The Implacable Hunter

by Gerald Kersh

  I said to Pugnax: ‘If the breeze holds easterly, the house is more or less safe.’

  ‘From fire, sir, yes, maybe sir.’

  ‘Mob out for pickings, of course,’ I said.

  ‘As far as that goes, yes sir. But that bastard Iscamyl is coming with a crowd from the wine-shops, sir.’

  ‘Not Barbatus’s watchman?’ I said.

  ‘Yes sir. Big Iscamyl. Drunk. Persian Smoke, sir –’

  Persian Smoke comes out of hemp-leaves, smouldering in a pot with a long spout: you suck in this smoke, and then asses sing, pigeons roar, bricks talk, trees walk, flowers whistle, and there is no difference between Up and Down.

  ‘And Iscamyl knows Barbatus’s house both inside and out, sir,’ said Pugnax.

  We were almost there. The crowd was not yet out of order; it clustered, shouting, at the main gate behind which Barbatus’s pyre was roaring to heaven and coming down again in large, vacillating flakes of flame. The people were pleased: all the world loves a good hot holocaust.

  Evidently, no rumour had yet escaped of treasure to be salvaged, and the patrolmen at the gate were using their sticks more through force of habit than necessity.

  I ordered: ‘From the fish-pond to the roof – buckets, helmets, syringes, pots, anything that will hold water!’

  And if it had not been for the smoke-drunk watchman Iscamyl, Barbatus would have departed with his Eurynome without further incident. But just then there was tumult on the other side of the house. Roaring like a wild beast at the head of a score or more of the scum of Tarsus, all mad with Persian Smoke or strong wine, Iscamyl was attacking the courtyard. He smashed through the crowd like a galley through a bank of oars. On their way, they must have overthrown and broken a statue of Augustus: he was brandishing a bronze right arm for a club, gripping it at the wrist – a bull of a man, foaming red in the light of the fire.

  I learned later that he was driving towards a hidden door to which he had access, and that once he had locked himself inside with some of his followers he proposed to make a treaty with me; I was to let him go with half of the treasure, or he would destroy everything. So sang the genius of the Persian Smoke in his crazed head.

  Pugnax leapt to my left side, and to my right a young officer named Pasion. With six other men I made the curved formation called the Greek Omicron, which can on occasion be so useful in street fighting. This was done in as long as it takes to make two signals. Then I took my Omicron forward, very smoothly and swiftly but resolutely, avoiding any appearance of haste. In such affairs I usually manage to achieve a matter-of-fact and coolly business-like air, with a trace of bored but good-humoured resignation, like a man who is going through an over-familiar but necessary routine towards an inevitable conclusion.

  But then the quality of the crowd changed; all in a moment it congealed, it hardened. Iscamyl’s rush was pressing it compact about us, and it was squeezing my formation out of shape as ice crushes a boat. Still I should have had no difficulty in doing what I intended; I was going to knock Iscamyl on the head, together with such of his followers as came handy, and scatter the rest, to be picked up at my leisure.

  However, as I strode confidently forward with this end clearly in view, a heave of the crowd threw out a huge fat man who, helpless as a log on a wave, fell with all his weight upon Pasion; and Pasion crashed into me while, with that perfection of timing and placing that comes only by accident, the fat man’s walking-stick flew neatly between my feet. I went sprawling. Pasion’s shield struck Pugnax under the chin, and the Omicron was divided in two.

  Thus, in a second, I was on my knees, covering my head with my shield, unguarded on either side, while Iscamyl came at me with his fantastic bronze club. Rising, I cut at his knee, but missed, and turned his first stroke with my shield. The force of that blow was so tremendous that the shield bent, ringing like an alarm-gong; my left arm went numb to the shoulder; and I was beaten down again.

  But in that instant someone leapt lightly over me, and I heard a familiar mallet-and-punch voice saying, coolly and scornfully: ‘You, Iscamyl, what is the meaning of this?’ It was Paulus.

  Rising, I saw him standing erect – his head came to the level of the watchman’s chin – and pointing to the upraised club. ‘You blasphemous dog!’ he said. ‘How dare you go about with three arms when God meant you to have only two?’ And he laughed.

