“You speak in your sorrow, Lady. But (forgive me) this is mere fantasy. I never spared myself more than him. Do you tell me a strong man’d break under the burden a woman’s bearing still?”
“Who that knows men would doubt it? They’re harder, but we’re tougher. They do not live longer than we. They do not weather a sickness better. Men are brittle. And you, Queen, were the younger.”
My heart shrivelled up cold and abject within me. “If this is true,” said I, “I’ve been deceived. If he had dropped but a word of it, I’d have taken every burden from him; sent him home for ever, loaded with every honour I could give.”
“You know him little, Queen, if you think he’d ever have spoken that word. Oh, you have been a fortunate queen; no prince ever had more loving servants.”
“I know I have had loving servants. Do you grudge me that? Even now in your grief, will your heart serve you to grudge me that? Do you mock me because that is the only sort of love I ever had or could have? No husband; no child. And you—you who have had all——”
“All you left me, Queen.”
“Left you, fool? What mad thought is in your mind?”
“Oh, I know well enough that you were not lovers. You left me that. The divine blood will not mix with subjects’, they say. You left me my share. When you had used him, you would let him steal home to me; until you needed him again. After weeks and months at the wars—you and he night and day together, sharing the councils, the dangers, the victories, the soldiers’ bread, the very jokes—he could come back to me, each time a little thinner and greyer and with a few more scars; and fall asleep before his supper was down; and cry out in his dream, ‘Quick, on the right there. The Queen’s in danger.’ And next morning—the Queen’s a wonderful early riser in Glome—the Pillar Room again. I’ll not deny it; I had what you left of him.”
Her look and voice now were such as no woman could mistake.
“What?” I cried. “Is it possible you’re jealous?”
She said nothing.
I sprang to my feet and pulled aside my veil. “Look, look, you fool!” I cried. “Are you jealous of this?”
She started back from me, gazing, so that for a moment I wondered if my face were a terror to her. But it was not fear that moved her. For the first time that prim mouth of hers twitched. The tears began to gather in her eyes. “Oh,” she gasped, “oh. I never knew … you also … ?”
“What?”
“You loved him. You’ve suffered too. We both … ”
She was weeping; and I. Next moment we were in each other’s arms. It was the strangest thing that our hatred should die out at the very moment she first knew her husband was the man I loved. It would have been far otherwise if he were still alive; but on that desolate island (our blank, un–Bardia’d life) we were the only two castaways. We spoke a language, so to call it, which no one else in the huge heedless world could understand. Yet it was a language only of sobs. We could not even begin to speak of him in words; that would have unsheathed both daggers at once.
The softness did not last. I have seen something like this happen in a battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped our cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face; friends for a moment, and then at once enemies again and for ever. So here.
Presently (I have no memory how it came about) we were apart again; I now resuming my veil; her face hard and cold.
“Well!” I was saying. “You have made me little better than the Lord Bardia’s murderer. It was your aim to torture me. And you chose your torture well. Be content; you are avenged. But tell me this. Did you speak only to wound, or did you believe what you said?”
“Believe? I do not believe. I know, that your queenship drank up his blood year by year and ate out his life.”
“Then why did you not tell me? A word from you would have sufficed. Or are you like the gods who will speak only when it is too late?”
“Tell you?” she said, looking at me with a sort of proud wonder. “Tell you? And so take away from him his work, which was his life (for what’s any woman to a man and a soldier in the end?) and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?”
“And yet—he would have been yours.”
“But I would be his. I was his wife, not his doxy. He was my husband, not my house–dog. He was to live the life he thought best and fittest for a great man; not that which would most pleasure me. You have taken Ilerdia now too. He will turn his back on his mother’s house more and more; he will seek strange lands, and be occupied with matters I don’t understand, and go where I can’t follow, and be daily less mine; more his own and the world’s. Do you think I’d lift up my little finger if lifting it would stop it?”
“And you could—and you can—bear that?”
“You ask that? Oh, Queen Orual, I begin to think you know nothing of love. Or no; I’ll not say that. Yours is Queen’s love, not commoners’. Perhaps you who spring from the gods love like the gods. Like the Shadowbrute. They say the loving and the devouring are all one, don’t they?”
“Woman,” said I, “I saved his life. Thankless fool! You’d have been widowed many a year sooner if I’d not been there one day on the field of Ingarn—and got that wound which still aches at every change of weather. Where are your scars?”
“Where a woman’s are when she has borne eight children. Yes. Saved his life. Why, you had use for it. Thrift, Queen Orual. Too good a sword to throw away. Faugh! You’re full fed. Gorged with other men’s lives; women’s too. Bardia’s; mine; the Fox’s; your sister’s; both your sisters’.”
“It’s enough,” I cried. The air in her room was shot with crimson. It came horribly in my mind that if I ordered her to torture and death no one could save her. Arnom would murmur. Ilerdia would turn rebel. But she’d be twisting (cockchafer–like) on a sharp stake before anyone could help her.
Something (if it was the gods, I bless their name) made me unable to do this. I got somehow to the door. Then I turned and said to her:
“If you had spoken thus to my father, he’d have had your tongue cut out.”
“What? Afraid of it?” said she.
As I rode homeward I said to myself, “She shall have her Ilerdia back. He can go and live on his lands. Turn oaf. Grow fat and mumble between his belches about the price of bullocks. I would have made him a great man. Now he shall be nothing. He may thank his mother. She’ll not have need to say again that I devour her men–folk.”
But I did none of these things to Ilerdia.
And now those divine Surgeons had me tied down and were at work. My anger protected me only for a short time; anger wearies itself out and truth comes in. For it was all true; truer than Ansit could know. I had rejoiced when there was a press of work, had heaped up needless work, to keep him late at the palace; plied him with questions for the mere pleasure of hearing his voice. Anything to put off the moment when he would go and leave me to my emptiness. And I had hated him for going. Punished him too. Men have a hundred ways of mocking a man who’s thought to love his wife too well, and Bardia was defenceless; everyone knew he’d married an undowered girl, and Ansit boasted that she’d no need (like most) to seek out the ugliest girls in the slave market for her household. I never mocked him myself; but I had endless sleights and contrivances (behind my veil) for pushing the talk in such directions as, I knew, would make others mock him. I hated them for doing it, but I had a bittersweet pleasure at his clouded face. Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love can grow to be nine–tenths hatred and still call itself love. One thing’s certain; in my mad midnight fantasies (Ansit dead, or, better still, proved whore, witch, or traitress) when he was at last to be seeking my love, I always had him begin by imploring my forgiveness. Sometimes he had hard work to get it. I would bring him within an ace of killing himself first.