The Implacable Hunter

by Gerald Kersh

  There was no need to put a threat into words. Lucius whispered: ‘If ever I cross that man again, may I –’ and he had no need to complete that oath.

  On our way to my house I asked Paulus: ‘What did your father say when Barbatus sent him his money?’

  ‘Nothing. He sent his grateful thanks. He looked at me, and sighed. But he said nothing.’

  ‘Had he yet been to see Soxias?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘His business went well, I hope?’

  Paulus said, with some irritation: ‘Why do you ask me? If you choose, you can know anybody’s business in Tarsus in an hour. I did not know that my father had any business on hand with Soxias, until last night. Did you think I was sitting at Soxias’s table on a matter of dirty commerce, Diomed? I was invited; I went. Why were you there?’

  ‘I was invited; I went. I generally do. One can always learn something new at Soxias’s table. Besides, Soxias is the most useful man in the world, if he happens to like you. He knows vastly more of what goes on than I do. Soxias has an eye at every hole and an ear at every door in the world. That’s the way I would have things, if I could. But with a different purpose from his…. However; your father’s business went well, I was hoping?’

  ‘I was angry with my father. I said that I was not playing the jester and eating dirt to make the merchants fat,’ said Paulus.

  ‘To which he doubtless replied: “Saul, can a starving man fight? Is a hungry bear strong? Is an unarmed man stronger than a man in armour with a sword? Money buys pontiffs, governors, generals. Money is not money. Money is strength. Can weaklings break chains? No. Are paupers strong? No. Gold is our spear, Saul, silver is our shield, Saul – money is liberty!” … Correct me if I’m wrong.’

  ‘You do not like my father,’ he said, without emotion.

  ‘It is not my business to like or dislike anybody,’ I said.

  ‘You cannot like my father, Diomed.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know him so well.’

  ‘Hold hard! I was merely following a line of reasoning, putting myself in your father’s position, Paulus. According to your argument, then, to know a man is to dislike that man. Not necessarily so! Following your reasoning, I might say: “Paulus does not love his father, since he feels that, knowing him, Diomed cannot like him.” Do you love your father, Paulus?’

  He shrugged that question away, and said: ‘You were asking about his business with Soxias. Was it satisfactory to my father? I think so. And what does it involve? I believe, copper ore and timber. I tell you because if it suits you to find out, you will find out.’

  I said: ‘Employ arithmetic. Copper plus timber connotes – what?’

  ‘Building?’ Paulus suggested.

  ‘True. But what else comes from the East? Hemp and pitch? Copper plus timber plus hemp plus pitch suggests –?’

  ‘Ships.’

  ‘To carry what?’

  ‘Cargoes. Grain, soldiers, anything.’

  ‘From where to where?’

  ‘From as far east as, say, Egypt – to as far west as Britain, perhaps.’

  ‘Bringing back what from Britain in ballast?’

  ‘Iron, and tin.’

  ‘With which we make what?’

  ‘Swords, axes, tools, knives –’

  ‘Fools, are we not? To pay good gold and silver for a few sticks of wood and lumps of ore?’

  ‘Why are you talking to me like this?’ asked Paulus.

  ‘A mood,’ I said. ‘To proceed; why pay when we can take?’

  ‘Why fight when it is cheaper to buy?’ Paulus replied, with a laugh.

  ‘A smooth answer,’ I said, laughing with him and leading him into my house. ‘But one of these days I hope to make you see the noble ideal of the Pax Romana.’

  ‘I am a Roman citizen,’ he said. ‘Never mock the power of gold and silver, Diomed.’

  He had me there, he thought.

  To avoid argument, I said: ‘True, Paulus, Roman citizenship is a costly thing to buy. Some men even pay for it with their blood. Your respected father must have thought it well worth whatever it cost him, or he’d never have bought it. Now it remains for you to earn it…. So long as you don’t eat dirt and play the jester merely to make the merchants fat.’

  Then my secretary brought me a parcel, long and heavy and wrapped in silk, carefully sealed. ‘From Barbatus,’ he said, ‘to be delivered into your hands. It was brought two hours ago.’

