The Book of the Beast (20 page)

The ancient slave brought candles, and bread and wine for Vusca’s repast, then crept off to his quarters on the upper floor.

Vusca ate, and inspected his hunting weapons. Then he doused the light.

Even here, over the quiet night, he could make out the trumpets from the Fort. He had not heard them for a long while.
Gates
, and the first and second watches. Then there was some clatter from a nearby brothel that cut other sounds off from him. He resented that. He visualised the drunken party, the men topped up with lechery and the whores loud with beer, the bad musicians, all the stuff of a paltry world that he had looked down on and which now he nearly envied.

The party guttered and went still at last. An owl cried over the roofs of the town. The dining room, where the slave had taken him, looked on the garden court (weeds and a cracked urn) and he saw the stars, and the opposite roof over the colonnade and vaguely the stars darkened and the tiled roofs, the pillars, the urn, came clear. An hour to
cockcrow
, dawn. And something was moving on the tiles there,
something -

Vusca sat in his shadow like stone. What was on the roof? He thought of the owl, the wide wings, a dart of a head -then it was gone.

In the stillness, sharp as a needle, Vusca heard the noise of something inside an upper room across the court.

It was not the slave. The slave slept at the other end of the house. It did not sound like the slave, either. It lightly shuffled, and hopped.

Vusca gripped one of the spears. The knife was in his right hand.

He went to the place where the stair was, and climbed up sightless, silent, to the second storey. He heard the noise again at once, behind a door, a bird’s noise, scuttering and pecking about.

He felt nothing now. His heart raged, but he was numb, as if from poison.

He opened the door, and pushed it, and went through.

It was a room without furnishing, save for some old sacks. A window showed grey sky, and the other way in.

Under the window something was feeding. It glanced up, and a coil of black tissue trailed from its mouth back to the torn-out human heart that lay before it. The mouth was not a mouth, but the beak of a gigantic bird. The eyes shone, two mauve stars came in with it at the window.

Vusca knew it. He knew it for the demon on the amulet, and also he knew it for his only son. Then he plunged forward, kicked it down, crashed upon it, and drove the knife through its left eye into the mindless brain beneath.

The hands and arms held him in a desperate embrace as it died. It was the only time Vusca had been held in the arms of his son. When they let go, the creature was stretched under him, the beak open and the remaining eye glaring.

Vusca stood up. He felt neither triumph nor grief, only an awful freezing coldness. For a time he stayed there, aimless, and the sun started to come and
cockcrow
sounded miles away. The dreadful thing, the worse thing was, he did not know what to do.

It was broad day when he thought of something. He could detect the slave creeping about below by then, and sparrows twittered in the garden court.

Vusca rolled the body of Petrus into a corner, among the sacks. Then he struck fire, and gave the room to it.

When he was sure the flames had hold, he went down and collected the slave, explaining to him that the house was burning. The slave sobbed as they went into the street. Soon a crowd collected, and watchmen came running to tackle the blaze. Vusca got away easily in the confusion. Probably they would save most of the house, but not the upper room. Petrus had had his funeral pyre. He had even had tears, though they were the tears of a slave, and shed in ignorance.

He did not go back to the villa. He sent a man, discovered in a tavern, a former legionary who had served under him, and was known to Lavinia, to fetch the shield and breastplate and swords. The man was an habitual drunkard, but could be trusted in the morning, if offered money. That was what the
Auxilia
, the legions, had become. He told the man to ask after his son’s wife.

When the fellow returned he had had a drink or two, but carried all the gear in an untidy bundle. He grumbled, not bothering as to why it was wanted, said he had had nuisance with Vusca’s slaves who seemed to think thievery was afoot. There had been another murder, in the native slum over the river - the heart of the victim was missing. And there had been a fire at Vusca’s son’s house on the west side, did Vusca know? Vusca said he had heard.

“And my daughter-in-law?”

“Ah that,” said the soldier, ‘
two
of ‘em. A fine boy, and a little girl. Now maybe you think that calls for a cup of wine?”

