The Implacable Hunter Read online

  ‘At your service,’ I said.

  ‘No. It would be a pity to cut such a fine arm. I need such arms, the gods know! … But perhaps this sword is not a gift?’ he asked, in a womanish, worried voice. ‘Perhaps you want to sell it?’

  I was throwing my dice with my eyes shut, now; here was my strategy. I said: ‘If Nero is willing to pay the price I ask for it.’

  ‘I could take it, darling, for nothing, you know.’

  ‘Yes, but that would bring bad luck.’

  ‘What did you say your name was? Diomed? You are a brave man, Diomed, the bravest of the bravest of the brave! There now, I like you. Name your price. Anything you want – there!’

  I pointed to a gold lyre by the window, and said in the Greek language which I knew he loved: ‘If Nero will improvise for me Alexander’s Lament for Hephaestion, I go home and die happy. That is my price.’

  To my everlasting disgust, Nero leapt up and kissed me, smearing my mouth with paint. ‘The elegiac?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, the hexameter-pentameter –’ I had been informed that this was one of his favourite poetic forms ‘– but not Ovidian. Ovid? Who was Ovid? In Asia it is Nero who is worshipped as the incarnation of Apollo.’ He was jealous of the fame of Ovid.

  ‘Great grief, but kingly grief!’ cried Nero. ‘Diomed you inspire me!’

  ‘Nero,’ I said, ‘Alexander’s sword has been in my possession these thirty years. Was I fit to draw it? No. I thought of Tiberius. No. Then Caligula. Certainly not. Claudius? Questionable. But in a dream a voice told me, Nero. I killed the finest horse in Italy to bring it to you forthwith for these are troubled times, Nero, and you must be our Alexander.’

  Possibly one of the silliest speeches even I have ever made, but he fell upon my neck again, and shouted: ‘Wine, more wine! I cannot improvise without wine, white wine, lots and lots of cold white wine; sparkling, spuming, icy, white, white wine!’

  Then he called in secretaries and soldiers to listen, and he made me lie on a couch hip-deep in sensuous cushions and sickly with strong perfumes, while the black-haired boy served me with wine. He put one foot on a stool, arranged the lyre on his knee, threw back his foolish golden head and, in a tremendous tenor voice, soullessly accurate and tallowy like his form, began to sing, shoving harsh handfuls of hastily-plucked notes into every halting ellipsis as one might hastily caulk a leaky boat in mid-stream with torn sacking.

  ‘Little Lucius!’ I thought. ‘It is Little Lucius! This is not Now and I am not Here…. It was all a dream, a devious and uneasy dream! …’

  But it was not a dream, and I was here and in anguish for my friend; we being the last two left alive of Soxias’s guests.

  ‘Alas, alas!’ I thought. ‘There is no such thing as a dream!’

  Nero was Nero, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, and I was crafty old Diomed, a monolith of bygone days, and full of the facts of life if one knew how to read the runes of my lined face, and construe the cuneiform of my scars.

  So, disciplined man that I am, while Nero sang and sang, and twanged and strummed, stopping my ears from within against his stridencies and his plangencies, I made myself remember why I was here …

  1

  AFTER dinner with Soxias, such of his guests as were sober enough to link sentence to sentence, or too replete to amuse themselves with the acrobats and the dancers, generally wound up a loose hour or two in scabrous gossip or in warming up stale tales of natural and unnatural love. All such smut is older than Egypt.

  Now, Little Lucius – so called, because he was ridiculously corpulent – got up reeling to declaim, for the thousandth time, his rhyme about Sappho and the Mermaid. His voice was naturally sibilant and effeminate; now he forced it into two tones, one husky and passionate and the other coy and sniggering, accompanying his song with vibrant notes which he struck with his long finger-nails out of a gold goblet.

  ‘Your undivided attention, please,

  To the fleshy tale of a fishy tail,

  To the warm tale of a cold tail,

  To the tale of an undivided tail,

  And a hopeless love in the summer seas –’

  he began.

