The Implacable Hunter (3 page)

He rose, without haste – always gazing at Lucius – and went and stood over him. Then he stooped, and dipped a forefinger into Lucius’s cup. One lazy drop of the heavy dark
wine hung at Paulus’s finger-tip. It seemed to hang there for a long time; Paulus’s hand was motionless, only the
winedrop
trembled and then fell with an inaudible splash on Lucius’s right wrist.

In a strange voice, soft yet strong with authority, gentle but exactly incisive, so that his words seemed, as it were, to punch little holes in the air, Paulus said: ‘You will not write your paraphrase, Lucius. Tonight you will sleep, and
tomorrow
when you arise your right hand will be palsied.’ Then he returned to his seat.

Lucius blinked, smiling crookedly, rubbing his wrist very hard with a napkin; and Melanion whispered to me, with a grim smile: ‘By the gods, Diomed, what a merchant they will make of this little Pharisee! And what a physician will be lost!’

‘Or soldier,’ I said.

And Lucius was now rubbing his wrist against his thigh, while Soxias, delighted with the atmosphere of consternation which Paulus contrived to spread – and being, I fancied, somehow namelessly afraid himself – laughed hoarsely; and sent over his cup, a great goblet of gold set with emeralds, crying: ‘Keep it for Solomon’s sake! … Serve you right, Lucius – every man for his own gods and devils! … Eh, Diomed?’

‘It is the policy of Rome –’ I began.

‘– Look out, gentlemen!’ cried Soxias. ‘Here comes Diomed the Manhunter! –’ he was amusing himself with me, now ‘– The names they call him in Tarsus! All cold-blooded, too: a turtle to snap, a crab to grip, a squid with eight arms to catch you and a bellyful of black ink to hide behind, an eel to slither away, a limpet to cling, an
unopenable
oyster –’

As he paused for an instant to think, Paulus said: ‘– Garlic?’

‘What garlic?’ asked Soxias.

‘Garlic, saffron, spices and salt. Stew Diomed with these, and he would be a fish dish, fit for a king’s table.’

‘First catch me,’ said I.

‘I don’t feel well,’ said Lucius, suddenly. ‘My fingers tingle.’

‘I have eaten man,’ said Soxias, watching the company from under his eyebrows. ‘The chest and the haunch are the best cuts. But having paunched your man, you must let him hang three days; and then seethe him for twenty minutes in water before roasting … Oh, but that brings us to the
subject
of gods again.’

Lucius staggered to his feet. Beckoning two slaves, Soxias said: ‘Take my lord Lucius to the vomitorium.’

‘What is the connection between roast man and gods?’ asked Tibullus, a shy little plump gentleman who had spent the past thirty years in scholarly retirement, writing a History of Asia.

Afranius said: ‘Don’t you know? Everything is god that comes to Soxias’s pantheon. He worships them all, and believes in none.’

‘No, no,’ said Soxias, with a certain gravity. ‘I believe in all of ’em, my boy, all of ’em. Don’t you mock. Everything is a god that is believed in. What connection between roast man and gods, asks Tibullus. Well, I dined once with some man-eating black men who worshipped quite a potent little god made of ebony. It was when I was young and poor and carefree. I got hold of a ship and went to Africa.’

‘Young and poor and carefree – you simply got hold of a ship?’ I said.

‘That’s right. And a cargo of wine and stuff. I cruised down the coast of Africa, where the forest grows down to the sea and the sea runs into the rivers. Nobody has ever scratched Africa yet, to this day. The people came out to meet us with clubs and spears, but after a few drinks of wine and a length or two of coloured cloth I had their king eating
out of my hand – he loved me like a brother – big strong fellow, a Hercules.’

‘He showed me this wooden god of his: a badly carved image of a hermaphrodite, with a backside like a pumpkin and breasts like cucumbers, black as coal. As nearly as I can pronounce it, they called it
’Ngo
;
and to this thing they sacrificed boys and girls whom they afterwards cooked and ate. Our priests do likewise, only ours eat beef and mutton.

‘Well, the king of this rancid mob told me that whoever touched this
’Ngo
would be struck dead. To prove it, he got a prisoner out of the fattening-pen and had him pushed forward at spear-point to touch the idol. Man was grey with fright, but what had he to lose? He touched the god, turned a back-somersault, and fell dead. King asked me, now did I believe in the power of his god –?’

‘Did you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Soxias, wiping his mouth.

‘So you touched it?’ asked Afranius.