  I broke the seals. The silk covered a narrow box, in which lay a short curved sword. The scabbard and hilt were of ivory, alive with carvings of hunting-scenes, and extravagantly bejewelled. The blade was beautiful, keen as a razor for all its evident antiquity, and finely balanced: it was a pity, I thought, to waste such a blade on a hilt so valuable that fear of spoiling it might spoil one’s swordplay.

  There was a little gold scroll-case, too, and a letter from Barbatus addressing me as his ‘beloved and most honoured friend’. It said:

  Do not send thanks for this parting gift, for I am called away upon a journey with one companion, and would not have you with us yet awhile. This was the hunting-sword of King Darius. Alexander the Great took it at Issus, and often wore it. It was with this sword that Alexander slew his friend Hephaestion. A true history of the sword is drawn out on the accompanying scroll.

  Barbatus.

  And there was one of Barbatus’s inevitable postscripts:

  You will remark the pommel of this sword. It is what the Indians call an elephant’s pearl. Once in many generations, as a reward for outstanding virtue, one of the elephants is presented with a mark of the Elephant-God’s approval in the form of a pearl of ivory, which it wears embedded in the heart of its right tusk, this most sagacious and powerful of beasts being too modest to wear it displayed. The possessor of such a pearl is a King among elephants. These pearls are extremely rare. I have seen only one other, and that was spoiled by the saw of the workman who cut the tusk. It is believed to confer upon the human owner of it, immense strength, great endurance, keen foresight, good hearing, and a remarkable memory, all of which attributes Alexander undoubtedly possessed.

  B.

  I said: ‘This makes twice in the day that I have had occasion to be reminded of Alexander. These things go in threes.’

  ‘My cup seems to be making everyone rich,’ said Paulus.

  ‘You have known me for a while, now, Paulus, and ought to have watched me. What does it mean when a man like me talks like an old woman about “things going by threes”?’

  ‘I should say that although you never look like anything but a bronze statue of a gladiator in repose, broken nose and scars and all, you are nervous. What about, I don’t know. Neither do you, I think, or you would not be nervous about it.’

  ‘Good. Let us eat and drink. It is time for my daily meal. I hope we finish it.’

  I sat facing the north. Whatever was going to happen would happen there, because when I turned to the south I felt an uneasy tingling at the nape of my neck. I have come to rely on this sign, or presentiment – ignored it only once, when I was young, and will carry to my grave a dent in my skull to remind me how wrong I was.

  4

  LOOKING at my simple table Paulus said: ‘Diomed, I am honoured.’

  I knew what he meant. I put out a variety of dishes only for strangers. When I dine alone, or with an intimate friend, I eat plainly, in the old fashion. Egg to apple – given a fish or a fowl, a roast of meat, some fruit and a piece of cheese, together with good wine – what more does a man require for his complete enjoyment? Show me a refiner of honest appetites, and I will show you a man on his way down. In the beginning man ate dirt because he could get nothing better. And he progressed through eleven hundred ways of cooking a pig – to what? Raw goldfish, a paste of unborn mice with honey and caraway seeds, and maggots begotten of creamy cheese soaked in sweet wine? Bah! When you make luxury of what the jackals eat – I mean, when you step out of your way to acquire a taste an
d need nausea for a relish – you are making sophistication out of decent disgust, and are going home to the cloaca and the rats. Honest hunger is the best sauce.

  This evening we had a dish of eggs, a fish and a young lamb. I said to Paulus: ‘You’ll eat worse than this before you die, if you want to be a soldier. I say nothing of dead horses and fresh dogs: once, in the swamps, I fought a water-hen for a clutch of nearly-hatched eggs. I hadn’t the strength to catch the bird. The chicks were pulsating, but I ate them all but two, which I brought back to Sergius; and so he and I rallied the men, and we all had a supper of beef that night. And here I am.’

  ‘I like plain food,’ said Paulus.

  ‘Anchovies so salty they cut your throat and bread that breaks your teeth, washed down with sad water flavoured with sour wine, warm from your hip – these things you will learn to relish at the end of a long hard day,’ I said. ‘How many ways of dishing up a fish does your father’s cook know?’

