiser excepting only Count Emmerick and Radegonde, who would also
be by a deal the wealthier.

Emmerick had replied, with appropriate indignation, that it would be
blasphemy thus to despoil the tomb of his heroic father.

But to the contrary, it was Emmerick, as he forthwith learned, who
blasphemed his heroic father’s memory in even for one moment supposing
that the blessed dead cared about such vanities as rubies and sapphires,
and wanted their own innocent grandchildren to starve in the gutter;
and, for the rest, would he simply look at that pile of bills, and not
be driving everybody crazy with his high-and-mighty nonsense.

Emmerick did look, very briefly and with unhidden aversion, toward the
candid smallish mountain of unsettled accounts with which he was already
but too familiar. “Nevertheless,” said Emmerick, “it would be an
abominable action, if the story were ever to get out—”

“It will not get out, my dear,” replied his wife, “for we will leave the
whole matter to Jurgen, who is the soul of discretion.”

“—And I cannot afford to have any part in it,” said Emmerick,
virtuously.

“You need take no part whatever,” his wife assured him, “but only your
fair half of the proceeds.”

So Radegonde sent for Jurgen the pawnbroker, and asked him to appraise
the jewels in Dom Manuel’s effigy, and to name his best price for them.

It was thus that Jurgen happened to come just then to Manuel’s tomb and
to disturb the dreaming of Madame Niafer.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _69._
                         _Economics of Jurgen_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


“YOU,” the fluttered old lady began—oddly enough, it must have seemed to
Jurgen,—“you were the last of living persons to lay eyes upon him. It is
very strange that you of all people should come now to end my dreaming.
I take your coming, rogue, as an omen.”

Then Madame Niafer began to tell him somewhat of her dream. And Jurgen
listened, with the patience and the fondness which the plight of very
old persons always seemed to evoke in him.

Jurgen was upon excellent terms with Madame Niafer, whom, for Biblical
reasons, he was accustomed to refer to as the Centurion. “You say to one
man, Go, and he goeth; and you say to another man, Come, and he cometh,”
Jurgen explained. “In fine, you are a most terrible person. But when you
say to me, Go, I do not obey you, madame, because you are also a dear.”

Niafer regarded this as sheer impudence, and vastly liked it.

So she told him about her dream.... And it was possible, Dame Niafer now
admitted, that this dream might have a little misrepresented the
deplorable women involved, because that snaky-eyed Freydis was known,
since she got her dues from the Druids and the satirists, to be
satisfactorily imprisoned in infamous Antan, whereas that hypocrite of
an Alianora was now a nun at Ambresbury. But in Madame Niafer’s dreaming
the hussies had seemed equally free from the constraint of infamy and of
the convent: they had seemed to be far more dreadfully constrained, by
skepticism....

“Madame,” said Jurgen, at the end of her account, “what need is there,
after all, to worry over this little day-dream? I myself had but last
month, upon Walburga’s Eve, a far more extensive and disturbing dream:
and nothing whatever came of it.”

The Countess answered: “I grow old; and with age one is less certain of
everything. Oh, I know well enough that the lewd smirking hussies were
very slanderously in the wrong! Still, Jurgen, still, dear rogue, there
is a haunting whisper which tells me that time means to take all away. I
am a lonely powerless old creature now, but I stay Manuel’s wife. That
alone had remained to me, to have been the one love and the proud wife
of the great Redeemer of Poictesme. Now, at the last, a whispering tells
me, time must take away that also. My Manuel, a whispering tells me, was
no more splendid than other men, he performed no prodigies, and there
will be no second coming of the Redeemer: a whispering tells me that I
knew this always and that all these years I have been acting out a lie.
I think that whispering talks nonsense. And yet, with age, Jurgen, with
age and in the waiting loneliness of age, one grows less certain of
everything.”

