‘Or as young.’
‘But a minute ago you called it new?’ He looked down now, into this girl’s staring yellow eyes: eyes whose pupils were upright slits that opened upon some inward quivering of incandescence, as of iron fired beyond redness; and his gaze grew gentle. ‘And you are becharmed by it: like a bee of the new brood come out to dance before the hive on a still sunshiny evening and taste open air for the first time and find your landmarks.’
Anthea laughed: a momentary disclosing of pointed teeth that transshaped, as with leap and vanishing again of lightning, the classic quietude of her features. ‘I knew it all before,’ she said. ‘Yet for all that, it is as new and unexperimented as last night’s snowfall on my high glaciers of Ramosh Arkab. A newness that makes my heckles rise. Does it not yours?’
He shook his head: ‘I am not a beast of prey.’
‘What are you, then?’ she said, but without waiting for an answer. ‘There is a biting taste to it: a scent, a stirring: and up there, especially. In the Teremnene palace.’ She lifted her nose towards the royal seat-town upon its solitary heights, as if even down wind her eager sense tasted its quality.
Vandermast said, ‘There is a child there. You saw it no doubt? A boy.’
‘Yes. But no past ordinary novelty in that. Unless perhaps that when, changing my smooth skin for my furred, I slunk in and made teeth at it behind the nurse’s back, it was not scared but gave me a look, so that I went out and glad to be gone. And, now I think on it, ’twas that first set me scenting this newness at every corner. Beyond all, in the Queen.’ She looked at him, paused, then asked suddenly. ‘This Queen. Who in truth is she?’
He made no reply.
‘Tell me, dear master,’ she said, drawing herself closer by a most unhuman self-elongating of body and limbs and rubbing her cheek, as might some cattish creature, against his knee.
He said, ‘You must not ask questions when you know the answer.’
Anthea sat back on her heels and laughed. Upon the motion, her hair, loosely bound up with a string of clouded zircon stones of that translucent blue which is in the lip of an ice-cave looked up to from within, fell, in tumbled cataracts as of very sunlight, down about her shoulders and, in one of its uncoiling fulvid streams, over her breast. ‘She Herself does not know the answer. I suppose, in this present dress of Hers, She is asleep?’
‘In this present dress,’ said the ancient doctor, ‘She is turned outward from Herself. You may, if you choose, conceive it as a kind of sleep: a kind of forgetting. As the sunshine were to forget itself in the thing it shines on.’
‘In that lion-cub of hers? I cannot understand such a forgetting in Her.’
‘No, my oread. Nor I would not wish you able to understand it, for that were to maculate the purity of your own proper nature.’
‘And you would wish me be as I am?’
‘Yes,’ answered he. ‘You, and all true beings else.’
The girl, silent, putting up her hair, met his look unsmilingly with her unquiet, feline, burning eyes.
‘We will go on,’ said the doctor, rising from his seat.
Anthea with a lithe and sinuous grace rose to follow him.
‘Whither?’ she asked as they came southward.
‘Up to Teremne. We will look upon these festivities.’
In the old Teremnene palace which, like an eagle’s nest, crowns the summit ridge of the south-eastern and loftier of the twin steep rock bastions called Teremne and Mehisbon, on and about which has grown up as by accretion of ages Rialmar town, is a little secret garden pleasaunce. It lies square between walls and the living rock, in good shelter from the unkinder winds but open to the sun, this side or that, from fore-noon till late evening. No prying windows overlook it: no intrusive noises visit it of the world’s stir without: a very formal garden artificially devised with paved walks of granite trod smooth by the use of centuries, and with flights of steps going down at either side and at either end to an oval pond in the midst, and upon a pedestal in the midst of that pond a chryselephantine statue of Aphrodite as rising from the sea. At set paces there were parterres of tiny mountain plants: stonecrop, houseleek, rock madwort, mountain dryas, trefoils, and the little yellow mountain poppy; and with these that creeping evening primrose, which lifts up wavy-edged four-lobed saucers of a spectral whiteness, new every night at night-fall, to bloom through the hours of dark and fill the garden with an overmastering sharp sweetness. And at full morning they droop and begin to furl their petals, suffused now with pink colour which were white as a snowdrop’s, and lose all their scent, and the thing waits lifeless and inert till night shall return again and wake it to virgin-new delicacy and deliciousness. This was Queen Stateira’s garden, furnished out anew for her sake seven years ago by Mardanus her lord, who in those days made little store of gardens, but much of his young new-wedded wife.
Shadows were lengthening now, as afternoon drew towards evening. In one of the deep embrasures of the east wall which look down the precipice sheer eight hundred feet, to the river mouth and the harbour and so through skyey distances to the great mountain chains, so blanketed at this hour with cloud that hard it was to discern snowfield from cloudbank, leaned King Mardanus in close talk with two or three about him. No wind stirred in the garden, and the spring sunshine rested warm on their shoulders.
Away from them at some twenty yards’ remove, by the waterside, upon a bench of lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl, sat the Queen. The brightness of the sun shining from behind her obscured her features under a veiling mystery, but not to conceal an ambiency of beauty that lived in her whole frame and posture, an easefulness and reposefulness of unselfregarding grace. The light kindled to flame the native fire-colours in her hair, and the thrown shadow of that statue touched the furred hem of her skirt and the gold-woven lace-work on her shoe.
Over against her on the same bench the Lady Marescia Parry, only child of Prince Garman of Fingiswold, and so cousin german to the King, faced the sun. She was at this time in the twenty-fourth year of her age: of a dazzling whiteness of skin: her eyes, busy, bold and eager, of a hot chestnut brown: her nose a falcon’s, her yellow hair, strained back from her high forehead by a thin silver circlet garnished with stone and pearls, fell loose and untressed about her back and powerful shoulders, in fashion of a bride’s.
The Queen spoke: ‘Well, cousin, you are wedded.’
‘Well wedded, but not yet bedded.’
‘’Las, when mean you to give over that ill custom of yours?’
‘Ill custom?’
‘Ever to speak broad.’
‘O, between kinsfolk. Tell me unfeignedly, what thinks your highness of my Supervius? Is a not a proper man?’
‘He belieth not his picture. And since ’twas his picture you fell in love with, and he with yours, I dare say you have gotten the husband of your choice.’
The Princess smiled with her lips: cherry-red lips, lickerous, and masterful. ‘And by right of conquest,’ she said. ‘That sauceth my dish: most prickingly.’
‘Yet remember,’ said the Queen, ‘we wives are seldom conquerors beyond first se’nnight.’
‘I’ll talk to your highness of that hereafter. But I spake not of conquest upon him. My blood tells me there’s fire enough in the pair of us to outburn such cold-hearth rivalries as that. Dear Gods forfend I should e’er yield myself chattel to the man I wed: but neither could I be fool enough to wed with such a man as I could bring down to be chattel of mine. Nay, I spoke of my parents; ay, and (with respect) of yourself, and of the King.’
‘Your conquest there,’ replied the Queen, ‘is measure of our love of you.’
‘Doubtless. But measure, besides, of mine own self will. Without that,’ here she glanced over her shoulder and