‘A business-man takes no unnecessary chances, my friend – oh no. I sent to the ship for a man who hadn’t seen what had been going on, and I said to him: “Go and get me that image, will you?” He went and tucked this
’Ngo
under his arm, and dropped it at my feet. So I picked it up. It was only wood.’

‘But you had been prepared to believe in it,’ I said.

‘I am a broad-minded man,’ said Soxias. ‘Where was the evidence that
’Ngo
was not the God of All Gods? Africa is full of surprises. The long and short of it was, the king wanted his god back. I said: “Uh-uh! First, comes a little matter of ransom.”

‘The rivers there are full of gold: the common people keep the gold dust, and the king keeps the larger pieces. Also, they have elephants like we have mice. I came home with gold in ballast, and ivory, as much as I could carry. And a
few of the biggest and strongest men, and the prettiest girls for slaves.’

‘And the king got his god back?’ asked Paulus.

‘Why, no. I kept
’Ngo
for luck; nailed him – or her, or it – up for a figurehead. It brought me good fortune.’

‘But not the king,’ said Paulus.

‘I don’t know. I sold him to an elderly widow in Sicily. I suppose she fed him pretty well. His wife went to a Greek dealer…. But to return to my point: that wooden god really did have the power to strike a man dead.’

‘The man’s belief in it struck him dead,’ said Melanion.

Soxias said, brightly: ‘Yes! And
’Ngo
struck me lucky because, you see, I believe in only the good-natured side of the gods.’ And then, looking at me, he closed one eye in a slow and malevolent wink. ‘Graven images,’ he said, smiling at Paulus, ‘I have a little graven image here in my house which would bring the proudest of you sprawling before her on the floor for my amusement!’

‘Technically,’ I said, ‘strictly technically, it
might
be
construed
as an offence not to show respect for, say, any image of the deified Augustus –’

‘Stamped on a coin, for instance?’ said Soxias. ‘I don’t mean that; although you know and I know that for a sufficient number of bits of gold, stamped with the image of a pig’s arse, even, there’s not one man or woman in ten
thousand
that wouldn’t grovel. No, no. I am referring not to a coin, or any number of coins, either gold or silver, but to exactly what I said: a little graven image – of a goddess, to be exact.’ His eyes were twinkling now at Cassius Barbatus, sometimes called Poor-Rich Barbatus: rich, because he had spent a great fortune amassing one of the most extensive and exquisite collections of rare gems in the world; poor, because he so passionately loved beauty for its own sake that he could not bear to be separated from any part of it.

Barbatus lived quite blissfully, calm and unruffled, in a
subtle world of facets and colours and curves too refined for my comprehension; a kindly, courtly, harmless old
gentleman
, very proud of his lineage. In his fine house, guarded by six strong slaves and surrounded with treasures, he ate mutton broth out of an earthenware dish and drank sour wine; but, two or three times a week, he dined sumptuously at the houses of rich friends where he was always
welcome
.

If, in a dispute concerning the origin or the value of some work of art, you said: ‘Barbatus says …’ there was an end of discussion. And he carried with him an infection of serenity. It was good to see him, at ease in his almost
threadbare
robe, wearing on his thumbs and forefingers rings that Caesar himself might have kept in a locked cabinet.

‘I would like Barbatus’s opinion,’ said Soxias, slowly, ‘of a little something I picked up the other day.’

‘Most happy!’ cried Barbatus. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure.’

‘Something rather special,’ said Soxias.

‘You were speaking,’ I said, ‘of graven images?’

‘Everything in its proper order,’ said Soxias.

Lucius came back, leaning heavily upon his attendants, who helped him to his place. His great face, palely
glistening
and veined all over with red, was like one of those roots farmers preserve as curiosities because they appear more animal than vegetable. He blubbered: ‘Soxias, you must make that fellow unsay what he said…. He has the Evil Eye…. He will enchant, bewitch …’ Then furiously, to Paulus: ‘You must call your spirits off, do you hear?
Otherwise
…’

Melanion said to Soxias, with his lowering smile: ‘Better send Lucius home to bed. There is not much fun left in him now, I think.’

Soxias ordered: ‘Take him home, take him home.’ Then he said to his secretary, a swarthy bearded man who never
spoke and whose name nobody knew: ‘Fetch the black shagreen box that the Persian brought.’

The secretary bowed and went away while Lucius, crying: ‘He will bewitch, he will fascinate!’ was carried from the table.

