Cyrion, page 24
“The matter of your stewardship of Flor.”
“And I thought for one delicious moment,” said Mevary, “you were about to question me on my own relationship with Eliset. I have, of course, been as a brother to her.”
“You have, of course, shared her bed, and this I know quite well, as does half of Cassireia, and the King’s court at Heruzala, for the matter of that.” Mevary’s mouth opened, and closed. Cousin Roilant said, “It makes no difference to me. If it had, you might suppose I would not be here now.”
“But I thought uncanny dreamings and desires drew you here like a magnet,” said Mevary gloatingly.
“I have no time for superstition. I am here because I intend to honor a bargain. Providing my wife behaves blamelessly after we are wedded, I shall raise no quarrel and harp on no past adventure. And for this, amongst other reasons, I shall expect you to remain far off from her. You will tend Flor, her property and mine. Money will be sent to improve the estate, and you yourself will receive a generous stipend.”
Mevary yawned. He was frankly no longer thrilled by stipends, the hope of gain being rather different.
Cousin Roilant looked offended.
“You may conclude you will live better than you have done.”
Mevary laughed. He drank, and laughed again.
“I do trust I shall. Well, I never anticipated such kindness, dear Pud. I toast you. To stipends.” Mevary could barely restrain his mirth.
“My thanks. I shall now return to my room.”
“Oh, for shame. I was desirous you would stay and play Knight-and-Castle with me—I still have the board and pieces we used as boys. Do you recall them? All those exciting defeats—”
“Excuse me.”
“Or a practice bout with sticks, or blunted swords, how does that appeal? I still indulge myself in knightly pursuits. No?”
“No.”
“I concede. You have an early start tomorrow. God bless your night. Angels flap over your bed, and so on.”
Mevary stood to see his kindred down the stair, towering over him now by half an inch in his Auxine boots.
Improvising a mis-step on the landing, and so arriving audibly at the veranda of the second floor, Roilant-Cyrion blundered unsilently back to his allotted chamber.
As he entered, he became aware of a pleasing scent. Shutting the door and walking around the carved screen, he saw nothing in the spacious room was changed. Save that the window-shutters had been closed against night-flying insects, and a squadron of candles lit.
Breathing shallowly, Cyrion went to each of the windows and unshuttered them. Turning, he doused the candles swiftly. Moving lastly to the bed, he picked up the amber rose he had let drop there, the token Eliset had sent him. It had opened its petals and their exquisite perfume had intensified to a remarkable degree, permeating the entire room. Going back to the nearest window, he threw the rose out of it, and stayed to watch it fall. And thereafter still stayed in a long perusal it seemed of the roofs and walls of Flor round about, and the downswept land beyond them, the cloud of darkened orchards, the cleft hills in the east where a blond moon was just now rising.
The drug in the rose, a soporific, had perhaps been activated by the heat of the candles burning close. He had been meant, obviously, to come in and, rejoicing in the charming aroma, sink heavily asleep. That his life was endangered tonight made no sense at all. Therefore, the lady who worked her sorcery with a flower had done it for some other reason. To sleep was to miss something. Cyrion, spying the circle of the moon, had some conception of what.
Half an hour later, when the room was scentless, Cyrion closed the shutters. He then spilled a vial of sweet-smelling unguent around the bed, positioned himself amid the pillows, and awaited a visitor.
The visitor was not long in coming.
First, a gentle tap. Next, the door opening a crack. Then an almost noiseless footfall about the screen. A lamp or candle was lit, and the light strayed over him.
“Cousin,” Mevary said anxiously, then shook him.
Cyrion grunted blearily and awarded the young man one eloquent, awesome snore.
Mevary laughed, briefly now.
“He sleeps like a hog, just as you said he would,” Mevary murmured. “No wonder. I can smell the drug even now.”
“Yes,” she said from the doorway, the clever sorceress. It was more like the hissing of a cat.
