“It is sufficient that you were moved without knowing why,” observed Nero. “That is the magic of poetry. Very often when I recited some of my best poems, to commemorate the sorrows of Orestes or Canace or Œdipus, I myself could not quite understand the springs of that terrible misery which convulsed my hearers. They wept; they fainted; a number of the women entered prematurely into the labors of childbirth; and I was compelled to have the doors and windows guarded by my Praetorian soldiers because so many of the audience invariably attempted to escape from the well-nigh intolerable ecstasies which my art provoked. Such is the magic of great poetry, a thing not ever wholly to be explained even by the poet.” Then Gerald said: “Yet, you two poets who have traveled through the Marches of Antan, wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—do you not look to find when you have reached Antan, which is the goal of all the gods, some third truth?” And it seemed to him that the faces of the two myths had now become evasive and more wary. Nero replied, “For a poet, there exist always just as many truths as he cares to imagine.” And Villon remarked: “I would phrase it somewhat differently. I would say there exist more truths than any poet cares to imagine. But it comes to the same thing.” “Yes,” Gerald assented,—“for it comes to an evasion. Yet I, who also am a poet, I retain my faith in the rather beautiful idea of that third truth.” And then Gerald told them that he himself had long dabbled in the art of poetry. “Indeed,” he added, generously, “I will now recite to you one of my sonnets which appears appropriate to the occasion.” “Dog,” Villon replied, taking up his hat, “does not eat dog.” And Nero very hastily stated that, howsoever unbounded their regret, they really must be hurrying on to the city of marvels. So these myths departed, traveling together, with an intimacy somewhat remarkable in the light of their flatly diverse teachings. And Gerald warned them to make the most of the present state of affairs in Antan, because the day after to-morrow the Lord of the Third Truth, a deity with several not uninteresting aspects, would be descending upon Antan, to take over all the powers of the Master Philologist, and to deal with Queen Freydis afterward as his divine inclinations might prompt. Thereafter Gerald went back to Maya and to his dinner quite jauntily, now that he knew in his appointed kingdom the true poets of this world were assembling to purvey his amusement: and he felt himself to be afire with impatience to reach that city of all marvels, yonder behind him, as he walked away from Antan, leisurely ascending to the trim cottage of Maya the wise woman, who went as a crowned queen, and would have none of his love-making, and yet was such an excellent cook, in her plain way. PART EIGHT THE BOOK OF MAGES