Mistress of mistresses Read online

  "From whatever heaven Mr. Eddison comes, he has added a masterpiece to English literature.'—James Stephens

  The author of this extraordinary and reverberating book has dared to be completely imaginative, to brush aside the world, create and order his own cosmqs, and with this background give us the death and transfiguration of a hero.

  The scene is that fabled land of Zimiamvia (already mentioned in the previous volume, The Worm Ouroboros) of which philosophers tell us that no mortal foot may tread it, but that souls do inhabit it of the dead that were great upon earth...Here they forever live, love, do battle, and even for a space die again.

  Lessingham—artist, poet, king of men, and lover of women—is dead. But from Aphrodite herself, Mistress of Mistresses, he has earned the promise both to live again in Zimiamvia and of her own perilous future favors.

  This volume recounts the story of his first day in that strange Valhalla, where a lifetime is a day and where— among enemies, enchantments, guile, and triumph—that promise is fulfilled.

  BY E. R. EDDISON

  THE WORM OUROBOROS

  A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON

  MISTRESS OF MISTRESSES

  A VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA BY

  E. R. EDDISON

  BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

  Copyright 1935 by E. P. Dutton Co., Inc. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper or radio broadcast.

  This edition published by arrangement with E. P. Dutton Sc. Co., Inc.

  First Printing: August, 1967 Second Printing: September, 1967 Third Printing: May, 1968

  First Canadian Printing: November, 1967

  Printed in Canada

  BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

  101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003

  W.G.E

  TO YOU, MADONNA MIA

  AND TO MY FRIEND

  EDWARD ABBE NILES

  I DEDICATE THIS

  VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA

  CONTENTS

  the overture

  ZIMIAMVIA

  I a spring night in mornagay

  II the duke of zayana

  iii. the tables set in meszria

  iv. zimiamvian dawn

  v. the vicar of rerek

  vi. lord lessingham's embassage

  vii. a night-piece on ambremerine

  viii. sperra cavallo

  ix. the ings of lorkan

  x. the concordat of ilkis

  xi. gabriel flores

  xii. noble kinsmen in laimak

  xiii. queen antiope

  xIv. dorian mode: full close

  xv. rialmar vindemiatrix

  xvI the vicar and barganax

  xvii. the ride to kutarmish

  xviii. rialmar in starlight

  xix. lightning out of fingiswold

  xx. thunder over rerek

  xxi. enn freki renna

  xxii. zimiamvian night

  note

  maps of the three kingdoms

  Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des mattresses,

  O toi, tous mes plaisrs! o toi, tous mes devoirs!

  Tu te rappelleras la beaute des caresses,

  La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,

  Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des maitresses!

  Les soirs illumines par l’ardeur du charbon,

  Et les soirs au balcon, voiles de vapeurs roses.

  Que ton sein m'etait doux! que ton cceur m'etait bon!

  Nous avons dit souvent d'imperissables choses

  Les soirs illumines par l'ardeur du charbon.

  Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirees!

  Que l'espace est profond! que le cceur est puissant!

  En me penchant vers toi, reine des adorees,

  Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang.

  Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soiries!

  La nuit s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison,

  Et mes yeux dans le noir devinaient tes prunelles,

  Et je buvais ton souffle, O douceur, O poison!

  Et tes pieds s'endormaient dans mes mains fraternelles.

  La nuit s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison.

  Je sais l’art d'evoquer les minutes heureuses,

  Et revis mon passe blotti dans tes genoux.

  Car a quoi bon chercher tes beautes langoureuses

  Ailleurs qu'en ton cher corps et qu'en ton cceur si doux?

  Je sais I'art d'evoquer les minutes heureuses!

  Ces serments, ces parjums, ces baisers infinis,

  Renaitront-ils d'un gouffre interdit a nos sondes,

  Comme montent au del les soleils rajeunis

  Apres s'etre laves au fond des mers profondes? —

  O serments! O parfums! O baisers infinis!

  Baudelaire

  The Overture

  THE UNSETTING SUNSET AN UNKNOWN LADY BESIDE THE BIER EASTER AT MARDALE GREEN LESSINGHAM LADY MARY LESSINGHAM MEDITATION OF MORTALITY APHRODITE OURANIA A VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA A PROMISE.

