Аврам Дэвидсон - Peregrine - primus

His hands rested, palms upright, upon the marble counter in what might possibly have been an attitude of prayer. Cornelius the Cappadocian seemed to be pointing one eye at Menander and the other at Peregrine, and he cupped his paunch in his hands and his lips moved soundlessly. Soundlessly, but intelligi

bly. Peregrine dipped his hand into his pouch once again, and something clinked briefly before being snapped up.

“Ah woe is me and what is this?” the aged M. Protector stared, aghast. “A coin bearing the image of an Abomination, the name of which shall not pass my lips. Though undoubtedly made of a pure silver, so blind were they in ancient days to a true sense of values: sound money and false gods—” This seemed not to promise well for a good conclusion to Peregrine’s quest for coin of the realm, but he was loath to abandon his search now.

“1 shall hide it from sight, lest its so-called beauty tempt some poor soul, and tonight will carry it to a Christian silversmith to have it melted down, and so put an end to the possibility of harm. Well, well, and so back to my—”

Peregrine said, firmly, “The scrip. The parchment—”

“Exactly,” said Menander Protector. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“The parchment, wherewith I am to indite the scrip.”

“You mean that—” began Peregrine.

“I should have thought, worthy Menander Protector,” said Appledore, speaking for the first time, “that the one thing an Imperial Office would not lack would be parchment.”

A smirk passed over the old clerk’s face. “Then you would have thought wrong!” he announced, triumphantly. “It is not the duty of this Office to furnish parchment for applicants. This, they must furnish for themselves. And, should you doubt me, I refer you to the decision in the case of Theme of Bythinia vs. Estate of the Protopresbyter of Cyrenaica et al., XXXth Book of Constitutions, Liber VVVXXXCCCIII, par. III.”

Perhaps by this time even Cornelius the Cappadocian was growing a trifle impatient, not, surely, out of any mere carnal lust, such as did indeed seem to be affecting Claud with an internal flame and ichorous itch, but doubtless to be gotten back to his discussions of Sacred Theology with the citizens outside. He cleared his throat with a phlegmy effort. “The learned, pious, and diligent prothonotary Menander Protector is as usual, correct,” he said. “However. When I inform him that these three applicants have come at great effort and great cost from far away in order to visit the shrine of the Virgin and Martyr Euphemia, she who, have for sixteen months by day and by night repulsed the vile attentions of the unregeneratively heathen her

husband, Casimir the Carpathian, until in a fit of heathen rage he slew her by his sword with a several many smites, and have moreover willingly given up their wordly effects—most of them, anyway—to the Army of Caesar, which is the Army of Christos Pantocrator after all; no doubt in view of these extenuating circumstances the learned, pious, and diligent prothonotary Menander Protector may not be unwilling, of his own mere free will and kindness, to go look and see if there may not be some old parchment which has outlived its original usefulness; for which purpose the three applicant pilgrims will place a charitable donative into the hands of the prothonotary himself,” and he said all of this, very, very, fast.

And in a shorter time than by then he would have believed it possible, Peregrine and his comrades and skilled intermediary Cornelius the Cappadocian, were back outside the Treasury building. The afternoon was grown late, but, compared to the insufferable dimness which by now reigned inside the former Baths, it seemed bright. Peregrine turned over the strips of parchment to see what was on the back of the scrip redeemable at the Bursary, for the old clerk had ripped a sheet from an even older book, after exacting from them all a promise that they were on no account to look at the obverse.

“It seems to be from something called The Entire Art of Making Love, with Illustrations — But the illustrations are all gone, why that dirty old man!”

“No doubt,” said the wall-eyed Cappadocian, “he did it to save your immortal souls. And, speaking of which, may I point out to you that in the adjacent street yonder there are to be found no less than six churches, all formerly Temples of various Abominations, as well as four chantries, a monastery, ten taverns, fifteen wine-cellars, and twenty-five brothels?”

Even Appledore seemed a trifle dazed.

“Twenty-five?” he repeated.

“Twenty-five. Is it not abominable?”

“It is more than abominable. It is superfluous.”

Here and there oil-lamps had begun to twinkle. The good smell of supper cooking came wafting through the evening air, along with the thick scent of incense. Hawkers called their wares, the musical bonk-bonk-bonk of wooden bell-boards announced vespers, and, over and above it all, a young woman, ob

AVRAM DAVIDSON

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viously dead to all shame, leaned out of a first story window. She had on a very lowcut dress, and she had a cithern in her hands, and she began to strum and to play and finally to sing a love-song.

“Well,” said Peregrine, shifting his saddle-bags and hitching up his belt and starting off into the street adjacent, “I guess we’ll just have to skip the churches, the chantry, and the monastery.”

PART

T he services of Cornelius the Cappadocian did not come exactly cheap. However, there were always extras being added at, he assured them, no extra charge. He had discovered in the course of conversation in what was either the seventh or the eleventh winecellar visited, for example, that Peregrine’s paternal grandfather, King Cumnodorius (commonly called King Cuckold, for reasons which will not escape those having any knowledge of the reputation of his Consort), had once signed a perpetual treaty of peace with Rome which had actually lasted an entire year, almost as long as the reign of the Caesar he had signed it with—on discovering this, Cornelius at once coupled it with the circumstance of Peregrine’s having lost his sword to the commissary-major; and darted into the street. Where, by the happy benevolence of Providence, he met with Menander Protector coming from Divine Liturgy at the Crypt of the Martyr. Menander, who doubled as Commissioner for Oaths,-was persuaded to enter a strictly private room in the dram-cave, there to take a little wine for his stomach’s sake and for his often infirmities; and there, also, to issue Peregrine a li

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peregrine: primus

cense to carry a sword within the city limits.

And so, the next morning found them, after some hot barleywater (a specific for over-indulgence -or, for that matter, indulgence), which did nothing to dispel all the hot memories of the previous night’s merry anticks, at the establishment of one Ulrich, a dealer in slightly-used metallurgies.

“I knew it, I knew it!” the dealer declared on first sight of them. He rubbed his bald-spot. “Something told me when I heard the gate squeak. ‘Northerners,’ I said to myself. ‘Northerners, coming for a broken sword, early though it may be for the broken sword season to have begun.’ ”

Peregrine was slightly interested by this. “Oh, do you have broken swords?” he asked. “What do Northerners always want with them?” he inquired.

“Listen,” said Ulrich, “Do I have broken swords?! I gotta pile o’ broken swords as high as my head, biggest goddam stock of broken swords in the Central Roman Empire, and every year, as soon as the ice breaks up on the Wherever-it-is, them crazy norskies come flocking down with their flocking ‘Oh, have you got a broken sword which my fair eldergodmother promised if 1 could find a dwarf who could forge it again, blah blah blah,’ see, I perceive that although strangers you are, norskies you are not, so freely I can speak. —‘Do I have broken swords?’ you ask. Go out there—you see the pile? Take your pick. I sell ’em by weight, no promises made as no questions asked or answered. Take your pick. But lemme warn ya. No spells!