Salome and other Decadent Fantasies, page 14
“I bow to your better judgment,” Giraiazal said, graciously. “Take Lysariel away, if you must—but do so gently, I beg of you, for his sister-in-law is with him. Loyal Zintrah has given as much time and care to the king these last twenty days as you, faithful Manazzoryn, gave to the queen in her darkest hours.”
“I will be gentle, for my daughter’s sake,” Viragan promised—and would doubtless have kept his promise, had he not arrived as Lysariel lifted the magnum to his lips for the final time, hoping to find a last drop which simply was not there.
Denied that comfort, the king lashed out in rage and pain at those whose sought to help him, proclaiming wildly that he would not be separated from his beloved, and that no prison had been built which could keep him apart from the most beautiful and most desirable woman in all the world. He had to be dragged screaming from the apartment and from the palace, disconcerting everyone who saw him. The unease caused by this unwelcome spectacle was, however, considerably quieted when the notorious sorcerer Urbishek was burned alive in the plaza that very same night, with half the population of the port looking on and applauding.
It was not until the following day that Viragan sent his men back to Lysariel’s apartment with orders to smash the coral statue and throw the pieces into the sea. It had not occurred to the prince that there was any considerable hurry, and he felt that it would have been a pity to deny his most loyal servants the chance to enjoy the public execution. He had cause to regret his complacency when the men returned to his house in some distress with the news that the statue had disappeared.
Viragan immediately summoned Giraiazal and demanded to know what had become of the statue, but Giraiazal confessed that he was none the wiser. The two of them went together to Manazzoryn, but he had no more idea than they what might have become of the likeness of Calia.
“It must have been stolen by thieves,” Viragan suggested. “When I find them, I’ll give them cause to regret their temerity.”
“I am not so sure,” said Manazzoryn. “My wife Zintrah was frightened when I told her that the statue had gone. It appears that she has visited my brother more than once in the hope of redeeming his distress, and she formed the impression that the image had lately acquired the power of independent movement. Is that possible, Giraiazal?”
“Perhaps it is,” Giraiazal conceded. “I have the greatest respect for Zintrah’s intelligence and judgment and the divers who harvested the coral on Urbishek’s behalf have being telling anyone who will listen that it is animated by an alien intelligence that was always intent on finding a road to freedom. If the statue was merely tired of serving as an object of adoration for a besotted madman, then its animation would be no cause for alarm. If, on the other hand, it still relished its role, that would be a different matter. Poor Lysariel is well enough guarded against any ordinary attempt to release him or to do him harm, but who can tell what a living statue might be able to accomplish?”
Viragan frowned when he heard this, but his expression cleared again soon enough. Knowing as he did the traditions and tendencies of his countrymen, he still believed that the statue had been stolen.
Manazzoryn was by no means so sure. “Who can tell what mission an animated image might have in mind?” he mused. “If it has absorbed the spirit of poor dead Calia, a reunion with its mad lover might not be the first object in its regretful mind.”
As he spoke, the king’s brother plucked nervously at his chemise, and it fell open at the front. Giraiazal observed that the girdle Manazzoryn had received as a wedding-present was tightly wound about his waist, disposed in such a manner that it would usually be invisible beneath his clothing.
How long, the astrologer wondered, had Manazzoryn been wearing the girdle? What action had put it in the young man’s mind that he might need its protection?
“Whatever the situation is,” Giraiazal said, by way of conclusion, “it is obvious that we ought to locate the statue if we can. If thieves have stolen it, we must recover it, but if it has indeed contrived to animate itself, we must be circumspect. Although it might eventually become necessary to publicize the object’s loss and offer a reward for its return, it might be prudent in the shorter term to commission trusted men to make discreet enquiries.”
“I will do that,” said Viragan. “My men are very discreet, for they know that they might lose their tongues if they were not.”
