Mistress of mistresses (21 page)

'And
yet changeth not,' said Lessingham.

"This
ring of mine,' she said: 'see, it is wine-red tonight, but a-daytime sleepy
green. And such, as Doctor Vandermast affirmeth, is beauty: ever changing,
never changing. But truly it is an old prating man, and I think hardly knoweth
what he prateth of.'

'Ever
changing, never changing,' said Lessingham, as if he felt his way in the dark.
Once more his gaze met the Duke's.

Her
slanting green eyes, snakish, veiled with their silky darknesses, turned upon
Barganax and then again upon Lessingham.

Lessingham,
after a little silence, said, 'Good night’ 'And yet' said she, as he bent to
kiss her hand; and surely everything of that lady, the least turn of her finger,
the least falling tone of her lazy voice, was as a stirring of mists ready to
blow away and open upon wonder: 'what riddle was that you did ask me but now,
my lord? A man's Self, said you? or his Love?'

Lessingham,
who had asked no riddle, made no answer.

'I
think it is both,' Fiorinda said, looking steadily at him. He was ware of a
settled quality of power in her face now, diamantine, older and surer than the
primal crust, older than the stars: a quality that belonged most of all to her
lips, and to her eyes: lips that seemed to close upon antique secrets, memories
of flesh and spirit fused and transfigured in the dance of the daughters of the
morning; and eyes yet blurred from looking upon the very bed of beauty, and
delights unconceived by the mind of man. Those eyes and those lips Lessingham
knew as a child knows its mother, or as the sunset knows the sea. In a
dizziness of conflicting yeas and nays, he recognized in her the power that had
drawn him but now up the hall, on to Barganax's sword-point. Yet she who had
had that power so to draw him was strangely not this woman, but another. He
bethought him then of their supper under the moon, and of her
allegretto scherzando
that had then so charmed his mind. The movement
was changed now to
adagio
molto maestoso ed appassionato,
but
the charm remained; as if here were the lady and mistress of all, revealed, as
his very sister, the feminine of his own self: a rare and sweet familiarity of
friendship, but not of love; since no man can love and worship his own self.

Again
she spoke: 'Good night. And you are well advised to go north, my Lord
Lessingham; for I think you will find there that which you seek. North, in
Rialmar.'

In
a maze, Lessingham went from the hall.

And
now Barganax and Fiorinda, standing under the shadowing glory of those wings,
for a minute regarded one another in silence. The Duke, too, knew that mouth.
He, too, knew those upper lids with their upward slant that beaconed to
ineffable sweets. He, too, knew those lower lids, of a straightness that seemed
to rest upon the level infinitude of beauty, which is the laying and the
consolation and the promise on which, like sleeping winds on a sleeping ocean,
repose all unfulfilled desires. And now at the inner corners of those eyes, as
she looked at him, something stirred, ruffling the even purity of that lower
line as the first peep of the sun's bright limb at morning breaks the level
horizon of the sea.

'Yes,'
she said: 'you have leave to resume our conversation where it was broke off,
my friend. Yet this throne-room perhaps is not the most convenientest place for
us, considering the lateness; considering too the subject, which, once thus
raised between us, was never, as I remember, well laid again ere morning.'

ix
 

The
Ings of Lorkan

THE
RUYAR PASS
 
OWLDALE AND THE
STRING-WAY
 
THE VICAR PREPARES WAR; SO
ALSO THE DUKE
 
LESSINGHAM INVADES MESZRIA
 
BURNING OF LIMISBA
 
RODER MOVES
 
BATTLE OF LORKAN FIELD
 
BEROALD
AND JERONIMY IN THE SALIMAT.

Lessingham
in
the same hour, not to fail of his word, burnt up that leaf. On the morrow he
rode north by way of Reisma Mere and Memison, going, as he had come south three
weeks ago, but twenty in company, but so fast that now he was his own
harbinger. So it was that the Duke's safe conduct procured him welcome of all
men and speeding on his journey, while at less than a day's lag behind him was
shearing up of the war-arrow and the countryside ablaze with rumours of war. So
by great journeys he came at evening of the third day up through the defiles of
the Ruyar to the windy stony flats that tail away north-westward between the
glacier capped cliffs of the Hurun range on the right and Sherma on the left,
and so to where, in the cleft of the Ruyar pass where it crosses the watershed
to Outer Meszria and the north, the great work of Rumala leaves not so much as
a
goat's way between
cliff and towering cliff.

