The Book of the Beast Read online

  The hill-man ignored him. He began to remove an assortment of implements, iron sticks, pincers, little bowls made of bone or shell. They all came out of his clothes.

  Vusca watched as these tools of a trade were laid on the floor. In one of the dishes the man lit a flame. Then, as if it were a bit of bread, he scooped the amulet off the table. He sat down with it on the floor as though in his hut. He put the gem into a kind of clamp, and started to work on it, holding it sometimes across the little flame.

  Presently mauve dusts veered off into the shell dish.

  The shadows were coming down on the rooms. Night had the window, only the torches from the Praetorium to alleviate it. On the floor, the solitary flame lit the wild man's polecat face as he filed and ground away at the amethyst.

  There was no sense of menace. The room seemed empty of anything that was not mortal. Was this feasible? Did the wild man have some wonderful power that held the demon in check even as he

  destroyed its totem?

  Vusca had full understanding now. The jewel was to be powdered. Then, he would "eat" it, swallow the crystals. He had heard of physicians prescribing powdered stones, as for his grandfather's rheumatism. Even Lavinia, when pregnant, had taken some resin in molasses.

  The demon had eaten Vusca's trouble, and his trouble was Vusca. Bad luck had made him into the man he was. The demon devoured that, and then it could go on, devouring him, down to the marrow of his spirit. Yes, he saw it now.

  He was drowsy. Should he make the arrangement with the sword? No, unnecessary yet, besides, he did not want the wild man to see it -

  He heard the trumpets of the first watch. He opened his eyes and the polecat was sidling towards him out of the shadows in its draggled fitch, with a cup in its paws.

  The wild man stank, much worse than any polecat. Something had screened off the smell before. Vusca basked in the new odour, of reality. One of the paw hands clutched his head, tilted his skull backward. The cup met Vusca's lip. 'Eat," said the wild man.

  Vusca ate. He gulped the wine, greedily, and in the liquid he felt the crystals pass over his throat, gritty, sandy, some larger and smoother, like tasteless pills of salt.

  The wild man took the cup away, and peered into it. He was satisfied and made a smacking noise with his own lips.

  Vusca became marvellously, swimmingly drunk. There was nothing to be afraid of. He had consumed the consuming one. Father Jupiter! What had he done - could this be the proper trick?

  He went over to the bed and lay on it.

  The wine had formed a glorious warmth inside him. His entire body seemed to be feeding from it. He felt a content, an assurance he had not experienced since childhood.

  The polecat came and stooped over him, and laughed filthy breath into his face. Vusca relished it. He knew, as if the gods spoke in his ear, that he had been saved. He fumbled to find money for the hill-man. The hill-man had skulked away, was going without recompense. Barbaras would see to it. Someone… would see to it.

  The lovely night, populated only by natural things, smelling of leather, horse-hide, flowers, gently closed the Roman's eyes.

  He thought: I forgot. The sword is over there. He thought: I shan't need the sword.

  Then his mind was a river of amethyst light and he went down into it to drink it up and be filled. "But so many gifts," she said. Her eyes were sparkling, she almost clapped her hands like a girl. "I used to send you things."

  "Yes, but that was -' Lavinia flushed and turned her head, shy of him. She was beautiful tonight.

  But then everything had a gloss and gleam upon it. Every dawn was a miracle. Dusk a blessing. Two weeks now since he had been cured. Until today he had been too cautious to be happy, with all the brightness of life summoning him. Today he had gone ten rounds, buckler and short sword, with his Secundo, in the yard. Vusca had the victory. But the Secundo, a man nine years his junior, was no faker.

  And Vusca had made the offerings today. He even went down to the Greek Hercules on the forum, and gave him something. Strength for strength. The blood in him was like a young man's. Everything was better than it had been -his sight, his reach, his nerve, his brain. The accretions of the middle years were all washed off. He could begin again.

  When she saw him, there in her house, she had blushed then, too. She had thought him fine. It was like the first look she ever gave him.

  The orchards did not seem irremediable, overgrown and in need of pruning, but that could be done. She said she liked to be in the villa, now the summer was coming. It was really rather dreadfully run down. The window in the long atrium was broken and had been patched up with honey and wax. The heating did not work properly. There were swallows in the bath-house.

  Somehow all that made it funnier, more likeable. The villa needed them. They could do things for it. And to come out to her here, tonight, feeling as he did, free and young, that was well-omened.

  When they had walked about a little, in the lavender afterglow, on which the fierce hills lay docile, like sleeping swans, they went in to the supper Lucia had set. It was a very familiar feast, the fried sausage

  and garlic, the basted chicken, black olives and sauce of mushrooms, the round white cheese with raisins, new bread, old purple wine from the home vineyard, and the dish of candied plums. He might have been here only a week ago, not years.

