The lamp burns yellow. And a patch of soft light warms the shadows below it, as these would otherwise devour the kitchen tabletop on which the lamp stands, holding to an emptiness that gladly goes unnoticed, a surrounding darkness only broken by the feeble gleam of the nearby porcelain sink and the eggshell-painted cupboards shut tight beneath it.
The scholar of Stridon, the Doctor of Dalmatia, the Illyrian armed with ink and quill works not here. Nor is this some scribe of demonic scripture or any odious priest of antiquity who would be-muddle ancient truths, lead gullible wanton fools, thin in faith, into unfathomable woods, whence mournful nymphs beckon from behind each rock and bent-over tree.
“What writest thou,” I ask him.
“O, foul, pasture-sodden, goat-legged, horn-headed devotee of carnal perversion and moon-bathed pale firm flesh. Defiler of maids who then drown themselves in lily-filled ponds, degenerate of mind, hairy-backed, musk-scented beast of a man without a soul, a soul deprived of a man long lost in blackness, and so disguised, free to roam timelessly across the cities of this earth, your genitals stiff and deformed, your loins putrid from sweat and semen, your eyes lascivious, lecherous, and bulging for conquest of the innocence you long ago shed for lack of shame.
“The canine cardinal is seated on your right and set to eat, all four of his legs warmly wrapped in fur. A crimson cassock and flaming cape cover the beast beneath his collar. A carmine-colored beret folds over his silly dog ears. His nose is wet, his mouth is deep, his tongue wags over sharp teeth.
“What will you put on his plate?”
The Half Guinea retrieves his quill from the well. For a suspended moment in time, as his large, sunbaked brick of four fingers and a thumb reaches the high point of the trajectory of its connecting forearm, pivoting smoothly on a bareboned elbow, this tiny feather of a bird – posing as an instrument of recorded human thought, ink-spotted at its smooth hard tip, no blood nor ink yet dripping from its shaft, but instead beaded in hesitation above and before that dry and lifeless parchment that awaits it below – appears to be in flight.
The sinner’s large tired eyes turn into the light of the lamp to illuminate every line in his thick knotted face – a three-dimensional map of his terrestrial years.
Light to eyes, eyes to hand, quill to parchment, ink to word.
But I say: “You eat with dogs and bed dark women in broad daylight. What truth would you undertake to illuminate from that heart of cold stone, your soul caked in pitch-black sin, a mind perverse from every practice of pleasure and violence devised over the last two millennia.”
The dog growls, then howls, its hind leg peddling mechanically beneath its crimson cowl.
“Pantera, I shall call you. For you bastardize the sacred. Your own blood is mixed, and you’ve done nothing but stir the sauce ever since, mix the straw, spit in the stew, which you then serve with a slippery, sickening smile.”
The Half Guinea’s two thick fingers hold tight to the neck of the quill, driving it into the sheep’s skin stretched out and prostrate across the table.
He writes…
A Confession
It was the old man who killed him, and all the men around the praetorium knew it. He was a troublemaker, to be sure. But what was that to us? How many of his kind had we seen before – a beggar, unshaven, uncivilized.
In truth, we preferred to deliver death in battle, for glory and honor, if only among ourselves. A Roman soldier won’t fight for pay alone. There’s whoring and wine and the ever-distant promise of retirement in Gaul with a vineyard near one’s home and a wife to manage the hearth.
But while these dusty sandals tread the Appian way, knobby-kneed by thirty years and toothless from rotten rations ten years thereafter, if Mars hadn’t sent you across the Styx with a German’s axe in your head by then. Nay, Caesar. Honor always had a place… along with whoring, wine, and one’s pay.
And in that dusty dung-heap of fanatics, overrun by snake-eyed Persians and boy-buggering Greeks, entertainment was the furthest from our minds. The baths lacked clean water and the games consisted of slashing through mobs of robes and facial hair.
O, by Jupiter, how we hated it to the last of us. We used to cast die in the dissolute night, around a fire in the hills, to divide the spoils of Zealots we’d killed that day. These weren’t battles but rather hunting expeditions against escapees from the latest cult of the insane. And as one might expect, the spoils were few, and most of us soldiers were ashamed to pick them up from the ground. So we’d cast die in the night in fun, but little glory, to be sure.
Then the Old Man showed up… first, as one of the camp dogs, as we used to call them.
The beggars shrunk from our sharp spears and fearsome standards, even in the night. For all knew we would rise up in rage in response to the least sign of disrespect toward our corps: audere est facere.
The Old Man, however, managed to make his way into our camp often completely unnoticed by the sentries or anyone else.
At first this caused alarm, and orders were given to drive him off and punish him as an example to others. But he showed no fear and we soon grew used to him.
Sometimes he would bring us withered fruit and kindling, but mostly he would amuse the infantrymen with his tales, some bawdy and others just crude.
‘Why drive him off,’ we said to one another, much less waste our strength and the leather of our flagrum?
But when Marius, who looked after the mules, raised certain concerns, all began to see this stench of a field latrine in a different light.
By then, the devil had cast such a pall of fear over the camp that none dared bar his entrance. He came and went as he pleased.
And it was during one of these sorties that we heard he’d killed the itinerant Stephanus – a poet, if you like. But what was that to us?
Ab Irato, 17 Janus 2018 CE
Okay, lookit – the date’s a bit irregular on this one, but on the whole, it’s fine – at least I can understand when it was filed. But YOU’VE STILL GOTTA SIGN YOUR NAME TO IT!!!