  Iscamyl hesitated for a moment to stare at him; what time Pasion reached past Paulus and thrust his sword into the big man’s stomach. It must have seemed, to most of them who saw him fall, that Iscamyl went grovelling on his face before the power of Paulus’s bare finger, for there was an uneasy murmur and a clatter of dropped weapons. So we re-formed, and put an end to the incident.

  Three decades of slavery, three hours of freedom, three minutes of esctasy, and so to the worms: that was the history of Iscamyl.

  I said to Paulus: ‘I told you to go home.’

  ‘Yes, I am going now,’ he said.

  I knew he had saved my life, and he knew that I knew. But we said no more; simply shook hands and parted.

  The prisoners were taken away. Iscamyl was the lucky one, if he but knew it. I placed a guard with the triumphant Ariaios in Barbatus’s house, and went away.

  Once home, I let myself remember that I was weary. I bathed, and let Dionë stroke my bruised shield-arm.

  She asked: ‘Is it true that Paulus is a wizard?’

  ‘He thinks and acts at the same time. That is wizardry, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, but is it true that he can paralyse people?’

  ‘Yes, by saying the right word at the right moment.’

  ‘Some magic word?’ she asked, avidly.

  ‘All words are magic words, if you use them at the right moment.’

  ‘But what is the right moment?’

  ‘The one that happens to fit the right word.’

  ‘But what is –?’

  ‘Be quiet, or I will send you away.’

  ‘I know some magic words. My mother taught me them.’

  ‘What will they do?’

  ‘They will make a woman conceive and bear a son.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘bear me a son and I will marry you.’

  ‘You are mocking me,’ she said, soberly.

  ‘Am I?’ I thought. ‘No.’ I said, ‘I am not mocking you, Dionë.’

  ‘You would not deceive poor Dionë? I am too foolish to be worth deceiving.’

  ‘Why should I trouble to deceive you?’ I asked.

  ‘You will marry me if I bear you a son?’

  ‘Upon my honour.’

  She began to weep. ‘Your friends will say: “Diomed is out of his mind – he has married a beastly little slave girl, her flesh is greasy, and her body stinks.”’

  ‘Very well then – I won’t marry you.’

  She pressed my feet to her bosom. ‘Marry me or not as you will, if my lord Diomed wants a son he shall have a son.’ she said.

  Her magic words were an Armenian charm, to be uttered at the climax of the act of love, Az-zadahed-zaz-hazazad! – to be repeated three times rapidly in one breath without error, and in the next breath to be pronounced backwards, Dazazah-zaz-dehadaz-za! The charm was rendered infallible if the woman ate, before going to bed, a paste made of the testicles of a live goat boiled with Greek honey, mushrooms, shellfish, cocks’ combs and doves’ tongues.

  She had long been practising the charm in private, she told me. I asked her if her mother had tried it. ‘Constantly,’ said Dionë.

  ‘Then why have you no brothers?’

  Her eyes filled with tears. ‘We were too poor to buy the right kind of honey,’ she said. ‘Besides, my mother stuttered.’

  I was forced to tell her to desist, saying that I would as soon couple with a wasps’ nest.

  But she bore a son, notwithstanding, and I married her gladly. We made each other happy. Dionë may be likened to a long story, charmingly told, consisting in a succession of diverting incidents, and given
a semblance of continuity only by the vividness of one delightful central character. You are not sorry when you have come to the end of it because you look forward, with such keen pleasure, to reading it again and again.

  She wanted me to name the boy Artavazd, after her mythical ancestor. I swore by all the gods that this was a little too much to ask. But she pleaded so winningly that I made a compromise, and named him Julius Artavius.

  And him I tried to form in my father’s image.

  6

  IF poor Afranius had been looking for frivolous adventure and diverting conversation in Paulus’s company, he was destined to some disappointment. Several weeks later a messenger from Jerusalem brought, among other documents, a bulky letter from my old friend. Generally, I enjoyed Afranius’s rare absences, for when he was away he would write to me, and his letters seldom failed to evoke all that was most agreeable in his pleasantly easy conversation, leaving his mannerisms – elided vowels, drawled emphases, mimic gestures and changes of accent – to my affectionate recollection.