  They talked about the villa and the farm. Later he went with her to the small shrine in the garden court. (The shape of the Christians' fish was gone from it.) After the offering, they sat under the colonnade, in the dark, and watched fireflies. It was what they had been used to do, in the days before their marriage. Now and then, a slave would go across the lawn on some errand. That had happened then. They had had to be furtive, then.

  He began to want her, his wife, as he had wanted her long ago. "Vinia," he said, "couldn't we…' like the young fool he had been. But this time there was no need to dissemble or to say no.

  The cries of her joy were strangers to him. Whores never raised this paean, even in pretence. He gloried in what he could do to her, and in the vigour of his own body. His seed burst from him with an overwhelming pang. He had forgotten that, too, the edge a woman's love could give to it.

  They coupled twice more in the night, like hungry wolves.

  In the early morning, just before sunrise, her eyes seemed vivid, flowerlike, more savage… husband and wife parted like lovers.

  Weeks after, he said to her, "Were your eyes always this colour?" And she laughed at him.

  It was high summer when she told him her news.

  "The physician says I'll bear to term. The auspices are good. Nothing can go wrong."

  He stood with her on the hill among the plum trees. Below the road went down to Par Dis, the cemetery, the walls.

  "Isis will help me," she said.

  The curve of her belly was barely visible. In there, the life was, the son perhaps he had made. His immortality.

  The other thing… was just a dream. (Now and then he had a slight pain, under his ribs, it was nothing, no worse than momentary indigestion. As the weeks went by, it lessened, never quite going away.)

  As he rode back to the town, he kept thinking of her eyes. They had changed, as she had changed. But when he mentioned it, she told him that his eyes too had come to be another colour. And this amused them both. In the dull metal mirror he saw no alteration. Only sometimes, in the faces of men he knew well, a sudden uncertainty, a second glance -

  She had a long labour, it was rough on her. But the child was flawless, and a boy.

  His eyes, in the first hour he opened them, were the colour of the amethyst, might have been made from the amethyst.

  Retullus Vusca, cold as death, held the life of his son in his arms. What should he do? And the impulse came to run to a high place, and there throw back this tiny breathing thing to the gods. But he only held the child, and Lavinia whispered, "You see now, he has his father's eyes."

  It was the scar of a past battle. Let it be t
hat. The cicatrice of a healed wound, that could no longer kill. PART TWO

  The Suicide

  The prime retribution on the guilty

  Is that no one can acquit himself of his own judgement.

  -Juvenal

  Ten columns, dyed with Tyrian, marched down the cella of the temple, to the obsidian plinth, figured with shields. There stood the god: Mars Pater, in his armour, bearded and helmed, night-underlit by the votive lamp. The sprays of fig, oak and laurel from the spring festival were still aromatic and sappy. In his small house by the shrine, the elderly, tame wolf, sacred to the god, lay quietly, muzzle on long paws. He was a pet of the priests, more often than not his chain was off. He would eat from your hand, had forgotten he was ever a wolf at all.

  The man who had entered, grizzled and muscular, perhaps in his fiftieth year, offered the wolf a titbit, watched him eat, nodded, and walked back into the central aisle before the statue.

  The man carried a bundle, which he now unwrapped and put down on the altar. He bowed his head, and seemed to pray.

  A priest came into the cella.

  The man who prayed broke off, looked up; he appeared glad that the priest was an old man, someone he had known for years.

  "Commander," said the old priest, then smiled. "I always forget."

  "You forget, to please me," said the man. "A young puppy rules the Fort of Par Dis. I'm a retired pensioner of the Empire. I tend my farm. My business is goats and vines and fruit trees." He stopped, and said, "And the lies I tell myself."

  The priest looked at the things which had been placed on the altar. There were three legionary javelins, three swords, some knives, the breast-plate of a cavalry skirmisher, service bracelets, bracelets for valour, the badge of command, a Medusa shield.

  "The things that matter," the man said, "that the god values."

  "The arms of the warrior," said the priest. "They should hang proudly in your house. Why?"

  "Because my house is ruined. There's a disease - something due to me - do you remember, I told you once - ?"

  The priest's face closed like a fist. Not against the man, against the fate. "But that was finished."

  "No. When the boy was born - I knew then. I knew ." "You did nothing."

  "Nothing. I should have killed him."

  "You must speak to no one else in this fashion," said the priest. "There were only twenty at the Spring Rite. The priesthood outnumbers the worshippers now. These Christians have the town, as they have the Empire. The Christians are powerful, and understand nothing of this sort. Be careful, Vusca. I warn you as a friend."

  "The time for carefulness is done. Don't you see why I came here, with the offering?" The old priest reached out and took the hand of Retullus Vusca.

