Аврам Дэвидсон - Peregrine - primus

“What, my foreskin?”

“Greek fire upon you, boy! The axe, the axe!”

And with a scowl, he drew apart from them and rebuffed further efforts to draw him into conversation. However, on hearing and reflecting, Claud showed an unexpected and in fact a previously unsuspected desire to help carry the saddle-bags, whilst

Appledore armed himself with a sheet of clean papyrus and a reed pen behind his ear. “I hope they’ll take me for a public scribe,” he explained, “but I hope they won’t take me so much for a public-scribe so as to demand evidence that I have paid trade-tax for being a public scribe.”

The Imperial Bursary was quite a surprise in more ways than one. “This is the Imperial Bursary ... is it?” asked Peregrine.

“Certainly it is,” said the man behind the small and heavilygrated window. “Why should you doubt it?” He was tall and lean and had close-cropped hair and close-cropped beard and long, lean jaws. “State your business.”

But Peregrine was not quite ready yet to state his business. “I wasn’t exactly doubting it,” he explained. “Only for a moment I thought it looked like a church, I mean, not an old church, formerly the temple of an abomination, but one of the new and modern-type churches, with thick walls and little windows, you see.”

“Certainly I see. It is a church, to be precise it is the Church of Saint Epaminondas of Epididymus, but it is also the Imperial Bursary, and is located here precisely because of the thickness of the walls and the littleness of the windows. Divine Liturgy is celebrated here on each Saint’s Day at high noon . . . each Saint Epaminondas Day, I mean, in order to maintain the franchise. Formerly the Dole for Aged, Indigent, and Cripples was distributed here, but by the wisdom the August Caesar, Augustus XXV, that has been discontinued as leading to the encouragement of unproductive elements; however, foundling children are still received here between seven and twelve every evening; state your business.”

Peregrine chuckled.

“Very little seems to get past Stingy Gus,” he said.

“Very little does,” said the lean-jawed man, “and do you know why?”

Peregrine chuckled again. “No. Why?”

“Because I am Stingy Gus. State your business.”

t t t t

The Imperial Bursary offered to redeem Peregrine’s scrip, but

only at an enormous discount; attempts to move Augustus XXV to be more generous by appealing to the case of Theme of Bithynia vs. Estate of the Protopresbyter of Cyrenaica proved total failures.

“Well,’' said Appledore, “as he himself said, in fact, as the commissary-major said, you can always appeal. Meanwhile, you continue to retain scrip supposedly for the full value of the sequestered items at current prices; and you might try seeing what that will purchase at a butchery or bakery.”

“Or a brothelry,” suggested Claud.

“You have a singularly narrow mind.”

“What I have is a singularly heavy prong.”

They were offered, after considerable very dubious perusal of the parchmentry, five loaves of bread apiece every day for fiftyfive days; and some similar bargain in lambs livers, goats’ melts, and rabbit tongues. They looked at each other, first with despair, then with a wild surmise, and, by unspoken consent, found their way to another district, where the lights were brighter, or, at least, redder.

“My family used to own one of the biggest latifundia in East Nubia,” the matron Eudoxia explained to Peregrine, as she poured wine in her best painted chamber. Appledore was elsewhere, discussing philosophy with one of Eudoxia’s associates who had (she had assured him) spent a lot of time minding the stoa; and Claud was in another compartment yet, taking the weight off his prong with the cooperation of a stalwart young woman who specialized in such cases. “I’m telling you all this because I can see that you’re not just an ordinary client, but one used to the better things in life.” She looked at him from beneath her painted eyelashes.

“As you are yourself,” he said, taking the cup.

The matron Eudoxia heaved a deep sigh, an act which did extraordinary things to her rather extraordinary bosom. “Oh, my pappa daddy would just turn over in his sarcophagus if he were to see some of the foul fates which have befallen me,” she said, “before I was enabled by a kindly providence to set up this establishment for wine-tasting and conversation. Although just how I am to keep it all together, what with the priests and the bishops calling me a second Hypatia, not to speak of the taxes, O my Saints and Martyrs! is more than I can say. Still, I never

lose hope, if good fortune is predestined for one, not all the priests and bishops and taxes in the world can prevent it, that’s what I believe. That’s what I used to tell this girl Theodora, we used to feed the bears together back in Byzantium, ‘Keep your chin up, Theo, and encourage the right kind of client, and your luck is bound to change, a lovely girl like you with a good head on her shoulders,’ I used to say. And see what happened? She married a Caesar’s nephew.

“Far be it from me to knock the government, after all, the Central Roman Empire is the land of opportunity, everybody knows that, and Ed be the last to begrudge contributing my just share to keeping those awful barbarians at bay—why, I used to know a girl, a really lovely person, and it was her fate to be captured by a Hun horde, and then to be re-captured by a cohort of Imperial troops: what she told me!

“But, now, as to this scrip, and all that,” said the matron Eudoxia, getting down to business, “I appreciate your being frank with me, I know what it is not to have ready cash and what you might call liquid assets, and it’s true that I do have a lot of contacts with high-placed people, which is always a help. Of course we are all good Christians nowadays [“Of course,” ( said Peregrine, looking deep into his wine-cup.], and there is after all nothing like a good theological rag-chew about such eternal verities as, is the Son made out of nothing, or is the Son made out of something, and if so, what kind of something ... or, for that matter, I guess, what kind of nothing? These things are important!”

However, important as they were, Eudoxia would, she admitted, be the first to admit that one cannot spend all of one’s good times discussing theology. One must spend some of one’s good time at wine-tasting and conversation as well— “But some of these little pesky priests and badmouthing bishops, I mean, I know what saintly priests and bishops are like! They don't make them, they just don’t make them, the way they used to make them down in East Nubia; why the desert was just crawling with saints when I was a girl, you didn’t dast throw a stick for fear of hitting an anchorite or a cenobite or an heremite, and every ruined portico, which formerly the pillars supported the portico of a temple of an abomination, every pillar had a preacher living on the top of it— But hereabouts and nowadays, the priests and

bishops, as they call themselves,” and here she gave a scornful snortle, I know all about them! Why, would you believe it, some ot them eat meat? Some of them bathe? Some of them are even,’ and she leaned forward to import an horrid confidence in an horrified and low-voiced tone, “some of them are even married!”

“No!”

“Yes! You call that being a priest or a bishop? How can he mortify his flesh properly if he gets laid every night in his own bed? You call that mortifying the flesh? Huh! So! Let them denounce me. Let them threaten to tear me to pieces with sharpened oyster-shells. It’s a funny thing about me, I have to tell the truth, let the chips fall where they may, and I am totally unable to dissimulate, so let them threaten to stone me, as if I was afeared of them, why—”