The light dipped and went out. In another half minute, they were gone, the witch and her lover, leaving the silly pudding cousin leadenly still and stertorously breathing. And very much awake.
* * *
• • •
The death of Jobel had plainly been a murder. Though the foaming madness had in many ways resembled that invariably fatal ailment passed from beasts to men, in some salient particulars it did not. There had been, for example, none of the prior symptoms generally attached to the sickness. Nor had any animals themselves so afflicted been noted in the vicinity. It was more certain (it was certain) some poison, reproducing the disease in its effects, had been put to work.
To finish a man so doomed with a clean knife blow would appear to be a kindness. Or an extra insurance. Jobel had been very unwise to tell Dassin what he had seen that night in the haunted well. Dassin equally unwise to report it under the influence of Cyrion’s self-drugged wine. That the boy now recognized his own unsafety was demonstrated by his flight.
Which left one, as the round moon climbed the sky, listening to catch the very vaguest sound, beyond the thrum of the sea.
The sound, when it came, was not vague in the least. It was low, but quite definite. And no doubt any innocent sleeping in the house, waking and hearing it, would pull the covers over their ears and shiver. Ghosts, particularly the Remusan ghosts who bivouacked in the bath house, were noisy neighbors.
A horn blew, somewhere as it seemed in the core of the mansion. Then a chanting rose, militaristic in its rhythm, words inaudible, a buried tidal hymn. Remusans, or perhaps the sirens, those local child-snatching mer-ladies of the coast. To whom, doubtless, Valia had literally fallen prey.
As Cyrion moved noiselessly down the stone stair into the inner courtyard, there was a profane shrilling that seemed to rush up from the basins of the two dry fountains.
No one was about. Of course not. Those with cause to be afraid were sensibly hiding. Those without cause were elsewhere.
Even before he entered the roofed over corridor-court, he beheld the shimmering glow that pulsed from it.
The sound of a horn came again, louder, blasting up from beneath his feet and striking against the upper air. There was a dull vibration in the stone flags.
He entered the glow, went through it to the well, and standing there, looked beyond it to the corridor’s end. In the bath house, too, a faint sheen seeped from somewhere in the unemptied pool of the Kalidarium. Most of the wan, wild light was about him now, however, wafting like smoke from the huge old well, so the fish and flowers shone brightly in all their colors.
The lamp above had remained unlit and unneeded. Through the ringed mouths of the two lion masks, the loop of corded rope still hung down into the well, its lower ends pulled taut as if freighted below the surface of the water into which they ran.
The water.
There in the luminescent well it lay, in a black and glittering jewel, where previously there had been only the moistureless stone floor.
That there had been no dead leaves, no debris at all on the floor of the well had already given away some of its secret to Cyrion. The floor was removable, it could be made to retreat into the shaft, to allow the passage of things which climbed down or rose up from beneath. Directly under the false floor, now revealed, the shaft of the well widened, and became one with what lay below it.
The chanting dashed up into his face like spray. There came a viscous, fishy scent, and then, unmistakably, the tinge of incense, unfolding through the stone funnel in invisible scarves. Abruptly the light in the well intensified and gave birth.
Leaning over, the watcher saw long treads of gold sprung in the black water, and after these, a wedge of fire. The ship came from nowhere, out of the rim of the well-shaft. The miniature demoniacal ship the slave had seen, and so earned death.
The sail was diluted scarlet, the color—and the size—of an autumn leaf. Torches blazed at the prow and along the sides, mere sequins of flame searing in the water. There was a swirl of motion on the deck, and a cumulous of scented vapor meandered in the well, at length reaching the corridor, dusting it as if with mist. When the mist cleared from the well, the tiny ship had passed from view. Like magic.
It was not, of course, magical. Its smallness was due solely to perspective. The distance from the high crest of the cliff to the base of the cliff. All of which must separate the well-head from the cavern floor beneath. The sudden widening of the shaft under the round rim, where the stone ledge had formerly closed it, gave the impression water lay directly below. In fact it was the sea, carpeting the cavern perhaps some two hundred and eighty feet down. Then again, the curtailment of the hanging loop of rope had abetted the illusion that water filled the shaft at thirty feet—for this was where the rope-line mysteriously tautened and ended.
