Esplandian

A light more occluded than darkness, air more stifling than void – it was winding and rough-hewn and nitred, the corridor – that he remembered – and the hissing flambeaux leaning from the sconces threw out more smoke than guidance, bringing to light the stones and the course they defined through the murk only to remind him how alien that course appeared, only to impress upon his furious mind how hopelessly lost he was. That he remembered, and the way he groped at the walls, inching perilously onward, thinking it vain all the time, thinking it hopeless, continually set to turn back, and only the quenchless agony of his resentment, wild at the least prospect of satisfaction, urged him forward or kept his feet from retracing the way he had come – that, and the fables the townsfolk recited, strange certainty haunting their features, of the hidden mansion high in that castle, where tapestries flowed down in jewels and cauldrons gleamed bright and his ancient father knelt and prayed by the stars.

Winch-faced and warted, so he supposed, bent into angles, a sign of his soul – that was the image he conjured, he clasped to, he lovingly almost harbored at heart, because also he thought of his mother, the gorgeous, carefree spirit who lightened his dreams, how she faded and wilted in the world of his youth – unnamed, unwedded - till death as a mercy deprived her at last. And it was not possible –all but inconceivable – such beauty, such life fell off by mistake, that back of her loneliness, the helpless abandonment, was anything but a malevolent will, and this was the symbol he wrought when he thought of him, twisted and gnarled till it looked like his hate, because that hate was the gauge of his very own righteousness, the bitterness sweeter than any fine joy, which he clung to, nourished, fed with his umbrage, only to stand justified in the face of his origins, only to have good cause to blame the one who summoned him out of the night. Such relish of his resentment aching him, he imagined the dagger hung quietly inside his cloak sliding into no fellow flesh, no earthly father who had lusted and erred in his youth as he himself had, but the sum of a lifetime of destitution, source and culprit of his own shame, his desertion by men, and his mother’s shame and desertion when she lived and she mourned.

Some light note piped by a finch or a cardinal in one of the nearby hedges reminded him of how, turning a corner, his eyes caught sight of a recess and a chapel within it, at the very same instant his ears caught the melody of a vaguely familiar canticle, donated from the mellifluous throats of four friars huddled around the altar, and resonating with the praise of a people redeemed – not him – and the glory flowing down from the heavens in thunder and plumage and cloudless beauty for a sign to them – not him – and the universal chorus of thanksgiving that all of creation poured forth in return to its original – but not him. And the enchantment of their sacred chords first stung him, then enflamed him, then exalted him in the certainty of his unique suffering destiny. Such fury corroding his mind, he staggered on, ragefully, navigating the uneven stones in a stretch of the corridor unlighted by torches – he remembered, even now, the darkness – till a faint irradiance protruding into that darkness betrayed the presence of his father.

Skulking about the limit of the threshold – not bursting in forcefully, as he imagined himself doing, not irreverent but awe-struck – his eyes passed the limit and his mind the occlusion and the vestiges of his father were there. Now he had to confess it – anger’s delusions giving way in an instant – the truth in the tales of the Insola Firme, his rage on the mountain, the blood of perverse Endriago, as it reeked from his greaves and his helmet, for nothing less than heroic were the shoulders that spread before him, no less than a wonder the weight of the armor their robustness might have born. But they were cassocked now in the tweed of a hermit, whose exploits were alms now, whose victories prayer, and the formulas falling like flails from his lips were nothing like war-cries screamed in the past. Too much of his knowledge hung grey on his head, too much of his love – the madness it wrought – but the remnants were there too, the magnificent prime, and he knew what he heard in the legends was true.

Majestic, unloved begetter; father loathed and revered – what execrations would I pour in the wounds of my dagger, for all the dishonor you instilled in my name, but that I see in your form a bearing, a dignity, I would eagerly call my original. How much I long to despise you, how much to embrace you – you, who brought me to light only to see my disgrace, who drew the breath in my chest I have poured out in sighs since a boy. So much I can trace in that lordly right hand – so many dangers dispelled, so many evils put down – I myself would invoke for my pride, but now too many years of cursing your sin, and the life it endowed me, lies between my heart and the voice of any such piety.

