Аврам Дэвидсон - Peregrine - primus

AVRAM DAVIDSON

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as kind and honest a fellow as you’d ever want to know,” he went on, wagging his head.

Peregrine, who was, to tell the truth, feeling just more than a bit restless, caught himself in the act, mentally issued a rebuke, and looked full of interest. He was, after all, fond enough of the old man, and he pitied him with all his heart, for little enough attention would his palindromes get from Prince Buddy, Prince Slim, Prince Chuck, his heirs male of the body lawfully begotten.

“—puts on his full regalia and a proper long face and off he goes to make his submission and get doused and take a new name and all the rest o’ that clobber, what was it he was going to be called? Theophilact? Pantalemon? Doesn’t matter, they says to him. ‘Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son or from the Father through the Son?’ ‘Whichever you please,’ he answers, being of blood royal and a true gentlemanly pagan with respects for all creeds. Well, they didn’t half do for him, poor fellow, ‘heathen’ and ‘heresiarch’ was the mere and mildest of what they called him as they was a-chopping of him up and casting the pieces into a whacking great fire before his very eyes, poor bloke. No, no, me boy, if such is how they treats you in the name of the Great White Christ, as some of them calls him, well, give me a great black one, is all I has to say, arrumph.

“—Now suppose we must get on with it. You has received your fair entitles and now departs with same, never returning either alone or with armed host, on penalty of being flayed alive in order to maintain the Peace of the Realm, lot of bloody nonsense, and may the gods—which is to say an allegorical expression of the infinite attributes of the First Cause—go with you at your right hand and left, and may you prosper in all your undertakings, yes, yes, with all my heart, boy, send us a line when you can, then, and don’t wait till you get settled somewhere, for you’re still young and that may be a long time, for your cullions hasn’t cooled yet; eh?”

And King Paladrine, whose face had grown longer and longer, embraced his son, who returned the hug and kiss and said, “I will, Dadda. Be well, Dadda. And, oh, say, Dadda, have you heard this one? ‘Stop, murder us not, tonsured rumpots!’?’’

‘‘What, what?” exclaimed the king, his face at once breaking out into an auticipatory grin. ‘‘How does it go? ‘Stop, don’t

murder—’ ”

He had it straight at last, burst into a hearty laugh, and waved farewell as cheerfully as though he was seeing Peregrine off to hunt for hares, and back he went, chuckling and grinning and wagging his head and repeating the line: a goodly and a doomed old man, and not until that night when, at wine before his fire he asked as usual that they “Send for Perry to give us a tune and a song,” was he to remember that there would never again be at his court a Perry forever.

And precious few tunes and songs.

Thus endeth the first lesson.

t t t t

The roads of Lower Europe, it seemed, were at that time full of wanderers. Dust lay heavy on the roads at times, which at other times were churned into mud. Christians now sat upon the throne of the Caesars, preaching something called Christian Love, and this was something of which Peregrine knew not vastly much; he knew though that now and then the emperors ceased to preach and slew, with every bit and every whit as much zeal and bloodshed as though they had been heathens. And then — then, woe to Christians of the wrong sect! and, most of all, at all times, no matter to which sect adhered the current caesar—woe to those who still and obstinately remained heathen! For “Always Rome sends grim gods!” was their mutter.

However, Peregrine’s thoughts were far from grim right now as he rode off; he was in too many ways glad to be going. He was riding off, and he was riding well. Prince Buddy’s mother, Queen Calpurnia, second of his father’s lawful wives (Queen Matilda had been kind to her husband’s bastards, but she had been dead for a few several years), was a good judge of what was and what was not “best quality second-grade arms and armor,” but she was no judge of mules. And the stable-thralls, while vowing up and down that this one was moon-blind and that one was old and the third was too tough-mouthed to be endured, had all the same seen to it that Peregrine was furnished as good beasts as were furnishable. He was of course as sorry as could be to leave his bluff and well-meaning old father, never to see him

AVRAM DAVIDSON

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again—as sorry as was possible in a bastard son who had known since he was three years old that some day he must do so. And just today the roads were neither dusty nor muddy, the land was green, the earth breathed a sweet and not a bitter fragrance, he could not at all believe that the Empire scene was fully as bad as his father had hinted at, and, if it were to be so, well, the Empire was not the whole scene. For the eighteen years of his young life he had seen nought but the small Kingdom of Sapodilla. Now he would see more than that.

He vowed to himself that he would see all that there might be to be seen.

t t t t

The Sovereignty of Sapodilla has—or had—Pannonia on one side and Nararre on the other, being bordered on the north by Lake Illyria and on the south by the Marches of Golconda. Maps are of little use in trying to trace these lineaments, as all the names have been since transferred to other places by right of conquest, by mass migration, and as purely administrative measures as well. When we learn from the pages of Procopius that Crete in his time as a Byzantine bureaucrat was held to be officially a part of Africa, need nothing surprise us more?

Nothing.

Millet and spelt were growing on both sides of the somewhat narrow and more than somewhat rutted path which was humorously called Highway Number One (wheat being still regarded by the thoroughly backward peasantry of Sapodilla as a new-fangled crop which had yet to prove itself) as Peregrine rode along; and the holes and boulders left by the spring’s torrential rains indicated that that same peasantry was up to its favorite outdoor sport of shirking its public duties. He indicated this, with a wave of his slender hand, and a rueful movement of his face, to the one servant allowed him by the customs and counsels of his ancestors—presumably as wise as the day they were uttered.

The servant was, presumably, also as wise as the day he had been uttered,-being the slack-mouthed by-blow of the scullery

maid in the lesser-servants’ kitchen, commonly called Daft Claudius; Prince Buddy’s mother had picked him, too. All guestions as to his paternity —which had never been many, the morals of scullery-maids being what they were—had been met with a look of such bafflement on the part of the woman as might have been worthy of a question dealing with the deeper metaphysics. He responded now to his new master’s gesture by picking meditatively at a scab in one corner of his mouth, and uttering what was for him a profound and prolonged comment.

“Ah,” he said.

Now and then a figure toiling by the barm of the road looked up a moment, resting on a hoe, and gazed at the place in the road which Peregrine and Dafty occupied, and then, blank look unchanged, returned to the task of turning clods. The impression left was that the notion that someone had been going by had been incorrect, and that no-one was going by after all. But Peregrine knew that if he were to turn quickly enough he would just miss meeting with a deeply-interested look. But he did not look back.

At a curve in the road by the side of a hill under a medlar tree two pages in magpie livery slouched to attention. “PER-xyV' a voice said, and an unhappy-looking and overfed boy with a medlar in one hand and his penis in the other stood piddling against the tree. He gave the implement a shake or two and let his tunic drop.