And Gerald reflected. Very certainly this Maya of the Fair Breasts did not excel all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. Yet the colors of her two eyes were nicely matched, and a fairish nose stood about equidistant between them. Beneath this was a tolerably good mouth, for all that the lips were sullen: and the indefinitely brownish hair, which was queerly arranged in nineteen formal braids, no doubt concealed a pair of well-enough ears. This rather heavy-visaged woman was reasonably young, she seemed hardly more than thirty-seven or thereabouts: she exhibited no deformity anywhere: her figure was acceptably preserved, her breasts were positively alluring. ... In fine, the appraising glance of the young man could with the kindly eyes of twenty-eight perceive in her no really grave fault.
Moreover, she reminded him of no woman that he had ever seen anywhere before this morning.
So Gerald said: “I am satisfied. I shall stay for dinner. I shall thankfully accept all the refreshments you proffer, of every kind.”
Then Maya answered: “But, indeed, you saucebox, you quite misunderstand me. So do you keep your proper distance! For I am not the sort of woman that you seem only too well acquainted with.”
Gerald said, with a caressing thrill in his voice, “Yet, do you but answer me this very simple question—”
Maya replied, “Oh, get away with you!”
Thus speaking, she boxed the jaws of the predestined ruler over all the gods of men; and with a few well-chosen words she placed their relationship upon a more decorous basis.
PART SEVEN THE BOOK OF POETS
24. On Mispec Moor
“He goes farthest that knows not where he is going.”
GERALD, after they had dined, persuaded Maya of the Fair Breasts to permit him to rest over for supper also, now that his journeying was virtually complete. For beyond the home of the wise woman upon Mispec Moor the way lay unimpeded to the ambiguous lowlands of Antan, where Queen Freydis and her consort the Master Philologist ruled in, it was said, a very old, red-pillared palace which had once belonged to still another queen, named Suskind.
But, as to this Antan, Gerald could not, even now, learn anything quite definite, because of all the gods and myths who had passed down into Antan none ever returned. It thus stayed, as yet, regrettably dubious whether these glorious beings now all lived together in unimaginable splendor, as Gerald had gathered at Caer Omn; or whether, as ran the gloomier report which prevailed in Lytreia, they had each been destroyed by the Master Philologist.
In any case, from Mispec Moor you clearly saw Antan. Thus, there remained for Gerald hardly more than an hour’s ride, and perhaps a morning’s spirited work, in order to complete his predestined conquest of his appointed kingdom. Gerald therefore rested until to-morrow, with this not over-hospitable hostess,—who viewed him with such uncalled-for suspicion that (as he found toward midnight) the woman had actually bolted the door to her room, out of a foolish notion that he might be trying to enter this immovable door, from which he was, instead, with entire dignity tiptoeing away. He rested so as to be in his very best fettle when he approached, to-morrow, the climax of his superb achievements.
Meanwhile he questioned Maya of the Fair Breasts as to his future kingdom; and she told him it was a poorly thought-of place. Nobody ever went there, Maya said, except such trash as poets and threadbare myths and over-inquisitive persons and such celestial riffraff as had lost their station in human esteem and their priests and their temples, said Maya, nodding her head rather gravely. That curious crown of hers sparkled cheerily with every movement of her head, for she sat at the window in a patch of sunlight, about her darning. And as to what became of such worthless people, Maya continued, after they reached Antan, that, certainly, was a question of no importance—
“Yes, but what is the general opinion hereabouts, among the sorcerers and enchanters of Turoine?”
“Our opinion is that the matter is not worth bothering about.”
“Yes, but what do you think—?”
Maya looked up from her darning, in mild but candid surprise. “You really do ask the silliest questions! For one, I do not think at all about those outcast tramps and vagabonds except to see that they steal nothing as they go by.”
So then Gerald questioned her about Freydis.
“I have heard of the woman,” said Maya, rather absent-mindedly, as she went on with the darning upon which stayed fixed her actual attention,—“of course: but nothing to her credit. They report, for example, that she has a mirror—”
“I, too, have heard continually of that mirror, but never of exactly what she does with it.”
“For that matter, Gerald, I also have a mirror, if that is all which is needed. Everybody has a mirror. In fact, I have a number of mirrors.”
“I know. I have noticed them everywhere about the cottage. But all your mirrors, dear lady, are rose-colored.”
—To which Maya replied irrelevantly, and without looking up from her darning: “But did you not know from the first that I was a wise woman? In any case, it is said that Queen Freydis holds her mirror up to nature, and that she does not scruple to hold this mirror up to her disreputable visitors, too. For they really are, you know. It is all very well being a god while it lasts. Only, it never does. And then where are you? Why, exactly! That is why the overlords of Turoine have always seemed to me more business-like. And there is no flaw in it, people say,”—now, though, as Gerald deduced, Maya was talking about the Mirror of the Hidden Children,—“no distortion of any kind, no flattering in it, and no kindly exaggeration. It is not in anything like my more sensible rose-colored mirrors. And nobody could of course be expected to approve of such a mirror.”
“Nevertheless, if there indeed be any such mirror, I mean to face it, when to-morrow I enter into my kingdom, and liberate the great words of the Master Philologist, and restore the Dirghic mythology, for in that mythology, I must tell you, I am a god with four aspects.”
“What nonsense you do talk!” said Maya, comfortably, as she slipped the darning-egg into another stocking.
Then Gerald confided in her. Then Gerald told Maya of how he, howsoever unmeritorious, was heir to all the unimaginable wonders which harbored yonder. He told her that he and none other was Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. He told her of everything that had happened in his triumphant expedition, thus far. He told her of somewhat more than had happened, for under Gerald’s expansive handling of the rather beautiful idea of his own invincibility the tale became an epic. And Gerald told her, too, of how he intended to rule in the goal of all the gods. He briefly indicated his summer and winter palaces, the probable personnel of his harem, the deities who would serve in his immediate household, and, in a general way, the worlds which he would create: and he promised to remember Maya, liberally, after he had come into his kingdom.
And Maya all this while went on darning placidly. She admitted that men—
“But, as I was telling you, I am a god,—a god with no less than four aspects.”
That did not really matter, Maya considered. The gods, as near as she had been able to judge those scatter-brained ne’er-do-wells that went tramping by, were just the same, and, if anything, more so. It was simply incredible, she continued, how little wear there was in a stocking nowadays. She then admitted that male persons did have these notions, even about such unlikely places as Antan. And Gerald would, in any event, be finding out for himself all about Antan tomorrow, because if he for one solitary instant thought she was going to have him hanging about her cottage forever—!