So he raged now remembering, so he raged then, his fingers finding his dagger in the folds of his tunic, and his mind like a barrister, pleading down the cause of devotion so that hatred and resentment only could have free claim to his motives - so sweet it was to hate, so welcome to his righteousness. The knowledge of his dishonor was a pressure too sad to withstand, which would wrench him apart unless he could expel it in violence. So he crept ever closer, gripped ever tighter, till he slunk midway through the room – then his father heard him and turned. He shuddered even now regarding the face in memory he regarded then, shuddering and immediate, when it gazed on him with no startled expression, no strain at recognition in its features, but rather, an instant apprehension of the son arrived from afar, as though he himself had been turned to a babe once again, staring into the eyes of a father who knew him in every corner and outgrowth of his being, because he had authored that very being. No wonder his mother adored this man, and had endured so many afflictions on his account, since he himself encroaching with so much malice plaqued to his sight could hardly keep from bowing down in devotion, so stately, so admirable was his comportment. Only the palpitation of the hilt on his fevered fingers for a moment recalled to him his vicious purposes, and only a forceful, purposeful anger – a stand against love – withstood the allure of a bond that was prior to fury.

How could he rise in greeting to one who came minded to murder? How could he open his arms to me, gaze tenderly on my vengeful features, like one who had never heard of resentment or felt the poison of its inclinations corroding the life in his veins? What could he see when he saw me, except the embodiment of his transgression, come in the flesh these many years later to harry the guilt of it out of his memory’s cloister? But if he did not see that, what power was in his sight to know me beyond my breath?

That was when he said, “son,” and approached him smiling, sudden at first, and warmly, then haltingly after he caught his own frown and intuited the reason for his hand in his cloak, but still with a gladness for his arrival glowing in his eyes and that same endearing smile on his lips as they said, “my son.” And that was when he himself caught the full stature of his father towering right there before him - the near, awesome fact of his power - and weakened a little and faltered from a dread that was akin to the holy, so that only the textured braid on the hilt, which his fingers still traveled, kept in his mind the direfulness of his old intentions. These he remembered reciting in his own mind, so as to confirm himself in their consummation, saying to himself, “this is Amadis, seducer of the pure Oriana, who was your mother. He is your father, the author of your shame, whose transgression you have worn since birth. Now let him make atonement,” and in other such words proclaiming silently how he had come to shed the blood of his father, the unutterable sin of man. But the other one did not start back from him in horror, did not remonstrate with him though his intentions were evident, but stood there too, regarding him – knowing, sympathizing, saddened by all that time had scattered between them – so that all the words that came out, all that his tear-suffused voice could manage was to say, “your love – Oriana – she was my mother.”

Then this venerable knight, this vanquisher of knights and monsters, trembled, then shook, then knelt down rocking from the violence of the tears he expended, muttering the whole time between his outbursts, “my beautiful Oriana,” which was all he could voice, before the avidity of his grief rent his tongue once more. It was that avidity in particular that exasperated his own heart the most, he remembered, that elicited from him not pity but renewed fury, because by weeping so emphatically for his own mother the man seemed to exculpate himself from any part in her demise, and thus from any part in the evil encumbering his own birth. His face grew stern before his father’s anguish; he straightened up, and railed at him: “do you weep for the woman you yourself have abandoned?” and for the first time, he remembered, there was amazement in his father’s expression, a look of incomprehension, when he settled his grief, and answered, as much in dudgeon as bewilderment, “I, abandon her?” as though even the suggestion seemed to threaten a stain upon his soul, and demand an answer. But then affection softened him again, the near presence of his son which he had been deprived so many years, and he spoke not in strident tones, but kindly, saying, “Let me embrace you first, since you are in fact my son - then we can speak of all these things.”

And he did embrace me, pulling me close for all my reluctance, binding me in the arms of one who was bound, till the hilt of my dagger lay on his heart and he felt with its tremors the malice of my black intentions. But he did not recoil. He did not thrust me away. He only bound me tighter to his chest, so that our blood, which is one, ran near, and the thrum of his heart against my blade was like a constant prayer of forbearance against all rage. So much cause for rage; no cause for love, yet love prevailed in your eyes and your arms, and held me, unwilling, in the grace of your ireless body. How could you hold me, your murderer, against the strength of your knowing body?

