«Chairs en fleurs, ô mes seins!»Pierre Louÿs, Les chansons de Bilitis CXVIII, «À Ses Seins».
The kingdom of Mpsina-Ibehh had been founded thirty-one centuries before, so the legend ran, by the mating of the first king, Mumeas-Ordna I, with a mermaid at the mouth of the river Hlokma; and Mutalu-Cicsaf XXIX, sixty-seventh and greatest in line to Mumeas-Ordna’s throne, bore yet an andro-thalassoparthenine blazon on the banners of his armies and palace at Supon-Oroc, which had flaunted, and never vainly, before a hundred proud cities and sterner citadels in his reign. Yet Mutalu-Cicsaf had that very year laid vain siege to two slight and scarcely swelling mounds, unmachiolated and undyked: the breasts of Ngival-Livraë, the tredecemannual daughter of the prince of Yelitsa, who had attended Mutalu-Cicsaf’s court in her father’s retinue but two months before.
Mutalu-Cicsaf’s attraction to the girl had been intense but sadly unmutual, for she protested to his petitioning eunuch, with most becoming modesty and gentleness, that she was both too young and too low-born to consider such an alliance with one of such high and puissant estate; and Mutalu-Cicsaf had believed that when she sailed away down the coast with her father, his unrequited passion would dwindle and pass. Yet it had not been so: he dreamed the night of her departure of not one moon but two, rising pearl-perfect in the east to draw up contradictory tides in the sea of his blood; and thereafter his dreams of her grew nightly more vivid, as though waxing to fill her absence. Her face and form were recalled to him daily in a hundred quotidian objects and situations: he had to see but a cloud white at noon or sun-dyed at even to recall her calm or blushing cheek; to reach for but an apple of Tsigmar or peach of Ūnaphet to recall her breasts or nates; to hear but the lisp of dusk-stroked leaves to recall her voice; to sample but a river-fish prepared by his cooks to brood on the tinkle and glitter of the copper-green scales of the gown in which she had first appeared before him; and it grew increasingly plain that the fire she had inspired in his blood was burning not lower but higher with the days.
Mutalu-Cicsaf thereupon determined to take by force what he had not been granted by favor, and prepared an army to invade and conquer her father’s kingdom. The breeding-lines of the folk of Mpsina-Ibehh had long multifurcated by profession and martial specialty, raising all to the highest pitch of which they were capable, so that Mutalu-Cicsaf’s gracile archers of Siminic could spit a hummingbird on the wing at two hundred paces or his squat ax-men of Tsigmar splinter a boulder of granite at a single blow. Mutalu-Cicsaf considered, not without justification, that with but the tip of his little finger he could conquer the principality of Yelitsa; but he considered it poor compliment to his intended bride to march with less than a third of his total strength, and hoped also to induce immediate surrender by impressing upon the Na-Yelitsari the hopelessness of resistance.
And so it was, a fortnight to the day after he issued orders for the equipage and assembly, that Mutalu-Cicsaf raised hand for the trumpeters to sound, and nodded benignly from his dias over the ranks of his wincing army, for he had taken precaution of plugging his ears with wax privatim against the harshness and volume of the trumpets. The notes shifted, climbing to challenge the white cloud-banners and golden sun-shield of the heavens, and with a coördinated stride that shook the very walls and towers of Supon-Oroc, his soldiery set upon their way. He waited till his centrally positioned personal regiment was passing, then slipped from the dias into his gonfaloned and gilded litter, which sixteen brawny slaves whisked into the heart of the regiment.
Mutalu-Cicsaf settled back against cushions of phœnicopteryx-feather, unplugging his ears and calling for his eunuch to supply wine and concubines, wherewith he won a first victory of the expedition, namely, against the tedium of the first day’s march into the west. His army camped that night on the foothills of the mountains overlooking Supon-Oroc, and Mutalu-Cicsaf strolled tipsily and complacently with his eunuchs and body-guard among its camp-fires, whose extent and number were such as to seem a fallen fragment of the starry heavens. The king was pondering whether to order certain ambers and woods to be added to the fires, that by burning in more varied hues the sky-simulacrum might be more complete yet, when a commotion arose on the fringes of his retinue and a eunuch came to him to report that his court-astrologer was demanding an audience, having ridden two horses to exhaustion in pursuit of his master from Supon-Oroc. Sobering somewhat, Mutalu-Cicsaf granted the audience and the astrologer was soon bowing breathlessly before him, then straightening to gasp out the following words:
“Your majesty, ¿dost see yon green star of the constellation Pnapnašk?”
But Mutalu-Cicsaf had barely followed the sharp index of the astrologer aloft to note the star than the astrologer’s words were rendered otiose by fulfilment of that against which he had come to warn. In a neighboring quartile of the heavens a hitherto unremarked star-speck waxed in a heartbeat to sun-bright intensity and size, stripping the pelt of darkness from Supon-Oroc and the land of Mpsina-Ibehh, and granting Mutalu-Cicsaf, though he realized it not, a final glimpse of his capital and realm. But the star was waxing brighter and larger yet as it swooped down upon Mpsina-Ibehh from its superlunary sphere, forcing all observers to clasp their eyes against abacination, though able still to follow its passage through the shield of their palms. Down, down the star swooped, to land, as though a hammer of the gods, full on the jewelled crown of Supon-Oroc, smashing it utterly and irretrievably in less time than it takes to compose a jot of the description.
Next, rumbling over the land of Mpsina-Ibehh like the laughter of iron titans, came the ear-bruising clangor of the concussion; and now it was that Mutalu-Cicsaf became slowly aware that the astrologer had seized and was shaking him by the arm in defiance of all etiquette and custom, whilst shrieking in his ear the words: “¡Order all flat on their faces, my lord!”
With a start Mutalu-Cicsaf came to himself and was about to order the astrologer beheaded for insolence when the outriders of that against which he was warning shook the ground beneath their feet.
“¡Flat, my lord!” the astrologer shrieked, then suited deed to his own words by throwing himself flat to the earth. Mutalu-Cicsaf signaled his trumpeters, then followed suit in disregard of royal dignity, but the first trumpet-notes had barely sounded than the full force of the earthquake was upon them, shaking all from their feet as it swept outward from the wreck of Supon-Oroc. Yet the army of Mutalu-Cicsaf might have risen almost unscathed from the ’quake, were it not that its tremors caused great avalanches to thunder down the slopes of the mountains behind them, sweeping the foothills with torrents of ice and stone in which regiments perished in eyeblinks. So it was, beneath a sky hazed pale with hanging ice-dust and stars halo’d as with blood, that Mutalu-Cicsaf received the shivering reports of his remaining generals in the flicker of fires burning across the plain of Mpsina-Ibehh, and learned that day-break would find full one-half of his army destroyed.
Later he sipped mulled wine beside a hastily constructed fire of aromatic mountain-juniper, his neck massaged by the slender fingers of his two surviving concubines, and pondered the advice of his five surviving eunuchs. Two urged that he return at once to Supon-Oroc, to survey the destruction and supervise the reconstruction of his realm, two that he remain in the mountains for the nonce, warding himself against the outbreak of plague that was sure to follow the star-fall, the fifth that he first consult the astrologer who had foreseen, albeit fruitlessly, what had come to pass. The astrologer, Hrebek-Iminuš by name, was being tended by the royal physician for a blow on the head received from a flying ice-block, and was not able to come again to the king till dawn was glimmering sanginueously on the eastern horizon across the fire-dappled, smoke-hazed plain of Mpsina-Ibehh.
Having learned what it was the king wished to know of him, he nodded slowly and advised the king to proceed with his invasion of Yelitsa, for Mpsina-Ibehh was now lost to him.
“If I read aright of the stars, my lord, the kings of Tik, Pnamn, and Mgaäänad-Ektaphu will shortly, having learned of your misfortune, enter an alliance to scavenge the scorched carcass of your kingdom, and you could never hope to hold it against them. Yelitsa, however, ye may still hope to seize for yourself and hold against all-comers, whilst you regain your strength and prepare to take back your ancient realm.”
Full day added weight to the astrologer’s words, for it was apparent that the disaster to fall upon Mpsina-Ibehh had been even greater than they had guessed by night. Therefore, having despatched all walking wounded back to Mpsina-Ibehh, where they were to prepare arm-cache and ambushcade against his eventual return, Mutalu-Cicsaf ordered his army on through the mountains. Herewith, however, a secondary consequence of the star-fall made itself known, for the air was growing sultry under the haze-reddened rays of the rising sun, which loomed gross and swollen as some blood-filled fruit of the underworld, and an unseasonal thaw was setting in, so that the mountain-slopes soon glittered with a rusty filigree of chuckling streams and the pass they tramped became a morass of stone-mingled sludge and slime. Above, flights of gore-crow were seen against the reddened sky, streaming with silent intent eastward to the melting ice-tombs of the foothills, where so many of Mutalu-Cicsaf’s soldiery lay fresh-buried and soon to be fresher disenglaced.
On that first day of their thaw-prolonged passage of the mountains the crows were seen constantly overhead; on the second the sky brooded in uncompanioned rancor, pressing hotter and heavier than ever with the smirch and dust of shattered Supon-Oroc; on the third and final the crows were seen winging heavily in reverse, breaking their silence with gleeful croaks, as though in gourmandic reminiscence of their feasting. Fists were shaken skyward by the comrades of the dead, curses vented in a hundred dialects of Mpsina-Ibehh, and many arrows wasted in futile shots of unfulfilled revenge, till Mutalu-Cicsaf ordered that the crows be suffered to pass unremarked. By now they were descending the further slopes of the mountains, where the thaw had carved out several rivers for its own descent, and below them lay the plain of Hvabbras, on whose far southern border Yelitsa abutted.
But the plain had received more water than it could speedily absorb, and the army of Mutalu-Cicsaf trudged off the mountains into a pest-breeding marsh where the pale, fresh-hatched larvæ of midge and mosquito wriggled in the unseasonal heat. As through a landscape of churned gore they crawled beneath that red-looming sun, armor and weapons rusting blood-red with sweat and vapors, till they woke one morning to hear an ominous hum rising for leagues about them. ’Twas the hatched imagos of the larvæ, dancing above the marsh in celebration of their emergence and soon to rise sun-ward, then descend droning in intolerable, insatiable swarms upon their prey. Mutalu-Cicsaf himself, who had deserted his sweltering litter for a horse, was among the few who by some quirk of bodily flavor or heavenly favor, went relatively unmolested by the insects; but many others were sucked to a fatal anæmia, his own horse and remaining concubines amongst them, or collapsed of blood-loss as they walked, oftentimes to drown in the deepening sludge of the marsh before they could be dragged free.
These dead soon came to be regarded by some as most fortunate, for the bite of the midge- and mosquito-swarms swiftly engendered a racking fever in a third of their surviving victims, of whom a half succumbed within the day, to be left floating where they fell, already tinged with a heat-accelerated decay whose malarial stench would be wafted to their comrades on sluggish winds during the morrow. And now, as though attracted by the sickness and despair that brooded over the army closer even than the sultry air, great water-snakes began to assail them from all quarters, gliding easily over the surface of the marsh and falling upon them with gaping, dagger-fanged maws. The army was fought to a standstill by midday, losing a dozen troops a minute at the height of the serpentine onslaught, and it was not till moon-rise that the snakes retired with sinister, hither-to unremarked trillings of their leprous tongues, which seemed to promise a re-doubled assault on the morrow.
Beneath the mocking red rays of the moon, vast as a giant’s blood-blister against the blood-tinged stars, Mutalu-Cicsaf held discourse again with his dwindled generals, ever and again interrupted by the shrieks of some archer or ax-man, slinger or swordsman, driven insane by festering snake-bite or incessant midge or mosquito, and often dispatched in self-defence by the comrades upon whom he threw himself in his maddened rage. All faces save his own were swollen with bites, bruised with slapping, and crusted with seeping blood and crushed insect, but the good sense of the battle-hardened veteran remained beneath the sadly altered exteriors and he readily took their advice to send out scouts to find the river Hlokma or some newer, whereon the waning ranks of the army would embark in a fleet of rafts nailed together from flotsam by his remaining armorers. His tropps could then float out of the marsh in whatever direction the river took them, and skirt its insalubrious miasmas, droning sanguipotes, and venomous aquatic reptiles en route to Yelitsa.