  "Yes, Commander. Is that all you want? Isn't there some way in which - ?" "No, Flamen. No way but this."

  "Then, it can be arranged for you." The priest touched the pattern of laurel on his breast, and let go the hand of the man, which was cold as winter marble. "Your family?"

  "I have - left provision, all the correct documents. But my family's cursed, Flamen. I should have seen to it. I can't. It isn't in me. A weakness. I make this sacrifice to Mars in the hope that he - '

  "Hush," said the priest, gently. "Only the god can decide that." "The caterwauling of the Christos dulls all their ears," said Vusca.

  "Hush," the priest said again. "Come now. There's the purification. They'll make ready for you." "The room under the altar."

  "Yes. Come now."

  Lies and weakness. The deception of self. More than eighteen years of that, aided by them all.

  The boy was handsome, his son. Everyone cherished him. He was his mother's. The women's. Vusca did not go too near. That much, at least, that distance… a sop to the truth. So his son grew up pampered by women, by Lavinia, and Lucia, and all the slaves. He liked the villa farm, had no hankering after a military career. At seven, Vusca had been dreaming night and day of the legions. But not Vusca's son. And Lavinia, so afraid: if he becomes a soldier he'll be sent far away. Sent away… something in that. Eighteen and a commission - it might be anywhere, now. It might be Rome. Vusca might send - that - to Rome. (Unnamed, unthought of, somewhere in his brain or heart, it stayed him.) Let the boy be a farmer, then. He was good with the land. That too was under the favour of Mars, and of Lavinia's Isis, if it came to

  that.

  Vusca watched the boy grow up, as if from a nearby hill.

  Petrus, they had called him. She had wanted the name. It had been the uncle's, popular among Christians. Vusca might have argued, but it did not seem to matter. He had no pride in this handsome son. He would say to himself that that was because Petrus did not take after him, would not be a soldier. That made it easy.

  The boy of course knew his father did not really care for him. He seemed to accept it was for the logical reason, the reason of the army. Once he had apologised to Vusca, quietly, on his fourteenth birthday. Vusca had taken the boy to the Fort, shown it to him, since that would somehow be expected. There

  was no doubt Petrus showed an interest. And the men took to him, the way everyone did. A father might have been able to persuade such an interested and likeable son to a taste for the soldier's life. Vusca did not attempt it. And Petrus. feeling the lack, assuming it was his fault, his omission, said that he was sorry.

  When others looked at Petrus, they saw the Roman virtues. He was a beauty, but not effeminate, not

  soft. He was modest, friendly, reserved without coolness, dignified but ready for a laugh. The farmer's life built his shoulders and legs, he could handle a five-horse chariot with skill before he was fifteen.

  When others looked at Petrus, they saw all that.

  When Vusca looked at him, he saw the peculiar eyes, which others found so attractive, grey-lilac, Lavinia's. And Vusca also saw an odd birthmark, the quarter ring of tiny dark blotches around his son's collar-bone. Isis' necklace of love - that was what Lavinia called it when he was a child, kissing the

  marks. Women who saw them always seemed fascinated. The villa slaves had said it was something holy. Even Drusus at the Fort, who had taught Petrus chariots, had been heard to say that the broken ring was the memory of a war-scar of some forebear, carried in the blood. When Vusca looked at the marks they turned him queasy.

  He had never liked to touch his son. He found it difficult to pick him up as a child. Later, if their hands brushed over some dish at table, Vusca felt a surge of revulsion, to which he never gave its actual name, and which he refused to acknowledge.

  Rome still stood, like a shadow. The power of the shadow took effect. Retullus Vusca quit his command at the ordained time and went to the villa to be another farmer.

  He did his best with it, the portion left to him. He had got accustomed again, quite quickly, to disappointment, to sourness. There had been that shining space, less than a year, in the centre of his life. It died down like a fire and left him with the used-up charcoal, which crumbled and had no heat.

  There were no other children. He did not sleep with Lavinia after the boy was born. Latterly he did not want women.

  Then there was the day in the orchard.

  It was the start of harvest, the fields full of men, and the pickers busy with the fruit. At noon, activity fell off. He sat polishing one of the swords by the trough, with the dog at his feet - and then the dog growled very low, and got up and went away, and his son came through the sunlight and the trees. It was curious that, the way the dog never took to Petrus. Vusca's dog, perhaps it had caught Vusca's allergy. Vusca thought of a recent incident with the horses hired by Petrus for the chariot, some trouble - then Petrus

  was in front of him. The sun was behind his head, giving him a sun god's halo, dampening down the shade of his eyes.

  "Father - '

  "Yes?" The false jovial voice came out pat, the tone which held Petrus firmly off. "Father, can I speak to you?"