The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption
of Kerin also, for that while, no more was heard.

62

And Miramon Lluagor, too, that under Manuel had been the Lord Seneschal of Gontaron, had now gone out of Poictesme,—sedately and unmysteriously departing, with his wife and child seated beside him upon the back of an elderly and quite tame dragon, for his former home in the North. It was there that Miramon had first encountered Dom Manuel in the days when Manuel was only a swineherd. And it was there that Miramon Lluagor hoped to pass the remainder of as long a life as his doom permitted him, in such limited comfort as might anywhere be possible for a married man.

Otherwise, he could foresee, upon the brighter side of his appointed and appalling doom, nothing which was likely to worry him. For Miramon Lluagor had very wonderfully prospered at magic, he was, as they say, now blessed with more than any reasonable person would ask for: and the most clamant of these superfluities appeared to him to be his wife.

They tell how Miramon was one of the Léshy, born of a people that was neither human nor immortal, telling 63how his ancestral home was builded upon the summit of the mountain called Vraidex. To Vraidex Miramon Lluagor returned, after the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had been disbanded, and Miramon had ceased to amuse himself with the greatness of Manuel and with the other notions of Poictesme.

63

They narrate that this magician dabbled no more in knight-errantry, for which the Seneschal of Gontaron—who through his art was also lord of the nine kinds of sleep and prince of the seven madnesses,—had never shown any real forte. He righted no more wrongs, in weather as often as not unsuited to a champion subject to rheumatism, and he in no way taxed his comfort to check the prospering of injustice. Instead, he now maintained, upon the exalted scarps of Vraidex, the sedate seclusion appropriate to a veteran sorcerer, in his ivory tower carved out of one of the tusks of Behemoth; and maintained also a handsome retinue of every sort of horrific illusion to guard the approaches to his Doubtful Palace; wherein, as the tale likewise tells, this mage resumed his former vocation, and once more designed the dreams for sleep.

Thus it was that, upon the back of the elderly and quite tame dragon, Miramon returned to his earlier pursuits and to the practice of what he—in his striking way of putting things,—described as art for art’s sake. The episode of Manuel had been, in the 
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