Read Ebook: The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption by Cabell James Branch

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Ebook has 1247 lines and 79641 words, and 25 pages

But Coth was implacable. "I will take directions from nobody who storms at me and who preserves no dignity whatever in our hour of grief. For the rest, the children agree in reporting that, whether he ascended in a gold cloud or traveled more sensibly on a black horse, Dom Manuel went westward. I shall go west, and I shall fetch Dom Manuel back into Poictesme. I shall, also, candidly advise him, when he returns to ruling over us, to discourage the tomfooleries and the ridiculous rages of all persons whose brains are overheated by their hair."

"Let the West, then," said Horvendile, very quietly, "be your direction. And if the people there do not find you so big a man as you think yourself, do not you be blaming me."

These were his precise words. Coth himself conceded the coincidence, long afterward....

"I, Messire Horvendile, with your permission, am for the North," said Miramon Lluagor. This sorcerer alone of them was upon any terms of intimacy with this Horvendile. "I have yet upon gray Vraidex my Doubtful Castle, in which an undoubtable and a known doom awaits me."

"That is true," replied Horvendile. "Let the keen North and the cold edge of Flamberge be yours. But you, Guivric, shall have the warm wise East for your direction."

That allotment was uncordially received. "I am comfortable enough in my home at Asch," said Guivric the Sage. "At some other time, perhaps-- But, really now, Messire Horvendile, I have in hand a number of quite important thaumaturgies just at the present! Your suggestion is most upsetting. I know of no need for me to travel east."

"With time you will know of that need," said Horvendile, "and you will obey it willingly, and you will go willingly to face the most pitiable and terrible of all things."

Guivric the Sage did not reply. He was too sage to argue with people when they talked foolishly. He was immeasurably too sage to argue with, of all persons, Horvendile.

"Yet that," observed Holden of N?rac, "exhausts the directions: and it leaves no direction for the rest of us."

Horvendile looked at this Holden, who was with every reason named the Bold; and Horvendile smiled. "You, Holden, already take your directions, in a picturesque and secret manner, from a queen--"

"Let us not speak of that!" said Holden, between a smirk and some alarm.

"--And you will be guided by her, in any event, rather than by me. To you also, Anavalt of Fomor, yet another queen will call resistlessly by and by, and you, who are rightly named the Courteous, will deny her nothing. So to Holden and to Anavalt I shall give no directions, because it is uncivil to come between any woman and her prey."

"But I," said Kerin of Nointel, "I have at Ogde a brand-new wife whom I prize above all the women I ever married, and far above any mere crowned queen. Not even wise Solomon," now Kerin told them, blinking, in a sort of quiet scholastic ecstasy, "when that Judean took his pick of the women of this world, accompanied with any queen like my Sara?de: for she is in all ways superior to what the Cabalists record about Queen Na?ma, that pious child of the bloodthirsty King of Ammon, and about Queen Djarada, the daughter of idolatrous Nubara the Egyptian, and about Queen Balkis, who was begotten by a Sheban duke upon the person of a female Djinn in the appearance of a gazelle. And only at the command of my dear Sara?de would I leave home to go in any direction."

"You will, nevertheless, leave home, very shortly," declared Horvendile. "And it will be at the command and at the personal urging of your Sara?de."

Kerin leaned his head to one side, and he blinked again. He had just Dom Manuel's trick of thus opening and shutting his eyes when he was thinking, but Kerin's mild dark gaze in very little resembled Manuel's piercing, vivid and rather wary consideration of affairs.

Kerin then observed, "Yet it is just as Holden said, and every direction is pre?mpted."

"Oh, no," said Horvendile. "For you, Kerin, will go downward, whither nobody will dare to follow you, and where you will learn more wisdom than to argue with me, and to pester people with uncalled-for erudition."

"It follows logically that I," laughed young Donander of ?vre, "must be going upward, toward paradise itself, since no other direction whatever remains."

"That," Horvendile replied, "happens to be true. But you will go up far higher than you think for; and your doom shall be the most strange of all."

"Then must I rest content with some second-rate and commonplace destruction?" asked Ninzian of Yair, Who alone of the fellowship had not yet spoken.

Horvendile looked at sleek Ninzian, and Horvendile looked long and long. "Donander is a tolerably pious person. But without Ninzian, the Church would lack the stoutest and the one really god-fearing pillar it possesses anywhere in these parts. That would be the devil of a misfortune. Your direction, therefore, is to remain in Poictesme, and to uphold the edifying fine motto of Poictesme, for the world's benefit."

"That is a highly moral sentiment, which I may safely rely upon you alike to concede and prove. Therefore, for you who are so pious, I shall slightly paraphrase the Scripture: and I declare to all of you that neither will I any more remove the foot of Ninzian from out of the land which I have appointed for your children; so that they will take heed to do all which I have commanded them."

"That," Ninzian said, looking markedly uncomfortable, "is very delightful."

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THEN Madame Niafer arose, black-robed and hollow-eyed, and she made a lament for Dom Manuel, whose like for gentleness and purity and loving kindliness toward his fellows she declared to remain nowhere in this world. It was an encomium under which the attendant warriors stayed very grave and rather fidgety, because they recognized and shared her grief, but did not wholly recognize the Manuel whom she described to them.

And the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was decreed to be disbanded, because of the law of Poictesme that all things should go by tens forever. There was no fighting-man able to fill Manuel's place: and a fellowship of nine members was, as Dame Niafer pointed out, illegal.