  Let me gather my thoughts a little, sitting here alone with you for the last time, in this high western window of your castle that you built so many years ago, to overhang like a sea eagle's eyrie the grey-walled waters of your Raftsund. We are fortunate, that this should have come about in the season of high summer, rather than on some troll-ridden night in the Arctic winter. At least, I am fortunate. For there is peace in these Arctic July nights, where the long sunset scarcely stoops beneath the horizon to kiss awake the long dawn. And on me, sitting in the deep embrasure upon your cushions of cloth of gold and your rugs of Samarkand that break the chill of the granite, something sheds peace, as those great sulphur-coloured lilies in your Ming vase shed their scent on the air. Peace; and power; indoors and out: the peace of the glassy surface of the sound with its strange midnight glory as of pale molten latoun or orichalc; and the peace of the waning moon unnaturally risen, large and pink-coloured, in the midst of the confused region betwixt sunset and sunrise, above the low slate-hued cloud-bank that fills the narrows far up the sound a little east of north, where the Trangstrommen runs deep and still between mountain and shadowing mountain. That for power: and the Troldtinder, rearing their bare cliffs sheer from the further brink; and, away to the left of them, like pictures I have seen of your Ushba in the Caucasus, the tremendous two-eared Rulten, lifted up against the afterglow above a score of lesser spires and bastions: Rulten, that kept you and me hard at work for nineteen hours, climbing his paltry three thousand feet. Lord! and that was twenty-five years ago, when you were about the age I am to-day, an old man, by common reckoning; yet it taxed not me only in my prime but your own Swiss guides, to keep pace with you. The mountains; the un-plumbed deeps of the Raftsund and its swinging tideways; the unearthly darkless Arctic summer night; and indoors, under the mingling of natural and artificial lights, of sunset and the windy candlelight of your seven-branched candlesticks of gold, the peace and the power of your face.

  Your great Italian clock measures the silence with its ticking: 'Another, gone! another, gone! another, gone!1 Commonly, I have grown to hate such tickings, hideous to an old man as the grinning memento mori at the feast. But now, (perhaps the shock has deadened my feelings), I could almost cheat reason to believe there was in very truth eternity in these things: substance and everlasting life in what is more transient and unsubstantial than a mayfly, empirical, vainer than air, weak bubbles on the flux. You and your lordship here, I mean, and this castle of yours, more fantastic than Beckford's Fonthill, and all your life that has vanished into the irrevocable past: a kind of
nothingness. 'Another, gone! another, gone!' Seconds, or years, or sons of unnumbered time, what does it matter? I can well think that this hour just past of my sitting here in this silent room is as long a time, or as short, as those twenty-five years that have gone by since you and I first, on a night like this, stared at Lofotveggen across thirty miles of sea, as we rounded the Landegode and steered north into the open Westfirth.

  I can see you now, if I shut my eyes; in memory I see you, staring at the Lynxfoot Wall: your kingdom to be, as I very well know you then resolved (and soon performed your resolve): that hundred miles of ridge and peak and precipice, of mountains of Alpine stature and seeming, but sunk to the neck in the Atlantic stream and so turned to islands of an unwonted fierceness, close set, so that seen from afar no breach appears nor sea-way betwixt them. So sharp cut was their outline that night, and so unimaginably nicked and jagged, against the rosy radiance to the north which was sunset and sunrise in one, that for the moment they seemed feigned mountains cut out of smoky crystal and set up against a painted sky. For a moment only; for there was the talking of the waves under our bows, and the wind in our faces, and, as time went by with still that unaltering scene before us, every now and again the flight and wild cry of a black-backed gull, to remind us that this was salt sea and open air and land ahead. And yet it was hard then to conceive that here was real land, with the common things of life and houses of men, under that bower of light where the mutations of night and day seemed to have been miraculously slowed down; as if nature had fallen entranced with her own beauty mirrored in that sheen of primrose light. Vividly, as it had been but a minute since instead of a quarter of a century, I see you standing beside me at the taffrail, with that light upon your lean and weather-beaten face, staring north with a proud, alert, and piercing look, the whole frame and posture of you alive with action and resolution and command. And I can hear the very accent of your voice in the only two things you said in all that four hours' crossing: first, The sea-board of Demonland.' Then, an hour later, I should think, very low and dream-like, This is the first sip of Eternity.'

  Your voice, that all these years, forty-eight years and a month or two, since first I knew you, has had power over me as has no other thing on earth, I think. And today— But why talk of to-day? Either to-day is not, or you are not: I am not very certain which. Yesterday certainly was yours, and those five and twenty years in which you, by your genius and your riches, made of these islands a brighter Hellas. But to-day: it is as well, perhaps, that you have nothing to do with to-day. The fourteenth of July to-morrow: the date when the ultimatum expires, which this new government at Oslo sent you; the date they mean to take back their sovereign rights over Lofoten in order to reintroduce modern methods into the fisheries. I know you were prepared to use force. It may come to that yet, for your subjects who have grown up in the islands under the conditions you made for them may not give up all without a stroke. But it could only have been a catastrophe. You had not the means here to do as you did thirty-five years ago, when you conquered Paraguay: you could never have held, with your few thousand men, this bunch of islands against an industrialized country like Norway. Stir's, 'Shall the earth-lice be my bane, the sons of Grim Kogur?' They would have bombed your castle from the air.

  And so, I think fate has been good to you. I am glad you died this morning.