“Madame,” said Jurgen, with his most judicial aspect, “let us regard
this really very interesting question from its worst possible side. Let
us—with suitable apologies to his great shade, and merely for the
quicker confounding of his aspersers,—suppose that Dom Manuel was, in
point of fact, not anything remarkable. Let us wildly imagine the cult
of the Redeemer which now is spread all over our land, to be compact of
exaggeration and misunderstanding and to be based virtually upon
nothing. The fact remains that this heroic and gentle and perfect
Redeemer, whether or no he ever actually existed, is now honored and,
within reason and within the reach of human frailty, is emulated
everywhere, at least now and then. His perfection has thus far, I grant
you, proved un-contagious: he has made nobody anywhere absolutely
immaculate: but none the less,—within limits, within the unavoidable
limits,—men are quite appreciably better because of this Manuel’s
example and teachings—”

“Men are happier also, Jurgen, because of that prediction as to his
second coming which he uttered in your presence on the last night of his
living, and which you brought down from Morven.”

Jurgen coughed. “It is a pleasure, it is always a pleasure, to further
in any way the well-being of my fellow-creatures. But—to resume the
immediate thread of my argument,—if this superb and most beneficial
example was not ever actually set by Dom Manuel—owing to the press of
family and state affairs,—if this example were, indeed, wholly your
personal invention, then you, O terrible Centurion, would be one of the
most potent creative artists who ever lived. Now that I proclaim, as a
retired poet, to be a possibility from which you should not take shame,
but only pride and thankfulness.”

“Do you not be talking your wheedling nonsense to me, young fellow! For,
if my life had been given over to the spreading of romances about a
Manuel who never lived—!”

Her weak, old, shriveled hands were fluttering before her, helplessly,
in a kind of futile wildness. She clasped them now, so that each hand
seemed to restrain the other. And Jurgen answered:

“I quail. I am appropriately terrified by your snappishness, and
flattered by your choice of an adjective. I venture, none the less, to
observe that I have encountered, Centurion dear, in the writings of one
or another learned author, whose name at the present escapes me, the
striking statement, and the wholly true statement,—and a statement which
was, indeed, a favorite with my saintly father,—that a tree may always
be judged by its fruit. Now, the children of Dom Manuel have thus far
most emphatically borne out this statement. Count Emmerick”—here Jurgen
coughed,—“Count Emmerick is noted for his hospitality—”

“Emmerick,” said Dame Niafer, “would be well enough if he were not led
by the nose in everything by that wife of his.”

Then Jurgen’s shoulders went up, his hands went outward, to disclaim any
personal share in the old lady’s appraisement of his present client
Radegonde. But Jurgen did not argue the matter.

“Madame Melicent,” Jurgen equably resumed, “has been the provoker of
much gratifyingly destructive warfare oversea, just as Madame Ettarre
has been the cause of another long war here at home, in which many
gentlemen have won large honor, and hundreds of the humbler sort have
been enabled to enter into a degree of eternal bliss appropriate to
their inferior estate. Such wars evoke the noble emotions of patriotism,
they enable people to become proficient in self-sacrifice, and they
remarkably better business conditions, as my ledgers attest. As for
Madame Dorothy, while she has incited no glorious public homicides and
arsons, she has gratified and she has made more pleasurable the
existence of half the gentry of Poictesme—”

“And what, you rogue, do you mean by that?”

“I allude to the organ of vision, without any anatomical excursus. I
mean that to behold such perfect beauty makes life more pleasurable.
Moreover, Madame Dorothy has incited a fine poem and a hungering and a
dreaming that will not die, and a laughter which derides its utterer,
too pitilessly—”

Now Jurgen’s voice had altered so that the old lady looked at him more
narrowly. Niafer had an excellent memory. She perfectly recalled the
infatuation of Jurgen’s youth, she who had no delusions about this
daughter of hers. And Niafer reflected briefly upon the incurable
romanticism of all men.

But Niafer said only, “I never heard of any such poem.”

Jurgen now completed the third of those convenient coughing spells. “I
refer to an epic which stays as yet unpublished. It is a variation upon
the Grail legend, madame, and pertains to the quest of a somewhat
different receptacle. However! In regard to the other children of Dom
Manuel,—concerning whose mothers your opinions, my adored Centurion, do
equal credit to your sturdy morality and your skill in the art of
impassioned prose,—we have Messire Raimbaut, a very notably respected
poet, we have Sesphra, who has become a god of the Philistines. Poets
befall all families, of course, with nobody to blame, whereas a god,
madame, is not ever, as rhetoricians express it, to be sneezed at. We
have, moreover, Edward Longshanks, one of the most applauded monarchs
that England has ever known, because he so compactly exhibits in his
large person every one of the general defects and limitations of his
people. Thus far, madame, we may estimate the children of Dom Manuel’s
body to have made a rather creditable showing.”