Vusca paid him and gave him his wine, and left him in the tavern.

Vusca went out carrying his nondescript bundle, wrapped in the old army cloak.

He had prayed she would die, and the progeny would die too.

Now he should go to the villa after all, go with the knife, see to it. Simple, to kill a child with amethyst eyes. But he knew he could not.

He sat on a stone bench in the street, near to a baker’s. All the town passed him, the carters and loafers, the powdered girls with their attendants, a Christian priest, a sweating bricklayer who asked him to move his feet and said, when he did, “Thanks, dad.”

Vusca sat all day on the bench. No one knew him. He was some old worn-out dad to this town where he had lived his manhood and commanded the Fort and walked the arrogance of Rome into the streets.

When it was dark, the whores began to call from their lamplit doors.

He shouldered his life and his soul, and went to the temple of Mars.

He had finished the priests’ wine. Only death could warm him now. Retullus Vusca, purified for the act by an elder priest-hood, took up the sword. He drove it in through the abdomen, upward, leaning into the agony to meet the point, until it bit into his heart. Then he rested. The stroke had been exact. He need do nothing more. He was not afraid. He did not mind the pain, which was -already flowing out from him. A tender warmth blossomed where the pain had been, on the blade in his heart.

It was then he discovered the final task still to do. By the miracle of the sword cut, a warning had been left to him, under his hand, to give—somehow he must achieve it.

The Roman crawled over his blood to the spot where the Medusa shield leaned on the wall. Through the nothingness of death, he struggled to see and feel her wounded face.

He prayed for an impossible strength. The god heard him.

As he fell back on the floor of the cell, Vusca dragged the shield with him. It covered him against the cold and dark. He could sleep now.

Eyes Like Emerald

The Madman

My apprehensions come in crowds;

I dread the rustling of the grass;

The very shadows of the clouds

Have power to shake me as they pass.

—Wordsworth

Because it was obvious he was mad, the crowds in the market made way for him. Only when he seemed likely to prove difficult did they shove at him, though once or twice urchins, and others nearly as or more unfortunate than he, pelted him with clods of dung and small sharp pebbles off the ground. Formerly, he might have been well-dressed, fashionably got up. Now the doublet was unlaced, half the points ripped out, the shirt filthy and torn, and he had lost a shoe. His hair was matted. Some said he had been come on sleeping or swooned among the pig-pens, like a regular prodigal. Even those that attacked him were wary, however, for he was young, and strong in his body. He might have been handsome, but for the affliction, and a curious film across his dark eyes.

Near the area where the pig market gave on the Dyers Street, a commotion ensued. A bird-seller was coming down with his wares in their cages strapped on all over him, and met the madman with twenty paces between them. Instantly every bird in its cage went wild, fluttering and cheeping, dashing itself on the wicker bars. The bird-seller tried vainly to quiet his charges. Seeing the madman, too, he nervously pressed back and invited him to pass. The lunatic, though, appeared smitten with weird fright. He fell against a wall, and beat his fists on his head. Then, with a shout, he ran straight at the bird-seller and felled him. The man went down hard at the impact and some of his cages were splintered and the panic-struck birds sprayed up into the sky. The madman meanwhile ran roaring up Dyers Street, where a few came out and pursued him, thinking he was a robber making off with something.

He was lost again in the alleys on the west side of the markets.

Raoulin
, said a voice in his head,
you must go at once to the university
.

No
, he answered.
No
.

In the courtyard of the Sachrist, the grave tutor led them in a discussion in the Platonic mode, but a girl stood under the colonnade, with a skull in her hands. Blood dripped from her skirt. The master indicated her. “Here we view the progress of corruption.” And her flesh slid from her bones. Only a skeleton at last, holding in its latticed hands the second skull.

The madman sprang up from his bed of refuse under the ruined wall, and ran away.

Images hunted him through the alleys of Paradys like dogs. He would race until he went down, and then they were on him.

Even as he ran, he heard their belling behind him.