'This
were a pretty mouse-trap,' said Amaury, as they drew rein in the cold shadow of
the wall: 'if he had
bethought
him out of prudence, may hap, say a Monday last, soon as you broke with him, to
send a galloper whiles we dallied and gave him time for it: enjoin his
seneschal of Rumala shut door upon us, hold us for's disposal upon further
order. Had you thought on that?' ' 'I thought on't,' said Lessingham, 'when I
took his offer.'

'So
I too,' said Amaury, and loosened his sword in its scabbard. 'And I think on't
now.'

'And
yet I took his offer,' said Lessingham. 'And I had reason. You are prudent,
Amaury, and I would have you so. Without my reason, my prudence were in you
rashness. And indeed, my reason was a summer reason and would pass very ill in
winter.'

In
Rumala they were well lodged and with good entertainment. They were up
betimes. The seneschal, a gaunt man with yellow mustachios and a pale blue eye,
brought them out, when they were ready after breakfast, by the northern gate to
the little level saddle whence the road drops northwards into Rubalnardale.

'The
Gods take your lordship in Their hand. You are for Rerek?'

'Ay,
for Laimak,' answered
Lessingham.                             
,

'By
the Salimat had been your easiest from Zayana.'

‘I
came that way south,' answered he; 'and now I was minded to look upon Rumala.
'Tis as they told me; I shall not come this way again.'

Amaury
smiled in himself.

'You
are bound by Kutarmish?' said the seneschal. 'Yes.'

‘I
have despatches for the keeper there. If your lordship would do me the honour
to carry them?'

'Willingly,'
said Lessingham. 'Yet, if they be not of urgency, I would counsel you keep 'em
till to-morrow. You may have news then shall make these stale.'

The
seneschal looked curiously at him. 'Why what news should there be?' he said.

'How
can I tell?' said Lessingham.

'You
speak as knowing somewhat.'

'To-morrow',
said Lessingham, 'was always dark today. To-day, is clear: so enjoy it,
seneschal. Give Amaury your letters: I'll see 'em delivered in Kutarmish.'

They
were come now to the edge of the cliff upon the face whereof the road winds in
and out for two thousand feet or more before it comes out in the bottom of
Rubalnardale, plumb below the brink they stood on as a man might spit. The
seneschal said, 'You must walk and lead your horses, my lord, down the
Curtain.'

*Can
a man not ride it?'

'Nor
ever did, nor ever will.'

Lessingham
looked over and considered. 'Maddalena hath carried me, and at a good racking
pace, through the Hanging Corridors of the Greenbone ranges in nether Akkama:
'twas very like this.' He began to mount: 'Nay, touch her not: she will bite
and strike with her forelegs at an unknown.'

The
seneschal backed away with a wry smile as Lessingham leapt astride of his
dangerous-eyed red mare. With him barely in the saddle, she threw a capriole on
the very verge of the precipice; tossed her mane; with a graceful turn of her
head took her master's left foot daintily between her teeth; then in a sudden
frozen stillness waited on his will.

‘I
had heard tell,' said the seneschal, as the mare, treading delicately as an
antelope, carried her rider down and out of sight, 'that this lord of yours was
a mad fighting young fellow; but never saw I the like of this. Nay,' he said,
as Amaury mounted and his men besides, 'then give me back my letters. As well
send 'em later with the party must take up your corpses.'

'We
shall now show you a thing: safe as flies on a wall,' said Amaury.

Lessingham
shouted from the bend below, ' 'Tis a good road north by Rumala: a bad road
south.' Amaury, smiling with himself, rode over the edge, and the rest followed
him man by man. The seneschal stood for a while looking down the cliff when
they were gone. There was nothing to be seen: only on the ear came a jangling
of bits and the uneven clatter of horse-hooves fainter and fainter from the
hollows of the crags. Far below, an
eagle
sailed past the face of that mountain wall, a level effortless sweep on still
wings brazen in the sunshine.