  His versifying was deliberately, exaggeratedly execrable: Lucius was grit between the teeth and alum in the mouth, and he rejoiced in the fact, after the manner of his kind. He had the power to irritate, to inspire ecstasies of revulsion and arouse agonies of disgust; and he exercised this power in order to excite violence, Thrashed, he cried: ‘More –!’ with a giggle. He exulted in the spectacle of exhausted rage.

  So, in his own way, did Soxias, that connoisseur of breaking-points. That is why he usually let Little Lucius sing the entire three hundred staggering lines of his song, night after night; Soxias closed his ears and watched his guests with a small, sleepy smile.

  And I watched Soxias.

  Cneius Afranius said to me, looking towards Lucius: ‘His is the only kind of muck, Diomed, that Time cannot refine nor usage sanctify.’

  I replied: ‘There are only two sexes, and the human body is capable of only a limited number of contortions and sensations. And take my word for it, Afranius – most of these contortions and sensations are much more painful than enjoyable.’

  ‘I take your word, Diomed,’ said Afranius. ‘You should know.’

  ‘Ask Melanion, then,’ I said.

  The physician, Melanion of Cos, who had been listening, nodded, and said: ‘Diomed is right. Most sensation is unhealthy.’

  ‘Eating when you are hungry? Drinking when you are thirsty?’ asked Afranius.

  ‘Very mild enjoyments, to a healthy man,’ said Melanion. ‘Eating when you are famished and drinking when you are parched are a kind of agony. You try it and see. Only a well-nourished man can linger over the sensation of taste. When a man picks and chooses his food, he does not need it. If he does not need it, it is not doing him any good. Hence, it is superfluous. Ergo, it is unhealthy.’

  ‘Oh come,’ Afranius protested, ‘there is a kind of spiritual comfort in a little civilised superfluity.’

  ‘There is a kind of indigestion in it,’ said Melanion. ‘There is a kind of constipation in it. Find spiritual comfort in a belly full of the thirty-two winds, a mouth full of vinegar, and a liver like a penned goose’s.’

  ‘Ai, ai, ai! And the act of love?’ Afranius asked.

  ‘Sir,’ said the physician, ‘as a reasonably healthy man who has been young in his time, I can tell you that ecstasy in the act of love, as you call it, exists only in anticipation or in gaudy retrospect. It is, in fact, a figment of the imagination. Eh, Diomed?’

  I said: ‘As a reasonably healthy man who is still far from old, I will agree that the sexual act is never what you expect it to be, and never what you think it has been and may be again. It’s a necessity of the body, a relief. You never really remember it.’

  ‘An itch and a scratch,’ said Melanion.

  Continuing, I said: ‘– And even if you could, as a reasonably competent and entirely devoted officer of police, I say that Memory is the most inveterate liar in or out of Court.’

  ‘And where love is concerned, the most confounded bore,’ said Melanion. ‘Like pain. No man can remember pain. No woman, either. No bore like a lover – except an invalid.’

  ‘Pain,’ said Afranius, thoughtfully. ‘No, one cannot recall pain, Tortures – flogging, burning, flaying, and so forth – hurt the spectators more than the victims.’

  I disagreed. ‘No. They love it. I know a kind-hearted old woman who sells honey-cakes. She doesn’t even brush the flies off her cakes for fear of hurting them. She never misses a crucifixion; goes to sell her cakes to the onlookers, but being unable to take her eyes off the men on the nails, she is invariably robbed. I asked her why she didn’t keep a better look-out for her goods, then.

  ‘She said: “I can’t help it, my lord. I look up and I see the poor fellow hanging up there bleeding and crying, and something seems to go out of me, like, near where I sit down, my lord; and my feet
seem to leave the ground, and I can feel myself hanging up there on the nails; and then I heave a sigh, and I’m not up there, I’m down here, and so happy to be alive I don’t begrudge the few cakes the boys have stolen, but I give away some more. I mean, my lord, if we all got what we deserve, where should we be – saving your honour? And it’s as if that poor fellow dies in my place; and I feel like a young girl again, and my new-married husband putting out the lamp.”

