James Branch Cabell
The Music Behind The Moon
EPITOME OF A POET
“Judge thou the lips of those that rose up against me,
and their devices against me all the day.
Behold their sitting down, and their rising up;
I am their music.”
FOR
CARL VAN VECHTEN
Whatever hereinafter he may like
PART ONE. OF MADOC IN HIS YOUTH
—De grâce, belle dame, si je puis vous demander ce que fait a coeur de savoir, dites-moi pourquoi vous êtes assise ici toute seule?
—Je vais te le dire, man pauvre Madoc, avec franchise.
THE TEXT FROM GENESIS
To such as will to listen I plan here to tell the story of Madoc and some little part of the story of Ettarre.
Now this is a regrettably familiar tale. It may possibly have begun with Lamech, in the Book of Genesis,—who was, in any event, the first well-thought-of citizen upon known record to remark, “I have slain a young man to my hurt!” And poets tell us that many poets whose bodies had survived to middle age have repeated this glum observation, although probably not ever since then, when Lamech spoke without tact, to their co-partners alike in the homicide and in married life.
Moreover, this is a regrettably inconclusive tale, without any assured ending. Nor is there any assured prophesying, either, that the next thousand years or so will remedy that defect in this tale, because the story of Ettarre is not lightly to be ended by the death of any woman’s body which for a while Ettarre has been wearing.
And, lastly, this is a regrettably true tale such as no correct-thinking person ought to regard seriously.
1. FOUR VIEWS OF A POET
Lean red-haired Madoc was the youngest and the least promising of the poets about the cultured court of Netan, the High King of Marr and Kett. When it was Madoc’s turn to take out his bronze harp from its bag of otter-skin, and to play at a banquet, he assisted nobody’s digestion. And, as the art-loving King would put it, twisting half-fretfully at his long white beard, what else was the lad there for?
The best-thought-of connoisseurs declared the songs of Madoc to be essentially hollow and deficient in, as they phrased it in their technical way, red blood: to which verdict the wives and the sweethearts of these connoisseurs were only too apt to reply that, anyhow, the boy was quite nice-looking. The unthinking women thus confirmed the connoisseurs in their disapproval.
But the strangest matter of all, in a world where poets warm themselves mainly by self-esteem, was that not even to young Madoc did his songs appear miraculous beyond any description.
To Madoc’s hearing his songs ran confusedly; they strained toward a melody which stayed forever uncaptured; and they seemed to him to be thin parodies of an elvish music, not wholly of this earth, some part of which he had heard very long ago and had half forgotten, but the whole of which music remained unheard by any mortal ears.
2. THE WOMAN LIKE A MIST
Now, upon a May evening, when a plump amber-colored moon stayed as yet low behind the willows in the east, this same young Madoc bathed with an old ceremony. Thereafter he sat beside the fountain meditatively disposing of his allotted portion of thin wine and of two cheese sandwiches. A woman came to him, white-limbed and like a living mist in that twilight.
“Hail, friend!” said Madoc.
She replied, with hushed and very lovely laughter, “I am not your friend.”
He said, “Well, peace be with you, in any event!”
She answered, “There is for you, poor Madoc, no more peace, now that I have come to you all the long way from behind the moon.”
And then that woman did a queer thing, for she laid to her young breasts her hands, and from the flesh of her body she took out her red heart, and upon her heartstrings she made a music.
It was a strange and troubling music she made there in the twilight, and after that slender mistlike woman had ended her music-making, and had vanished as a white wave falters and is gone, then Madoc could not recall the theme or even one cadence of her music-making, nor could he put the skirling of it out of his mind. Moreover, there was upon him a loneliness and a hungering for what he could not name.
3. WHAT WISDOM ADVISED
Therefore Madoc comes to the dark and ivy-covered tower of Jonathas the Wise. And the lean and kindly man put forth his art. He burned, in a tall brazier, camphor and sulphur and white resin and incense and salt: he invoked the masters of the lightning and of volcanoes and of starlight; and he recited the prayer of the Salamanders.
Then Jonathas sighed, and he looked compassionately over his spectacles. “The person that troubles you, my poor Madoc, is Ettarre the witch-woman, whom Dom Manuel the Redeemer begot in Poictesme; and whom the Norns have ordained to live with Sargatanet, Lord of the Waste Beyond the Moon, until the 725 years of her poisonous music-making are ended.”
Madoc said, “How may a struggling poet avoid the spells of this witch and of this wizard?”
Jonathas replied: “There is for a poet no defense against their malice, because their weapon is that song which is an all-consuming fire. Still, as one nail drives out the other, and as one fire consumes another fire, so something may be done against the destroying pair with this.”
And thereupon, lean kindly Jonathas gave to young Madoc a very large quill pen fashioned out of a feather which had fallen from the black wings of Lucifer, the Father of All Lies.
4. ONE PATRIOT’S REWARD
With this pen Madoc began to write down his songs before he sang them: and the pen made for him a new kind of song.
Now the connoisseurs nodded approval. “The sentiment is wholesome, and, in these degenerate days, regrettably rare.” King Netan clapped his hands, he laughed aloud, and he gave Madoc a greyhound, a white tunic worked with green embroidery, and seven chests of gold coin.
Thereafter Madoc lacked for no reward, and every week he had a lovelier lady for his love. At all the royal banquets he sang his new song, of how enviable were Netan’s people in every heritage and in their sturdy racial qualities, and of how contemptible the other nations appeared in comparison: and everybody applauded his remarkable lightness.
But Madoc one day put aside his harp, he removed an amorous countess from about his neck, and he went alone out of Netan’s shield-hung hall. All at that banquet were applauding Madoc; but through the shouting he could hear a skirling music which derided his patriotic perjuries: and Madoc knew that the fatherland he was praising showed as an unimportant pimple on the broad face of the world, and that its history, or the history of any other people, was but a very little parenthesis in Earth’s history.
5. SOME VERY ANCIENT GAMES
So Madoc fled from the cultured court of Netan, where the superb emotions of patriotism were denied him by that music which a pallid and pestiferous witch was devising in the Waste Beyond the Moon. He fled southward, into the fertile land of Marna.
In a green field, beneath a flowering apple tree, a young woman was playing at chess against a veiled opponent. His face could not be seen, but the gray hand with which he now moved a bishop had four talons like the claw of a vulture. The woman was clothed in blue: about her yellow hair she wore a circlet of silver inset with many turquoises, and about her wrists also were bands of silver, and in her face was the bright pride of youth.