Viragan was presumably correct in his estimation of the integrity of his servants, but enquiries inevitably generate a momentum of their own. Within five days the news was all around the island that the statue of Calia forged out of ensorcelled coral by the black magician Urbishek had come to life and gone to ground, with the undoubted intention of planning mischief. By the time that Manazzoryn issued a royal proclamation to the effect that the statue had been stolen and that a lavish reward was offered for information leading to its recovery, the move was widely seen as a belated attempt to cover up the truth.
Giraiazal apologized profusely for his error, and was forgiven; Manazzoryn and Viragan were both intelligent enough to know that if only the statue had been found during those five days the problem would never have developed. In any case, it did not seem that the rumors could do them any harm, and Viragan knew how valuable it was to a newly-ensconced regent to have the taverns and marketplaces preoccupied by harmless gossip of matters supernatural rather than the discussion of practical politics.
As time went by, the rumors regarding the statue grew more fanciful, as rumors invariably do. The idea that had immediately occurred to Manazzoryn, that the force animating the missing likeness might be the unquiet spirit of dead Calia, was reproduced again and again. The notion that the queen had been recalled from beyond the grave by the power of her husband’s love had an intrinsic melodramatic appeal, as did the fancy that the separation of the two lovers had driven the entrapped spirit to such distraction that it had contrived to vivify the coral. The supposition that the ensouled work of art was now wandering the island’s interior in search of her lost love exerted such an influence on the popular imagination that sightings of the statue were soon reported in some profusion from the farmlands inland of the port, each alleged witness asserting that the statue seemed to be searching for something, weeping as it went.
On the thirtieth day of his regency Manazzoryn summoned Giraiazal to ask him again whether it was possible that these speculations were true, and that the spirit Calia really had returned from the afterlife.
“I have certainly heard tell of statues rendered ambulatory by such questing spirits,” Giraiazal admitted, “and love is, in essence, a supernatural force—all the more so when it is allied with conspicuous insanity. Unless and until I can communicate with the entity in question, however, I am unable to determine whether some kind of larva has taken possession of it—and, if so, exactly what kind it might be.”
“Can the spirit be dispossessed?” Manazzoryn asked. As he spoke, his right hand slipped unthinkingly inside his chemise, the fingers reaching out as if to touch the girdle that he secretly wore beneath.
“Almost certainly,” said Giraiazal, “but not, I fear, until it has been conclusively identified and squarely confronted. The wisdom of lore and legend instructs us that an exorcist must know the name of the spirit he seeks to banish and must do his work at close quarters. While the image remains in hiding, all that we can sensibly do is to keep searching for it.”
On the following day, Manazzoryn doubled the reward offered for information leading to the recovery of the statue.
On the day after that, Zintrah announced that she was with child.
This latter news was cause for considerable celebration throughout Cyntrom. Although Manazzoryn was only a regent, he was the king’s brother, so his first-born son would be heir presumptive to the throne. Because it seemed highly unlikely that the widowed Lysariel would ever be able to sire an heir apparent, Zintrah’s child would one day be king, provided only that it was a boy.
“Will my child be a son?” Zintrah asked Giraiazal, anxiously, when he had confirmed her pregnancy and made an estimate of the child’s most likely day of birth.
“He will indeed,” replied the astrologer, who had already compiled a hypothetical horoscope based on the most likely day of the child’s delivery.
“Will he be as handsome as his father?” Zintrah demanded. “Will he be king of Cyntrom? Will he be one of those rare and lucky men who live long and prosper?”
“All the signs that presently bear upon the question assure me that he will be all of that and more,” Giraiazal told her, “but I shall be able to make a more accurate and far more detailed calculation when I know the precise hour of his birth.”
* * * *
Viragan immediately made plans to host a lavish feast in celebration of his daughter’s good fortune, and set them in train. For thirty days his ships were active as never before, sailing in every direction in pursuit of rich cargoes—including a few that were eventually bought with honest coin, out of the necessity for haste.