  ‘Only a few of the mob jeer and throw dead cats. They hate the executioners, but in general they like the thieves. “Might be you or me,” they say. They are engrossed. I remember one crucifixion, for example: a bandit named Calchas tore one hand loose from its nail in his last struggles. And what did he do with it? He tried to cover his nakedness. And there was not a man in the crowd that did not drop a hand to his own groin.’

  At this point, Soxias, in his twanging, husky voice that always reminded me of some primitive musical instrument made of dry gourd and stretched gut, called across the table: ‘Lucius, be quiet.’

  Lucius, having drawn a deep breath, was beginning to change his metre to tell what happens to mermaid and mortal:

  ‘– When the prurient mulch laps the succulent ooze –’ or some such unappetising anapæst; and, enjoying himself, pretended not to hear.

  But Soxias’s voice had a numbing quality. It forced most people to stop what they were saying or doing and listen to him, whether they understood him or not; and they did not always understand him at first. He spoke Greek with a sing-song of Aramaic, lisped Persian with a Dacian titter, muttered Armenian with an indrawn African hiss, and was fluent in Latin but with that indescribable big-tongued bubbling accent which has given us the word ‘Barbarian’. Listening to Soxias, one received the impression that he was drinking the language scalding hot and relishing every sip of it, to the sensitive hearer’s discomfiture.

  He said again: ‘Lucius, be quiet! Compose a fresh song, or I think perhaps I will send you to Ptalep in Alexandria.’

  ‘What a name!’ Lucius giggled. ‘Like spitting out a pomegranate-seed. I’d love to meet Ptalep! Is he a poet?’

  ‘No,’ said Soxias,’ ‘a taxidermist. I will have you stuffed and mounted.’ As Lucius laughed, he went on, in an easy and confidential tone. ‘The skin comes off more easily when the subject is alive.’

  ‘Oh, but I’d love –’ Little Lucius began. Then, bold as he was, he stopped, and sat.

  Soxias was a queer man to joke with. There were uneasy little stories current about him in Tarsus. For example: Two men met in hell. One asked the other: ‘Why, Decius, what brings you here so young?’ ‘Alas, Nonus! I laughed when I thought Soxias was jesting. He was not. And you?’ ‘Alas, Decius! I did not laugh when I thought Soxias was serious. He was jesting.’

  For Soxias liked to be feared, and he knew that nothing is so frightening as the unpredictable, to all those who still cling to life and hope. So the gods are feared; and this strange, dangerous old man, having gnawed his way out of nobody knew what dark rat-holes in his unrecorded youth, and fought and bought his tortuous upward path, now sat among the gods, licked sleek if not clean and perfumed to drown the stench of a dozen drains. But the gods, as I read their histories, are nothing much more than over-indulged, bored children, hugely enlarged; and such, on the surface, was Soxias.

  When the humour was on him he would squander fortunes on such follies as labyrinths leading nowhere, or marble staircases which at the touch of a lever became smooth inclines; and it was said of him that if a fly annoyed him he would have that fly’s life if it cost a million. He was at once grossly blatant and infinitely secretive, disguising a certain swift and tricky tortuousness under an appearance of transparency, just like a child; and, again like a child, possessed with that frantic curiosity which cannot examine without destroying, and that tedious humour which cannot jest without teasing. He loved to see people falling suddenly on their backsides. ‘The arse is the seat of all humour,’ he used to say; and went to fantastic lengths to demonstrate this.

