Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“Well, ‘one Vergil, a natural of Rome, and no mere denizen,’ do they have anything to do with this in Naples… I say nothing of the Bail of Brundisy…?” The wauling in my ear was Quint’s, to be heard above the clamor of the throng. There was in his voice some light and affectionate taunt that I had not been born in the City itself but in a fœderate town in the Italies’ south, well within the Empery, but nearer to where I now lived by the great Voe of Naples than to Yellow Rome itself. The so-well-paved Appian Way went straight and strait between Yellow Rome and Brundisy, but there branched off a branch of it for Naples. A young mage, not yet very well-established in his profession (or in public fame) did well to travel now and then to the Imperial capital, and gently press the thought that there was one (myself) useful to be friend of a friend (Quint) with a friend (the rich Etruscan) to the Court Imperial, to the Oliphaunt Throne…not to be lightly named: whosoever sate upon it.

I pressed my bearded lips to Quint’s smooth ear-hole, said loud and sharp, that we had throngs and thugs, all right: but neither one was anything to this particular display.

The throng howled, as the throng always would.

“Chin up, cock! Brave it out!”

“They’ll stretch that short neck!”

“Hang the hangman! A louse for the hangman!”

“You’ll scrag no more widdies nor prentices!”

“Up tails all!”

“Die! For a lousy stiver? Die! ”

The wretch’s face changed expression, but it changed slowly: now he had the sly look of a pig who had broken into a pea-patch, now he was pleased at the attention, now he scowled as some thick and gross insult struck home, now he looked desperately from side to side; always the hangy forced him on, as close to him as the butcher to the ox. All this passed before me and before Quint, and we stood and looked on; I was his guest, and he was the guest of Someone Important in Yellow Rome. Even a wizard, even if he did not want wealth, was willing to draw near to wealth, if he were young and new and scarcely known. And near to power, even if that sort of power he did not much want. Soon enough this procession would pass by, and then we would cross, cross safely on foot, for in Rome (and in Rome alone) no wheeled vehicle might pass through the streets in the day time.

In that case, in a sudden silence, what hooves were those, and what wheels? Quint, I saw, that Roman of Romans, knew at once: and would tell me soon enough…if I did not ask. The mob broke into noise again, its inalienable right, and though it was still shouting, it seemed to be shouting the same something, though not all at the same time. Half the yammering throng faced the nice little wagonette and its nice little mule, and the woman, half-veiled, who was in it. Her small slave-girl holding the sea-silk sunshade or ombello was beginning to be inattentive a bit and a bit the sunshade slipped.

And half the vulgus faced the procession and shouted and gestured, pointing, pointing—

The lictor had strode on, eyes down; and in fact by then he had gotten ahead of the procession and seemed rather to have forgotten it: lictors, too, have their secret private thoughts.

The soldiery slogged along in its fixed rhythms, paying no attention at all to the thing its ranks confined; probably thinking of the evening’s rations: bread, salt, garlic, parsley, wine, perhaps a bit of dried meat or a bit of dried fish — tunny harpooned in the bloody trapping pens, for instance — and the anticipated meal with its, perhaps, treat, meant far more to them than any execution of a sentence of death (death, to an old soldier, was more boring than exciting).

The hangman, whose attention was so suddenly besought by many cries and movements, pressed on. I noticed that the hangman pressed on.

What Quint, with his pale thin face and dark thin hair, noticed, was not known to me.

Who made up the mob rabbling and howling? The meanest class of citizenry, whose leather badges with S P Q Rstamped in gilt served to prove citizenship, made up the largest part. They had no money to buy anything and no mind to read anything, so a procession to the gibbet was an absolute gift for them.

Men, too, from all the peoples of the Empery were there: Franks with long hair and Celts with short and Ægyptians with none; pale Berbars from the Solitudes of Syrtica and of As’hara, sand as high as mountains and hills of solid stone pierced with holes where the Troglodytes live; dark Numidians who had seen the Sphynges flying in their thousands to drink of the waters at the sources of the Nile — of all other waters drink they not, of the Waters of Ægypt drink they not — and Gauls with their bearded chops, the wailing of whose dead fills the islands and the highlands of the misty great green darkling Sea of Atlantis between shore to shore of whose vasty waters might no bird fly; and Æthiops with emeraulds in their ears. Many indeed could I see (though not so many) were aliens from outside the Empery, and even the Œconomium.

I was indifferent at seeing or smelling the so-called Foul or Infamous Crafts such as the knackers and the carriers of dogs’-dung for the tanneries, for I still had the muck of the farmyards and the fernbrooks on my legs and feet, and the odor of dead beasts and dung-heaps was fresher to my nose-holes than those of ambergrise and nard.

And here and there, as so often of late (and some said, more and more often, and they darkly mumbled their gums about laws graven on the Twelve Iron Tablets about the artificial production of monsters and other omens…no one of course was ever able to find such laws) here and there through the mass went wandering a satyr or a centaur of, say, the size of a goat-kid. There were no weanling Lapiths to be seen, however; and who would know one, had there been? memory of one Cluco, a night-soil-man little wittier than a wittold, in my home-hamlet in the Bail of Brundisy, who used to stop anyone too purblind to avoid him, and confide, “My granddam, now, she seen a Laypith, she seen ‘un with a horn in the muddle o’ his forrid: which be the reason, she bein’ six months gorn wi’ child, that I has six finger on my left ’and.” What the logical, or even illogical connection between the two things were, no one was ever able to conjecture; certainly all local priests denied that ever there had been stories—“myths,” you might call them — of monoceroid Lapiths; and neither was anyone, lay or cleric, able to credit Cluco’s being able to invent such a story. But, however invented, tell it he did, decade after decade, to whoever could not trot faster than he could, and who — usually — was glad or let us say willing enough to avoid the presence of Cluco, polydactylous or not (for rhododactylos I assure you he wasn’t, and neither was he rosy-scented) with the dole of a very small coin or a not-quite-so-small chunk of bread: at which see Cluco become unseen; this may or may not have been more profitable than the night-soil business, but was certainly much easier.

When I mention the size of a goat-kid I refer to the centaurs, for the satyrs were man-sized (as I could have told anyone), and very near each creature was someone (invariably a shill) mentioning confidentially the name of the thaumaturge who’d made it, in some such words as, “That ’un’s the work of that same Septimus as keeps his crib atween Apollo’s Court and the Steps of Woe.”—why would anyone want a confected satyr or centaur? perhaps one of those newly-rich who kept a baby elephant in his atrium might want one, and for the same reason: show.

Thieves were there, in the vulgus; as they could not steal the golden spikes from the ridge-poles of the temples and the other public buildings, they cut the thongs of purses with their knives so much sharper than razors; sellers of snacks were there, for many a man had neither cook nor kitchen to dress a meal of victuals, and if he turned aside into a cheap eating-place he might miss something: but whether a rabbleman stewed hog-palates in vinegar or cut the thongs of purses or did, as was the right of citizens, nothing at all, something there had now changed and perhaps everything had changed. But the hangman wished to behave as though nothing had happened. The lictor, whose attention was now besought by many cries and movements, strode on, eyes down, and in fact by now he had gotten ahead of the procession. The hangman pressed on. A bit the woman’s sunshade slipped and a bit the veil, revealing to me a face of such extraordinary loveliness and purity that my breath was stopped.