“There is something in what you say,” Dame Niafer admitted. “Yet what is
this nonsense about ‘the children of his body’? Have men any other
implement, unknown to their wives, with which to beget children?”

Jurgen beamed. Jurgen, it was apparent, had found an enticing idea to
play with.

“There is quite another sort of paternity, acquired without the need of
troubling and upsetting any woman. So, for the perfect rounding off of
our argument, we must consider also Dom Manuel’s children in the spirit,
those lords who were of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, and whose
heroism was modeled so exactly after his fine example.”

Niafer replied, a little puzzled: “They were notable and pious persons,
who were sent into all parts of the earth as the apostles of the
Redeemer, and who will return again with Manuel.... But do you tell me
just what you mean!”

“I mean that it was of rough and ungodly fighting-men that Dom Manuel’s
example made these incomparable heroes. There was a time, madame,—a time
to which we may now, in the proper spirit, refer without any
impiety,—when their delight in battle was as vigorous as their moral
principles were lax, a time when they jested at holy things, and when
their chastity was defective.”

The Countess nodded. “I remember that time. It was an evil time, with no
respectability in it: and I said so, from the first.”

“Yet do you consider what Dom Manuel’s example and teachings made, in
the end, of his companions in this life! Do you consider the saintly
deeds of Holden and of Anavalt, and how Ninzian was for so long the
mainstay of all religion hereabouts—!”

“Ninzian was a holy person, and even among the apostles of Manuel he was
perhaps the most devout. Nevertheless—”

But Jurgen now became more particular. “Do you consider how but fourteen
years ago Donander died a martyr in conflict with the pagan Northmen,
proving with his body’s loss the falsity and wickedness of their
superstitions when in the sight of both armies Donander was raised up
into heaven by seven angels in the same instant that a devil carried his
adversary northward!”

“That miracle is attested. Yet—”

“Consider how holy Gonfal also perished as a martyr among the infidels
of Inis Dahut, after his chaste resistance to the improper advances of
their queen! There, madame, was a very soul-stirring example for you,
because you brunettes are not easy to resist.”

“Get along with you, you rogue! My eyes stay dark and keen enough to see
that what hair I have is white in these days.”

“Then also, pious Miramon Lluagor, it is well known, converted many
hundreds of the heathen about Vraidex, by the great miracle which he
wrought when Koshchei the Deathless, and Toupan, the Duke of Chaos, and
Moloch, Lord of the Land of Tears, and Nergal, the Chief of Satan’s
Secret Police,—and several thousand other powers of evil whose names and
infernal degrees at this instant evade me,—came swarming out of hell in
the form of gigantic bees.”

“It is known that such favor was vouchsafed by Heaven to the faith and
the prayers of Miramon. Ninzian, indeed, was present at the time, and
told me about those awful insects. Each was about as large as a cow, but
their language was much worse. Nevertheless—”

But Jurgen was nowhere near done. “Then Guivric,” he pointed
out,—“Guivric of Perdigon, also, in whom the old leaven stayed longer
than in the others, so that for a while he kept some little faults, they
say, in the way of pride and selfishness,—Guivric got wholly rid of
these blemishes after his notable trip into the East to discomfit
single-handed the signal schisms of the pernicious and sinister Sylan.
There was never a sweeter nor a more prodigally generous nor a more
generally lovable saint upon earth than all found Guivric after his
return from exorcising that heathen heresiarch into a mere pile of
bones; and so the dear old Heitman stayed up to the glorious hour of his
seraphic death.”

“That is true. I recall the change in Guivric, and it was most
edifying.”

