12.The Mage Emeritus
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NOW the tale is no more of Gonfal, who was the first to perish of the lords of the Silver Stallion. The tale instead tells that, in the while of Gonfal’s adventuring in Inis Dahut, yet three other champions of the fellowship had left the Poictesme which under Dame Niafer’s rule was altering day by day. Coth of the Rocks, indeed, had ridden westward within the same month that Gonfal departed for the South. There was never any profitable arguing with Coth: and so, when he declared his intention of fetching back Dom Manuel into the Poictesme which women and holy persons and lying poets—as Coth asserted,—were making quite uninhabitable, nobody did argue. Coth blustered westward, unmolested and unreasoned with: and for that while no more was heard of him.
And it was in the May of this year that Kerin of Nointel, the Syndic and Castellan of Basardra, disappeared even more unaccountably than Dom Manuel had done, for about Kerin’s passing there were not even any rumors. Kerin, so far as anybody could learn, had vanished in the darkness of the night seasonjust as unaidedly as that darkness itself had vanished in turn, and with just as slight vestigial traces of his passing. The desolation of Kerin’s young wife, Dame Saraïde, was such that dozens upon dozens of lovers might not content her for her widowhood, as was immediately shown: and of Kerin also, for that while, no more was heard.
And Miramon Lluagor, too, that under Manuel had been the Lord Seneschal of Gontaron, had now gone out of Poictesme,—sedately and unmysteriously departing, with his wife and child seated beside him upon the back of an elderly and quite tame dragon, for his former home in the North. It was there that Miramon had first encountered Dom Manuel in the days when Manuel was only a swineherd. And it was there that Miramon Lluagor hoped to pass the remainder of as long a life as his doom permitted him, in such limited comfort as might anywhere be possible for a married man.
Otherwise, he could foresee, upon the brighter side of his appointed and appalling doom, nothing which was likely to worry him. For Miramon Lluagor had very wonderfully prospered at magic, he was, as they say, now blessed with more than any reasonable person would ask for: and the most clamant of these superfluities appeared to him to be his wife.
They tell how Miramon was one of the Léshy, born of a people that was neither human nor immortal, tellinghow his ancestral home was builded upon the summit of the mountain called Vraidex. To Vraidex Miramon Lluagor returned, after the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had been disbanded, and Miramon had ceased to amuse himself with the greatness of Manuel and with the other notions of Poictesme.
They narrate that this magician dabbled no more in knight-errantry, for which the Seneschal of Gontaron—who through his art was also lord of the nine kinds of sleep and prince of the seven madnesses,—had never shown any real forte. He righted no more wrongs, in weather as often as not unsuited to a champion subject to rheumatism, and he in no way taxed his comfort to check the prospering of injustice. Instead, he now maintained, upon the exalted scarps of Vraidex, the sedate seclusion appropriate to a veteran sorcerer, in his ivory tower carved out of one of the tusks of Behemoth; and maintained also a handsome retinue of every sort of horrific illusion to guard the approaches to his Doubtful Palace; wherein, as the tale likewise tells, this mage resumed his former vocation, and once more designed the dreams for sleep.
Thus it was that, upon the back of the elderly and quite tame dragon, Miramon returned to his earlier pursuits and to the practice of what he—in his striking way of putting things,—described as art for art’s sake. The episode of Manuel had been, in the lower field of merely utilitarian art, amusing enough. That stupid,tall, quiet posturer, when he set out to redeem Poictesme, had needed just the mere bit of elementary magic which Miramon had performed for him, to establish Manuel among the great ones of earth. Miramon had, in consequence, sent a few obsolete gods to drive the Northmen out of Poictesme, while Manuel waited upon the sands north of Manneville and diverted his leisure by contemplatively spitting into the sea. Thereafter Manuel had held the land to the admiration of everybody but more particularly of Miramon,—who did not at all agree with Anavalt of Fomor in his estimation of Dom Manuel’s mental gifts.
Yes, it had been quite amusing to serve under Manuel, to play at being lord of Gontaron and Ranec, and to regard at close quarters this tall grave gray cockeyed impostor, who had learned only not to talk.... For that, thought Miramon, was Manuel’s secret: Manuel did not expostulate, he did not explain, he did not argue; he, instead, in any time of trouble or of uncertainty, kept quiet; and that quiet struck terror to his ever-babbling race, and had earned for the dull-witted but shrewd fellow—who was concealing only his lack of any thought or of any plan,—a dreadful name for impenetrable wisdom and for boundless resource.
“Keep mum with Manuel!” said Miramon, “and all things shall be added to you. It is a great pity that my wife has not the knack for these little character analyses.”
Yes, the four years had been an amusing episode. But dreams and the designing of dreams were the really serious matters to which Miramon returned after this holiday outing in carnage and statecraft.
And here, too,—as everywhere,—his wife confronted him. Miramon’s personal taste in art was for the richly romantic sweetened with nonsense and spiced with the tabooed. But his wife Gisèle had quite other notions, a whole set of notions, and her philosophy was that of belligerent individualism. And the sorcerer to keep peace, at least in the intervals between his wife’s more mordantly loquacious moments, must of necessity design such dreams as Gisèle preferred. But he knew that these dreams did not express the small thoughts and fancies which harbored in the heart of Miramon Lluagor, and which would perish with the falling of his doom unless he wrought these fancies into dreams that, being fleshless, might evade carnivorous time.
He was preëminent among the dream-makers of this world, he was the dreaded lord (because of his retinue of illusions) over all the country about Vraidex: but, in his own home he was not dreaded, he, very certainly, was not preëminent. And Miramon hungered for the lost freedom of his bachelorhood.
His wife also was discontent, because the ways of the Léshy appeared to this mortal woman indecorous. The dooms that were upon the Léshy seemed not entirelyin good taste, to her who had been born of a race about whom destiny appeared not to bother. In fact, it was a continual irritation to Gisèle that her little boy Demetrios was predestinate to kill his father with the charmed sword Flamberge. This was a doom Gisèle found not the sort of thing you cared to have imminent in your own family: and she felt that the sooner the gray Norns, who weave the fate of all that live, were spoken to quite candidly, the better it would be for everybody concerned.
She was irritated by the mere sight of Flamberge. So her thinking was not of silk and honey when, after polishing the sword as was her usage upon Thursday morning, she came into Miramon’s ivory tower to hang the fatal weapon in its right place.
With Miramon under the green tasseled canopy sat one whom Gisèle was not unsurprised to see there. For closeted with Miramon to-day was Ninzian, the High Bailiff of Yair and Upper Ardra, who was the most famous for his piety of all the lords of the Silver Stallion. The dreadful need and the peculiar reason which Ninzian had for being pious and philanthropic were matters not known to everybody: but Miramon Lluagor knew about these things, and therefore he made appropriate use of Ninzian. Indeed, upon this very afternoon, the two were looking at that which Ninzian had fetched out of the land of Assyria, and had procured for the sorcerer, at a price.