It well might be, however, she suggested, with a side glance toward Holmendis, that some other peculiarly holy person, even though not a warrior-- At the same instant Coth said, with a startling and astringent decisiveness, "Bosh!"

His confr?res felt the gross incivility of this interruption, but felt, too, that they agreed with Coth. And so the fellowship was proclaimed to be disbanded.

Then Anavalt of Fomor made a lament for the passing of that noble order whose ranks were broken at last, and for Dom Manuel also Anavalt raised a lament, praising Manuel for his hardihood and his cunning and his terribleness in battle. The heroes nodded their assent to this more intelligible sort of talking.

"Manuel," said Anavalt, "was hardy. It was not wise for any enemy to provoke him. When that indiscretion was committed, Manuel made himself as a serpent about the city of that enemy, girdling his prey all round: he seized the purlieus of that city, and its cattle, and its boats upon the rivers. He beleaguered that city everywhere, he put fire to the orchards, he silenced the mill-races, he prevented the plowers from plowing the land; and the people of that city starved, and they ate up one another, until the survivors chose to surrender to Dom Manuel. Then Manuel raised his gallows, he whistled in his headsmen, and there were no more survivors of that people."

And Anavalt said also: "Manuel was cunning. With a feather he put a deception upon three kings, but the queens that he played his tricks on were more than three, nor was it any feather that he diddled them with. Nobody could outwit Manuel. What he wanted he took, if he could get it that way, with his strong hand: but, if not, he used his artful head and his lazy, wheedling tongue, and his other members too, so that the person whom he was deluding would give Manuel whatever he required. It was like eating honey, to be deluded by Manuel. I think it is no credit for a private man to be a great rogue; but the leader of a people must know how to deceive all peoples."

Then Anavalt said: "Manuel was terrible. There was no softness in him, no hesitancy, and no pity. That, too, is not a virtue in a private person, but in the leader of a people it may well be a blessing for that people. Manuel so ordered matters that no adversary ever troubled Poictesme the second time. He lived as a tyrant over us; but it is better to have one master that you know the ways of than to be always changing masters in a world where none but madmen run about at their own will. I do not weep for Manuel, because he would never have wept for me nor for anybody else; but I regret that man of iron and the protection he was to us who are not ruthless iron but flesh."

There was a silence afterward. Yet still the heroes nodded gravely. This was, in the main, a Manuel whom they all recognized.

Dame Niafer, however, had risen up a little way from her seat, when the pious gaunt man Holy Holmendis, who sat next to her, put out his hand to her hand. After this she said nothing: yet it was perfectly clear the Countess thought that Anavalt had been praising Manuel for the wrong sort of virtues.

A fire was kindled with that ceremony which was requisite. The banner of the great fellowship was burned, and the lords of the Silver Stallion now broke their swords, and they cast these fragments also into this fire, so that these swords might never defend any other standard. It was the youth of these nine men and the first vigor and faith of their youth which perished with the extinction of that fire: and they knew it.

Thereafter the heroes left Storisende. Each rode for his own home, and they made ready, each in his own fashion, for that new order of governance which with the passing of Dom Manuel had come upon Poictesme.

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NOW Guivric and Donander and Gonfal rode westward with their attendants, all in one company, as far as Guivric's home at Asch. And as these three lords rode among the wreckage and the gathering fogs of November, the three talked together.

"It is a pity," said Gonfal of Naimes, "that, while our little Count Emmerick is growing up, this land must now be ruled by a lame and sallow person, who had never much wit and who tends already to stringiness. Otherwise, in a land ruled over by a widow, who is used to certain recreations, one might be finding amusement, and profit too."

"Come now," said loyal Donander of ?vre, "but Madame Niafer is a chaste and good woman who means well!"

"She has yet another quality which is even more disastrous in the ruler of any country," returned Guivric the Sage.

"And what hook have you found now to hang a cynicism on?"

"I fear more from her inordinate piety than from her indifferent looks and her stupid well-meaningness. That woman will be reforming things everywhere into one gray ruin."

"Indeed," said Gonfal, smiling, "these rising fogs have to me very much the appearance of church incense."

Guivric nodded. "Yes. Had it been possible, I believe that Madame Niafer would have preserved and desecrated the fellowship by setting in Dom Manuel's place that Holy Holmendis who is nowadays her guide in all spiritual matters; and who will presently, do you mark my prophesying, be making a sanctimonious hash of her statecraft."

"He composed for her, it is well known," said Gonfal, "the plaint which she made for Dom Manuel."

"That was a cataloguing of ecclesiastic virtues," Guivric said, dryly, "which to my mind did not very immediately suggest the tall adulterer and parricide whom we remember. This Holmendis has, thus, already brought hypocrisy into fashion."

"He will be Niafer's main counselor," Gonfal speculated. "He is a pushing, vigorous fellow. I wonder now--?"

Guivric nodded again. "Women prefer to take counsel in a bedchamber," he stated.

"Come, Guivric," put in pious young Donander of ?vre. "Come now, whatever his over-charitable opinion of our dead master, this Holmendis is a saint: and we true believers should speak no ill of the saints."

"I have nothing against belief, nor hypocrisy either, within reason, nor have I anything against saints, in their proper place. It is only that should a saint--and more particularly, a saint conceived and nurtured and made holy in Philistia,--ever come to rule over Poictesme, and over the bedchamber of Dom Manuel," said Guivric, moodily, "that saint would not be in his proper place. And our day, my friends, would be ended."

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