Аврам Дэвидсон - Peregrine - primus

“No, friends, No sir! I don’t want to be a king!”

There was a silence there on the plateau. Then Claud gave a disappointed grunt, and Appledore a weary sigh. Then the latter said, “Well, well, and I thought perhaps to end my days as the

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patronee of a powerful king, and teaching philosophy in a stoa, but it seems that no one nowadays is minding the stoa. So be it, boy. Shall we then return the crown to its previous concealing dust, and let the dragonlet return to add to its hoard? It might serve as bait as it were, and you—for I shall long have gone to learn true philosophy from the spirit lips of Aristotle and Epictetus in the mead of golden asphodel—but you might mark its location in your mind, and return hither some day to recruit your fortune from the recruited hoard, eh?” There was a longer silence. Peregrine plucked at his red lips.

“No ...” he said. “No ... Let us wrap it in a napkin and conceal it in our baggage, say, between the pod of musk and the ten measures of barley meal. Perhaps . . . That is, who knows ... I mean . . .

“See to that, Claud,” he concluded, as though a bit annoyed that no one else had suggested anything, either, concerning the purpose and future of carrying the mysterious crown with them. And his fingers stroked the new soft beard slowly springing up up on his cheeks and chin, then he mounted his mule and rode slowly off, they presently following him after the new-found treasure had been stowed away.

t t t t

Their next encounter was at a narrow cottage beside a grove standing in a dale, where a woman standing in a door about to empty a basin of dishwater gave a startled shriek and disappeared inside. “Ee! Reverend Mother! Men!” they heard her shrill. And in another moment out came bustling a stout and redfaced woman in a white robe and a black wimple, who sank, staff in hand, onto her knees before Appledore; who gazed at her with the almost utmost astonishment.

“O handsome, stalwart and lusty sir,” she cried, “spare, O spare the chastity of these religious ladies—meself included, for all that I’m long in the tooth, sure, isn’t me dedicated chastity as dear to me as to me younger sisters?—who have been just after fleeing from Rome, Boadicea is me name, and I come of a good, a fine, and why should I corfceal the fact from yezz?—a royal

family, in me native Celtland—fleeing from Rome where the accursed Stilicho, the Sassenach dog—for is there but the spit out of a devil’s mouth the difference between a Goth and a Saxon?— has been after extinguishin’ the sacred fire upon the altar of our Lady Vesta, may he niver know a moment’s rist, may his wife rigularly cuckold him with Athiopians, and may his yard niver grow hard agin as long as he lives, which may it be short! Sweet honey and noble harseman, say that yezz’ll spare our maidenheads, and may Our Howly Mither Vesta peep down upon yezz favorably from Hivven: do, sir! Do!”

Appledore twirled his withered moustachios, and gave a languishing leer, which he made haste to extinguish. “Hem! and, Harrumph, Reverend Madame, have no uncertainty but that my natural and inevitable lusts, though certainly awakened at the sight of your comely form and figure, will instantly subside upon learning your identity. However, weakened by years and by many fasts as I am, can I vouch for the constancy of my companions in this matter?”

The Chief Vestal Virgin let her jaw to drop at the sight of Peregrine and Claudius, who at that moment came cantering into sight, “Oh sure and be Vesta!” she exclaimed, “but ain’t there a two more o’thim, and two more of us a-trimblin’ with fear in th’ cottage there, it bein’ all the bit o’ convent that we’ve got to oursilves these days, which makes one a-piece for the Christian divvils to try to ravish: Och, allana! me deary sisters! After being the coddled daughters of hathen Rome, to be humped in a hovel by a trio of tramps!” And she lifted up her voice in a Brythonic, or, as it may have been, a Goidelic lamentation, in which she was interrupted by a third female.

“Your keening smacks a trifle of impiety,” said she, “Reverend Mother. Now that the Sacred Fire, attended with the infinite diligence of antiquity and splendor, has been suppressed, is it perhaps not inevitable that our vows of chastity be suppressed with it? If the inscrutable decrees of The Fates decree that we be ravished in this wretched retreat, why, what can we do, save submit seriously to Their sacred though severe decree?”

Mother Boadicea glared at her, venomously. “Shut yer gob, ye whure!” she said; “or I’ll give yezz such a puck wid me staff—”

By this time the third Vestal Virgin had emerged once again

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from the cottage, though she seemed uncertain upon which side of this knotty piece of theology to range herself; and both Peregrine and Claud reined in their beasts and all three faced all three. Truth to tell, the former could not recollect if the Virgins of the Vestal Fire had been professed at the age of seven or seventeen, or whether they had been supposed to serve until thirty-six or sixty-three; and he was fairly certain that he had heard of the extinguishing of the Fire by General Stilicho some several years back—an act which had resounded like a thunderclap throughout what remained of pagan Europe; in short, though the Mother Superior of what remained of the Vestal Virgins was indeed as she herself had acknowledged, viz. “long in the tooth,” the other two seemed by no means young—certainly, not as either he or Claud were prepared to understand Youth.

“Neither force nor constraint shall touch a thread of your garments, Reverend Lady,” he said, straightfaced; “nor those of your fellow-religious. For we have all three of us been raised by good pious pagan mothers,” and the long and short of it all was that before another few minutes had passed, the three vestals, still as virgin as before, were preparing dinner for Peregrine, Appledore, and Claud, out of the travellers’ provisions.

“Would that Stilicho had never extinguished the Sacred Fire,” observed Peregrine, wiping his mouth. The Vestal Virgins echoed his regret, though not all, perhaps, with the self-same heartiness; “—or,” he went on, “burned the Sibylline Books—”

At this reference to the other notorious act of the great Gothic general (who seemed, great or not, one way or the other to be obsessed with fires), the Mother Superior, who had needed no third invitation to address herself to the mugs filled from the wine skin, winked and smiled.

“Eh?” said Peregrine.

Mother Boadicea repeated the grimace, this time laying an index finger alongside of her nose.

“Why, whatever do you mean?” Peregrine enquired. “Did he not burn the Sibylline Books?”

At this Mother Boadicea raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, smoothed her skirts, and looked elaborately half-way over her left shoulder and, in short, appeared so much the very picture of a woman who wishes it known that she knows something which others know not: “Whisht!” she said. “Coosha, coosha, He did,

did he?—may no good cess befall his seed -ah, well, if you know that for a fact, far be it from me to tell yezz itherwise. Curiousity killed the cat, and, says I, serve it right for letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon 'I will.’ And if yezz was ivver to hear that some pious soul, the white the rest of them were runnin’ around wringin’ their hands and wailin’ like the beansidh, tuk and wrapped the Howly Volumes up in her pettycuts, substithuthin thereunfor an unexpurgated edition of the Satyricon in five volumes, which the cursed man nivver nowticed, nor could, bein’ unable to read a word not in his native Gothic—why, me pretty squireen, I give ye lave to deny the intire story: So there.” And with that she gave her coiffed and wimpled head an emphatic nod, and downed the rest of the goblet.