Gonfal then looked at an onyx. It was the onyx of Thossakan. Its wearer had the power to draw out the soul of any person, even of himself, and to imprison that soul as a captive inside this hollowed onyx; and its wearer might thus trample any whither resistlessly. Beyond the somber gleaming of this onyx showed the green lusters of an emerald, which was engraved with a lyre and three bees, with a dolphin and the head of a bull. Misfortune and failure of no sort could enter into the house wherein was this Samian gem. But the brightest of all the ensorcelled stones arrayed upon the ebony table was the diamond of Luned, whose wearer might at will go invisible: and to this Cymric wonder Gonfal accorded the tribute of a shrug.
“This diamond,” said Gonfal then, “is a gift which a well-balanced person might loyally tender to his queen, but hardly to his prospective wife. I speak as a widower, madame: and I assure you that Prince Duneval of Ore we may dismiss from our accounting, as a too ardent lover of danger.”
Morvyth thought this very clever and naughty and cynical of him, but smilingly said nothing. And Gonfal touched the offering of pompous little Thorgny of Vigeois. This was the gray sideritis, which, when bathed in running waters and properly propitiated, told with the weak voice of an infant whatever you desired to learn. The secrets of war and statecraft, of all that had ever happened anywhere, and of all arts and trades, were familiar to the wearer of the gray sideritis. And Gonfal touched, more gingerly, the moonstone of Naggar Tura, whose cutting edge no material substance could resist, so that the strong doors of an adversary’s treasure house, or the walls of his fortified city, could be severed with this gem just as a knife slices an apple.
Yet equally marvelous, in another fashion, was this moonstone’s neighbor, a jewel of scarlet radiancy streaked with purple. All that was needed to ensure a prosperous outcome of whatsoever matter one had in hand could be found engraved upon this stone, in the lost color called tingaribinus. For the wearer of this stone—a fragment, as the most reputable cantraps attested, of the pillar which Jacob raised at Bethel,—it was not possible to fail in any sort of worldly endeavor.
Yet Gonfal put this too aside, speaking again in a foreign language unfamiliar to Morvyth, and saying, “Hohkum!”
And then, but not until then, Gonfal answered Queen Morvyth.
“I mean,” he said, “that with my own eyes I have seen that sturdy knave Dom Manuel attain to the summit of human estate, and thence pass, bewilderingly, into nothingness. I mean that, through the virtues of these amulets and periapts and other very dreadful manifestations of lithomancy, a monarch may retain, for a longer season than did Manuel, much money and acreage and all manner of power, and may keep all these fine things for a score or for two-score or even for three-score of years. But not for four-score years, madame: for by that time the riches and the honors of this world must fall away from every mortal man; and all that can remain of the greatest emperor or of the most dreadful conqueror will be, when four-score years are over, picked bones in a black box.”
And Gonfal said also: “Such is now the estate of Alexander, for all that he once owned this agate. Achilles, who wore the sideritis and was so notable at Troy, is master of no larger realm. And to Augustus and Artaxerxes and Attila—here to proceed no further in the alphabet,—quite similar observations apply. These men went very ardently about this earth, the vigor of their misconduct was truly heroic, and the sound of their names is become as deathless as is the sound of the wind. But once that four-score years were over, their worldly power had passed as the dust passes upon the bland and persistent wind which now is come up out of the South to bring new life into Inis Dahut, but to revive nothing that is dead. Just so must always pass all worldly honors, as just such dust.”
Then Gonfal said: “Just so—with my own eyes,—I have seen Dom Manuel tumbled from the high estate which that all-overtrampling rogue had purchased and held so unscrupulously; and I have seen his powerfulness made dust. These occasional triumphs of justice, madame, turn one to serious thinking. . . . Therefore it seems to me that these questing gentlemen are offering you no gift, but only a loan. I perforce consider—as a realist, and with howsoever appropriate regret,—that the conditions of the quest have not been fulfilled.”
The Queen deliberated his orotundities. And she regarded Gonfal with a smile which now was like his smiling, and which appeared not very immediately connected with the trituration they were speaking of.
Morvyth said then: “That is true. Your mathematics are admirable, in that they combine resistlessly the pious and the platitudinous. There is no well-thought-of Fundamentalist in Inis Dahut, nor in any of the Isles of Wonder, who will dare dispute that the riches of this world are but a loan, because that is the doctrine of Pyge-Upsfzugos and of all endowed religions everywhere. These over-busy, pushing ugly little pests that ride impertinently about the world, and get their own way in every place, have insulted me. By rights,”—the Queen said, rather hopefully,—“by rights, I ought to have their heads chopped off?”
“But these heroic imps are princes, madame. Thus, to pursue your very natural indignation, would entail a war with their fathers: and to be bothered with seven wars, according to my mathematics, would be a nuisance.”
Morvyth saw the justice of this; and said, with ever so faint a sighing: “Very well, then! I approve of your mathematics. I shall pardon their impudence, with the magnanimity becoming to a queen; and I shall have the quest cried for another year and another day.”
“That,” Gonfal estimated, still with his odd smiling, “will do nicely.”
“And, besides,” she added, “now you will have a chance with the others!”
“That,” Gonfal assented, without any trace of a smile or any other token of enthusiasm, “will be splendid.”
But Morvyth smiled as, with that habitual gesture, she tidied her hair: and she sent for her seven heroic lovers, and spoke to them, as she phrased it, frankly.
Chapter VII. Fatality the Second
Thus all was to do again. The champions pulled rather long faces, and the lower orders were disappointed in missing the gratis entertainments attendant on a royal marriage. But the clergy and the well-thought-of laity and the leading taxpayers applauded the decision of Queen Morvyth as a most glorious example in such feverish and pleasure-loving days of soulless materialism.
So again the eight lovers of Morvyth met in the cathedral, to have their swords appropriately consecrated by the Imaun of Bulotu. And that beneficent and justly popular old prelate, after he had cut the throats of the three selected children, began the real ceremony with a prayer to Pyge-Upsizugos, as to Him whose transformations are hidden in all temples patronized by the best-thought-of people, and saying, as was customary and polite:
“The height of the firmament is subservient unto thee, O Pyge-Upsizugos! thy throne is very high! the ornaments upon the seat of thy blue trousers are the bright stars which never diminish! Every man makes offering unto that portion of thee which is revealed, and thou art the Sedentary Master commemorated in heaven and upon earth. Thou art a shining noble seated above all nobles, permanent in thy high station, established in thy stern sovereignty, and the callipygous Prince of the Company of Gods.”
Nobody quite believed this, of course, but in Inis Dahut, as in all other places, the Fundamentalists took a proper pride in their tribal deity, and, whenever they could spare time for religious matters made as much of him as possible. So they now tendered to Pyge-Upsizugos a fine offering of quails and cinnamon and bullocks’ hearts, and they raised the Hymn of the Star-Spangled Buttock in the while that the two ewers containing the blood of the children were placed upon his altar.