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.”
But the wives of Glaum seemed unimpressed. “Your meaning, sir,” said one of them, “may be terrible, but certainly it is not plain.”
This wife had reddish golden hair, uncovered: she wore a blue gown, so fashioned that it left her right breast wholly uncovered also; and, doubtless for some sufficient purpose, she carried an iron candlestick with seven branches.
Gerald asked, with indignation tempered by her good looks: “And do you doubt my divine word? Do you dispute my Dirghic godhead?”
Another wife answered him, a glorious dark sultry creature in purple, who wore a semi-circular crown and had about the upper part of each bare arm two broad gold bands.
She said: “Why should we question that? Gods by the score and by the hundreds, gods in battalions, have passed through the land of Dersam, going downward toward Antan, to enter into well-earned rest after their long labors in this world.”
“Ah, so it appears that Antan is the heaven of all deserving gods, and that I am to rule a celestially populated kingdom well worthy of me!”
“We have not ever been to Antan. We thus know nothing of its customs. We know only that many gods have passed us, traveling upon all manner of steeds as they went down into Antan. Bes rode upon a cat, and Tlaloc upon a stag, and Siva upon a bull: we have seen Kali pass upon the back of a tiger: above our heads Zeus has gone by upon the back of an eagle, as he traveled abreast with Amen-Ra upon the back of a very large beetle. We therefore think it likely enough that you who pass upon this shining horse are yet another one of these gods. What are the gods to us, in this our season of unexampled trouble?”
Then the seven wives fell into a lamentation, and their complaining was that, since Glaum of the Haunting Eyes had left them, the sacred mirror reflected only the person who stood before it.
“And is not such the nature of all mirrors?” Gerald asked.
“Oh, sir,” replied the wife who carried a bunch of keys, and who wore that unaccountable tall bifurcated orange-colored headdress, “but until yesterday ours was the mirror which showed things as they ought to be.”
“And what did one discover in it?”
Now the old wife spoke. Her head was wrapped in a white turban; her face had no more color than has the belly of a fish; and a sprinkling of white hairs, so long that they had grown into spirals and half-circles, glittered upon her shaking chin. “To the aged, such as I have now become, the Mirror of Caer Omn reveals nothing any more: but to the young, such as we all were before Glaum left us, it was used to reveal that which may not be described.”
“Then why do you not place before it some young person—?”
“Alas, sir, but there is no longer any co-respondent youth in the mirror!”
The speaker was the brown-haired and alluringly plump wife who wore nothing at all anywhere, and whose delicious body had been depilated in every needful place.
Then the seven wives of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes raised a lament; and now the pallid sharp-nosed wife who was far gone in pregnancy, and who wore that maroon-colored headdress shaped like a cone, began to speak of the young fellows who had been used to come to them out of the sacred mirror.
She spoke of very handsome, tall, brisk, nimble, impudent young fellows, that had been always jolly and buxom and jaunty, and not ever grumpish like a husband; of over-rash young fellows who must have their flings, who stuck at nothing, who went to all lengths, who had a finger in every pie, who kept the pot a-boiling; of what forward, eager, pushing, plodding, thwacking, negligent of no corner, business-like, never-wearying, soul-stirring workmen they had been at every job they undertook; of what great plagues they had been, too, without the least bit of any patience or of any modesty; and of how unreasonably you missed these sad rapscallions now that there was no longer any co-respondent youth remaining in the sacred Mirror of Caer Omn.
Gerald replied: “Your plaint is very moving. I regard a mirror which begets any such young fellows as a rather beautiful idea. It is true that I am a bachelor who therefore object to no reasonable mitigation of matrimony. But I am also a god, dear ladies, a god who brings all youth with me here in this vial.”
At that the last wife spoke. Her hair was flaxen; her body was everywhere engagingly visible through her gown, of a transparent soft green tissue; she carried a small golden-hilted sword. And this wife said:
“You differ, then, from those other gods who have passed this way. No youth went with these gods, who had themselves grown old and tired and more feeble, and who journeyed toward a resting from all miracles and away from a world wherein they were no longer worshipped.”
“But I,” said Gerald, “I am a god who is, moreover, a citizen of the United States of America, wherein every sort of religion yet flourishes as it can never do in an effete and sophisticated monarchy. So do you show me the way to the temple of the sacred Mirror of Caer Omn!”