  I must have been deep in my thoughts and memories when the Senorita came into the room, for I had heard no rustle or footfall. Now, however, I turned from my window-gazing to look again on the face of Lessingham where he lay in state, and I saw that she was standing there at his feet, looking where I looked, very quiet and still. She had not noticed me, or, if she had, made no account of my presence. My nerves must have been shaken by the events of the day more than I could before have believed possible: in no other way can I explain the trembling that came upon me as I watched her, and the sudden tears that half blinded my eyes. For though, no doubt, the feelings can play strange tricks in moments of crisis, and easily confound that nice order which breeding and the common proprieties impose even on our inward thoughts, it is yet notable that the perturbation that now swept my whole mind and body was without any single note or touch of those chords which can thrill so loudly at the approach of a woman of exquisite beauty and presumed accessibility. Tears of my own I had not experienced since my nursery days. Indeed, it is only by going back to nursery days that I can recall anything remotely comparable to the emotion with which I was at that moment rapt and held. And both then as a child, and now half-way down the sixties: then, as I listened on a summer's evening in the drawing-room to my eldest sister singing at the piano what I learned to know later as Schubert's Wohin?, and now, as I saw the Senorita Aspasia del Rio Amargo stand over my friend's death-bed, there was neither fear in the trembling that seized me and made my body all gooseflesh, nor was it tears of grief that started in my eyes. A moment before, it is true, my mind had been feeling its way through many darknesses, while the heaviness of a great unhappiness at long friendship gone like a blown-out candleflame clogged my thoughts. But now I was as if caught by the throat and held in a state of intense awareness: a state of mind that I can find no name for, unless to call it a state of complete purity, as of awaking suddenly in the morning of time and beholding the world new born.

  For a good many minutes, I think, I remained perfectly still, except for my quickened breathing and the shifting of my eyes from this part to that of the picture that was burning itself into my senses so that, I am very certain, all memories and images will fall off from me before this will suffer alteration or grow dim. Then, unsurprised as one hears in a dream, I heard a voice (that was my own voice) repeating softly that stanza in Swinburne's great lamentable Ballad of Death:

  By night there stood over against my bed

  Queen Venus with a hood striped gold and black,

  Both sides drawn fully back

  From brows wherein the sad blood failed of red,

  And temples drained of purple and full of death.

  Her curled hair had the wave of sea-water

  And the sea's gold in it.

  Her eyes were as a dove's that sickeneth.

  Strewn dust of gold she had shed over her,

  And pearl and purple and amber on her feet.

  With the last cadence I was startled awake to common things, as often, startling out of sleep, you hear words spoken in a dream echo loud beyond nature in your ears. I rose, inwardly angry with myself, with some conventional apology on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back in time. The verses had been spoken not with my tongue but in my brain, I thought; for the look on her face assured me that she had heard nothing, or, if she had, passed it by as some remark which demanded neither comment on her part nor any explanation or apology on mine.

  She moved a little so as to face me, her left hand hanging quiet and graceful at her side, her right resting gently on the brow of the great golden hippogriff that made the near bedpost at the foot of Lessingham's bed. With the motion I seemed to be held once again in that contemplation of peace and power from which I had these hours" past taken some comfort, and at the same time to be rapt again into that state of wide-eyed awareness in which I had a few minutes since gazed upon her and Lessingham. But now, just as (they tell us) a star of earthly density but of the size of Betelgeuze would of necessity draw to it not matter and star-dust only but the very rays of imponderable light, and suck in and swallow at last the very boundaries of space into itself, so all things condensed in her as to a point. And when she spoke, I had an odd feeling as if peace itself had spoken.

  She said: 'Is there anything new you can tell me about death, sir? Lessingham told me you are a philosopher.’

  'All I could tell you is new, Dona Aspasia,' I answered; 'for death is like birth: it is new every time.'

  'Does it matter, do you suppose?' Her voice, low, smooth, luxurious, (as in Spanish women it should be, to fit their beauty, yet rarely is), seemed to balance on the air like
a soaring bird that tilts an almost motionless wing now this way now that, and so soars on.

  'It matters to me,' I said. 'And I suppose to you.'

  She said a strange thing: 'Not to me. I have no self.* Then, 'You', she said, 'are not one of those quibbling cheap-jacks, I think, who hold out to poor mankind hopes of some metaphysical perduration (great Caesar used to stop a bung-hole) in exchange for that immortality of persons which you have whittled away to the barest improbability?'

  'No,' answered I. 'Because there is no wine, it is better go thirsty than lap sea-water.'

  'And the wine is past praying for? You are sure?'

  'We are sure of nothing. Every path in the maze brings you back at last to Herakleitos if you follow it fairly; yes, and beyond him: back to that philosopher who rebuked him for saying that no man may bathe twice in the same river, objecting that it was too gross an assumption to imply that he might avail to bathe once.'

  Then what is this new thing you are to tell me?'

  'This,' said I: 'that I have lost a man who for forty years was my friend, and a man great and peerless in his generation. And that is death beyond common deaths.'

  "Then I see that in one river you have bathed not twice but many times,' she said. 'But I very well know that that is no answer.'

  She fell silent, looking me steadfastly in the eye. Her eyes with their great black lashes were unlike any eyes that I have ever seen, and went strangely with her dark southern colouring and her jet-black hair: they were green, with enormous pupils, and full of fiery specks, and as the pupils dilated or narrowed the whole orbs seemed aglow with a lambent flame. Frightening eyes at the first unearthly glance of them: so much so, that I thought for an instant of old wild tales of lamias and vampires, and so of that loveliest of all love-stories and sweet ironic gospel of pagan love—Theophile Gautier's: of her on whose unhallowed gravestone was written: