But the Lady of the Water-Gap was changed in quite another fashion. Where she had stood now fluttered a large black and yellow butterfly.
9. How One Butterfly Fared
SO it was in the shape of a large butterfly that Evasherah returned toward Gerald, to careen and drift affectionately about him, in a bewildering medley of bright colors. He cried to her adoringly, “My darling—!” He grasped at her: and she did not avoid him.
Gerald now held this lovely creature, by the throat, at arm’s length. He began the compelling words, “Schemhamphoras—” And in Gerald’s face was no adoration whatever.
Instead, he continued, rather sadly, “—Eloha, Ab, Bar, Ruachaccocies—” and so went through the entire awful list, ending by and by with “Cados.” His prey was now struggling frantically. The unreflective girl had not allowed for her lover’s being a student of magic. And her restiveness was—well, it might be, pardonably,—a bit interfering with Gerald’s aesthetic delight, now that he paused to admire the splendor of the trapped Princess’s last incarnation, before he used the fatal Hausa charm.
For Evasherah’s wings were of a wonderful velvety black and a fiery orange color, her body was golden, and her breast crimson. He noted also that Evasherah, in her increasing agitation of mind, had thrust out from the back of her neck a soft forked horn which diffused a horrible odor.
And those curved, strong, needle-sharp fangs which were striking vainly at him were so adroitly designed that Gerald fell now to marveling, still a little sadly, at their superb efficiency. A yellowish oil oozed from their tips. They had, he saw, just the curve of two cat claws: whensoever such fangs struck flesh, their victim’s recoil would but clamp fangs which were shaped like that more deeply and more venomously; it was a quite ingenious arrangement. It perfectly explained, too, how the visitors of this soft-spoken, cuddling and utterly adorable Princess happened to leave their skulls in the thick grass around her alabaster couch.
Then Gerald said: “O Butterfly, O Gleaming One, your breakfast this day is disappointment, your fork is agony, and your napkin death. O Butterfly, repent truly, abandon falsehood, put away deceit and flattery, cease thinking about your deluded lovers even remorsefully. Repent in verity, do not repent like the wildcat which repents with the fowl in its mouth without putting the fowl down. Where now is the artfulness which was yours, where are the highhearted, tricked lovers?—To-day all lies in the tomb. This world, O Butterfly, is a market-place: everyone comes and goes, both stranger and citizen. The last of your lovers is a pious friend, he assists the decreed course of this world.”
Still, it was rather strange that the body she had chosen appeared to belong to the species Onithoptera croesus,—Gerald decided, as his foot crushed the squeaking soft remnants and rubbed all into a smeared paste of blood and gold-dust,—because, of course, this kind of butterfly was more properly indigenous to the Malay Archipelago than to these parts, over and above the fact that for any butterfly to have the fangs of a serpent was false entomology.
However, the geography and local customs and all else which pertained to the Marches of Antan were tinged with some perceptible inconsequence, Gerald reflected, as he returned to his tethered stallion. He mounted then, cheered with the yet further reflection that he had got from Evasherah the rather beautiful idea of being a god, and had got also the four remaining drops from the Churning of the Ocean. The properties of this water were sufficiently well known to every student of magic.
PART FOUR THE BOOK OF DERSAM
10. Wives at Caer Omn
“What has a blind man to do with any mirror?”
NOW Gerald mounted on the stallion Kalki, and Gerald traveled upon the way of gods and myths, down a valley of cedar-trees, into the realm of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes. The land of Dersam was already falling away into desolation, because of the disappearance of its liege-lord into mortal living. And at Caer Omn, which formerly had been the Sylan’s royal palace, and where Gerald got his breakfast, the three hundred and fifty-odd concubines of Glaum were about their cooking and cleaning and nursing, but the seven wives of Glaum sat together in a walled garden.
Six of these wives were young and comely, but the seventh seemed—to Gerald’s finding,—as wrinkled as a wet fishnet, and as old as envy.
By the half-dozen who retained their youth, however, Gerald was enraptured. As he looked from one of them to the other, each in her turn appeared so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld.... But, no! Glaum was his benefactor. Glaum at this instant, in Lichfield, was toiling away at that unfinished romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme which by and by was to make the name of Gerald Musgrave famous everywhere. It would, therefore, never do to encourage these so shapelily and chromatically meritorious dears to follow out the dictates of womanly confidence and generosity to the point where they could bleat about it. No, to permit them all to deceive one husband would be an unfriendly and injudicious pleonasm, Gerald reflected. And Gerald sighed whole-heartedly.
The seven women had sighed earlier. “What else is now come to trouble us?” said the wives of the Sylan when Gerald came.
He answered them, with a great voice: “Ladies, I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. Yet, I pray you, do not be unduly alarmed by this revelation! I am not a ruthless deity, I deal fiercely with none save my misguided opponents. I, in a word, am he of whom it was prophesied that I, my dear ladies, or perhaps I ought to say that he—although, to be sure, it does not really matter which pronoun a strict grammarian would prefer, since in any case the meaning is unmistakable and very sublime,—would at his or at my appointed season appear, in unexampled and appropriate splendor, to reign over Antan, riding upon the silver stallion Kalki.”
But the wives of Glaum seemed unimpressed.
“Your meaning, sir,” said one of them, “may be terrible, but certainly it is not plain.”
This wife had reddish golden hair, uncovered: she wore a blue gown, so fashioned that it left her right breast wholly uncovered also; and, doubtless for some sufficient purpose, she carried an iron candlestick with seven branches.
Gerald asked, with indignation tempered by her good looks: “And do you doubt my divine word? Do you dispute my Dirghic godhead?”
Another wife answered him, a glorious dark sultry creature in purple, who wore a semi-circular crown and had about the upper part of each bare arm two broad gold bands.
She said: “Why should we question that? Gods by the score and by the hundreds, gods in battalions, have passed through the land of Dersam, going downward toward Antan, to enter into well-earned rest after their long labors in this world.”
“Ah, so it appears that Antan is the heaven of all deserving gods, and that I am to rule a celestially populated kingdom well worthy of me!”
“We have not ever been to Antan. We thus know nothing of its customs. We know only that many gods have passed us, traveling upon all manner of steeds as they went down into Antan. Bes rode upon a cat, and Tlaloc upon a stag, and Siva upon a bulclass="underline" we have seen Kali pass upon the back of a tiger: above our heads Zeus has gone by upon the back of an eagle, as he traveled abreast with Amen-Ra upon the back of a very large beetle. We therefore think it likely enough that you who pass upon this shining horse are yet another one of these gods. What are the gods to us, in this our season of unexampled trouble?”