Scouts were despatched forthwith and returned in mid-morning to report that a silt-laden river, apparently the Hlokma, lay no great distance thence. The army was ordered thither, with the best swordsmen posted on its outliers against a renewed assault of the water-snakes, but whether by divine favor or their removal from the habitual lair of the creatures, no sword was drawn in defence that day. At the river Mutalu-Cicsaf’s armorers set to work on the flotsam gathered en route or plucked from the flood, and by mid-afternoon the motley fleet had embarked. Yet how Mutalu-Cicsaf ground his teeth to see its smallness and realize that he had left a further half of his finest troops floating empurled and bloated in the marsh. His two remaining eunuchs, noting their master’s distress, hastened to provide an apolaustic distraction, but the best they could contrive, in absence of even a single concubine or wineskin, was to was for one to fan Mutalu-Cicsaf with his tattered robes whilst the other juggled fragments of wood to the accompaniment of lampascene songs.
Little though this was, Mutalu-Cicsaf was pleased by it as once he would not have been by treasury-lowering estravaganze months in the preparation, and though he sighed in initio for the loss of his concubines and wine-store, he would have happily been entertained longer than the half-hour he was granted. That passed, however, the juggling eunuch’s efforts were rescinded by a gay-fletched arrow that sprouted in the slimming wattles of his throat; and Mutalu-Cicsaf looked up to see that the air was suddenly full of such shafts, waspily buzzing through the cries of the first-wounded as pygmy figures on the banks of the putative Hlokma bent springy bows among rushes taller than themselves. He threw himself flat to the raft-floor and ground his teeth, peering from the uneven wood, to see the response of his own archers, whose reduced volleys flew one in three sadly awry, so weakened by privation and fever were they.
Nevertheless, the response swiftly forced the pygmies into cover and the river’s current was carrying them clear of the menace. Yet it was already apparent that the pygmies’ arrows were fatal even to the merely wounded by virtue of the toxin smeared on their flint heads, for delirious screams were arising throughout the flotilla and Mutalu-Cicsaf ground teeth again to think of his draining strength. Misjudging in his anger and grief that the threat was now past, he began to raise himself from the floor of the raft when a final wasp buzzed at extreme range from the river-bank; and he cried in distress at the worsening sting of an arrow-nick across his forearm. His sole remaining eunuch hastened to plant mouth to the wound, sucking frantically to draw out the toxin ere it embarked entire on his master’s blood-stream; but already Mutalu-Cicsaf could feel the death-delirium clouding his brain.
The screams of the wounded and plashes of paddles was fading in his ears and even the motion of the raft and scent of the river were lessening. He tried to speak, wishing to leave words to be remembered by, but his tongue failed him and he closed his eyes against a sudden and paradoxical brightening and yellowing of the sun’s rays. The eunuch’s lips fell from his forearm and he staggered and fell headlong, clutching what seemed not to be the uneven wood of the raft or the water of the river but a solid sward of earth. He opened his eyes and indeed a solid green sward lay beneath him, as though his dying mind wandered in a maze of illusion. Up he rose to see that he stood alone on the plain of Hvabbras as it had been before the flood, with a bight of the river Hlokma gleaming beneath bright sun a league or two to the west. ¿What had happened to him? ¿Was he delirious and dreaming, or dead and transported to some pratic afterlife?
Yet the sun upon his back, the sward beneath his feet, the cries of river-fowl in his ears, all had the smack of unillusive reality; and as though to confirm his impressions, his belly hereat commenced a loud and most un-otherworldly rumbling. He set off for the river Hlokma, hoping find river-crab or turtle-nest to assuage his hunger; and dusk found him belching on the river-side by a low-burning fire, belly tautened with both the crab-meat and the turtle-egg he had hoped to find. His mind was fed too, on the satisfaction that his woodscraft had not deserted him from his youth, long years though it had been since he had last exercised it. But the meat was insufficient, for his mind gnawed at the mystery of how he had come to find himself deserted on a unflooded plain of Hvabbras. Some impulse made him raise eyes to the darkening heavens and he swore aloud at what he saw there: the glimmering net of the fisher-goddess Siracten, but with the star Khanakh shining in all its emerald splendor as it had not done since the reign of his five-times-great-grandfather Muphamis-Oroc VII, wherein it had exploded in day-seen nova. The solution came to him in a flash of insight: some herb smeared on the head of the pygmy arrow had magicked him out of his time, returning him to an elder era at least three centuries before his own. That none other of the wounded had accompanied him he guessed was due to a difference in the dose.
