Аврам Дэвидсон: Peregrine : primus

blows increased. Appledore’s voice passed into common speech.

“Ass-headed Abraxas, have favor upon the integuments of Thy child!” he called—and, twice more, repeated the same set of words. Then, as Perry stared, fascinated, the hide began a slow rise from the dust of the road. Appledore threw back his head and brayed . . . once . . . twice ... a third time ....

No, no. The third bray came not from Appledore at all. It came from the ass which now stood, a trifle unsteadily, on the road before them and now took its first, uncertain step. And then began to crop the grass on the barm. Appledore let it feed awhile. Then he took the belt from around his waist and bound it into a bridle. Then he gave a skip and a hop and jumped onto the beast’s pin-bones. “A bit boney,” he said. “But ’twill do. ’Twill do.

“Till better comes our way, that is. Tchk! Tchk!” And, feet splayed out, he set off along the road which led—Appledore perhaps knew whither. Peregrine did not. But meant to discover. He pointed his mule’s head after the wizard and was about to dig his heels into the animal’s flanks when he realized that someone was speaking.

“A useful sort of trick, that,” said someone. “It will be interesting to see if the Child of Abraxas can cross running water, and how it will behave in the dark of the moon. It eats grass like a live-born, but, now, I wonder if it really needs to! It may be mere habit, dimly remembered from the days when it was truly alive. Habit is a very peculiar thing, you know.”

Slowly, and with absolute astonishment, Peregrine heard and watched as these comments came from the mouth of his recently-appointed thrall, Daft Claud. “Very peculiar,” said Daft Claud, echoing himself, and perhaps echoing some thought of his master s mind. From down the road Appledore’s voice drifted back. “Yoicks!” it was.

“Yoicks!” repeated Peregrine. Then he said, “Hey, uh That s the most I ever heard you say before . . . .” Narrowly he scanned the other’s face. It did not seem at all slack-jawed. “Did the old fellow work a spell on you, too?” Peregrine asked. Claud shook his head. And, very, very slowly, he grinned. And he winked.

Peregrine said, “Why, you deceptive son-of-a-bitch! I don’t believe you’re daft at all! I know you’re not! —Are you?”

“Nope.”

“Well, then how come that you never let on? Back there, I mean, at Court?”

“It I had,” said Claud, “they’d have made me work twice as hard.”

t t t t

Lower down, with the afternoon’s shadowings lengthening and the sun cooling off, they started up a troop of mummers who had been lying, almost hidden in the grass; and now came flashing up from the thicket like so many quail. They were, or seemed to be, all of a family, large-headed and swart, and they whooped and danced and trotted on their hands, and beat timbrels and cymbals and turned cartwheels and formed pyramids and rolled their eyes beseechingly at him and made such funny grimaces that Peregrine laughed, and tossed them a silver penny. Flashing, it was tossed from hand to hand, till it came between the teeth of the boss-mummer himself, who nipped it and took it out and popped it into his pocket and rolled his eyes and waved his hands and shouted his thanks. Peregrine laughed again, and almost would have stopped, except that Appledore seemed out of hailing distance, so he waved back, and rode on.

Claud rode with him, legs dangling over the baggage. A thrall, by rights, should have been walking; but Peregrine had as much doubts as to Claud’s status, these new times, as he had about his own. In Sapodilla, to be sure, Claud had been a thrall. But was he now? In Sapodilla, also, Peregrine had been a royal bastard. Was he still? Bastard? Royal? And what of Appledore? Was he any more what he had been than the bag of bones and dead hide was now what it had been? Life was now being lived in a new place, and, seemingly, according to new rules. Peregrine raised his dark eyebrows and whistled softly to himself.

He was still whistling when they were all suddenly hustled to one side of the road and a troop of strange mules went cantering by, followed by a man on a white horse who did not so much as notice them. And two of the strange mules bore a litter between them, a curtained litter, the horseman caught up with the litter

and rode between it and Peregrine’s view . . . but not before the curtains had fluttered, the curtains had parted, a face peered out, a pair of eyes met his own, held his eyes—

And then the curtains were drawn as though they had never been undrawn, and in between Peregrine and the curtained litter rode the man on the white horse.

And a very large white horse, and a very large man, they were, too.

“I wonder was she his wife?” Peregrine thought, aloud.

“I wonder was she his wife?” he said to Claud. But Claud was being dumb again, and barely gawped at him and at his question. The cool was thick and deep now, and the road was paved with thick stones, and passed between high hedgerows and orchards and walls. A town lay ahead—one, perhaps, of those white patches which from far, far above had promised Imperial Cities. A man rode a donkey, slouched over, a staff held between arm and side. Peregrine saw that it was Appledore.

“I wonder was she his wife?” he asked him.

‘Vinegar was the wife of wine,’ ” the old man muttered. Then his head snapped up. “Ah, Peregrine . . . my thoughts were elsewhere .... Was who, you wonder, the wife of whom?”

There was even smoke in the air, first thin, then thick; and the smell of supper. Suddenly the boy’s belly awoke, and began to nudge against his ribs. “Didn’t you see her, then?” he asked. “The woman in the litter? The man on the white horse? They passed you a while back.”

But Appledore insisted that none had passed him. “For,” he said, “until I am totally sure of this Child of Abraxas I am riding his dead center down the road, lest he collapse me into a ditch, or such-like. No one could have passed me—unless they passed through me.” And he chuckled.

For a moment Peregrine doubted himself. Had he, dreaming, dreamed that, too? Had there indeed been a litter, a curtain, a parted curtain, a glimpse of eyes as deep and bright and lustrous as some forest pool? Had not, in that moment, her garments moved? Had not a wisp of something fluttered out upon the air and dust, trembling and dancing in the sunlight?—and had his hand clutched after it, dipping and diving in the currents of air?

in that very moment when the alien rider had come between him and the litter? Had it not?

Had it?

He looked at the hand, clenched upon the reins. And took the reins in his left hand and slowly, slowly, very slowly, unclenched the right. Something indeed lay there, clinging to his sweaty palm, itself all damp and huddled. He let the leathers drop and guided the mule with his knees and carefully plucked the thing up with his fingers. It was a feather, he did not know what kind of a feather. And still clinging to it, as he raised it nearer to his eyes, was a sort of faint fragrance. A sort of scented musk. A hint of gardens richer than any which grew in the thin soil of his neglected native land.

A hint of the flesh of women, and this, too, richer than any known to him before.

Very carefully he felt for his pouch, and very carefully he took out the bit of parchment in which his old nurse-nanny had wrapped him up a golden luck-penny. And very carefully he placed the one upon the other. And very carefully rewrapped and returned the small packet and drew tight the thongs of the pouch. A moment he thought, and now he knew he dreamed. And then he took the reins and whooped and shouted. “Appledore! Claud! Mules! Child of Abraxas! Are you not all as hungry as I?”