“Do you recall, also, madame, how the venerable Kerin went down to teach
the truth about the Redeemer in the deepest fastnesses of error and
delusion! and how he there confuted, one by one, the frivolous
scientific objections of the overseers of hell,—with a patience, a
painstakingness and a particularity surprising even in an apostle,—in an
argument which lasted twenty years!”

“That also is true. In fact, it was his own wife who told me about it.
Nevertheless—”

But Jurgen was still talking. “Lastly, madame, my beloved father Coth,
as a matter of equally general knowledge, went as an evangelist among
the brown-skinned and black-hearted unbelievers of Tollan. He introduced
among them the amenities of civilization and true religion. He taught
them to cover their savage nakedness. And, in just the manner of holy
Gonfal, Coth likewise subdued the goad of carnal desire and the prick of
his flesh—not once, but many times,—when Coth also was tempted by such
an ill-regulated princess as but to think of crimsons the cheek of
decency.”

The Countess said, meditatively: “You and your cheek—However, do you go
on!”

Jurgen now shook a grizzled head, in rather shocked deprecation. “You
ask the impossible. Upon the innumerable other pious exploits of Coth,
I, as his wholly unworthy son, may not dwell without appearing
vainglorious. That would be most unbecoming. For the modesty of my
father was such, madame, that, I must tell you, not even to me, his own
son, did he ever speak of these matters. The modesty of my father was
such that—as was lately revealed to a devout person in a vision,—even
now my father esteems himself unworthy of celestial bliss; even now his
conscience troubles him as to the peccadilloes of his earlier and
unregenerate days; and even now he elects to remain among what, in a
manner of speaking, might be termed the less comfortable conditions of
eternal life.”

“He is privileged, no doubt, to follow his own choice: for his
consecrated labors are attested. Nevertheless....”

Then for a while Dame Niafer considered. These certainly were the facts
as to the lords of the Silver Stallion, whom she herself could remember
as having been, in the far-off days of her youth, comparatively
imperfect persons: these acts of the apostles were facts recorded in the
best-thought-of chronicles, these were the facts familiar even to
children, facts which now a lengthy while ago, along with many other
edifying facts about the saintly lords of the Silver Stallion, had each
been fitted into its proper niche as a part of the great legend of
Manuel: and as she appraised these facts, the old Countess validly
perceived the strength of Jurgen’s argument....

“Yes,” Niafer conceded, by and by, “yes, what you say is true. These
consecrated persons had faults when they were first chosen by my husband
to be his companions: but through their intimacy with him, and through
the force of his example, they were purged of these faults, they were
made just and perfect: and after the Redeemer’s passing, they fared
stainlessly, and were his apostles, and carried that faith which his
living had taught them into every direction and about all quarters of
the earth. These are the facts recorded in each history book.”

“So, you perceive, Centurion dear! I can but repeat that, in the axiom
favored by my honored father, every tree must be judged by its fruits.
The exploits of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion I estimate as the
first fruits of the cult of the Redeemer. Men of the somewhat lax
principles to which these apostles in their younger days—I say it in the
proper spirit, madame,—did now and then, we know, succumb, such men are
not unmiraculously made just and perfect. I deduce we may declare this
cult of Manuel the Redeemer to be a heavenly inspired and an in all ways
admirable cult, since it produces miraculously, from the raw material of
alloyed humanity, such apostles. This cult has already, in the holy
lives and the high endings of the lords of the Silver Stallion, madame,
passed the pragmatic test: it is a cult that works.”

“Besides,” said Niafer, with a not unfeminine ellipsis, and with a
feminine preference for something quite tangible, “there is that last
sight of my husband’s entry into glory, which as a child you had upon
Upper Morven, and the fearful eucharist which you witnessed there. I
could never understand why there was not even one angel present, when as
many as seven came for Donander. Even so, you did witness very holy and
supernatural occurrences with which Heaven would never have graced the
passing of an ordinary person.”

“The imagination of a child—” began Jurgen. He stopped short. He added,
“Very certainly, madame, your logic is acute, and your deduction is
unassailable by me.”

“At all events—” Then it was Niafer who stopped abruptly.

But in a while she continued speaking, and in her withered face was much
that puzzled and baffled look which Coth’s old face had worn toward the
end.

