Аврам Дэвидсон - Peregrine - primus

mind, in a manner of speaking, that it might be that some good friend to Caesar might choose this moment to ask of Caesar the grant and escheat and forfeit of this villa, messuages, tenements, lands, domains, demesnes, and so forth and so on. In which case the new owner might not be averse to engaging me as his man of business as it were, his Chief Steward. Being acquainted as I am with the entire establishment, inside out as one might say, and the characters bf all its personnel—”

“Knowing which thralls’ fingers to dip in the boiling oil, you mean?”

Sempronius gave another splendidly noncommittal cough. “Well,” said Peregrine, thoughtfully, “I shall think about it... . By the way, was it not the fact that when any Vestal Virgin was convicted of inchastity and inmured alive that she was said to have the choice of starving to death by lamplight, or of drinking the oil and thus surviving a little longer in the darkness?”

“A man of my own severely limited education, sir, can only marvel at the extent of Your Honor’s simply superb education,” said Sempronius.

t t t t

Darlangius Caesar Augustus was aghast. “Why that slimy son-of-a-bitch, he said. “Imagine the gall of the man, trying to imprison, torture, mutilate, and destroy my friends, in that order. Cuckoldry-shmuckoldry, what’s the matter: my friends aren’t good enough for him? Well, let him blanch down there like an endive. His estates are forfeited to The Purple, make a note of that, honey,” he murmured to his secretary. “I said. Make a note, not Gouge a note; do you think that goddamned stylus is for cutting cuticles? If you didn’t have the sweetest little ass in Transpanonia, I d, uh, mmm,” and his voice fell away as, with one hand he caressed the sweetest little et cetera and with the other groped for his desk-copy of Volume One of The Sermons of Saint Ephraim the Deacon. Then, something occurring to him, he said, Drat, I can’t do both of these and talk to you at the same time. Laying down the patristic sermons, he cleared his throat, and began to address Peregrine.

“The forfeited estate—And file that under: Forfeitures: Tor

ture, Illegal, Abuse of; and not under Escheated Estates of Intestate Bastards —er, ah, mumph, no offense, mboy—would be a nice little nest egg on which to start life anew,” said Caesar. “1 mean. Look here. 1 adopt you. Endow you with said estates. Make you my right-hand man and Co-Heir. That makes you the Caesar to Caesar’s Caesar. Or Anyway. Sooner or later, all these two-drachma little caesarates are bound to fall like ripe medlars into the ripe, I mean right hands. Now I. Mboy. Am a man of vision. But. Of action? No. Mean to say. Tomorrow I may get deeply interested in codifying the agricultural laws. The next day, however, might find me reforming the rules for inspecting whorehouses. Demands a great amount of empiric research, project like that. Who—meanwhile—carries on with the Three asses shall hereinafter be deemed to equal one ox — ? and so on. Not, you bet your ass, your putative adoptive Pappa, Domitian Antonius Nerva Ahenobarbus Julius Darlangius Augustus Tiberius Theophrastus Bombastus Phillipus Aureolus, um, er, ah, where in the Hell is that note I made of whatever the Hell my entire title is? . . . Never mind ... You do see what I mean, my boy? I can’t even keep my hands on my own name.” Considering just what he was keeping his own hands on at the moment, this was perhaps not surprising.

Peregrine said, sincerely, ‘‘Caesar, I am moved by what you say. But I am not now the man for that. Putting pride aside, and speaking as simply and plainly to you as I would to my own and natural father, I say this: I am really not yet a man. I am still a boy who is still in the process of passing into manhood. Who would be the man you want, is Austin.”

Caesar was himself sufficiently moved to move his hands off his secretary and to place them on his young friend s shoulders. “Comparisons would be odious,” he said, “and so I am not going to make them. The point at issue is that Austin is not here and that you are.”

“You sum everything up in those words. Austin is not here. And because Austin is not here, therefore I can not remain here, either. When I left my father’s court—and I left it, let us not forget, under a ban of death should I return armed or at the head of an armed host—all I wanted was to see more of the world. To see all that there was to be seen, was my thought. When I first had a hint of'Austin’s having passed by a certain way which I

was also passing by, of course I wanted to see him, meet with him, be with him, too. But now I find that my feeling is more intense—I want to find him, my brother, more than I want to do anything else.

“And so, though otherwise I would much be tempted to gain by adoption a crown and title which can never be mine by descent of blood, to purge that taint, as some think it, by donning purple, I can’t.”

Darlangius, listening carefully, asked if that were the only reason. The younger man was briefly silent. And then said, “I don’t dislike Chiringirium. —Where would I feel at home? I don’t know. If I ever find such a place, I suppose I’d settle there. I can’t help right now being reminded that my name means foreigner . . . alien . . . wanderer ...”

Slowly the ruler nodded. He seemed slightly older, slightly wearier. “I shall be sorry to lose you, my young friend . . . ‘Lose you’? No, I won’t lose you, but I shall certainly miss you. As I miss Austin. ‘Young friends last longer, when they last at all.’ Who said that? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. I hope you will come back, both of you. ‘Foreigner, alien, wanderer’? Yes . . . Peregrine means those things. It means something else, too—”

And, the former court-philosopher, a capella bard, etc., of Sapodilla, having just at that moment come in, Darlangius asked, “Appledore . . . what else does Peregrine mean?”

“It is a kind of falcon, Your Demi-imperial Highness . . . . Well, my boy. You are leaving? Then I must give you my answer. I am not going with you. Not this time. I find that I am more tired than I had realized. Adventures merely heat the blood of the young—indeed, they may well be deemed necessary for to purge it of the thick humors which the excitations of youth engender—but they have the contrary effect upon those of us whose heads have been tempered by the snows of many decades. —In short, my boy: Bene Valetas. Nix.”

t t t t

^ Appledore was present when his former pupil bade farewell to Chiringirium. The archbishop was stationed downwind and, happily swinging what must have been the largest thurible in all

AVRAM DAVIDSON

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Christendom, intoned benedictions and sang psalms, accompanied by a choir. In a litter made brave with cloth of tissue of gold, sat the Caesar himself. Appledore was actually the requisite distance from the city gate as required by law in order for him to escape indictment for uttering pagan blessings and other ceremonies “in any place which is either public or private.” It had been learned that the minimum distance was one-half a bowshot plus one-half of one-half a bowshot: and this had been carefully measured out by the Very Reverend the Protopresbyter of Chiringirium, an old-style ecclesiast, who was an authority on the ecclesiastical bowshot, which was not, of course, the same as the archers’ bowshot. (Caesar had listened to all this with great patience and had then murmured something which might, conceivably, have been “bowshot”).

Darlangius had equipped Peregrine and party with a lavish hand more lavish than the hand of the poor king of Sapodilla, by far—from a list of his own (called, somewhat unsurprisingly, the Lavish List); ranging from Ablution, silvern-gilt vessels, for the purpose of, 25 to Zithern, ebony and/or other precious woods, made of; mother-of-pearl, inlaid with —and, assisted by Claud, a train of the best horses and mules in the district to carry it all.