Cyrion, page 26
Still on his own, Cyrion took the opportunity to sniff at his cup. Nothing unusual seemed to be present in it, as yet, but then, the overpowering odor of the scented candle would blot anything out. He considered which of them might have lit it.
Outside, in the humming, glittering dark, Mevary and Eliset had drawn very close. There was a faint crystal rasp—the pearly girdle coming unknotted and falling down.
Cyrion exchanged his rough-stemmed cup for Mevary’s chipped one. And sat back to wait.
Mevary soon after returned; Eliset, minus the girdle, a minute later. The meal was resumed, in as much as it had ever begun. Mevary continued to eat Eliset and Cyrion continued not to.
In a moment or so, Mevary reached for his cup. He raised it, looked at it, and raised his eyebrows instead. Putting the cup down again, he turned to Cyrion with an arch smile. “Oh, indeed?” said Mevary.
Cyrion was blank.
Eliset was an icon.
“It would seem,” said Mevary, “I do not have my own cup any more. Do you have your own cup, Eliset?”
The icon glanced down, and glazed her wine with a layer of frost.
“I have no idea.”
“And you, my ginger pudding. Whose cup do you have?”
“Absurd,” muttered Cyrion from the side of his swollen mouth.
“Hmm.” Mevary did not drink.
Without warning, awful squeaky music came skidding from below and from some form of implement—conceivably, from the quality of the noise, a plucked mousetrap.
Rising with an oath, Mevary left the pavilion and shouted down into the court. The uncouth melodies ceased.
“Roilant,” said Eliset icily, “I see you are still intent on this pose—our victim.” She leaned forward across the tables. With a deft movement, she exchanged Mevary’s cup, which had been Roilant’s, with her own. “So, we will poison you?” She lifted Roilant’s cup, her eyes resting on ‘Roilant’ balefully. As she drank his wine he came to his feet. Then checked. Slamming down the half-empty cup, she said, “Then, if it was doctored, I shall die, shall I not?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I am a fool then. As I was a fool to marry you. But married we are, I believe. No. I shall not lock my door against you. Mevary has—persuaded me I must be dutiful. So, you may come to me when you wish. If you are not altogether too afraid of me.”
Taking her snowstorm with her, she went out, passing Mevary as he reentered. This time, she moved on down the stair.
Mevary looked at the cups.
“Now,” he said. “Let me get this fixed. You have my cup, I have Eliset’s, and Eliset has yours. Since she and I are the poisoners and Eliset has obviously sampled your cup, we can deduce your cup to be safe. Mine, which you now have, should also be safe, since I have been using it since sunset. Eliset’s drink, however, now passed to me—this seems a little cloudy. Can it be, dear Pud, you yourself have taken up the poisoning trade?” And Mevary poured the wine from Eliset’s goblet indiscriminately on to the floor and cushions.
“Thus,” said Mevary, with unreassuring briskness. Going back to the door of the pavilion, he yelled, “Zimir, Harmul, more cups. Lots and lots of them. You really are,” he added encouragingly to Cyrion, “much sharper than I gave you credit for.”
Cyrion looked affronted.
He looked more affronted still when the ragged servants came scampering up the stair with ten or so cups between them, all a match, and all randomly pocked and chipped and roughened, and dumped them on the central table. Mevary, pushing the dishes of food out of the way, filled the goblets broadcast from an upturned jug. He then, spilling and clinking, moved them many times about each other, his own and Cyrion’s own, and even Eliset’s, now refilled, included in the clanking medley.
“Now,” said Mevary, “we each pick a cup, dear cousin, and drink it down.”
Cyrion rose, with a spluttered avowal of departure.
Mevary snapped his fingers.
The surprisingly strong hands of Zimir descended on Cyrion’s shoulders, and set about thrusting him back in his seat. Cyrion sat. As he did so, a thin dirty knife blade manifested two inches from his left eye.
