Salome and other Decadent Fantasies. Brian Stableford
them, borne by the power of a tireless mount, from the curving roads to the undulant hills and away into the airy wilderness, where the height made them giddy and giddier, until the subtler rhythm of a horse’s sturdy heart displaced the clatter of its hoofbeats and they passed at last into the jeweled infinity east of the sun and west of the moon.
Then La Belle Dame Sans Merci took Sir Florian, in her turn, into the warmer and warmest depths of the motherly earth: to those caverns measureless to man that lie beneath the purgatorial realms of Tartarus. There she sang to him, and sang again, and gazed at him with such apparent adoration that he closed her wild, wild eyes with kisses, unable to bear the yearning of her stare.
The knight unwound the binding vines from the faery’s helpless wrists while she trembled sightless in his arms, drawing every vestige of intoxication from the pressure of his body upon hers and the congruent pounding of their hearts. She took them from him, and opened her eyes again, commanding him to tilt his head and bare his throat.
There was no hesitation this time, no faltering is his resolve. It was not that he was not afraid, but only that he was content to savor his fear as he savored every least sensation that still had the power to stir him, all equalized as pleasure.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci wound the vine about Sir Florian’s slender neck, and began to draw it tighter. The pressure she exerted was gentle at first, and it was only by the slowest imaginable degrees that it grew more and more insistent
Now he closed his own eyes, even though there had not been the least trace of wildness in his sotted gaze.
Still it was not finished, for the sense of touch still remained to Sir Florian’s dizzied mind, and for the first time since consciousness was born in his infant brain the knight felt as a faery might feel, taking nothing of that sensation for granted. He could never have done so had he been awake, but he was not. In dreams, sometimes, even humans are privileged to forget the follies and fervors of flesh. For a moment and more Sir Florian was well-nigh incorporeal, yet gifted still with the sense of touch.
Had the knight been truly incorporeal, of course, the strangling vine could not have harmed him; but even in dreams, the follies and fatalities of flesh may reassert their sullen shift upon the human form.
When the delicious moment was gone, Sir Florian fell into the sleep within sleep: an abyssal deep as far beyond the shallows of dreamless peace as quiet eternity lies beyond the jeweled infinity east of the sun and west of the moon.
* * * *
The story would have ended there but for one thing.
It did not matter in the least to La Belle Dame Sans Merci that Sir Florian had felt, if only for an instant, as a faery might feel. She knew it, of course, but there was nothing in his momentary revaluation of the preciousness of touch to strike a spark of empathy. When she drew back from him, however, and saw him lying cushioned in the earth, as still as still could be, she saw for the first time how beautiful he was.
It occurred to her, in a way that no other notion had ever occurred to her before, that he was unusual among his own kind—and perhaps unique.
When she had appeared to the knight by the lake the faery had only seen him in general terms. The wildness of her own eyes has ensured that when she looked at him she saw nothing but arms and armor, holiness and chivalry, empire and progress. When she had first come to him in his dream she had seen even less, for she had been in the grip of her own passion. There is nothing human about a faery’s passion, but it is passion nevertheless, fiercer in its own way than the lumpen kind of lust that oozes in a human’s veins. It was she, then, who had consented to be tied about the wrists and waist, knowing that the binder is more securely captive than the bound. It was she who had consented to be placed astride his mount so that the two of them might ride from the earth into the sky, to soar beyond the limitations of the air, knowing that the commanded is more securely in control than the commander. It was she, then, who had been caught between light and dark, as between full sight and blindness, seeing so much more as to be convinced that she saw everything.
It was she, now, who realized with unaccustomed, appalling and massive accuracy that the best sight is not necessarily the most sight, and that beauty works most insidiously in misty uncertainty.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci touched her hand to her own throat, and asked herself whether she rather than he might have been more securely strangled by the knot that she had made. She closed her own less-than-wild eyes in order to wonder whether his consent might conceivably have more power than her command.
And she did not know the answer.
For the moment, at least, she did not know the answer.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci was afraid, and could not count her fear solely in the common currency of intensity, in which all is equalized as pleasure.
She was afraid for herself, and rightly so. Creatures of paradox cannot abide doubt. Doubt is the crack which opens the way to destruction.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci might still have saved herself, if she had searched assiduously for the answer to her question, found it and made it fast—but she did not.
Instead, she murmured the words that came spontaneously into her head as she looked down at the pale Sir Florian, who was lying as still as still could be.
“O for a fiery gloom and thee,” she whispered, wishing, as the words escaped, her that the two of them might be other than they were, further elsewhere and further elsewhen than the jeweled infinity east of the sun and west of the moon, or the quiet eternity beyond.
Alas, there is no elsewhere or elsewhen beyond infinity and eternity, for any such place and time would be a blatant contradiction in terms—and neither human nor faery can be other than they are, however paradoxical their natures might be.
* * * *
Sir Florian awoke with the light of dawn and the warning words of a warrior host echoing in his ears. It seemed to him, although he could not quite imagine why, that kings and princes had come to him, with all their armored knights in train, with the pallor of death upon all their faces, crying: “La Belle Dame Sans Merci! La Belle Dame Sans Merci! La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath thee in thrall!”
He found himself on a cold hillside far above the lake and its miasmic mists. While he watched the silver light of dawn play upon the clouds clustered on the eastern horizon, and a few frail sunbeams flickering in the nearby mists, the knight felt a flush of fever in his heart and upon his cheek; but when he rose to his feet, the fever died like the vestige of a dream, and when stronger rays of the rising sun burst through the clouds a moment afterwards, he saw the golden track it laid upon the still and silent waters of the lake as a great straight road connecting earth with Heaven.
In that instant of revelation, Sir Florian knew that it would not matter how many kings were fated to fall in battle, nor how many knights were doomed to perish in hopeless quest of the Holy Grail of Christendom. He knew, without a moment’s faltering, that the cause of progress and empire could not be stopped, nor even significantly interrupted, and that Great Britain would one day exist.
He knew, too, that he ought to feel proud of his knowledge, grateful for his certainty. He knew that the gift of this revelation was a token that he had won the greatest battle of all: the battle of right over wrong, of reality over myth, of reason over emotion. Within this knowledge, however, there was the faintest seed of doubt—not doubt that it was true, but doubt that truth was as precious as he had been taught to hold it.
He noticed then that although dawn had broken, there had been no chorus of voices to greet it. No birds sang.
Autumn had not yet given way to winter, but no birds sang.
Sir Florian shivered then, in the cold morning air. A strange thought came into his head, which he could not understand at all but which filled him with a longing more desperate than any he had known before or ever would again.
O for a fiery gloom and thee!
He could not understand at first what it was that he longed for, or why, but the thought persisted nevertheless, as plaintive