  ‘I don’t know. You lead every conversation back to my father, Diomed. What do you want to know about him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I only asked you, before, whether you loved him. You told me that you did not.’

  ‘Excuse me; I did not say so.’

  ‘If you can remember our recent conversation, Paulus, you must realise that you have said everything.’ I went on, in gentle admonition: ‘If you have nothing to say, better say nothing.’

  But now Dionë began to sing in another room; some sad Cilician song of the forlorn love of a child of the Captivity alone among strangers. Whoever first made that song sang it drop by uncontrollable drop in tears to an outlandish twilight. And whoever picked it up let it out again, not from the heart but from the vulva. There is not much difference between the spirit that is refreshed by artificial woe, and the backside of Little Lucius that is titillated by a delicate bundle of twigs.

  Yet: ‘How sweetly Dionë sings!’ said Paulus.

  I said: ‘Yes, she has a pleasant voice. But I cannot say that I am very much in sympathy with such songs. Translated, she is howling:

  Oh pity me, pity me, pity me, pity me,

  Outcast and forlorn, oh forlorn,

  Naked and hungry, yea, hungry and thirsty,

  Far, far, far – oh far from my love!

  Which is silly; as when, if you will excuse me, your Jaël, plucking a little harp, says that she hangs it on a tree and, with a winning smile, asks how she can sing the Lord’s song in a strange land…. Twang!’

  ‘Dionë is extremely beautiful,’ said Paulus, ‘if you will allow me to say so.’

  ‘She is not a bad-looking girl. But Jaël, surely, is infinitely more beautiful?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I grant you, Jaël is beautiful, certainly.’

  ‘But what?’ I asked.

  ‘But nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon. I thought you had something to add. You say: “Oh, I grant you, Jaël is beautiful, certainly,” and there is a kind of shrug in your voice – somewhat as if I were trying to sell Jaël and you were anxious to buy her, but thinking fast to find a fault in her so as to lower the price,’ I said. ‘How long have you been married?’

  ‘We were betrothed when she was seven years old and I was nine. We were married when Jaël was seventeen and I was nineteen.’

  ‘A year ago.’

  ‘Eleven months. You see, sometimes family marries family, fortunes marries fortune, clan marries clan.’

  ‘Which makes for a certain locking of shields,’ I suggested, ‘a certain stability in defence and attack. A strong family is a very fine thing.’

  ‘Yes. Now my mother and Jaël’s father are very distantly related. Jaël’s parental grandfather’s sister was my mother’s cousin twice removed. Work out the relationship if you like,’ said Paulus.

  ‘It is remote enough,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. There is a genealogy. We trace our descent to the House of David, my dear sir.’

  ‘For that matter,’ I said, ‘it seems that one can’t spit around here without splashing the foot of somebody who’d be a prince in Asia Minor if the truth were but known.’ I was thinking of Dionë and her Artavazd, King of Kings. ‘But you are wise to keep such legends for strictly private conversation, my boy. Our friend Jesus of Nazareth had some such notion, I think – and much good it did him!’ Paulus did not like to be mentioned in the same breath with Jesus Christ – I hastened to soothe him: ‘Look at me! Stick a pin in me and the blood of Quirinus himself would squirt! In our family we regard Marcus Porcius Cato as little more than a zealous kind of civil servant! We have survived simply because we have taken good care to say nothing at all about it. Wild mares get with foal by the wind, as they say, and we are all sons of the same father. But I was interrupting, my dear Paulus.’

  ‘Concerning Jaël, and what you were pleased to call my ‘shrugging a but’. You have sharp eyes, Diomed. Have you never observed how closely Jaël resembles my mother?’

  ‘There is a resemblance. Only a slight resemblance. But your mother is one of the most beautiful women in Tarsus.’

  ‘And my sisters?’