“At all events, it was only a dream about those hussies. And at all
events, it is near time for dinner,” said Dame Niafer. “And people must
have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go
out of it we must take what we find. That is all. I have not the
imagination of a child. I am old. And when you get old it is better not
to imagine things. It is better for an old person not to have any
dreams. It is better for an old person not to think. Only one thing is
good for an old person, and gives to that old person an end of
loneliness and of bad dreams and of too much thinking.”

Niafer arose, not without difficulty; and the bent, limping, very aged
Countess Dowager of Poictesme now went away from Jurgen, slowly and
moodily.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                 _70._
                         _All Ends Perplexedly_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════


JURGEN, thus left alone, forthwith ascended the side of the great tomb.
He stood now at the top of it, holding to the neck of the horse upon
which sat the sculptured effigy of Manuel. The stone face, above and
looking beyond Jurgen, when seen at such close quarters, was blotched
and grotesquely coarse, the blank eyeballs gave it a repellent air of
crass idiocy. But Jurgen was there to appraise not the face but the
garments of the overtowering hero, and it was at the gems with which
this famous effigy was inset that Jurgen was really looking.

Then, without any deep surprise, Jurgen whistled. To his trained eye it
was apparent enough that these gems with which Madame Niafer had
prodigally adorned her husband’s statue were one and all, and had been
from the first, bright bits of variously colored glass. The Countess
Radegonde, it appeared, had been by a great many years forestalled in
her economics and in her practical view of this tomb by the countess who
builded it.

And somehow Jurgen was not much surprised. His only verbal outbreak was
to utter one of his favorite remarks. He said, “These women!”

He climbed down to the pavement afterward, with the gingerly care
befitting a person of forty-and-something. He cocked his gray head,
looking upward with a remarkable blending of the quizzical and of the
regretful. Now, seen at an appropriate distance, now Manuel of Poictesme
appeared again resplendent and in everything majestic. He sat there,
wary and confident and superb, it seemed, perpetually to guard the
country which he had redeemed; and to which, men said, he was to
return....

Thus Jurgen waited for some while, regarding the vast tomb which was
wholly empty, and which everywhere was adorned with a worthless tinsel
glitter, and which yet stayed the most holy and, precisely as Jurgen had
pointed out, the actually inspiring shrine of the heroic cult of the
Redeemer....

Jurgen opened his mouth. Then he shut it.

For Jurgen recalled that only last month he had become involved in a
somewhat perturbing experience, on account of having spoken extempore in
praise of the Devil; and so, as concerned the Redeemer, Jurgen decided
not to commit himself one way or the other. It seemed the part of wisdom
for an aging pawnbroker to keep out of all such extra-mundane
affairs.... Even so, a carnival of thoughts now tempted him to play with
them, because this was a paradoxical tomb about which, but for the
promptings of discretion, one might say a number of fine things. Those
tinsel fripperies were, to the eyes of a considerate person, worthy of a
reverence undemanded by mere diamonds, because of the deeds which they
had prompted: and this emptiness was sacred because of the faith which
people had put in it. And that this glittering vacuity could, as a
matter of fact, work miracles was now fully attested: for it had reduced
Jurgen to silence.

No: you could never, shruggingly, dismiss this tomb as, upon the
whole, a malefic fraud which emanated only folly and intolerance and a
persecution of the short-sighted by the blind. That was, in fact, a
relatively unimportant aspect, in that it was an aspect which need
never trouble you personally, if you were careful. And, at
forty-and-something, you were careful.

Meanwhile you knew the shining thing to have been, also, the begetter of
so much charity, and of forbearance, and of bravery, and of
self-denial,—and of its devotees’ so strange, so troublingly
incomprehensible, contentment,—that it somewhat frightened Jurgen. For
Jurgen, but a moment ago, had been handling—perhaps—a bit
over-intimately that really dangerous fountain-head of all the aspiring
and fine standards which the aging pawnbroker was used unfeignedly to
admire, with a vague, ever-present underthought as to the disastrousness
of acquiring them. It would, he felt, be the very deuce if in business
life one were ever to find these notions on the wrong side of his
counter....

