Аврам Дэвидсон - Peregrine - primus

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

“Basilians!” BOOM!

“ Cainites, Ebionites, and Gnostics!” BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

” Eutychesianites, Catharites, Hermaphrodites!”

Congregation: “Ar, they’m be filthy boogers, they morphadites”—BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Although the congregation were delighted out of their gourds with the emphatic acoustical emphases of the big bass drum, it plainly made the archbishop uneasy (“Jumped like a goosed twit,” was the way Caesar himself put it, later); and he began to run through the list in a manner which made aged connoisseurs of General Anathemas shake their venerable heads and groan; lumping together Nestorians and Pretorians, Essenes and Mani

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peregrine: primus

chees, Patrippassians, Sabellians, Valentinians, Monarchianites and Monophysites, Pelagianists and Plagiarists.

“We brand them with infamy, condemn their conventicles, confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks, oh my goodness, I forgot to include Donatists and Monatists!”

BOOM! went the big bass drum. BOOM! And, Caesar giving the signal, it continued to go BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! until, finally, he taking pity on the quaking prelate, gave him leave to swing the thurible. As lagniappe he broke out a store of the rare No. 1 Jumbo Tribute Incense (Lebanon Red), and in short order the thick, rich, reeking thunderheads began inexorably to send the crowds out of the cathedral and into the refreshment tents; whilst the archbishop himself, totally unaware that he was being abandoned, giggled happily as he swung the burner and censed the invisible and rapidly absquatulating congregation.

In the tents, by Decree, was spread out a lavish array of pilchards, plovers, peacock, poppycock, plumduff, pistachionuts, pulse, and pease-porridge-hot, pease-porridge-cold—but not, at which there were some grumbles, not pease-porridge-inthe-pot-nine-days-old; Caesar not having known nine days before that he was going to find himself in the position of Chief Caterer of Chiringirium.

“Eat up, everybody,” he urged, walking to and fro: “cost me a fortune.”

“Will you be able to pay for it?” asked Peregrine, not seeing in Darlangius the same sort of single-minded fiscality which had characterized, let us say, Stingy Gus.

“Oh yes,” the new ruler said, easily. “Secret Police Fund takes care of all that.”

Peregrine thought this over for a moment, then was moved to ask what the police had to do with it.

“That’s the secret.”

Also present, and moving rather gingerly, was Claud; and now and then he rubbed his wrists and his elbows and felt about his throat, as though for reassurance. The eye of Darlangius fell upon him, and he beckoned. “Young man,” he said, “not only do I feel that the State owes you a recompense, but I am fully aware that, had it not been for your imprisonment, / should now be still in the ranks of the penniless laity, a state from which I am grateful that Providence was pleased to remove me. Now, I

am going to offer all of you boys cushy jobs. But you, my dear Clot—what did you say your oh, Claud—you get first pick. How would you like to be Grand Logothete, say, or Lord Privy Part? No? I hope that you are not thinking of getting a transfer into your present position as Chief Scout?—because in my opinion you are a lousy scout. I don’t think you could find elephant tracks in the snow.”

Claud grimaced, looked rueful. “Well, be that as it may,” he said, “I sure have learned a lot about the horses in the hinterland of this province. 1 must know the pedigree and the good and bad points of every single one.”

Caesar raised his eyebrows. “Is that so? Well, in that case, how about being the Chief Purchasing Agent, Cavalry?” Claud thought it over, exchanged looks with Philoxena, then turned back and nodded. “Excellent,” said Caesar. “Try some of this lamprey -mayonnaise, it’s delicious.”

Peregrine said, “What? . . . Claud? . . . You’re leaving us?”

“What, ‘leaving us?’ ”

“I mean, you’re not coming along with us?”

“Coming along where?” demanded Claud, a trifle testily. ‘‘I am content to stay, I hope you’ll stay, but if you don’t stay, then it seems to me that it’s you who’s ‘leaving us,’ if you see what I mean.”

Peregrine thought it all over. Claud was giving up a place as companion? thrall? to a gentleman-adventurer? wandering bastard? and was taking instead a job in the Imperial Civil Service which was of such a nature that it would endure through untold reigns and upheavals (not that there were any signs of such here): one which must pay well and which carried with it a certain fixed position in the social scale—if not the very highest, certainly not the very lowest. Not for him to seek an all-but-unknown princess when he already had a woman who was sincerely devoted to him. Where Austin, son of Palindrome, might be, was of only minimal and academic interest to Claudius, son of who? And as for baleful beechen boards, he was an innocent as a babe unborn. And so Peregrine concluded that he did indeed see what Claud meant.

By unspoken command, then, Claud and Peregrine and Caesar Augustus (sipping from a gemmed goblet filled with a rare vintage laid down in days long gone by a hedonistic predecessor

with a nice palate himself) turned to Appledore. The latter had bellied up to the enormous silver salad-bowl containing the lamprey -mayonnaise as though it were going to be included any minute now in another General Anathema. After a moment he observed that they were waiting for his answer, and he wiped his mouth on a square of fine linen (embroidered et ux Mesilissa, it had perhaps once or twice been put to other purposes).

“Well, I’ll tell you, my boy—my boys—and Caesar—it all depends. I should wish first to get together with my old schoolmate, the philosopher Volumnius, and talk things over. And I’d have to meditate the matter. So ... as of right now ... I don’t know . . . .” And he returned to his salad.

“There,” said Caesar, “you see? What’s your hurry? Hot pants? What’s out there that isn’t here, and of better quality, too? Take it easy. Stick around. Have another drink. Take in the ceremony. There’s a pretty pageant coming up. I disband the standing army with severance pay and passports—hint, hint and create local militias: The Army of the First Ward, South, and so on. Bishops bless the banners. Then we install the new rank which I have created. This one is practically a beauty contest. Majorettes of the Drum. Some of the boobs on these broads would knock your helmet off.”

Interested in spite of his uncertainties, Peregrine asked, “And who is going to judge the beauty contest?”

Caesar gave him the smile of a man in full fig and vigour who has just fully realized the implications of the jus primae noctis, and, teetering up and down on his feet and rubbing his hands together, (very softly), “Caesar,” he said.

PART

B y abolishing the dreaded secret police, of which the late caesar C. Petronius Niger, had made wide use, Darlangius at one stroke was made free of enough funds on hand to pay for all sorts of public benefits without having to raise taxes by a penny. He repaired the aqueducts, re-opened the baths, dedicated three new cathedrals (each, of course, named Hagia Sophia), repaired the walls, and for one entire week had the public supply of fountains run with wine from five to six in the evening. There were also, needless to say, games and processions and beauty contests galore. Indeed, no caesar had ever been so wildly and so widely popular as this one; and when a certain tax-farmer, one Macromius, was heard to mutter that the new autarch and autocrat was “nothing but a fat fornicator,” he was pelted with offals by indignant market-women. And hot and cold collations were laid on at the Domicile, so that Peregrine for the first time was able to see, smell, taste, touch, and —had he desired—wallow in such dainties as breaded kids’ kidneys and suckling pigs with truffles in their noses. However, although it would be of all possible exaggerations