Yet the knowledge of his dislocation nowise distressed him, for his dislocation in time had lifted a great burden from his shoulders whose presence he had but dimly guessed before: that of kingship and the responsibilities of high command. He believed now, laying himself to sleep beneath the light of ancient stars, that he would have been happier as a simple woodsman or fisher than as king of all-conquering Mpsina-Ibehh; and on the morrow, when he rose refreshed to construct a line and hook for fishing, he resolved not to return to Supon-Oroc and claim relation with the king by virtue of the royal seal he bore yet around his neck on a chain of triplex steel, but rather to travel downriver to the sea, where he would find a village of fisherfolk and seek a place among them by virtue of his skill and valor. To confirm the resolution, he lifted the seal from his neck, wound it tight in its steel chain, and flung it far and high out over the river, smiling to hear the splash that told of its eternal loss.
Later in the day, having feasted on three juicy fish caught on his own line, he set off for the putative fisher-village, eyes busy over the river for some floating tree wherewith he could carve and burn himself a canoe. He waited a day to draw one from the waters of the Hlokma, and spent a further week carving and burning out his canoe; but thereafter he traveled in an hour what he would on foot have traveled in a day, and he soon smelt the salt freshness of his destination carried on the wind. The next day the banks of the Hlokma began to recede on either hand, and toward midday he rode and rocked a bore churning upriver with the tide. An hour thereafter he was on the open sea, rejoicing in his success before he turned his prow to overnight on an island whereon he hoped to find shellfish or sea-bird’s eggs wherewith to break the monotony of his previous diet.
Yet as he drew his canoe up a shore of sloping golden sand a sweeter note than a sea-bird’s broke the shish and shush of the waves: the voice of a young woman upraised in lament, touching the strings of his heart that his eyes stung a moment with a hotter brine than the cool sea’s. His mind flew to the legend of his dynasty’s foundation: the mermaid found and betrothed by Mumeas-Ordna at the mouth of this selfsame river thirty-one centuries before his own, rescinded reign. ¿Was this some jest of the gods or their demons? He let fall his canoe and stalked the voice, soon peeping through a screen of sea-squill to see below him a young and slender woman in tattered finery washing her hair in a rain-water pool, lifting her voice in lament the while. Then his heart pounded in disbelief, for she had straightened and thrown back soaking wings of her dark hair to reveal the pale face of his beloved Ngival-Livraë.
He burst from the sea-squill with a shout and after a moment of gaping bewilderment the girl rushed to meet him, throwing herself into his arms and stammering out between her sobs, in the fragmentary Supon-Orockese she had picked up in his court, the story of how she came to this strange meeting out of time and space. Her father’s ship had been wrecked passing the river-mouth, Mutalu-Cicsaf pieced together through her barbarous accent, and she had been the solitary soul to struggle ashore on the island. Then had come some months of deepening loneliness and despair, till, but six days before, having quite lost hope of rescue or escape, she had seen an empty raft floating half-submerged in a bay on the far side of the island. Swimming to it in hope of somehow repairing it for escape, she had found an arrow stuck in one of its irregular timbers and resolved on a sudden to bury the same in her heart, for she saw that the raft was on the point of final disintergration. But when she tugged the arrow forth and set the point to her breast, resolution deserted her in the instant that she began to press it home, and she merely nicked herself with its flint.
The delirium that overtook her as she swam ashore, breast-wound stung by the sea-brine, had been identical to his own, Mutalu-Cicsaf realized, and had ended after the same wise: with his darling dislocated in time just as he had been the day before, for it was surely a raft of his own army that had floated to her carrying its ensorceled arrow. Her dose, by favor of the gods, had somehow been identical to his own, or else the drug had worked more strongly on her slender frame. He slowly explained the paradox to her, kissing her wet and tear-brined face the while, and telling her that he was re-christened henceforth: no longer Mutalu-Cicsaf XXIX but Mumeas-Ordna as yet-not-the-First, in preparation for the time he returned to his destined kingdom of Mpsina-Ibehh with his mermaid bride.