‘This thing of which I speak,’ Soxias went on, ‘nobody knows who made it or how – perhaps Barbatus will know. Naming no names, I had it off a Persian who stole it from a Greek who got it from a Sidonian character who beat about the Euxine river-mouths. It is, I am told, a true image of Eurynome who, I am told for a fact –’ he smiled at Paulus ‘– created the world. Did she, Barbatus?’

‘So we are informed by reliable authorities,’ said Barbatus, gravely, looking eagerly towards the dark secretary who was slowly returning, carrying with infinite care a square black box bound with silver, ‘for in the beginning, the world was without form and all elements were intermingled in Chaos, and thus without order. From this Chaos, Eurynome sprang, naked and beautiful, dancing.

‘She divided the heavens from the earth and the waters, and made the light which she wore in her hair and, whirling in her dance, scattered about the firmament in the form of the sun and the moon and the stars. She was the mother of all created things in their order: from the lowest in the depths of the waters to the highest, which is Man, who alone can stand upright and turn his head to look at the stars. For, with a clap of her beautiful hands, she made the wild north wind which she twisted into the great Serpent, out of whose love for her Eurynome produced the universal Egg, which the Serpent cracked in his mighty grip, releasing all the forces of Being.’

‘Now where,’ asked Soxias, unfastening the box, ‘have we heard this story before? Eh, Paulus? I thought it was Moses who brought it away, together with a few articles of jewellery, from the Egyptians! Well, here is Eurynome –’

Paulus’s reply, if he made any, must have been lost in a general cry of wonder at the object that stood revealed in the soft light of the perfumed lamps.

Even I caught myself exclaiming: ‘Aie! It is alive!’ and
indeed
the figure of Eurynome really was moving. She swayed ever so gently and then turned slowly in a full circle. I could see, at a second glance, that she was standing on the tip of one toe upon a perfect polished ball of some gem-stone of various shades: at the bottom it was black as jet, the black changed to deep blue, the deep blue to lighter blue which, in its turn, merged into a limpid rose colour, the whole
seeming
to imprison a straining radiance, so that one felt that if by some chance this ball should break, there would be a letting loose of light to dazzle the world.

Nobody could ever know what love and inspired toil had been dedicated to the making of this thing. Between
Eurynome’s
toe and the top of the ball was a little space of crystal so pure that she appeared to be separated from the ball of light by nothing but a clear spark of this light itself. She stood, so exquisitely balanced as to rock and pirouette in obedience to every breath, only to return ineluctably to her poised uprightness.

The stone of her body was of all the colours in heaven and earth, but her long swirling hair was of a red that was almost black where it began, fading through innumerable subtle shades to a translucent yellow where it ended. Twined about her body was a black snake whose head, neither reptilian nor human, she caressed with her left hand while she held it at arm’s length. Her right, straining high, supported the bowl of a cup – the heavens – thin as beaten gold, but cut out of the living crystal, all angry red and smoky black. And from the black rim of the cup of heaven to the black bottom of the ball of the world, this marvel measured about twice the length of a man’s hand.

We were all silent, then, for as long as it takes to draw a
fresh breath – all but Soxias, and he said, in his best
merchant’s
voice: ‘The remarkable thing about it, really, is that it is all carved out of the one piece. There couldn’t have been two such bits of stone. And what balance! Just blow and she spins like a feather in a drain!’ He leered at Barbatus who stood, frozen with awe.

Afranius muttered: ‘Does he want to sell her? A man would give –’

Melanion interrupted him. ‘– Hush! Soxias is about to have his fun.’

Barbatus, who had been momentarily smitten dumb, said: ‘Yes. Here is, indeed, the First and the Last! Oh, Soxias, if I were the millionaire I once was, I would say: “Take
everything
, Soxias; take my money and my lands and my houses, but give me this Eurynome!”’

Then, to our bewildered embarrassment, this stately old gentleman covered his face and bowed his head as if he were weeping in silence. Only Soxias was unmoved by this.

He said: ‘What’s the matter, Barbatus? You are quite right to like this piece – I knew you would. That’s why I showed it to you. I’m not the man to keep a pretty thing locked in a box. I don’t blame you for what you say; I don’t mind telling you I paid a pretty penny for this item. Still, why talk of money? I don’t want money, I’ve got money. If I took gold by the handful and chucked it into the river, a handful every minute, I shouldn’t live long enough to get to the bottom of my coffers. Ask Melanion … eh, Melanion?’