When he thought of the marked gentleness – the gentility – with which the man wielded his furious limbs into place beside him, and loomed over him without a hint of aggression, he realized why folks he encountered always spoke of his father as the embodiment of courtesy. The song of a sparrow in the maw of a lion, the carol of chimes at the swell of a squall, were like the voice of one so massive and mild. Of love and the madness it wrought, great tribulations for its sake, and an antagonism that dogged him half his life over half the earth, he recounted the story, saying first how his parents set him afloat on a stream in Gaula, so that no one in his father’s kingdom would discover their unsanctioned passion, and then how he waxed under Gandales’ tutelage, till, a flawless knight, he rumbled his way through a foreign territory to gain his name. He spoke of his father, and the contrition of his father, and how in his train, then acknowledged, he visited the court of the malign Lisuarte, where for the first time he laid eyes on the woman who would take sovereignty over all his soul, and how he recapitulated his own begetting one night in a windowless chamber as the feast roared out from below, and how their bodies submitted to the force of their young affection, from which conjoining ensued his son, and the rage of the king her father.

“I held you one time, just after you were born, in the locked bedroom of your mother.” He said it reverently, piously, his hands opened before his eyes, as though the infant still lay there cradled in their joints. “Then Lisuarte discovered your birth, discovered my parentage, and it was all I could do to escape from his kingdom with his henchmen on my heels. They followed me across the sea, since the eye of Archelaus, the king’s magician, followed me everywhere, so that for ten whole years I did not sleep a week together in one black hovel. At last, the ministrations of some old enchantress, who found me sleeping beneath the cord-pile stacked against her barn, freed me from this watchfulness, and girt me with the green sword, which became the instrument of my fame. Now, I went riding to castles and to palaces, defeating great champions and redeeming realms from the hideous monsters haunting their limits, and at every one I came to, I always sent a messenger back to the islands to learn if there was any word of Oriana, but the message always returned the same, that she had disappeared into the wilderness to escape her father’s vengeance, and nothing was known of what became of the child. It agonized me, repeatedly, because I could still resolve her features in my mind at all hours, and feel the impress of her back upon the fingers that did not clasp it, but I never knew if I would ever stand clinging to her person again. Then one day, wandering alone through the orchards of the great Eastern Emperor, a breathless herald came running down the lane – frantic, tear-wild - and revealed to me that Oriana was dead, that she had been found drowned in a brook, but no sign of the child was found. I was struck mad with grief in an instant, taking to my horse to speed off into the desert, intending only to die there. I lashed my mount for three long days over its tortuous wastage till it collapsed, at which point I staggered on frantically, achieving a poor blank mountain that had loomed in the distance. There I intended to perish, reciting the name of Oriana with my last flagging breaths, but some Frankish monk, a hermit there, caught wind of my endless keening, and came to me, and tended to me, and led me down from the mountain, releasing me to the care of a train of passing pilgrims, who conveyed me to the shelter of these walls. Here I mean to wear out the last of my unheroic days, repenting the sin that ruined the one I most wished to preserve. But sometimes, when the burden of remorse bends me almost to the ground, I wonder where is the child that was born of that sin, the babe that glowed in my hands, and I think at such times that the sin was no sin, but the one grace truly of all my life.”

He ought not have condoled him, this man he had come to kill; he ought not have mourned for him in recesses of his heart long fastened, given how long and how bitterly he grudged the being this man had forced on him - the stigma and the loneliness he forced on him – yet there he was standing, pitying, straining tears back even from his own eyes, because this one had been abandoned like he had, had known madness and despair like he had, and the blade of revenge fell blunted on a face that winced like his own. What idols, what simulacra, he had hated long years of his father; what false and foolish abstractions in place of the incarnate man, so much readier did anger take hold of the air, fall frail on the flesh. But the longing to loath, that had seared his heart for so many years and had driven him onward vengefully for so, so many years went subtle and enervate and sapped of its violence as he gazed on the creases and folds that time had inflicted on his father’s cheeks, and the scars on his hands – great wounds – that had come from his struggles with men and with spirits. He had taken his breath at the power of one so marred like himself that resentment came slow and reluctant, and only by turning away again – removing his gaze from his gaze – could he fan the fury back to a heat, and rage at his phantoms as once he had raged.

