E. R. Eddison - Mistress Of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia (Fantasy Masterworks 21)

A VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA BY

E. R. EDDISON

Fantasy Masterworks Volume 21

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"From whatever heaven Mr. Eddison comes, he has added a masterpiece to English literature.' James Stephens

The author of this extraordinary and reverberating book has dared to be completely imaginative, to brush aside the world, create and order his own cosmqs, and with this background give us the death and transfiguration of a hero.

The scene is that fabled land of Zimiamvia (already mentioned in the previous volume, The Worm Ouroboros) of which philosophers tell us that no mortal foot may tread it, but that souls do inhabit it of the dead that were great upon earth...Here they forever live, love, do battle, and even for a space die again.

Lessinghamartist, poet, king of men, and lover of womenis dead. But from Aphrodite herself, Mistress of Mistresses, he has earned the promise both to live again in Zimiamvia and of her own perilous future favors.

This volume recounts the story of his first day in that strange Valhalla, where a lifetime is a day and where among enemies, enchantments, guile, and triumphthat promise is fulfilled.

BY E. R. EDDISON

THE WORM OUROBOROS

A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON

Copyright 1935 by E. P. Dutton Co., Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper or radio broadcast.

This edition published by arrangement with E. P. Dutton Sc. Co., Inc.

First Printing: August, 1967 Second Printing: September, 1967 Third Printing: May, 1968

First Canadian Printing: November, 1967

Printed in Canada

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003

W.G.E

TO YOU, MADONNA MIA AND TO MY FRIEND EDWARD ABBE NILES

I DEDICATE THIS VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA

the overture

ZIMIAMVIA

I a spring night in mornagay

II the duke of zayana

iii. the tables set in meszria

iv. zimiamvian dawn
v. the vicar of rerek

vi. lord lessingham's embassage

vii. a night-piece on ambremerine

viii. sperra cavallo

ix. the ings of lorkan

x. the concordat of ilkis

xi. gabriel flores

xii. noble kinsmen in laimak

xiii. queen antiope

xIv. dorian mode: full close

xv. rialmar vindemiatrix

xvI the vicar and barganax

xvii. the ride to kutarmish

xviii. rialmar in starlight

xix. lightning out of fingiswold

xx. thunder over rerek

xxi. enn freki renna

xxii. zimiamvian night

Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des mattresses,

O toi, tous mes plaisrs! o toi, tous mes devoirs!

Tu te rappelleras la beaute des caresses,

La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,

Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des maitresses!

Les soirs illumines par lardeur du charbon,

Et les soirs au balcon, voiles de vapeurs roses.

Que ton sein m'etait doux! que ton cceur m'etait bon!

Nous avons dit souvent d'imperissables choses

Les soirs illumines par l'ardeur du charbon.

Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirees!

Que l'espace est profond! que le cceur est puissant!

En me penchant vers toi, reine des adorees,

Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang.

Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soiries!

La nuit s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison,

Et mes yeux dans le noir devinaient tes prunelles,

Et je buvais ton souffle, O douceur, O poison!

Et tes pieds s'endormaient dans mes mains fraternelles.

La nuit s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison.

Je sais lart d'evoquer les minutes heureuses,

Et revis mon passe blotti dans tes genoux.

Car a quoi bon chercher tes beautes langoureuses

Ailleurs qu'en ton cher corps et qu'en ton cceur si doux?

Je sais I'art d'evoquer les minutes heureuses!

Ces serments, ces parjums, ces baisers infinis,

Renaitront-ils d'un gouffre interdit a nos sondes,

Comme montent au del les soleils rajeunis

Apres s'etre laves au fond des mers profondes?

O serments! O parfums! O baisers infinis!

Baudelaire

THE UNSETTING SUNSET AN UNKNOWN LADY BESIDE THE BIER EASTER AT MARDALE GREEN LESSINGHAM LADY MARY LESSINGHAM MEDITATION OF MORTALITY APHRODITE OURANIA A VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA A PROMISE.

Let me gather my thoughts a little, sitting here alone with you for the last time, in this high western window of your castle that you built so many years ago, to overhang like a sea eagle's eyrie the grey-walled waters of your Raftsund. We are fortunate, that this should have come about in the season of high summer, rather than on some troll-ridden night in the Arctic winter. At least, I am fortunate. For there is peace in these Arctic July nights, where the long sunset scarcely stoops beneath the horizon to kiss awake the long dawn. And on me, sitting in the deep embrasure upon your cushions of cloth of gold and your rugs of Samarkand that break the chill of the granite, something sheds peace, as those great sulphur-coloured lilies in your Ming vase shed their scent on the air. Peace; and power; indoors and out: the peace of the glassy surface of the sound with its strange midnight glory as of pale molten latoun or orichalc; and the peace of the waning moon unnaturally risen, large and pink-coloured, in the midst of the confused region betwixt sunset and sunrise, above the low slate-hued cloud-bank that fills the narrows far up the sound a little east of north, where the Trangstrommen runs deep and still between mountain and shadowing mountain. That for power: and the Troldtinder, rearing their bare cliffs sheer from the further brink; and, away to the left of them, like pictures I have seen of your Ushba in the Caucasus, the tremendous two-eared Rulten, lifted up against the afterglow above a score of lesser spires and bastions: Rulten, that kept you and me hard at work for nineteen hours, climbing his paltry three thousand feet. Lord! and that was twenty-five years ago, when you were about the age I am to-day, an old man, by common reckoning; yet it taxed not me only in my prime but your own Swiss guides, to keep pace with you. The mountains; the un-plumbed deeps of the Raftsund and its swinging tideways; the unearthly darkless Arctic summer night; and indoors, under the mingling of natural and artificial lights, of sunset and the windy candlelight of your seven-branched candlesticks of gold, the peace and the power of your face.

Your great Italian clock measures the silence with its ticking: 'Another, gone! another, gone! another, gone!1 Commonly, I have grown to hate such tickings, hideous to an old man as the grinning memento mori at the feast. But now, (perhaps the shock has deadened my feelings), I could almost cheat reason to believe there was in very truth eternity in these things: substance and everlasting life in what is more transient and unsubstantial than a mayfly, empirical, vainer than air, weak bubbles on the flux. You and your lordship here, I mean, and this castle of yours, more fantastic than Beckford's Fonthill, and all your life that has vanished into the irrevocable past: a kind of nothingness. 'Another, gone! another, gone!' Seconds, or years, or sons of unnumbered time, what does it matter? I can well think that this hour just past of my sitting here in this silent room is as long a time, or as short, as those twenty-five years that have gone by since you and I first, on a night like this, stared at Lofotveggen across thirty miles of sea, as we rounded the Landegode and steered north into the open Westfirth.