The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE SILVER STALLION

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)

The Silver Stallion

A Comedy of Redemption

by

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE: LAST SIEGE OF THE FELLOWSHIP

BOOK TWO: THE MATHEMATICS OF GONFAL

BOOK THREE: TOUPAN’S BRIGHT BEES

BOOK FOUR: COTH AT PORUTSA

BOOK FIVE: “MUNDUS VULT DECIPI”

BOOK SIX: IN THE SYLAN’S HOUSE

BOOK SEVEN: WHAT SARAÏDE WANTED

BOOK EIGHT: THE CANDID FOOTPRINT

BOOK NINE: ABOVE PARADISE

BOOK TEN: AT MANUEL’S TOMB

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.

BOOK ONE

LAST SIEGE OF THE FELLOWSHIP

“They shall be, in the siege, both against Judah and against Jerusalem.”

—Zechariah, xii, 2.

—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.

1.
Child’s Talk

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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.

2.
Economics of Horvendile

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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.”

3.
How Anavalt Lamented the Redeemer

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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.

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.

BOOK TWO

THE MATHEMATICS OF GONFAL

“He multiplieth words without knowledge.”

—Job, xxxv, 16.

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.

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.

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.”