"And Miramon Lluagor, too,
that under Manuel had been the Lord Seneschal of Gontaron, had now gone out of
Poictesme,—sedately and unmysteriously departing, with his wife and child
seated beside him upon the back of an elderly and quite tame dragon, for his
former home in the North. It was there that Miramon had first encountered Dom
Manuel in the days when Manuel was only a swineherd. And it was there that
Miramon Lluagor hoped to pass the remainder of as long a life as his doom
permitted him, in such limited comfort as might anywhere be possible for a
married man.
Otherwise, he could foresee,
upon the brighter side of his appointed and appalling doom, nothing which was
likely to worry him. For Miramon Lluagor had very wonderfully prospered at
magic, he was, as they say, now blessed with more than any reasonable person
would ask for: and the most clamant of these superfluities appeared to him to
be his wife.
They tell how Miramon was
one of the Léshy, born of a people that was neither human nor immortal,
telling 63how his ancestral home was builded upon the summit of the
mountain called Vraidex. To Vraidex Miramon Lluagor returned, after the
Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had been disbanded, and Miramon had ceased to
amuse himself with the greatness of Manuel and with the other notions of
Poictesme.
They narrate that this
magician dabbled no more in knight-errantry, for which the Seneschal of
Gontaron—who through his art was also lord of the nine kinds of sleep and
prince of the seven madnesses,—had never shown any real forte. He righted no
more wrongs, in weather as often as not unsuited to a champion subject to
rheumatism, and he in no way taxed his comfort to check the prospering of
injustice. Instead, he now maintained, upon the exalted scarps of Vraidex, the
sedate seclusion appropriate to a veteran sorcerer, in his ivory tower carved
out of one of the tusks of Behemoth; and maintained also a handsome retinue of
every sort of horrific illusion to guard the approaches to his Doubtful Palace;
wherein, as the tale likewise tells, this mage resumed his former vocation, and
once more designed the dreams for sleep.
Thus it was that, upon the
back of the elderly and quite tame dragon, Miramon returned to his earlier
pursuits and to the practice of what he—in his striking way of putting
things,—described as art for art’s sake. The episode of Manuel had been, in the
lower field of merely utilitarian art, amusing enough. That stupid, 64tall,
quiet posturer, when he set out to redeem Poictesme, had needed just the mere
bit of elementary magic which Miramon had performed for him, to establish
Manuel among the great ones of earth. Miramon had, in consequence, sent a few
obsolete gods to drive the Northmen out of Poictesme, while Manuel waited upon
the sands north of Manneville and diverted his leisure by contemplatively
spitting into the sea. Thereafter Manuel had held the land to the admiration of
everybody but more particularly of Miramon,—who did not at all agree with
Anavalt of Fomor in his estimation of Dom Manuel’s mental gifts.
Yes, it had been quite
amusing to serve under Manuel, to play at being lord of Gontaron and Ranec, and
to regard at close quarters this tall grave gray cockeyed impostor, who had
learned only not to talk.... For that, thought Miramon, was Manuel’s secret:
Manuel did not expostulate, he did not explain, he did not argue; he, instead,
in any time of trouble or of uncertainty, kept quiet; and that quiet struck
terror to his ever-babbling race, and had earned for the dull-witted but shrewd
fellow—who was concealing only his lack of any thought or of any plan,—a
dreadful name for impenetrable wisdom and for boundless resource.
“Keep mum with Manuel!” said
Miramon, “and all things shall be added to you. It is a great pity that my wife
has not the knack for these little character analyses.”
- The Silver Stallion, James Branch Cabell
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