Something About Eve by Cabell James Branch

Author:Cabell, James Branch [Cabell, James Branch]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy

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.

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