Dusk
was confounding all distances, smoothing away all shadows, smudging with sleepy
fingers the clear daylight verities of whinbush and briar and thorn, mole-hill
 
and wayside stone, outcropping rock and
grassy hummock, fern and bent, willow and oak and beech and silver birch-tree,
all into a pallid oneness and immateriality of twilight, as Lessingham and
Amaury came at a walking-pace over the last stretch of the long open moorland
sparsely grown with trees that runs up north from Ristby, and took the road
north-eastward for Owldale. The westermost outlying spur of the Forn impended
in a precipitous gable on their right; beyond it, north and round to the west,
gathered by the dusk into a single blue wall of crenelled and ruined towers,
the Armarick peaks and the fells about Anderside and Latterdale were a vastness
of peace against the windy sky. There had been showers of rain, and thunder
among the hills. Great Armarick, topping the neighbouring peaks, had drawn
about his frost-shattered head a coverlet of sluggish and slate-hued cloud.

They
had long outridden their company. Amaury's horse was blown. Even Maddalena had
quieted her fiery paces to the unrelenting plod that draws on to corn and a
sweet bed and sleep at night. Lessingham in a graceful idleness rode sideways,
the slacked reins in his left hand, his right flat-palmed on the crupper.
Turning his head, he met Amaury's eyes regarding him through the dusk.
Something in their look made him smile. 'Well,' he said: 'grey silver aloft
again, Amaury?'

'There's
more in't than that,' said Amaury. 'You are stark mad these five days I think,
since we set out north from Zayana. I cannot fathom you.'

Lessingham's
eyes took on their veiled inward-dreaming look and his lips their smile that
had first snared Barganax's fancy, holding a mirror as it were to Fiorinda's
smile. 'I was never more sober in my life,' he said, his hand softly stroking
Maddalena's back. There was a
secret
beat of music in his voice, like as had been in the Duke's when, upon
Ambremerine to the singing of the faun, he had spoken that stave into his
mistress's ear.

They
rode the next league in silence, up the deep ravine of Scandergill above which
the valley spreads out into wide flats, and the road strikes across to the
north side through oak-woods that turned with their overarching shade the
cloudy May night to inky darkness. A drizzling rain was falling when they came
out of the forest and followed the left bank of Owlswater up to the bridge
above the waters-meet at Storby, where Stordale opens a gateway into the hills
to the north and the Stordale Beck tumbles into Owldale white over a staircase
of waterfalls. The keeper of the bridge-house took the password and came down
to offer his duty to Lessingham: he flew an owl to carry tidings of their
approach to the Vicar in Laimak, and another, because of the darkness, to
Anguring that they should have lights to light them over the Stringway. Two hours
above Storby they halted half an hour for their company,-left behind in their
wild riding beyond Ristby. Now the road narrowed and steepened, climbing in
zig-zags under the cliffs at the base of Little Armarick and tapering at last
to a four-foot ledge with the jutting rock of Anguring Combust above it and
the under-cut wall of the gorge below. At the bottom of that gorge, two hundred
feet beneath the road, Owlswater whitened in foam and thunder over the ruins of
old Anguring castle, that twenty years ago the Lord Horius Parry had flung down
there from its rock, when after a long siege he had by stratagem won it and
burnt it up along with his brother and his brother's wife and their sons and
daughters and all their folk, glad to have rooted out at last this tree that
had stood as a shadow against the sun to mar the fair growth of his own
lordship in Laimak. Then had he let build, over against it on the left bank of
the gorge, his own new fortalice of Anguring, upon a backward and upward
running crest, to command at close range both the road below the former castle,
and the Stringway. Upon this
Stringway
Mnddalena now delicately stepped, her soul calm, amid the flurry of winds and
unseen furious waters and flare-lit darknesses, with the comfort of a familiar
master-mind speaking to her through pressure of knee and through sensitive
touch of bit upon lips and tongue. The gorge was here barely twenty paces
broad, and a huge slab, fallen in ancient times from the mountain face above,
was jammed like a platter or meat-dish caught and gripped there up on edge: one
edge of the platter jammed where the road ended under old Anguring, and the
other jammed against the gorge's brink where new Anguring sat perched like a
preying bird. Along that slab's upturned edge ran the road: an arched footway
of rock, too narrow for two horses meeting to pass one another: the
inexpugnable gateway from the south into upper Owldale and the pasture lands of
Laimak. Lessingham rode it unconcerned, giving Maddalena her head and letting
her take her time, in the smoky glare of a dozen torches brought down to the
cliff's edge out of Anguring. Amaury and the rest were fain to lead their
horses across.