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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_36._
_The Appointed Enemy_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_37._
_Too Many Mouths_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
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.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_38._
_The Appointed Lover_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_39._
_One Warden Left Uncircumvented_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
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.