Esthetically it was, of course, delightful to regard the preëminent
manifesters of the Redeemer’s power and sanctity, in those splendid
lords of the Silver Stallion about whom Jurgen had but now been talking.
It was an ennobling and a picturesque reflection that humanity had once
risen to such heights; that mere mortal men had, through their faith in
and their contact with the great Redeemer, become purged of all faults
and carnal weaknesses, and had lived stainlessly, and had even performed
their salutary miracles whenever such a course seemed requisite. Jurgen
thought it would be rather fun to work miracles. In any event, it was
pleasant, and it was non-committally uplifting, just to think about the
heroic saints of yesterday, and to envy their lot in life and their
assured fine place in history.

Jurgen thought, for example, of gentle and great-hearted old Guivric
sharing his worldly wealth in such noble irrationality with all needy
persons; and of kneeling Miramon with those seven thousand horrific bees
swarming about him,—screeching out infernal threats, but powerless to
trouble the serene, psalm-singing and unstung saint. Jurgen thought of
Kerin facing so intrepidly yet other hideous cohorts of disputatious
fiends and cowing their science so-called with decisive Biblical texts;
and of the noble shocked figure of virtuous Gonfal holding fast his
nightgown about him with one hand, and with the other repulsing the
enamored—and, they said, quite good-looking also,—Queen Morvyth of the
Isles of Wonder, when she assaulted his chastity. Performances like
these were well worthy to be commemorated in history: and Jurgen
regarded them with a warm, gratifying thrill of purely esthetic
appreciation.

For, from any practical standpoint, Jurgen obscurely felt, it would be
inconvenient to be quite as perfect and superb as all that. Or, you
might put it better, perhaps, that this was not a condition which a
really honorable person, with a shop and a wife and other obligations,
could conscientiously do anything directly to provoke for himself. Any,
as one might say, defenseless householder whom the all-powerful Redeemer
had explicitly and unarguably singled out to live in the heroic sanctity
of an apostle would be, of course, in quite another and wholly
justifiable case....

And Jurgen was wondering what it was that the child who Jurgen once had
been had, actually, witnessed and heard upon Upper Morven. He could not
now be certain: the fancies of a child are so unaccountable, so opulent
in decorative additions.... Yet the testimony of that child appeared to
have done more than anything else toward establishing Dom Manuel’s
supremacy over all the men that Poictesme had ever known; indeed, when
every fostering influence was allowed for, the whole cult of the
returning Redeemer had begun with the testimony of that child. And
perhaps it was natural enough (in this truly curious world) that Jurgen
nowadays should be the only person remaining in any place who was a bit
dubious as to the testimony of that child....

Anyhow, young Jurgen had brought down from Morven a most helpful and
inspiring prediction which kept up people’s spirits in this truly
curious world; and cheerfulness was a clear gain. The fact that nothing
anywhere entitled you to it could only, he deduced, make of this
cheerfulness a still clearer gain....

There might, besides, very well have been something to build upon.
Modesty, indeed, here raised the point if Jurgen—at that tender age and
some while before the full ripening of his powers,—could have invented
out of the whole cloth anything quite so splendid and far-reaching? And
that question he modestly left unanswered. Meanwhile (among so many
perplexities) it was certain that Poictesme, along with the rest of
Christendom, had now its wholly satisfactory faith and its beneficent
legend.


                                EXPLICIT


------------------------------------------------------------------------



                COMPENDIUM OF LEADING HISTORICAL EVENTS

               (_Abridged from the computations of Bülg_)

           ══════════════════════════════════════════════════


     1239  Manuel the Redeemer departs from Poictesme, in the
             September of this year. Last siege of the Fellowship
             of the Silver Stallion held upon the feast of St.
             Clement the Roman. Niafer named regent in her
             husband’s stead, pending either the return of Dom
             Manuel or the arrival of the twenty-first birthday of
             their son Emmerick.

     1240  Gonfal goes into the Isles of Wonder. Coth travels to
             Sorcha, and thence westward. Kerin disappears in the
             May of this year. Miramon Lluagor leaves Poictesme.