For his part, Manazzoryn gave his father-in-law free use of the palace, its apartments and its servants, so that the magnificence of the occasion would not be constrained by the narrower confines of Viragan’s own house. The ceilings were bleached, the marble floors repaired and polished and the wall-hangings renewed with fine and elaborate fabrics. Jugglers and fire-eaters were hired, dwarfs and dancers recruited, and every musician on the island was ordered to tune his instrument to the best of his ability. A huge supply of giant lobsters was laid in, and birds of gaudy plumage collected for the roasting.
These elaborate preparations were not in vain. The feast was undoubtedly the most fabulous ever celebrated in Cyntrom, and was declared to be a great success by everyone—except, presumably, the two men-at-arms who drew black chips in the lottery held to determine who would stand guard on Lysariel’s cell. When the rest of Viragan’s servants returned home shortly after dawn they found these two unfortunates lying dead, their necks cleanly broken. One man’s half-pike was missing and the other had not a trace of blood upon its blade. The lock on the door had been shattered, and Lysariel had vanished.
The island’s rumor-mongers, whose narrative skills had been honed to perfection by their recent practice, went to work with a will. The tale was told all over the island within a matter of hours that Calia had returned to reclaim her lost lover, and had borne him triumphantly away. For seven days different accounts competed for the privilege of specifying where the coral bride might have taken her groom, but when no sight or sign of the couple was found the prevailing opinion took hold that she had carried him first to lonely Lamri, and then into the tempestuous sea, so that they might set up home as merfolk in the eel-infested grotto from whose walls the queen’s new body had been hewn.
This tale might have attained sufficient authority to become the stuff of legend had it not been for the fact that Lysariel returned to his palace forty days after his disappearance, quite alone.
No one tried to stop the king as he walked through the streets of the port, partly because the gleam in his eye put all who encountered him in mind of the wicked glare of Achernar and partly because there was a half-pike with a razor-sharp blade clutched tightly in his two hands. He said not a word until he was within the palace gate, the guards posted there having stood aside to let him through on the grounds that he was, after all, the king. Once he had gained admittance to the newly-decorated corridors, however, he began to run in the direction of the throne-room, crying out at the top of his voice.
The word he cried was: “Murderer!”
It happened that the regent was meeting with his councilors at the time, and it was not at all clear when Lysariel burst into the throne-room exactly who the target of his accusation might be. Although the majority of the councilors appointed by the new merchant princes had almost contrived to forget that they had ever been anything else, the sight of a madman wielding a half-pike was exactly the kind of trigger required to remind them that there was not one among their company whose hands were entirely clean. So far as the one-time pirates knew, the only men in the room who had never done anything that might be regarded, if only technically, as murder, were Manazzoryn and Giraiazal.
It was doubtless for this reason that Cyntrom’s ministers scattered in every possible direction when Lysariel made his dramatic entrance, leaving a clear path between the mad king and the throne on which his younger brother sat. This, at least, was the explanation they eventually offered for their negligence. The men-at-arms stationed behind the throne offered the equally-plausible excuse that the confused councilors had blocked their way.
It turned out, alas, that the throne was Lysariel’s appointed destination and Manazzoryn his intended victim. The transfixed regent stared at his lunatic sibling with utter horror, unable to move a muscle as the vengeful blade was directed at his heart. Even Giraiazal, who had seen a sketchy record of this atrocity written in the stars, was struck dumb with astonishment as the elder brother charged full tilt upon the younger and drove the blade of the half-pike into his sternum with such force that the bone was sheared in two, the heart behind sliced lop-sidedly and the stomach beneath it burst asunder.
Blood and chyme leapt from the wound in a great gout, and Manazzoryn expired, the air rushing from his lungs in a strange whistling gasp that might have been an aborted attempt to scream.
Lysariel was seized by a dozen hands as soon as he became quiet and disarmed himself—which he did immediately after the fatal blow had been struck. When he released the haft of the firmly-embedded weapon, however, he promptly fell into a swoon and the men who took hold of him had to bear him up again. He was carried away unconscious, and was taken back to Viragan’s house, where he was placed in the same room as before. The lock on the door had been repaired and reinforced, and Viragan gave orders that four guards were to remain on duty outside the door at all times.