  ‘The resemblance is stronger there, of course – but they are your mother’s daughters, so why should they not resemble her? Also consider this: your mother is not only a beautiful woman, she is a fascinating woman, she has the power to charm; she is a strong woman, and she can command obedience because she can compel many people to say to themselves: “I wish I were like Paulus’s mother.” There is much more to a resemblance than a physical similarity. If you love and admire someone – especially when you are young – you cannot help imitating that person in the intonation of your voice, in your gestures, in your dress, in your postures, and even in your way of feeling. Whoever is loved and admired founds a school and forms a fashion in spite of himself.’

  ‘Whoever is loved and admired; exactly,’ said Paulus. ‘Well, my mother has created Jaël in her own image. Thus, my mother loves Jaël, Jaël loves my mother, and my father and my sisters worship them both. However, when I bring myself to approach Jaël as my wife I am overcome with a feeling that not only am I about to perpetrate some nameless abomination with my entire family – I am going to lie with four women all of whom I find somehow repulsive.’

  I said: ‘You speak with little respect of your mother, Paulus.’

  ‘Do I? Then I express myself badly, or you pretend not to understand me. I have the deepest respect for my mother, and I honour her according to the Law.’

  ‘According to the Law,’ I said. ‘Save us from your Law! Such honour has too many loopholes…. And your father?’

  ‘My father is my mother’s husband,’ Paulus said, impatiently. Then he began to talk to me almost in the tone of an elderly gentleman with all his follies behind him, made wise by suffering and hardened in his opinions by a long series of disillusionments. It is at the same time comical and sad, when a softly-nurtured youth talks like this to a man whose cheek felt the edge of a sword before it knew the razor, as mine did; and who has mourned dead father, mother, brothers, wife and son, as I had before my twenty-fifth year.

  But I managed to keep a straight face as Paulus said: ‘Diomed! Beware of women! They will stop at nothing to gain power. They are sensual and greedy to the soul. They are all dangerous, devious, treacherous and lustful. There is no such thing as a truly virtuous woman. All their love is fleshly. Even good women use their purity only for vain and selfish purposes. They cannot help it – they are made so. Their youthful beauty is a delusion; and there is nothing so sickening as the hideousness of an old woman, because she is Woman unmasked. Woman is a quagmire – it is her nature to suck indiscriminately down into herself. She caresses in order to crush and crushes in order to swallow, having first bathed you in her saliva – like the Serpent, who found her, of all created creatures in Eden, the one that was open to his wicked counsel. Open, open, open! She is always open, like a pitfall. She gives birth to something small only to take it back again when it is large. She must squeeze
flowers to disguise the fact that she stinks like a slaughterhouse. She is the Cow of Egypt with an obscene belly. She is the crocodile of the Nile in her tears – she cries only to lure the pitiful within reach of her sepulchral mouth. Tears! Offend her – and your every word offends her if it is not her word too – and she will weep you to distraction. Say nothing, do nothing, and she will ask: “What have I done wrong?” until you go away; when she will weep you back to beg forgiveness for having made her cry. Diomed, she contaminates you with hypocrisy and deceit. It is impossible to be honest with a woman and live in peace with her. She drives you into hiding in the coldest caves of your echoing heart. Woe to the house that is ruled by a woman! And woe to the council in which any woman has a voice, for it is weakness that votes her there!’

  I said: ‘By which I infer – since we had been speaking of your father – that your mother rules your father’s house, and your father acts on your mother’s advice.’ I had known this long before; and I knew, also, that there is a certain rottenness in a man who can so consistently act in accordance with evil advice. If he knows no better, he is wrong; if he knows better but is constantly prevailed upon, he is wrong. A bad adviser is not necessarily always to be blamed for a wrong course of action. ‘Still, you honour your father.’

  ‘According to the Law.’

  ‘There is no law, however, which can command you to love, I believe.’

  ‘Diomed, I swear to you that when I was a child I had for my mother a love almost unholy in its intensity! But when I became a man –’

  ‘A man according to your Law, I take it?’

  ‘If you like. When I became a man, as it were overnight, I began to shrink from my mother’s touch.’

  ‘So that, not having your face buried in her bosom, your eyes were free to see her and your mind to consider her?’

  ‘Yes! It was like that with you?’