Аврам Дэвидсон - Peregrine - primus

“Breathe as little as possible,” Appledore counselled firmly. “And, please, nobody sneeze . . .”

“Enough of these vanities and pusillanimities,” said Eugenius. “Let us commend ourselves to the care and mercies of the Great Serpent who encircles the world in the form of the Ocean Sea. Here goes,” and he plunged in his paddle and the coracle ’gan to skip and swirl and dart and dangle and bob and leap from wave to wave. “Take that line there, to portside,” said Eugenius, crisply, and, when no one obeyed, in part because no one could figure how to determine port from starboard on an almost perfectly circular vessel, he, with a hiss worthy of a serpent-venerator, seized hold of it himself, and in a trice had

swung himself out of the coracle. A cry of alarm arose, was at once stilled as the half-moon swung up and out from wherever it had been hiding, and showed the outline of a larger vessel, and someone—presumably Eugenius—still holding the coracle against this vessel’s hull.

Peregrine, afterwards, was not quite sure how he had managed to manage his half-stiffened and half-trembling limbs. He thought that perhaps he had levitated.

The vessel was rank with the smell of sheep-fells and wool, and fortunate for the landlubbers that it was so, for more than once they tripped and fell, and had they not fallen upon fells and fleeces and upon bales of wool, their shins would have testified, with scars and scrapes, to their ineptitude.

“The tide will soon turn,” said Eugenius, “and we must kedge out into the channel, heave ho and smartly there, damn your butterfingers, boy! avast and hoist the topgallon, unfurl the futtockshrouds, man the mandible, jiggle your jissom now,” and many other similar sounds which meant as much, or as little, as any of the Eddessan’s theology to Peregrine and to Claud; and but little to Appledore, and that little long and all but lost in the mists of time. But, somehow, and perhaps owing to the beneficence of the Great Water Worm, an Emanation in whose existence Eugenius was certainly convinced, the morning found them sailing down the swelling surface of the buxom flood.

“Fortunate it was,” said the Ophite, at length satisfied, “that I had already laden me my vessel for a voyage, and to be sure they will all back there believe that I did so with foreknowledge of their impending and intended raid. And glad am I that they will, for then they will suspect each other, ah hah hah hah,” he laughed grimly. “Now, let me see. They will learn that I had said I intended to sail downstream, so they will think that I will think that they would think that I would instead sail «/?stream. Therefore they will expect me to sail downstream. Which I will anyway, for the new Caesar’s writ runneth not past those waters which we have already passed. And, more to the point, perhaps, neither does that of the Bishop of the Fourth Ward, South, the fanatic.

Peregrine, perched on the prow with a fishing-line attached to his great toe, looked up. “The Bishop of the Third Ward South?”

AVRAM DAVIDSON

[ 73 ]

“No, no, boy, the Bishop of the Fourth Ward, South. The Bishop of the Third Ward, South, is a mere visionary, spending all his time at it. And the Bishop of the Fourth Ward, North, is a voluptuary, spending all his time at it. But the Bishop of the Fourth Ward, South, ah, there is one you have to watch out for: a gaunt ascetic of the worst gaunt ascetic type, with a long and boney nose ever eager to sniff out heresies as he calls them. Why! Twas not a month since that he interrupted the Divine Liturgy so-called, but perforce I had to attend, else he’d have had my kidneys crucified before you could say Kyrie Eleison—to proclaim a hue and cry against the limner of the very synaxarion he had been chanting from; and for why? For that the limner in his illumination for the Sixth Sunday after Sextuagesima had depicted Christ as wearing blue and gold robes after the Resurrection instead of purple and gold robes, for Christ should then having been wearing purple, the mourning of princes, he being Prince of Princes, and in mourning for himself—that is, to speak more precisely his Divine nature should have been shown as wearing mourning for his Human Nature, however—and from this that fanatic, the Bishop of the Fourth Ward, South, did deduce and adduce that the limner was an heretic, “A Valentinian or worse, if worse there be,’ he said—forasmuch as he did deny that Jesus in any form died upon the Cross, but hinting by means of his illuminated limnings that a phantom took the place of Jesus and —

“But now I piddle upon the purple of the Bishop of the Fourth Ward, South, and let him swim, an he wishes now to seek out and confront me, ah hah hah,” he laughed grimly. And he told in relishing tones of what had once been done to an anti-Ophitical bishop in the good old days gone by, omitting no torture however slight. And then he shifted his helm in order to avoid causing severe scandal to a fish-weir.

Peregrine gazed upon the master of the vessel, the woolmerchant and arch-heresiarch, in no small wonder, as the man sat with the stick of the helm in his aft armpit. For the moment, safety and the memory of ancient revenges, as well as the clean fresh air of the river, had brought a sparkle to his eyes. But the furrowed skin around those eyes, the sagging cheeks, the lines descending from eyes to cheekbones, from nose to jowels, told of something different, something more usual. And Peregrine won

dered about him, and about the other harried followers of equally strange sects and occult cults, tired of the farce called the Pax Romana, under which their hurried sacraments of bread and milk, their offering of the Cup to serpents, may yet at some future day obtain them a crown in paradise, but which were far likelier and more definitely to do so at the price of a red-hot-iron crown on earth.

Aloud, Peregrine said, musingly, “To think that only yesterday morning my friends and I narrowly escaped the press-gang, and—”

“The press-gang! Great Sacred Snakes! Do not mention the word, lest it come to pass. The press-gang was active yesterday, you say? This bodes no good.”

This puzzled the young man. Surely, he suggested, since the writ of the Caesar in power of the river ran not hither—

“The writ of Caesar hath little or nothing to do with it!” declared Eugenius, with vehemence. “The Imperial Fleet hath a writ of its own, a will of its own, and a way of enforcing that will which belikes me not at all. For some years now, in fact, Romanus, Arch-Admiral of the Inland Fleet, has carefully been omitting the names of the local caesars from his orders, and whilst he claims he does it for simplicity’s sake alone, it being too difficult to keep changing, and sometimes not being cognizant on water of everything which has taken place on land, still, I am not so sure. My life has not been such so as to render me other than suspicious. So, for all that he modestly claims that he is merely the servant of the Emperor, and goes on at a great rate about how the Throne is never vacant and the fleet serves the Throne, that is, the Empire in its entirety, rather than being limited to any one man . . . still. . . still. .

And his mutters and mumbles died away. Peregrine took a deep breath of the riverine air, and gazed all about him with pleasure. Claud sat stock-still in dead center of the boat, and although he looked somewhat less expectant of semi-instant death by drowning, it was only somewhat so. Appledore had stripped down to the buff and had tied all his clothes to a line which he was towing behind by way of laundering, now and again giving it a jerk and a tumble, and now and then breaking into an old chanty in a cracked and off-key voice. And when Peregrine yelled and grabbed, first for his toes, and then for the line at