Аврам Дэвидсон: Peregrine : primus

Rider’s ward. A sound rose in his throat and broke upon his lips, and no hand moved now at all to keep his silence.

Appledore stirred, said, low, “Of what we have seen and heard, we three, this night which has now ended, it would be best, I think, if we are never called upon to speak of between us ever again.”

But Peregrine knew that he himself had seen more than either of the other two. And he kept his hopes. And he kept his silence.

And the greyness of the earliest morning turned a soft and a warm color, and the Sun came swimming up from wherever the Sun had spent the night. And the birds took their small heads from under their small, warm wings, and all the birds began to greet the day. And Peregrine knew that, whatever the day should bring, or the night succeeding this day, whatever danger night succeeding night should or would or might successively bring, Peregrine knew that he was able to meet it. And to endure it.

PART

P art of Peregrine’s mind continued to be occupied with the remembrance of the eyes of Princess Poppyseed; part of it returned again and again to the word of the Rider on the White Horse. “There is no escape, save through the Gates which our fathers would have died rather than enter, preferring death in its familiar forms to life, therein, in its unfamiliar And it was with a mixture of lust, love and foreboding, that he attended to his gear, testing swordblade and arrowhead with his thumb, and seeing to the replacement of the missing foodstuffs and examining the hooves and shoes of the mules.

In these essential tasks his moody attentiveness was almost matched by Claud’s moody inattentiveness. In the short time since their having left Sapodilla the page’s slack mouth had become firm, his dull eyes had begun to show an unfamiliar sparkle, and the sores round his face had quite dried up. Even now, although he was subdued, his manner was new and different. And so, almost the moment he turned abruptly to speak, Peregrine had expected him to do so.

Said Claud; r ‘I need a lay.”

Said Perry: “You won’t get it from me,”

“Say, I ain’t your half-brother, and I know you ain’t either. No, I thought that the girls here were the same as the girls back home, only, like I heard they know a thing or two as the homegirls don’t. Well, this one in the kitchen here, so her name’s Amoeba, or something like that, nice pair of—Well, I says, ‘Girl, I got something real big for you and there’s nobody in the stable now, let’s go, hey?’ And—you know what she says to me? You’re not a-going to believe this maybe, but I swear by my cod it’s true: She says, ‘ What will you pay me?’

“Oh!” said Peregrine, intrigued, “I’ve heard about that. ‘Whores,’ they call them, don’t they? Well, go on—”

“Is that what it means? I thought it was just a word. Well, the long and short of it is, she says it’s a sin. And what does that mean? She says, ‘If I got to risk hell-fire, you got to pay me for it, Big Something,’ she says. Then she started lecturing me about my immortal soul, and, before long, you know, it wasn’t big at all, anymore. And I says, ‘Forget it,’ and went to muck out the mules’ stalls. I mean, it’s not as though she was a priestess at some great temple where the girls ‘hang up their girdles for the goddess,’ as they say: she’s just a girl! —Funny kind of religion, is what I call it. Asceticism is one thing, an interesting philosophical discipline; but I ain’t no philosopher, I’m only a healthy young fellow with a heavy prong: cacadaemon!”

And he spat into the straw.

Appledore, who had been listening with only now and then a glint of wry amusement, now said, gravely, “Bring me the skin and the bones of Cleopatra the Queen, and I will enconjur her up into full life for you and your pleasure. Stripling.”

“I wouldn’t consider it,” said Claud, after considering it a moment. “She might leave splinters.”

Peregrine began to heave harness up onto the beasts. “Enough of this bawds’ prattle,” he said, concealing his grin. “Onward!”

They took a back-path, grass-grown, in preference to the main roads, for rumor had it that no less than three successive cities through which the highways passed had proclaimed their own Caesars Augustus and were prepared to march on Ravenna and depose whatever claimant was currently (and precariously) occupying the Imperial Throne: but nobody in town knew which city had proclaimed what Caesar. Even assuming that the three

travellers were able to find out in sufficient advance to declare for, say, Marcus, instead of for, say, Romulus or Valentinusor what might ever be the names—they were still certain, at best, to lose their beasts and gear to the commissary-major.

Caesar might have one name, or he might have a different name, but Caesar always had a commissary-major. So Appledore said.

“I was once proclaimed Caesar myself,” he said, as they wound upwards between boulders and scree along a trail no wheel had rolled, surely, over.

“And I was once proclaimed Son of the God at the Temple of the Oasis of Jupiter-Ammon-Alexander.”

“No, for true, Perry. It was in Byzantium, where anything can happen. Troops of soldiers were rioting for their back pay and had looted the wine shops. ‘ Proclaimed is Chrysodorus, chaste champion of orthodoxy!’ one band was shouting. And, across the square, another outfit was shouting, ‘Chrysodorus is a crvpto-Monophysite, and buggers little boys! Proclaimed is Basilianus, conqueror of the Avars!’ —or whichever barbarian nation had made a temporary submission most recently, for ready cash and a chance to send back for fresh horses. Well, gentlemen, they had somehow gotten a purple robe and were tussling over it and someone tugged at the moment when someone else had stopped tugging, and it went sailing through the air and by the inscrutable ordinance of the Fates, lo! it fell right smack onto me! Sudden silence in the square. And one soldier—a Norsky, a Varangian, by the looks of him—yelled, A sign! A sign from the Great White Christ!’ They always talk that way, you know.

“Next thing I knew, they had hoisted me onto a shield, after asking in the most deferential manner conceivable in a bunch of thugs who had gotten half-soused and could as easily have subjected me to the most conceivable tortures, ‘What’s your name, O Brother? And how will your Imperial Highness choose to be known?’ ‘Julius the Second,’ I said. And they went staggering through the precincts of the Golden Mile, bellowing, ‘Proclaimed is Julius II, chaste champion of orthodoxy, conqueror of the Avars, Caesar Augustus most serene, Sebastocrator, Pantocrator, Autarch, Autocrat, and unquestionable Emperor of the East!’

Peregrine ducked to avoid a low-crouching branch. “Zeuspater!” he muttered.

“They went looking for a crown, and scarlet, pearl-encrusted slippers and all the rest of the Regalia, but on the way they found another drammery they hadn’t cracked; when they were totally in liquor, Your Servant to Command slipped out of the purple robe and draped it around the big Norsky; then I skedaddled for The Sweet Waters of Asia and parts more distant as fast as my legs, the ferry-wherry, a relay of swift horses and my byno-means-boundless purse would take me. For as a philosopher, I wanted no part of the precarious Purple.”

“Chronos!” whispered Claud. The mules strained at the boulders and slipped on the scree. The air was getting thinner, and was scented with pine-balsam. “Did you ever hear what happened afterwards?”

Appledore nodded, then set his wizard’s cap to rights again.

“It seems that when they sobered up and saw the big Varanguard wearing the purple robe which none of them, including himself, could remember having put there, ‘A sign from The Great White Christ!' they cried, and they proclaimed him Caesar under the style and title of Isidore III—”