  But this letter was not light-hearted. For once in his life, Afranius was not able to make himself comfortable; and he was a man with a glorious capacity for enjoying himself in any circumstances.

  A divine gift, this; but its efficacy depends to a great extent upon self-abandonment. An honest hedonist cannot be self-conscious. And it appeared that my little Paulus possessed a peculiar power to make Afranius feel uneasy, when they were alone together. He awoke some watch-dog in Afranius’s head. ‘He sets twanging some note that I can feel but not hear – a sort of vibration that stiffens the backs of my legs.’ he wrote.

  And I smiled as I imagined them, the horses walking like the ghosts of horses in the powdery dust, the men’s faces veiled so that only their eyes were visible; Afranius riding as if he were taking his ease in a cushioned chair, while Paulus perched like a marmoset on his great black stallion. Afranius tried to make free and easy conversation:

  ‘Here,’ he said, of the melancholy spaces through which they were travelling, ‘here is immensity without size and matter without form. Nothing for a man to measure himself against. What?’

  Paulus said: ‘What then? Why measure, Afranius? Measure what? How measure? In a palace, a man feels safe and small. Safety is vanity, and small is too large for a man to feel, as himself. Now here, a man knows that he is nothing. At the same time, he is one with everything. Here, he is his right size.’

  Afranius had several answers on the tip of his tongue: that he had known the deserts before Paulus was born or thought of, and found that their only magnitude was in area, for the desert had neither height nor depth; that man was more aware of the height of the heavens when, measuring himself against a soaring column, he looked up at the twilight roof of a temple, than when he star-gazed in the sand … and so forth. That as for ‘right size’, it was not in the nature of matter that any created thing could possibly be the wrong size; that ‘size’ was to be measured only in terms of presumptuousness, and ‘wrong’ as applied to ‘size’ to be considered only in terms of situation – that is, a gnat was a roaring whirlwind if it got into your ear, a monster of presumption! Therefore it got crushed.

  The littler things were, the more prone were they to offend the gods by forgetting their place, and so magnifying themselves by force of obtrusion, and getting themselves killed: gnats acting whirlwinds in ears, midges making mountains of themselves in eyes, flies bathing like Cleopatra in your milk, fleas taking liberties with your wife’s pudenda, and undersized barbarian boys on horseback laying down the law to a gentleman of the world.

  So thought Afranius, and – which is remarkable – so that easiest and kindest of men felt strongly tempted to say, then and there. And with the temptation came a certain awe of the boy who with a mere metaphysical finger-snap, could so irritate him; and with his vague awe, a dislike that defied analysis.

  ‘One does not wonder,’ he wrote, ‘that all Tarsus believes he paralysed Lucius with a touch and cured him with another, and sent huge Iscamyl sprawling with a mysterious gesture.’ So Afranius changed the subject, and talked of the cities he had seen, and the men and women he had known – especially the women.

  One cannot talk of women for long in Asia without touching on King Solomon and his thousand wives. ‘From which I infer,’ said Afranius, ‘that Solomon did not like women, but was in general indifferent to them.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Paulus, interested.

  ‘In fact it is possible that while he needed women physically, he had in his heart a deep disdain for them,’ said Afranius, glad to have captured Paulus’s eager attention at last.

  ‘Explain, my dear Afranius!’

  ‘Why, one wife and a couple of mistresses is a love nest. A thousand wives is a convent. Consider, my dear Paulus: if you were a horse-lover, would you keep a personal stable of a thousand horses for nobody’s riding but your own? Or would you keep four or five?’

  ‘Four or five – if I loved horses.’

  ‘And if you loved dogs, would you keep a kennel of a thousand dogs?’

  ‘I would rather keep none. Two dogs are enough. Dogs must be loved, or they break their hearts.’

  ‘And women?’ asked Afranius. Paulus shrugged. Afranius said: ‘Putting love aside for the moment; I take it that, like other men, you need a woman to go to bed with – I talk now like a brutal Roman, you see – and you know that a sound young woman, for her health’s sake, needs the regular embraces of an appropriate man. And I will assume that, young as you are, there have been times when you would have preferred to sleep, but have made love, as one might say, more in compassion than passion, for the satisfaction of seeing a woman made happy.’