“It could now be any cup, could it not? Any cup could contain that lethal ingredient I added by sleight of hand in front of you. “Since,” said Mevary, you reckon me a felon, I will no longer make a m ock of you by dissembling. She has wedded you, she will get your goods when you die. All your entrancing little fortune. So, drink.”
“No—” Cousin Roilant struggled, and the filthy knife came an inch closer.
“It seems it must be ‘yes,’” said Mevary, woven all of silk.
Cyrion stopped struggling. “All right.” He went limp. “Which?”
“Oh, any, any. This is play, remember. You shall have every cup on the table, until you reach the deadly one. Then you shall have that.”
Harmul giggled with nervous excitement. Zimir could be felt to be smiling.
Cyrion picked a cup at random. It was not Mevary’s—there was a chip missing from it, but at another place. He bore it upward and flung it over his shoulder into the face of Zimir.
There was an explosion of activity behind Cyrion, and the threatening knife went away. Rushing up from his chair, Cyrion went after it. As he took the blade from the boy’s flailing grip, Mevary, with a howl of scorn, drew his sword.
“Knife to my sword? You should have come to table armed in the old barbaric way, Roilant, dear.”
He stepped between Cyrion and the table, and the sword drove Cyrion back.
“Meaning to spill all the wine? Oh no. Too easy, sweet Pud.”
The dainty first motion of the sword, the second driving arc, informed one at once Mevary was a swordsman of some excellence. Cyrion moved backward, defending himself, as in a recent story, with the hopeless knife. The sword spat toward him and he glanced aside. Harmul dived from the area with a yelp. Latticework went by.
Cyrion was out of the pavilion. Mevary, kicking Zimir and a table from his way, hastened after him.
On the roof, under the large black sky with its spangled audience of stars, the soft air pleasant after the fug of the candle, both men paused, as if to appreciate their new arena.
“Of course, my sword might be envenomed too.”
Mevary flirted his blade across the night, pointed a star with it, and sent it stooping like a falcon’s wing.
Cousin Roilant, with unexpected agility, avoided its edge. Then he threw the knife.
It should have hit Mevary, and would have done if the wolf cousin had not been so very agile himself. He was gone like thought, and the knife went over the parapet of the terrace, into the night. Mevary, too contemptuous to be amused, leapt forward, the sword singing as it led the way.
Cousin Roilant, in a beautiful backward spring, eluded him, and met with something else. Something dimly shining, spooled out at ankle-height from the parapet, and across the terrace, like a long and slender serpent. Feet snagged, Cousin Roilant went down and Mevary, stalled, amused after all, strolled to him. While Zimir and Harmul bounded from the pavilion, dutiful thralls, and fell on the prone man, ignoring the flailing of his booted feet that had been snarled by Eliset’s girdle of purple and pearls.
Cousin Roilant stopped fighting. He lay and was jeered at, while Mevary went back to the pavilion. But when Mevary returned, bearing a cup of wine, Cousin Roilant began to show fresh tendencies to leave.
Mevary kneeled and offered the cup.
“I found the right one. My cup. Which you exchanged for your own. As obviously I intended. Either I poisoned it then, when I had finished drinking, or just now. I wonder which. Whatever it is, drink up. Enjoy, celebrate. It is your wedding night.”
Cousin Roilant battled a while longer, the two boys rolling on his arms like dogs, barking and cursing him, until Mevary’s unsheathed sword came back and kissed the fighter’s windpipe.
“Either you drink,” said Mevary with great seriousness, “or I open your neck and force it down your throat that way.”
Cousin Roilant appeared to give in.
Released by Mevary’s servants, he sat up and held out his hand, with livid, bulbous dignity, for the cup.
“Quaff it all, now,” said Mevary. “Like a good little boy.”
Tilting back his ginger head, Cyrion poured the entire contents of the cup between his lips, closed his mouth, and swallowed with a dry strained gulp.
Mevary stepped back.
