The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption

by James Branch Cabell

Coth said this without any raging. He was merely puzzled.

For all, everywhere, appeared to have failed and deserted him. This Coth had been in his day a hero: and none of that far-off adventuring seemed much to matter now, nor could he quite believe that these things had happened to the tired old fellow who went muttering about the lonely Château des Roches, and was kept alive with slops of gruel and barley-water. This tremulous frail wreckage was not, assuredly, the Coth who had killed single-handed the three Turks at Lacre Kai, and who had kidnapped the fat King of Cyprus and in the sight of two armies had hung the crown of yet another king on the thorn-bush at Piaja, and who had been himself an emperor, and who had held the White Tower at Skeaf against the Comprachos, and who had put that remarkable deception upon the enamored one-legged tyrant of Ran Reigan, and who had shared in so many other splendid rough-and-tumble happenings.

There had been a host of women in these happenings, fine women, not to be had at anybody’s whistle like the tow-headed Dorothys whom these sanctimonious times were spawning everywhere to come between a father and a boy with no real harm in him. And none of these dear women mattered now.... Besides, it was not true to say that Jurgen had no real harm in him. Jurgen had been violent and headstrong from the very first: that was another pity, but Jurgen had taken after his mother in this, old Coth reflected, and his mother had always been injudicious alike in pampering and in rebuking Jurgen, with the result that Jurgen was nowadays a compendium of all iniquity.

And the Manuel too whom Coth had loved was gone now, and was utterly ousted from every person’s memory by that glittering tomb at Storisende, where a Manuel who had never lived was adored as a god is worshiped. Yet that, also, seemed not to matter. It was preposterous. But all the world was preposterous: and nothing whatever could be done about it, by a tired muttering old man.

People, no doubt, were living more quietly and more decorously because of this fictitious Manuel whom they loved and this gaunt ranting Holmendis whom they feared. But that too, to Coth, seemed not to matter. People nowadays were such fools that their doings and the upshot of these doings were equally unimportant, Coth estimated. If they succeeded in worming their way into heaven by existing here as spiritlessly as worms, Coth had not any objection, since he himself was bound for hell and for the company of his peers in a more high-hearted style of living.

Coth fell a little complacently to thinking about hell, and about the fine great sinners who would make room for him there, on account of the Coth that had been, and about the genial flames in which nobody was pestered by milksops prattling about their damned Redeemer. And Manuel—the real Manuel, that squinting swaggering gray rogue whose thefts and bastards and killings had been innumerous,—that Manuel would be there too, of course; and he and Coth would make very excellent mirth over those reforms which had ensnared all the milksops into heaven, even at the high price of spoiling the Poictesme of Coth’s youth.

For those elder heroic days were quite over. Of the great fellowship there remained, beside the hulk that was Coth, only Guivric and Donander and Ninzian. Donader of Évre was now, they said, in the far kingdom of Marabon, combining the pleasures of knight-errantry with a pious pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas. And while Coth had always admired Donander as a fighting-machine, in all other respects Coth considered him a deplorable young fool, nor, after holding this opinion steadfastly for twenty-five years, was Coth prepared to change it. Ninzian was a sleek hypocrite, a half-hearted fellow who had stinted himself to one poor pale adultery with a pawnbroker’s wife; and who flourished in the sanctimonious atmosphere of these abominable times because he truckled to Holmendis nowadays just as formerly he had toadied to Manuel. That prim and wary Guivric, whom people called the Sage, Coth had always most cordially detested: and when Coth heard—from somebody, as he cloudily remembered, but it was too much trouble to recall from whom,—that old Guivric too was now departed from Poictesme, it seemed not to matter.

Perhaps, Coth speculated, one of those troubled-looking servants had told him Guivric was dead. Almost everybody was dead. And in any event, it did not matter about Guivric. Nothing really mattered any longer....

All that Coth had ever loved was gone out of life. Gray Manuel, the most superb and admirable of earthly lords (howsoever often the man had needed a little candid talking to, for his own good), and peevish tender-hearted wise Miramon, and courteous Anavalt, and pedantic innocent Kerin (who had been used to blink at you once or twice, like the most amiable of owls, before he gave his opinion upon any subject), and Holden, the most brave where all were fearless, and indolent gay Gonfal, whom you might even permit, within limits, to rally you, because Gonfal was the world’s playmate,—all these were gone, the dearest of comrades that any warrior had ever known, in that lost, far-off season when the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had kept earth noisy with the clashing of their swords, and had darkened heaven with the smoke of the towns they were sacking, and when throughout the known world men had talked about the wonders which these champions were performing with Dom Manuel to lead them.

And so many splendid women too were gone: these days produced only your flibbertigibbet Melicents and Dorothys and such trash. There were no women nowadays like Azra, nor like Gunnhilda, nor like Muirnê of the Marshes,—or like plump, ardent, brown Utsumé, or like Orgeleuse, that proud lady of Cyprus, who had yet yielded in the end, or like Azra.... And Coth, chewing meditatively at nothingness, with sunken and toothless lips, thought also about great-hearted Dame Abonde, and about little Fleurette, and about Azra, and about Credhê, that jolly if remarkably exigent Irish girl, and about tall Asgerda, and about Azra, and about Bar, that treacherous but very lovely sea-wife, and about Oriande, and about poor Felfel Rhasif Yedua, who had given all the hair of her body and afterward her life, to preserve his life, and about Azra.