They did so, and the King said, “Fill it with Thramnian wine. Drop me an emerald in it to spawn luck i’ the cup, and drink him fortune and wisdom in victory.”
Prezmyra, that had watched the King till now as a mother watches her child in the crisis of a fever, rose up radiant in her seat, crying, “Victory!” And all they fell a-shouting and smiting on the boards till the roof-beams shook with their great shouting, while the King drank first and passed on the cup that all might drink in turn.
But Gorice the King sat dark among them as a cliff of serpentine that frowns above dancing surges of a springtide summer sea.
When the women left the banquet hall the Lady Prezmyra came to the King and said, “Your brow is too dark, Lord, if indeed this news is all good that lights your heart and mind from withinward.”
The King answered and said, “Madam, it is very good news. Yet remember that hard it is to lift a full cup without spilling.”
•••••
Now was summer worn and harvest brought in, and on the twenty-seventh day after these tidings afore-writ came another ship of Witchland out of the west sailing over the teeming deep, and rowed on a full tide up Druima and through the Ergaspian Mere, and so anchored below Carcë an hour before supper time. That was a calm clear sunshine evening, and King Gorice rode home from his hunting at that instant when the ship made fast by the water-gate. And there was the Lord Gro aboard of her; and the face of him as he came up out of the ship and stood to greet the King was the colour of quick-lime a-slaking.
The King looked narrowly at him, then greeting him with much outward show of carelessness and pleasure made him go with him to the King’s own lodgings. There the King made Gro drink a great stoup of red wine, and said to him, “I am all of a muck sweat from the hunting. Go in with me to my baths and tell me all while I bathe me before supper. Princes of all men be in greatest danger, for that men dare not acquaint them with their own peril. Thou look’st prodigious. Know that shouldst thou proclaim to me all my fleet and army in Demonland brought to sheer destruction, that should not dull my stomach for the feast to-night. Witchland is not so poor I might not pay back such a loss thrice and four times and yet have money in my purse.”
So speaking, the King was come with Gro into his great bath chamber, walled and floored with green serpentine, with dolphins carved in the same stone to belch water into the baths that were lined with white marble and sunken in the floor, both wide and deep, the hot bath on the left and the cold bath, many times greater, on the right as they entered the chamber. The King dismissed all his attendants, and made Gro sit on a bench piled with cushions above the hot bath, and drink more wine. And the King stripped off his jerkin of black cowhide and his hose and his shirt of white Beshtrian wool and went down into the steaming bath. Gro looked with wonder on the mighty limbs of Gorice the King, so lean and yet so strong to behold, as if he were built all of iron; and a great marvel it was how the King, when he had put off his raiment and royal apparel and went down stark naked into the bath, yet seemed to have put off not one whit of his kingliness and the majesty and dread which belonged to him.
So when he had plunged awhile in the swirling waters of the bath, and soaped himself from head to foot and plunged again, the King lay back luxuriously in the water and said to Gro, “Tell me of Corsus and his sons, and of Laxus and Gallandus, and of all my men west over seas, as thou shouldest tell of those whose life or death in our conceit importeth as much as that of a scarab fly. Speak and fear not, keeping nothing back nor glozing over nothing. Only that should make me dreadful to thee if thou shouldst practise to deceive me.”