I was a boy and bewildered and averse to my days, and the hills that I haunted were a haven from eyes, from tongues to malign, where I wandered and longed, till my mother – with sorrows enough to her heart, with watchfulness worn – despaired for my heart, fell anxious and mute for the soul of her boy. But in secret black places deep in those woods, I would dream of your coming, your armor put by – how fondly I’d run to you, how gladly you’d kneel, how kindly the strength of your world-famed hands - so year after year, as manhood came on, I’d look to the west, and dream your return. But the byways were empty, and the time grew so long, till the aura I dreamt of darkened and palled, the saviour I prayed for I imagined my curse, because you were distant, my affliction was near, and I knew it was negligence kept you afar. Then I sat at your side, and learned of your passion, the madness that life transfixed in your head, till I marvelled how ever I dreamt as I had. I had hoped for your ghost; I had hated your ghost, but when I had looked on your face in the flesh, how idle, how pointless, that hatred, that hope.

And what had he said in reply when his father had ended – when the arc of his tragedy had fallen to silence, and any kind heart being near, in which the human wound was not utterly scarred, would have heard and commiserated, but his, encrusted by fury, only hardened the more? He recalled that he spoke of his mother – yes, that was his first word – and how he had found her choking on the brook, with her dress splayed out as a shroud to inter her, and the uncreating waters lapping her eyes.

“Only the night before she had spoken of you” – he winced when I said it – “and weeping, pleaded I not surrender the faith that his horse would come thundering, that out of the murk of the forest his armor one day shine promising, and taking us to him – his sprawling embrace – he would vanquish our sorrows, and with one stroke of his war-turning hand, wipe every tear from our cheeks. But she professed it despairing - he turned, he assumed this - and the very next morning, I found her incredulous. Standing, staring, straining to fathom, all I could think of was one who was absent, and what I remember was that anger took hold even before my grief could resolve – then he trembled. On that bank, in that wind, with my mother floating disabused at my feet, I swore to expend the rest of my breath pursuing the one who was absent, but might have been present to save her, and not to have rest or have joy till I plunged my blade in his throat. Such a quest in my heart, I set out at once, a chivalrous knight endeavouring parricide; a hero intent on the very worst crime. I fled from the realm of Lisuarte at once, not knowing what harm that resentful old monarch might be willing to countenance against me for your sake, and when I came to the continent declaring my mission, along with the lineage impelling me to it, I found that lineage broadly known, and the disrepute that attended my birth – he darkened as though the shame were his own. Always and constantly, the door was flung closed, the hand was withdrawn, and I was compelled to go forth as a derelict, the cast off of nature, harbouring unspeakable rage for my errand. I travelled long years, I endured great obloquy, and nothing bore me up against the burden of breath except the hope of this moment, where now I stand justified - then he knew for sure why I came.”

This was the story he told, and it was meant as a rebuke to the tale of the other, because that was of misery, but his, it was greater, and he would make known how much greater his sorrow, and also with what a right he raged. These were the shadows of fury that loomed from the past, that conjured their meeting even more than the words and the gestures, with which revivified passions came rushing to mind the rhythms of their contention, its agonized cadence, which began when his father, more grieved than alarmed, at last demanded his candor:

So you have come to take revenge on your father for the crime of being your father?

I have come to take revenge on the one who afflicted my days with shame.

But the act that afflicted you was the act that conceived you; they were one and the same.

I do not forgive you for that, but hate you the more.

Would you abjure your breath? Disclaim your own light?

That breath is all sighs, that light all opprobrium.

There’s a blessing back of that breath, if your eyes will but see.

There was never a time those eyes were not marred by your gift.

No man has ever breathed pure, since the time of the fall.

For me there was no fall, but disgrace from the start.

Yet even you have known goodness in the midst of abandonment.

What goodness have I known unspoiled by knowledge of my state?

But your mother? Her presence? Her grace? There was never a fairer.

And I watched her beauty dissolve from the force of her grief.

But once you were young and you gazed on her perfect face.

A face that time disfigured, and the hopes of your coming.

It was fortune, the law of our kind, that kept me away.

There is no law of our kind – all things might be otherwise.

And would you wish otherwise the days you dwelt in her arms?