A large part of the mansion of Flor must rest above the cavern, the hollow gut of the cliff. The sounds that started in the echo chamber of this hollow struck up through every delving pipe the mansion possessed—the fountains, the cistern, the live well in the kitchen court. Even the bath house stood upon it, and so the hot-water pool, which must have developed revealing transparencies in its floor, was never fully emptied. Only when the cave was filled by torchlight did the kalidarium display its secret, as openly as the open well.
Something scuttered close by. A lizard, perhaps.
Cyrion did not appear to have thought so.
He was gone into the shadowy recess between one of the well’s twisted pillars and the wall behind.
There was also another shadow, one which had not been evident a few moments before. It lifted against the whitish sheen in the bath house, swelled, and came out through the doorway. And strangely, took no light itself from the glowing ambience of the well. Nevertheless, it grew visible, as if from some other, inner, agency.
It was the figure of a man in middle years, well-dressed, and disfavored by a predatory wolfish face framed by tawny greying wolfish hair. He moved past Cyrion’s hiding place, past the lit-up well without a glance. The eyes were wide and hungry, and oddly myopic. The body moved slowly. But the earlier noise must indeed have resulted from a lizard, or some other nocturnally active fauna of the house, for this man, who caught no reflection and cast no shadow, also made no sound at all.
The chanting in the cavern under the well had sunk to a murmur indistinguishable from the sea.
As the man reached the end of the corridor-court, he turned to look back, and for the first he seemed to note the well. A kind of mindless snarl arrested his face. Then, turning again, he passed on into the inner court of the house. Cyrion, who had actually planned a journey in the opposite direction, instead followed him, and as silently.
At the edge of the inner court, Cyrion halted. His dubious quarry stood at the court’s near end, close to the mossy basin where once a fountain had streamed over against the stars. The man writhed his head, looking up toward the broken posts of the veranda and the rooms beyond. Then craned the other way, in the direction of the kitchen court. Toward the passage which led to it he now advanced a step—and stopped. And vanished.
The vanishment was decided. It was not a trick of any sort. There was also little doubt of his identity. From his appearance, the visitor had been none other than Mevary’s dead father.
Some twenty minutes later, there arose a new noise, a persistent scratching and clinking from somewhere in the graveyard of Flor.
THREE
It was a delightful morning for the excursion to Cassireia. Birds in wayside trees sang or shrieked merrily. The path ran downhill, mostly with open vistas on all sides and a still, promising sky above, and then for variety here and there, a plunge to bathe among the dry green woods. Where the last windings of the track launched on the broad and ancient road, the white walls of the city came visible, and the violent dark blue of the sea beyond.
Roilant’s two servants, they had earlier learned, had already made the trip, having absconded from the village at Flor. Obviously embarrassed, Cousin Roilant had himself procured mules, and hired men to bear the moth-eaten litter unearthed at the mansion. (Only Mevary had seemed unastonished that the two servants were gone. One might almost think he had asked after them in the village before.)
Eliset, guarded from the sun by worn gauze, occupied the litter. The ungainly figure of Roilant endured the foremost mule, and was endured. The bony Harmul brought up the rear. This, aside from the hired men, comprised their complete party. Even Jhanna had been left behind. “I shall scarcely need her about me,” Eliset had protested—in fact, Jhanna seemed seldom about her at any time—“and since we are to be so circumspect, the fewer travelers the better, surely?”
No one commented, even obliquely, on the supernatural uproar of the previous night.
Eliset’s vigil had left her pale but poised. There was no mark on her person of anything she had practiced or willed or worked upon during those hours when the well burned from within and unquiet spirits walked. A genuinely yawning, ill-tempered Mevary, with brown rings under his eyes, had been a nicer calendar of the occult festivities he had supposedly known of and conceivably attended. On the other hand, an approving bystander of his lover’s black art, he might yet be debarred from its operation. His debauch could, after all, have been occasioned otherwise, in the wine cellar, and later in the bed of one unwilling but beautiful subject, who hatingly welcomed him because she had no choice.