The fact that the king had been very obviously mad did not prevent speculation as to the possibility that there had been method—or motive, at least—in his madness. Cyntrom’s rumor-mongers had now become so confident in the exercise of their dubious art that it required no more than a minute for them to work out that if Manazzoryn had been a murderer, and Lysariel a duty-bound avenger, then Calia’s fatal fall could not have been an accident. Either Manazzoryn must actually have cast her down, or she must have tumbled while trying to avoid his illicit amorous advances.
This, it was now said, if only in discreet whispers, was why Calia had returned from the grave to possess her likeness. She had come to demand the settlement of a score and the punishment of her would-be rapist. Now, presumably, she would be able to rest in peace. The statue must already be dispirited, and would likewise rest in the quiet of its grotto.
The bold diver who had appointed himself the spokesman of the team assembled by Urbishek had been so affected by his recent celebrity that he volunteered to test this hypothesis by venturing into the grotto to see if the statue was actually there, but nothing returned to the surface but a faint trail of blood, which was taken as testimony that he had been torn apart and eaten by voracious eels.
In the meantime, Viragan assumed the regency. He could not have done so before because Manazzoryn, although very young, had been the king’s brother, but now that the sole inheritor of the true royal blood was Zintrah’s unborn son—who was also Viragan’s grandson—it seemed entirely appropriate that he should do so.
Zintrah was, of course, utterly devastated by the tragedy, but she bravely accepted the burden of her new responsibilities. She took what comfort she could from the wise counsel of Giraiazal, although she was a trifle resentful about the apparent failure of his earlier assurances.
“You told me that I might save the sanity of the king,” she reminded the astrologer, having called him to a conference in the apartment she had shared with Manazzoryn. “You assured me that I alone in all the world had charm enough to win his affections away from the coral courtesan—but what were your flatteries worth, in the end? My beloved husband is dead and Lysariel’s madness is responsible for his murder.”
“You did not fail in what was asked of you, your highness,” Giraiazal informed her. “What I told you, if you remember, was that you alone had charm enough to distract Lysariel from his fetish. That you most certainly did—and it was neither your fault nor mine that I had not time to complete the penetration of the statue’s secret.”
“It seems that he was faithful to his statuesque hussy in the end,” Zintrah complained. “She released him from his prison, it seems, and sent him forth to commit fratricide. For her sake, he killed his own brother.”
“If you will forgive my saying so,” the astrologer said, very meekly, “that is merely the allegation of popular gossip. We cannot be certain that the statue was ever fully animated, either by the spirit of Calia or some demon. The possibility remains that it was merely stolen. There is no proof that anyone assisted Lysariel in his escape, but if assistance was lent, it is perfectly possible that it came from a merely human being. As to what he might have been told, or otherwise came to believe, about his brother, we can as yet only speculate.”
“He called him murderer,” Zintrah pointed out. “It cannot have been true, of course—but Lysariel must have believed it.”
“Unless,” said Giraiazal, speaking very softly, “he had some other reason to wish his brother dead.”
“You may be a magician and a man of unparalleled cleverness,” Zintrah replied, sharply, “but that remark is suggestive of disloyalty. Will you tell me what other reason he could possibly have had?”
Giraiazal bowed his head, reverently accepting the implied rebuke. “Your highness is undoubtedly right,” he conceded. “I have always been a scholarly man, preoccupied by my study of the ever-evolving firmament. It is the penalty of those who strive too hard to decipher mysteries that they sometimes give too much thought to the unlikely, and not enough to the obvious. I admit that I failed to protect Manazzoryn from the madness of Lysariel, just as I failed to protect Calia from the petty malice of Fate, but I beg you not to doubt my loyalty or my sincerity. You know better than anyone else how long I labored to snatch Calia from the jaws of death, and how deftly I attempted to pluck Lysariel from the clutches of obsession.”