Raoulin
, said the voice.
Raoulin
.

Yes
, he said. But he did not know who Raoulin was.

Find a priest
, said the voice.

He had sinned, and would die unshrived.

For some priests had already passed him, going up to the cliff of the colossal Church. They told their beads and murmured as they walked, unaware of anything beyond them in the world. Only one, younger than the rest, glimpsing the madman, quickly crossed himself and looked away.

What could he say to a priest?

I, a poor sinner… I lay with the dead. My fault, my great fault.

In the night, he travelled aimlessly, an escaped beast that takes the City for the jungle, and so cannot comprehend it. Down along the quays he rambled. The rats watched him as he drank from the dirty river.

Under the water he saw a corpse go by, her hands clasped at her bosom, her hair brushing his drinking lips.

Near where some ships were moored with swags of sails across their broad arms, a fire was alight on the stones. Men sat dicing and he slunk closer, attracted to some forgotten code of fellowship.

Presently the men were aware of a presence.

“Something’s out there.”

“A dog. Can smell our dinner broiling.” (This could have been true, for Raoulin had noticed that meat and spices cooked over the fire in a pot.)

“Doesn’t the scripture say, as you do even to the least of my brothers?” asked another man, and digging in the pot with his knife, he took out a bit of meat, and threw it away into the dark where Raoulin was.

The other men cursed him. The benefactor cursed them louder.

Raoulin gnawed the meat down to the bone. But when he reached that bone, his gorge rose, he flung the bone from him and ran away from it, into the jungle tangle of the night.

In the hour before the summer dawn, two women went by the broken shed he had found to lie in, sweating and tossing and dozing, and they heard his sounds, and glanced as they crossed the doorless door. They were two harlots from the quays, who plied there dusk to dusk.

“Well,” said the taller girl, “there’s one won’t be wanting our comfort.”

And they laughed in the way of women who have nothing on earth to find amusing, and can therefore be amused by anything.

When they were gone up the shadowy path, Raoulin shuffled to the shed’s opening. He had an idea, a want, to go after. No sooner did he feel this, and act on it, than his mind was wonderfully swept clean.

No images or thoughts or voices started up to appal him. With a blissful singleness of purpose, he climbed behind the two women.

In a brief while he saw them before him again, outlined in the black by some vagary of night-sight that had come to him.

They did not converse, and walked sluggishly, doggedly. Then one hesitated, and turned to look back with a gleam of her pale face.

“Something is behind us.” The tone was not amusement but dread, now.

“Oh you and your night fancies. Three years you’ve worked the bank with me, and you still see ghosts.”

“I saw its eyes. Green, like a cat’s. But up in the air.”

The other turned then. She stared at Raoulin, and did not apparently make him out at all.

“There’s nothing. If there was, they’ll want the same as the others. Charge twice for a ghost.”

They went on, and Raoulin continued after them, though hanging back rather more. Instead of the roiling abyss within him, now he knew a dim excitement. It was not hunger or thirst, nor lust, yet it was something, a need that was undeniable, though nameless.

In an impoverished street whose tops bowed together, the harlots parted. The scared girl flitted away under an arch. The other pushed open a door and went into the night hole beyond.

There was no bolt or lock to the door. It was simple to steal upon it, to peer in at the crack.

The girl had lit a candle, which made a huge light in the nothingness. Raoulin saw her like a cameo, white on umber. There was another, too. A man unbeautifully asleep on a pallet, who at the light sat up and snarled, “Is that you? What have you got?”

The harlot took out a few coins from her sleeve and let them fall into his hand.

“Is this all? You’re not keeping anything back, slut-face? I’ll—’

“I know what you do if I try to cheat you. And it’s harder, my work, with bruises.”

“Well and good. Now take a penny and go out and get me a pot of ale.”

“Sweet Jesus. At this hour? It’s almost morning and haven’t I been out all night—’

The man rose up and slapped her glancingly across the head.

“Stop your nagging. Do as you’re bid.”

The girl palmed the penny and came suddenly back to the door.