There had been no sign of Jhanna that morning when they set out. While, unsuitable omen for a wedding day, Zimir had been behind the stables, digging a grave.
They entered Cassireia through a high gateway, whose stones were white as blanched almonds in the sunlight.
The great market-place beyond, with its odors of raw and cooked meats, fresh fish, scented oils, burnt honey and ripe fruit, its clouds of powders, grain dusts and flies, and its strident noise of music and argument, engulfed them, Making their way, with some altercation between Harmul and a drover of oxen, they wound around a mobile pottery, negotiated a billowing sea of sheep, and turned into a side lane known as Silk Street, where gilt-threaded raiment poured from shop fronts like golden rain.
Present and past held the city in equal measure. Looking up on every hand, one saw the elevation of partly ruined palaces. There the crumbling cake erected by the slaves of the first King Hraud, and there another put up to honor that Hraud who had been the stepfather of Zilumi, the terpsichorean sorceress. While, along the sea’s blue hem, ran the colonnades of the Cassian Emperor, which at sunset still blazed with Imperial Purple.
At the end of the Street of Silks was the Street of Birds, and beyond this, the Street of Smokes, from which the small procession emerged, half-drugged, into the cave of a tunnel. The mouth of the tunnel opened on a small square with a water basin. A stable and a couple of inns crowded in with a pie-seller’s and a fortune-teller’s bazaar. Across the square, grave, graven and gracious, a small temple, with a pale mosaic dome and pillared entry. A temple reconsecrated and sanctified, for across the lintel was written, in two languages and letters of gold, the words common both to east and west: There is no god save only God.
The litter was set down in the shady portico, and Eliset drawn forth. The hired men were dispatched to one of the inns with the mules for company, and Harmul, a disreputable figure in his rags, stationed with the greatest reluctance on all sides, at a convenient pillar.
Cousin Roilant led his bride into the temple-church, pausing only while they removed their shoes, in the eastern manner, on the threshold.
The place was luminously cool, and the altar glistened with its gold and silver vessels. Doves, branches of olives and a rainbow were worked on the curtain, in token of the first punishment and the first forgiveness. Eliset and Cyrion turned, at his much-muddled directions, into a side chamber.
Here, a group awaited them by the secondary altar. A man bowed, and introduced the hired witnesses, with a mention of their suitability. As Cyrion nodded, Eliset waited aloofly, still as one of the clear shafts of light shot in through the windows. Though plainly dressed and without jewels, she had veiled herself in a thin embroidered gauze, and this veil now hung over her face, mostly concealing it. Only her hands gave her away, knotted together at her waist.
Finally, through a side entrance, the priest came in with a boy bearing parchment scrolls.
A somewhat pastoral prayer was offered, and the marriage ceremony began, just as the bell from the citadel rang for noon.
The rite, as was soon apparent to anyone who might know, had been pared to its bones, and the bones were being hurried. The priest, a white-robed, heavily bearded man, with fierce dark locks springing from beneath his shawled head, gabbled in places, and in others hesitated. He seemed also vastly unenamored of the red-haired groom, while mournfully fascinated by the veiled bride. When he symbolically bound their hands with the strip of fringed silk, he fumbled. The attendant boy caught the silk before it reached the floor. At the exchange of rings, it was the groom who fumbled, and metal rang on the paving. To the mismanagement of both priest and cousin Eliset remained impervious. Presumably, she herself did know enough to know enough had been said to espouse them, and that when the clumsy ritual mumbled to an end, though having been denied its dignity, she yet understood that she was sheltered by its legal power.
Documents were signed. The leader of the witnesses was presented with their fee, and they spilled in a gently bleating herd out through the temple into the square.