That we dwelt in the thought of your absence - that I’d wish otherwise.

So every life from the start is stamped by its utmost.

But since it was needless at first, I might rue its boundaries.

And not awake to her voice, her beautiful eyes?

And not awake to her eyes – that much he had certainly said, and when he did, the sobs broke out of his own chest, and he became like a boy of five alone in his cottage while his mother foraged nearby - terrified by the silence but abiding in faith for the return of one who was kind. It was true what he said, resent it how he might, that every regret of his breath was regret of her presence, her gentle solicitude, and that so much as to rue one moment of his derelict life was to imply that the memory of her face regarding him as he stirred from his dreams was something less than a vision, and that was a blasphemy. So he heaved with the memory, till the heat of his rage, and the violence it kindled abated, and he stood regarding his own father with eyes replenished and purified, made clear by a love that longed beyond breath, that so many years ago ached in the luckless souls of his mother and father, who, cast into inscrutable flesh, embraced and endowed him the same. So he wept and he mollified, meditating upon the decades of anguish that had come to define the man’s life, and confessing how like to himself – bewildered and bounded – he yet lived as a hero, till the other one turned and strode to the corner, and pushing an arras aside, took out what was his old sword, now encrusted with wear, and offered the hilt to him, saying, as he did so:

“This was the weapon I wore when I labored in Spain, when I slaughtered a cadre of knights suborned by the Duke of Lyon. It has lapped black blood; it has decided on death, but never once has it fallen on the crest of one righteous. All these years, as I knelt in this gloom and imagined my son discovering me here one day, I imagined myself entrusting its mission to his firm hands, and abjuring him to lift its blade over the head of anyone whose word has been the occasion of evil.”

And though the recollection of it pained him now – shamed him – he did take the hilt in his hands, and he did weigh its heft, and he did survey the breadth of his father’s grand chest, where it might have been buried, since his wrath was a memory now, but one that still seemed to oblige him, demand of him vengeance, while the peace of the face obscured by the lighting loomed out of an era prior to resentment. It was that same face that went before him as he fled from the chamber, trembling, stymied by the affection he found there, as well as in his heart, but assuring himself that he would return when it was conquered, and his vindictive purposes could be carried out unimpeded, though he also knew now that those purposes had lost their hold on him, and that the bizarre affection aroused in him at their meeting was a thing he longed to submit to, and could not long resist untiring.

It was the very same face that haunted his prayers in this decrepit cell where he lay remembering, where for going on three decades his thoughts had returned to that moment repeatedly – repeatedly marvelling at the love that sprung when he came so filled with hate – and where he had waned to a remnant in his devotions, not even knowing that whole time whether his father lived or died, but often when the stars turned so, and signalled at his narrow casement, disturbed by the hope he lived. And it was there, with his fellow brothers gathered around in the murk, reciting formulas, that he cast his last eyesight on those same stars, puzzling out their ramifications through the tenor of his exhausted days, when the face of his father came to him once again, hovering in the midst of those indecipherable lights, till the peace of his origins seemed to vanquish the violence of his origins - the cause of his being redeem him from the causes of his being – and he remembered as it is set down here the time of their meeting, at last raising his dwindling frame from his bed, and screaming into the empyrean that it shook his brethren, saying:

Wherever you are abiding in the sky or in the earth, my absent father, I will hurl out my last words that they might find you and accost your ears, because you dragged me out of the unknowing to suffer with knowing, afflicted me with breath to inspire obloquy and despair, and for this I ought to curse you, as I have cursed you many times – but now I do not curse you, here at my end, but rather bless you, extol you, glorify your heritage, for the sake of the one you loved and who bore me. Ostracised and tormented, and I bless you; bewildered and abandoned, and I bless you; travailing and homeless my whole life through, and I bless you with an overflowing heart, because the one you loved and who bore me was heavenly and beautiful and kind, and I walked as the fruit of your passion for a day in the light of her atoning smile.

They shook the solemn chamber, these words, and the hearts of his tranquil brethren, and when he had disburdened himself fully of their force he fell backwards to the bed, his fingers relinquishing the hilt of the sword that had been affixed to his chest, and thus justifying himself in his lineage, furiously blessing his father, he surrendered both his breath and his rage.