     1243  Execution of Gonfal, on or about the feast day of
             Tiburtius and Valerianus.

     1244  Miraculous birth of Fauxpas de Nointel.

     1245  Miramon Lluagor acquires, but gets inadequate benefit
             from, the bees of Toupan. Coth imprisoned at Ran
             Reigan.

     1247  Coth reaches Porutsa, and is made Emperor of Tollan.
             Coth is blown back into Poictesme.

     1250  Death of Miramon Lluagor. Flight of Demetrios the
             parricide into Anatolia.

     1252  St. Ferdinand enters into eternal life. Anavalt goes
             into Elfhame, and perishes there.

     1253  Ork and Horrig suffer martyrdom among the Peohtes.

     1254  Marriage of Dom Manuel’s reputed son, Prince Edward, at
             fifteen years of age, to the infant daughter of St.
             Ferdinand.

     1255  Mélusine puts a magic upon King Helmas, and transfers
             his court to the high place at Brunbelois. Betrothal
             of Melicent to King Theodoret.

     1256  Perion de la Forêt comes, in disguise, to Bellegarde.
             Jurgen goes into Gâtinais. Dorothy marries Michael,
             the son of Guivric.

     1257  Melicent escapes out of Poictesme, and is purchased by
             Demetrios. Jurgen makes merry with the third wife of
             the Vidame de Soyecourt.

     1258  Ending of Dame Niafer’s regency in the name of Manuel;
             with the formal accession, in the June of this year,
             upon the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul, of
             Count Emmerick the Fourth.

     1260  The portrait of Queen Radegonde becomes a mortal woman,
             and terminates the intimacy with Holden which began
             at Lacre Kai in 1237. Count Emmerick marries
             Radegonde. Death of Holden. Death of Azra.

     1261  Guivric goes east to face the Sylan. Coth dies in his
             sleep. Kerin returns into Poictesme after twenty-one
             years spent underground.

     1262  Birth of Emmerick’s first son. Ninzian detected by his
             nine hundred and eightieth wife, and is visited by
             Lucifer.

     1263  Rape of Ettarre, with her prompt rescue by Guiron.
             Maugis d’Aigremont goes into rebellion. Donander
             leaves Poictesme, and is killed by Palnatoki.

     1265  Kerin murdered by outlaws. Continuation of Maugis’
             rebellion.

     1268  Death of Pope Clement the Fourth, with the resultant
             accession, in December, of Ayrart de Montors. Jurgen
             visits the Château de Puysange, and there meets the
             Vicomte’s wife.

     1269  Birth of Florian de Puysange.

     1270  Holmendis leaves Poictesme, and dies in Africa.
             Edifying decease of Guivric. Jurgen returns into
             Poictesme, and marries Lisa, the daughter by courtesy
             of old Pettipas the pawnbroker. Count Emmerick at
             odds with the Pope.

     1271  Accession to the papal chair of Gregory the Tenth.
             Continuation of Maugis’ disastrous rebellion, with
             the partial burning of Bellegarde.

     1272  Death of Balthis. Disappearance of Ninzian. Accession
             of Dom Manuel’s reputed son to the crown of England.

     1275  Perion and Melicent come back into Poictesme. End of
             Maugis’ rebellion, with his just punishment by death.
             Marriage of Ettarre to Guiron des Rocques, who in the
             following year succeeds his brother, as Prince de
             Gâtinais.

     1277  Jurgen has a queer dream, upon Walburga’s Eve. Niafer
             visited by a queer dream during the forenoon of St.
             Urban’s day. Death of Niafer, in the June of this
             year.

     1291  Alianora dies at Ambresbury, and is interred piecemeal,
             parts of her being buried in the Benedictine convent
             there, and the remainder at the Friars Minors in
             London.

     1300  Count Emmerick murdered by his nephew, Raymondin de la
             Forêt, who seeks refuge in the unhallowed forest of
             Columbiers, and there marries Madame Mélusine the
             enchantress.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




 ● Transcriber’s Notes:
    ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
    ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
    ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
      when a predominant form was found in this book.
    ○ Text that:
      was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).