And stepped back even farther as the plump figure, eyes starting, gained its feet and hurtled by him and, for once sure-footed, went tearing down the stair to the inner court.
The two servants, hooting, pelted after him. In a moment, there was a scuffle below.
“We have him!”
“Trying to put his fingers down his throat—”
Mevary looked down from aloft.
“One sip,” declared Mevary, “would be sufficient. Too late to try to bring it back. Better go to Eliset, and die in comfort.”
Harmul and Zimir, letting the unfortunate go, careered between the empty fountains, honking with mirth.
On the roof, with the swordsman’s elegant economy, Mevary sheathed his sword.
* * *
• • •
A quarter of an hour afterwards, the bridegroom smote on the chamber door of his bride, and on being admitted, crooned the romantic words: “I am poisoned.”
“No,” she replied with asperity, “I am the one who is poisoned.”
Cyrion shut the door and leaned on it. The swelling seemed to have gone down, and left his face to its recently normal pudgy state. He said, “Gentle Cousin Mevary openly threatened me and—shall I say?—invoked me to drink the cup of wine that had originally been his. He had predicted all my moves, it seems. The exchange was intended.”
“Unless we had also poisoned your own cup for good measure.”
“You would not have drunk from it if you had.”
“Would I not?” She regarded him with disdain. “Is my life so lovely I should cling to it? Perhaps I no longer cared what became of me.”
“If you reckoned on dying, why are you dressed for the nuptial couch?” inquired Cyrion.
Eliset stared a moment, then lowered her eyes and turned away. The diaphanous robe turned with her, and the bright veil of hair.
“And if you yourself expected to die, Roilant, why are you here?”
“One has,” said Cyrion sensibly, “to spend one’s last minutes somewhere. Why should I spare you the theatre of my final agony? I may even, in my death throes, manage to damage some of your sparse furnishings.”
“No matter. I shall have all your estate at Heruzala soon to comfort me.”
“Shall you?”
She turned back to look at him.
“Or can it all have been a lie? Perhaps you have no estates. Perhaps your widow will be penniless.”
She seemed schooled now, and gorgeous, the center of the amber candleshine that filled a room which, even with its signs of decline and decay, drew from her a curious depth of beauty—the power of sorcerous illusion?
“Why not,” said Cyrion, seating himself in a high-backed chair, “lighten my ultimate moments with a few fascinating truths. Why not tell me about Mevary.”
“Mevary—is Mevary.”
“Excuse me. I meant the first Mevary, his father. Your uncle.”
In a strange gesture, for she had made no sound attempt at modesty before, she pulled the folds of the loose robe together, so they became opaque.
“He was my guardian until I was seventeen.”
“At which time he died. How was that?”
“He drowned,” she said softly.
“At sea.”
“In the bath house. In the kalidarium. He—” she looked away a second time and moved toward the window. “He was a drunkard, and disgustingly drunk he went to his bath and drowned there. Disgustingly, I am sure.”
“You loved him dearly.”
“As you perceive.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No. I had dreamed of it, now and then. I did not do it.”
“His ghost walks about the house, did you know?”
“I have heard it does. His ghost. Old Tabbit’s, who was my nurse. Remusans galore, and sea demons who claw their way up the cliff by night—” she swung about and came hurrying back to him, dropped to her knees, bowed her head and said, through the fall of glistening hair, “You deserve the truth. Your damnable stupidity deserves it. Should Roilant be told? Yes, he should be told. I never meant to deceive him.” She looked up and met his gaze sardonically. “I will tell you. Mevary will have intimated I am no innocent. But not, I think, that his father made me his mistress on the day I was fourteen. It was less than a month after my own father’s death. It happened here, in this chamber. Over by that chest. My uncle came into the room, and inside five minutes he had forced me. When it was done, he asked if I had liked it, and if I loved him. When I said ‘no,’ he struck me. Then he asked me again, and I said, ‘yes.’ I learn quickly, do you see. For three years I gave him the lip-service his vanity required, and what his flesh required I gave too. I welcomed him always eagerly. I even learned the customs of his appetites. You will find me knowledgeable, if soiled.”
