Аврам Дэвидсон: Peregrine : primus

t t t t

Any dreams which he may have dreamed about gourmandizing amidst the presumably rich cuisine of the Central Roman Empire vanished like a pricked bubble at the inn. “Landlord!” he shouted, joyfully, having handed over the mules and the Child of Abraxas to a wall-eyed hostler with a prominent goitre: “Landlord! What can you give us for our supper?” And he flung himself onto a bench. Moving slightly, a second later, and gazing upwards, a trifle bemusedly, in search of the fowl which must, not very many minutes ago, have perched on the very beam above that very bench. Lrom this search he was recalled by the landlord’s voice.

“What can / give you?” the voice asked. There was a silence. The time might have been better spent, the voice and even more

the silence hinted, in considering . . . perhaps Longinus, On The Sublime. “For your supper?”

The silence fell again.

“Beans,” the voice said.

The first silences had really been the landlord’s silences. This one was definitely Peregrine’s. It was not a meditative, it was an incredulous silence. He had been expecting to hear mention of, as it might be, breaded kid’s kidneys. Or quails in aspic. Or a suckling pig, with truffles in its nose. “Beans?’’ he demanded.

Something in his tone there must have been which disturbed the landlord. There was a shuffling noise, as he came closer into the dim light shed by the fire; a thin man with protruding eyes and a pendulous belly. He stopped, the shuffling sound did not. Behind him came she who could only have been the landlord’s wife; that is to say, the landlady. A fat woman, with sunken eyes and a pendulous bosom.

“Is there something the matter with beans?” he asked.

“Something you don’t like?” she enquired.

“You some kind of a Pythagorean, or something, you don’t care for beans?”

There was a mutter from the other side of the fireplace. “Them Pythagoreans,” another voice said. “Always advertising, and that’s why they got all the money.”

“What about all the starving children in Erythrea?” the landlady demanded, truculently. “You think that they wouldn’t be glad to have some beans?”

“They’d love to have some beans,” the landlord said.

Peregrine considered matters. Perhaps he had been too hasty. This was, after all, not Sapodilla. There, beans had been thrallfood. Did the small Peregrine misbehave? “Think you’re much, don’t you, just because you’re the king’s bastard? Go and eat beans with the thralls.” —But that was there. And then, Who knew what sort of a lavish way they had of preparing beans, here in the Central Roman Empire?

“I, too, would love to have some beans,” he said, after an instant. Landlord and landlady beamed at him, transfigured. They lifted their hands and, slowly, hieratically, they made that gesture of which he had often heard.

“In the Name of the Father, and of the Mother, and of the Holy Son,” they said, more or less in unison. “We bid you thrice

welcome." And busied themselves with cauldron, ladle, and with pots.

Peregrine felt an elbow in his ribs. Appledore whispered, “1 was looking forward to something like this,” his voice filled with relish “ ‘The Mother ! I was hoping there’d be some new heresies, I used to get so tired of the old ones! Oh boy!”

And on Peregrine’s other side, Claud leaned over heavily and said, “Syncretistic influences of Isis-worship, how much you want to bet?”

Appledore, forgetting to whisper, said, ‘‘Do you really think so? You know, I shouldn’t be a bit surprised!”

The mutter from the other side of the fireplace became visible, and the floor shook beneath the tread of one of the largest (and ugliest) men whom Peregrine had ever seen. His eyes were large and bloodshot and he had in each nostril a larger beard than Peregrine had in either armpit, and his lubber-lips sagged, disclosing large and cracked and yellowy-greenery teeth, rather like those of a quarrelsome horse. “Say. Strangers.” he said. “Just what religion do you belong to. Hey?”

Peregrine held his breath. Appledore promptly answered, “The True One.”

“And which one is that. Hey?” demanded the AntiPythagorean.

Resolutely, Appledore said, “There is only one.” More than resolutely. Almost reprovingly. The ugly one swayed on his vast, splayed feet a moment, still muttering. Then he retreated. But still muttering. The landlady looked up from the cauldron to ask her husband something. He, in turn, looked over to the new guests.

“Will you have bread, then?” he asked.

They nodded. And then Appledore was moved to say, “It is, after all, the basic substance of the Holy Sacrament—” He was warned by the visible change in his hosts’ faces to stop. And asked—perhaps unwisely—though by that time it perhaps scarcely mattered—“It is n’t? Then, for pity’s sake, what is?”

The landlord was decent enough to answer the question, before picking up an axe and dodging around the fireplace to attack them. “Beans!” he shouted.

“Heretics!” shrilled his wife, flailing her ladle and tucking up her skirts. “Donatists! Mandeans! Gnostics! Orthodox! Mono

physites!” She came leaping and waving the huge ladle like a battle-mace. And the floor trembled again as the ugly giant came thundering forward, but this time stopping stock-still in the face of the landlady’s vituperation.

“Yer wrong on them charges,” he said. “They’re Pythagoreans, I tell ya! I can smell ’em! I can tell ’urn in the dark—”

“Let me at them! Let me by! I’ll skewer their heretical tripes!” the landlord shouted. “The—the—the Nestoreans!”

He dodged to one side around the ugly giant, only to come smack against his wife, skittering around the other. The pot tipped into the fire, filling the air with steam and sharp shouts of pain and dismay, and all the while the ugly giant, meanwhile kicking aside the benches, asked, rhetorically, “Who was the original beans-hater? Answer me that? Pythagoras! Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? I want a Yes or No from ya—where are they? I’ll killum, I’ll killum! —It was Pythagoras. Wasn’t it?”

Later, in the darkness, Peregrine said, panting, “Well, you wanted to hear of new heresies. I hope you found this one new enough for your taste.” Fortunately the hostler had been very slow, and had not as yet unbridled the mules. They had lost part of the baggage, but they still had their hides. And so, judging by his protesting bray, so had the Child of Abraxas.

Claud, breathing thoughtfully, asked, “Appledore, was it Pythagoras who was the original beans-hater?”

Appledore’s reply was succinct. “Yes,” he said.

Claud let out another thoughtful breath. “Well,” he said, after a moment, “maybe he knew what he was doing . . ..”

t t t t

By the light of the half-moon they paused to consider a moment at the crossroads the other side of the town. Appledore pointed to a small shrine. “Some pagan image stood in yon niche,” he said. “Some tangible reminder of the ancient and intangible faith of our forefathers. Personally, I was raised at my mother’s knee as a Neoplatonist, but—”

“Your mother’s son’s head may rest in yon niche,” said Peregrine, impatiently, “if we don’t decide which way we’re going to

move on—and decide the right way—”

Appledore gestured him to silence and patience. The philosopher divided his beard with both hands and stroked each clump. “To the right,” he said, musingly, after a moment, “the road leads down, down into the great heartland, so to speak, of the Central Roman Empire, where there is to be sure both repressive government and repressive religious orthodoxy, with each heresy striving to become orthodoxy—but at least the orthodoxy and the heresy is of a more familiar and predictable kind. To the middle,” he gestured, “the road leads on more or less, seemingly, on this same level . . . perhaps because this same level is neither up nor down but as it were—”