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 ofa 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 ofthe 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 desiredto 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 dreadfulmanifestations 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 andheld 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.