“And the second Mevary,” said Cyrion stoically. “How did he find you?”
“As you say, he is my lover.”
“That you love as your god.”
She studied him with a keen blue intelligence for some while.
“So you heard that, too? And believed it as he did? No. He is not my god. I do not love him or enjoy him, or even like his company. In the tradition of his kind father, he raped me. I was used to it by then. Like his father, also, his lovemaking is little better than a rape. And like his father he is petty, jealous, a beater of women and horses, and one who responds well to worship. So, I worship him.”
“Why?”
“Did I not just now tell you why? How else was I to live here? How else was I to live?”
“Ah, yes. You could not bear to let the inheritance go, any ruinous inch of it. So you endured. And waited for me to honor my vow.”
“You.” She glared now. “I had hoped that marriage would bring me the gift of peace.”
“After you had dispatched me.”
She shook her head as if confused, searching. “I almost feared Mevary might consider such a thing. But I do not think he has the metal for murder. Anything else, but not quite that. It asks a kind of vile strength I do not judge he has.” She sat back on her heels, frowning at Cyrion, then growing very still. Finally she said: “What is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
“You are ill.”
“I told you at the door what I was.”
“Poison? I do not credit that.”
“He told me I should not get rid of it. It seems he was correct. Aesthetically, you have little to worry over. It will not resemble Jobel’s demise. What splendid luck for us both.”
She stared in earnest now. The low lamp, the candles, picked out the threads of sweat which were slowly running from his hair, across his cheeks and throat. His hands gripped the arms of the chair. His lips, so speedily cured of their swelling, were nearly the color of slate.
“What,” she said, “should I do?”
“A suitable prayer?” he got out. It was now becoming noticeably difficult. “I would not advise you to kiss me farewell.”
The pain, for demonstrably there was pain, must have increased. His body stretched, contorted, his face buckled around the rictus of his mouth, and his eyes froze in their sockets. A trickle of blood came from one corner of his lips, which closed in a smiling grimace.
The last Cyrion saw of Eliset, as the considerable agony dissolved his vision, was her upright figure backing away along the room, gold into gold. Then the terminal link snapped within him like the breaking of a stem. The world went in a blaze of black lightning, during which he undoubtedly screamed.
Eliset, having reached the window again, halted, the scream raw in her ears. She seemed to be waiting.
When she went back to him to be sure, he had relaxed, falling sideways across the arm of the chair, eyes shut, faintly smiling, his breathing ended and his heart stopped.
FOUR
The sight of a solitary rider trotting up through the orchards of Flor in the glass-edged sunlight of midmorning, did not serve as a tonic for the tumbled household. The night before, there had been an unusually energetic coming and going, opening and closing of doors. Not everyone was in the picture. Those who were, were not necessarily sanguine. The lone rider with his charge, delivered without mercy at the gate into the unchoice paws of Zimir, turned out indeed to be a harbinger of fate.
As Zimir eddied toward the stable-arch, he was apprehended suddenly, and in rather sinister mode, by a tawny figure. The packet, being demanded, changed hands. It proclaimed itself the property of Roilant of Beucelair and was promptly opened by Mevary. For the very good reason that Cousin Roilant would no longer show much interest in it. It contained two papers. The first, a parchment signed and sealed by three lawyers, bore witness to the validity of the second paper, which was but the copy of another, secreted in the vaults of some suitable edifice at Heruzala. The second packet bore Roilant’s own seal, and was duly opened in turn.
With hindsight, it required perhaps no genius to guess the contents. Roilant’s paper, with many a flowery legal phrase, gave notice that, at his sudden death—should it occur—all his estates, moneys and chattels would devolve upon no lesser person than King Malban, his esteemed liege lord, for the benefit of his armies, his charitable works, and the maintenance of his kingdom of Heruzala.