  Paulus said: ‘Proceed,’ and what Afranius could see of his face was red.

  Afranius hastened to say: ‘Excuse me; I know that among Asiatics it is sometimes considered bad form to –’

  ‘No, no, we were talking of Solomon,’ said Paulus.

  ‘And I was coming to the point. What man with any kindness for women could keep a thousand for himself? Assume the unlikely: that Solomon took a different wife to bed every night; unlikely, because he was a ruler, a man of affairs, a judge, a diplomat, and a writer, and he sometimes needed to sleep – and you may believe me when I assure you that it is twenty times more exhausting to make love once to a different woman every night for five nights, than to make love twenty times in that period to the same woman. This is a matter of which I well know the arithmetic. But we will assume that Solomon was so constituted that he paid equal attention to all his wives in turn –’

  ‘An appalling thought,’ said Paulus.

  ‘Appalling indeed! For, just before dawn, Solomon says to the wife at present in use: “Go now, Number So-and-so, and I’ll send for you again about three years from now.” And he must have chuckled to himself, Go, sweat, dream and itch, bitch! Oh, how he must have hated women, that Solomon! The sort of man who says of the act of love: “It is a messy business,” and must have plenty of strong perfume and napkins to hand.’

  ‘A great king,’ said Paulus.

  ‘You know, of course, how he overcame Sheba?’ Afranius asked.

  Paulus shook his head, and Afranius told him, with a wealth of detail, I dare say, how the proud Queen of Sheba would not come to Solomon’s bed. Dignity forbade his going to hers, so the wisest of kings devised a plan. At supper one night he ordered none but highly spiced and salted dishes to be served. Then he had all the water-vessels removed from all the palace chambers except his own. Sheba, in the middle of the night, tormented by a raging thirst, went from room to room looking for water; and so, at last, she came to Solomon.

  To me, Afranius confided: ‘… I have no doubt that when it was all over, Sheba got up and yawned, and said: “The water, at least, was hard,” and walked out nonchalantly, with scorn. I read bafflement in Solomon’s Song …’ But he did not say this to Paulus who, he wrote, began at once to analyse the anecdote in the Rabbinical style – for the neare
r they approached to Jerusalem, the more contentiously Jewish Paulus seemed to become – saying that Solomon had dreams of a vast empire in Africa, and explaining how Sheba coming to Solomon’s bedchamber for water symbolised a parched and naked Ethiopia’s burning thirst for the spiritual fountains of Judaea.

  With unwonted bitterness, Afranius commented: ‘One of the outstanding characteristics of the Jew is, his lack of the sense of humour and his inability therefore to assess the real value of a fact …’

  The Jew, Afranius said, must create an illusion of significance: he is a blower-up of bladders, a maker of illusory magnitudes. He will dig a hole merely for the love of depth. Peace and the good straight road are not for the Jew – he must contend, deviously. His only joy is in suffering; without suffering, the Jew falls into a sort of lassitude – if he feels no pain, he will go and sit on a nail. He washes without cleansing himself, scarifies without refreshing, and is a critic without alternatives. He loves punishment for its own sake, and law for the sake of litigation; for him the truths of the world are juggler’s balls to play tricks with. He asks questions, not to learn the answers, but to breed further questions. There is no arguing with a Jew, for he concedes to no man the right to differ. And there is no such thing as one Jew, for he has no individual character. A Jew alone is a dead Jew: he must run in a pack. Even their God does not regard them, except in groups of ten – and this same God was a demented twist of Amenhotep’s, brought to them by their only lawgiver, an Egyptian ….

  So wrote Afranius to me. But, dauntless conversationalist that he was, he tried Paulus again, with another legend of Solomon.

  ‘Business finished in Jerusalem,’ he said, ‘we go on to Damascus. Now on that road, which I have travelled two or three times before, to my cost, we must go through a pass which is sometimes called Benaiah’s Pass, or The Pass of Solomon’s Worm. Did you ever hear of Solomon’s Worm?’

  ‘No,’ said Paulus. ‘But why to your cost?’

  ‘Oh, apart from the fact that it is a dreary, hellish kind of place, I never went that way but I had some misfortune. Once I lost my favourite horse. Another time my party was attacked by bandits, and I got an arrow in the arm.’