  Yet all the time Soxias grew richer and richer, by virtue of what appeared to be nothing but brutal cunning and a child’s (or a god’s) sublime disregard for the feelings of those upon whom he trod, coupled with a kind of prescience which was said to be magical. But I know something of the value of what appears to be nothing but brutal cunning and the fact of the matter is, that Soxias had his spies in every corner of the world; paid them generously, was astute in evaluating their reports, and swift to act. So I could guess that – since his mind was running on somebody in Alexandria – Soxias had had some news from Egypt, and that next year, or the year after that, there might be a rise or a fall in the price of grain.

  Even while he was talking to Little Lucius, I caught the glint of his flat black eye as he looked sideways at me without turning his head. No doubt he was saying to himself, in whatever language he thought with: ‘Aha! The policeman’s nose twitches. Diomed has sniffed out Egypt. But Diomed knows that Soxias doesn’t drop loose words so he will say to himself: “If Soxias hints at the east, look to the west; probably there is trouble in Britain.”’

  But No Doubt is one of Truth’s commonest enemies.

  One thing was certain, now: that Soxias was determined to be amused; therefore, someone must suffer.

  He turned to Paulus and asked: ‘What do you say? Shall I send Lucius to be stuffed?’

  With a gesture that included the great table and Lucius’s preposterous belly, Paulus replied: ‘Why waste labour and money? You have already stuffed Lucius more generously than Ptalep ever could.’ Everyone laughed; nobody liked Little Lucius.

  Soxias said: ‘Point of interest, Paulus – what would your god-in-the-box have to say to a stuffed Lucius?’

  Paulus had a certain boxer’s knack of turning an enemy’s tactics to his own advantage. He was a master of the feigned miscalculation. His retreat was circular – a calculated kind of attack; and he was a born adept in the delicate art of making an opponent underestimate him by letting it be felt that he was underestimating his opponent. So the other man would, apparently negligent, leave a vital spot unguarded for a moment, to invite a blow that must miss and lay Paulus open to a smashing right hand: he was always surprised to find that he had been playing Paulus’s game, that his counter-stroke missed, that he was caught on one foot, off-balance, and at the quicker man’s mercy.

  For this, among other good soldierly qualities, I had an affection for the man; and I said to myself: ‘Oho, Soxias! You have started the game, but I’ll wager a horse to a hen that I know who will finish it!’

  ‘Speak up, speak up,’ said Lucius.

  Paulus said: ‘Why, Soxias, there would be nothing to say to a stuffed Lucius. Let out the squeal and the guts, and what is Lucius? A hide. You deal in leather, Soxias, among other things. Sell Lucius to a cobbler.’ Before Soxias could speak, he added, quickly: ‘But all the world knows that Lucius has a skin, a very thick skin. The mystery is, where does he keep his bones?’

  A poor little joke, but young Paulus made it sound almost funny, he spoke with such earnestness, and looked about him with an air of shrewd inquiry. It was good enough to make Soxias laugh, and that was enough.

  Ambassador to an unknown kingdom, governor of a sullen and insecure province, general of a mutinous army: somewhere in Paulus slept the seed of a clever handler of men. I thought that he had danced like a bullfighter between the horns of a threatening conversation. (At my table, I ban religion and politics.)

  But Little Lucius, with honey in his voice and hate in his eyes, was at it again. ‘Soxias,’ he said, ‘I will write you a new song on a sacred theme – I have a Greek translation, from the Hebrew, of a delicious bit of erotica written by a Jewish king who fell in love with a black slut out of Africa. It is esteemed as holy by the Jews, my dear! I think I shall paraphrase it in Latin dactyls, like:

  Careful King Solomon numbered his concubines

  Counting the tits and dividing by two

  –
or perhaps I shouldn’t? Paulus’s god might not like it, eh, Paulus?’

  Afranius said: ‘Leave the gods out of it.’

  ‘Eh, Paulus?’ Lucius persisted.

  Paulus raised a hand as if he was about to speak, but he said nothing; he simply gazed, unblinking, at Lucius. Awaiting his reply, we were silent, and this sudden silence was curiously oppressive: it was as if everyone was holding his breath.

  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 –’