THE BOOK OF DERSAM
“What Has a Blind Man
to Do with Any Mirror?”
10.
Wives at Caer Omn
NOW Gerald mounted on the stallion Kalki, and Gerald traveled upon the way of gods and myths, down a valley of cedar-trees, into the realm of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes. The land of Dersam was already falling away into desolation, because of the disappearance of its liege-lord into mortal living. And at Caer Omn, which formerly had been the Sylan’s royal palace, and where Gerald got his breakfast, the three hundred and fifty-odd concubines of Glaum were about their cooking and cleaning and nursing, but the seven wives of Glaum sat together in a walled garden.
Six of these wives were young and comely, but the seventh seemed—to Gerald’s finding,—as wrinkled as a wet fishnet, and as old as envy.
By the half-dozen who retained their youth, however, Gerald was enraptured. As he looked from one of them to the other, each in her turn appeared so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld.... But, no! Glaum was his benefactor. Glaum at this instant, in Lichfield, was toiling away at that unfinished romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme which by and by was to make the name of Gerald Musgrave famous everywhere. It would, therefore, never do to encourage these so shapely and chromatically meritorious dears to follow out the dictates of womanly confidence and generosity to the point where they could bleat about it. No, to permit them all to deceive one husband would be an unfriendly and injudicious pleonasm, Gerald reflected. And Gerald sighed whole-heartedly.
The seven women had sighed earlier. “What else is now come to trouble us?” said the wives of the Sylan when Gerald came.
He answered them, with a great voice: “Ladies, I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. Yet, I pray you, do not be unduly alarmed by this revelation! I am not a ruthless deity, I deal fiercely with none save my misguided opponents. I, in a word, am he of whom it was prophesied that I, my dear ladies, or perhaps I ought to say that he—although, to be sure, it does not really matter which pronoun a strict grammarian would prefer, since in any case the meaning is unmistakable and very sublime,—would at his or at my appointed season appear, in unexampled and appropriate splendor, to reign over Antan, riding upon the silver stallion Kalki.”