E-Book, Englisch, 242 Seiten
Kersh The Implacable Hunter
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30453-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 242 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-30453-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington on August 26 1911. He quit schooling early, and took a succession of jobs while developing his ambition to write. In 1934 he published a roman a clef, Jews without Jehovah, immediately suppressed by members of his family who took exception to its contents. Following the outbreak of war Kersh joined the Coldstream Guards in 1940. The following year he drew on his Guardsman experience to write the bestselling They Die with their Boots Clean, a classic fictional account of basic training. A sequel followed, The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson, and the pair would be re-published together as Sergeant Nelson of the Guards. Thereafter Kersh was hugely productive: a writer not merely of novels(such as The Song Of The Flea in 1948 and The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small in 1950) but also stories, journalism, sketches and columns, radio and documentary film scripts. His stories are collected in volumes including The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories and The Best of Gerald Kersh. His success was tempered by troubles over money, health and personal affairs, but through this turmoil he wrote some of his best novels: Fowler's End (1958), The Implacable Hunter (1961) and The Angel and the Cuckoo (1966). He died in New York on 5th November 1968, aged 57.
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PAINTED as I was with a savage’s pattern of inlaid red dust mixed with sweat that filled the countless folds and wrinkles in my battered face, and mounted on a lame clay horse, my old friend Marcus Flaminius did not know me until I called him by name in the courtyard of his pretty villa on the outskirts of Antium.
‘Diomed!’ he said, and caught me as I dismounted, for I was stiff in every muscle and sore in every bone from the long ride. ‘Diomed, old friend, where have you sprung from?’
‘Home,’ I said.
‘You seem to have come in a devil of a hurry.’
‘I did.’
‘Come in, come in! You have spoiled a good horse there.’
‘Yes. And left a better one dead on the road,’ I told him.
‘Not the mare Daphne?’
‘Yes. She burst her heart thirty miles back.’
‘Aie-aie! Then you are in a hurry indeed, Diomed! First drink some wine. Then tell me who’s after you. This is not much of a place to hide in, but we’ll see what we can do.’
‘I’m not hiding, my dear Flaminius. But if I might beg a bath, the loan of your barber, something to eat, and leave to rest a couple of hours, one or other of my men will catch me up, bringing fresh clothes.’
‘You know very well that my house is yours. How long have you been in the saddle?’
Gratefully drinking, I replied: ‘A hundred miles or so. If you love me, give me another pillow – I am not the man I was forty years ago.’
‘You always were made of iron. We are of an age, I think, give or take a year. What are you, sixty-nine? And look at you: iron, bronze, rock. “A hundred miles or so” – just like that! If I rode twenty I’d drop dead. It is as much as I can do to travel a day’s journey in my chair.’
‘I rather think I’ll trouble you for a loan of that same chair, when I go to pay my visit,’ I said.
‘And who are you visiting so urgently at Antium?’ he asked.
‘Nero.’
He raised his brows. ‘By Hermes and by Aphrodite, you choose a pretty time to visit that one!’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Oh, he’ll spare me a quarter of an hour from his falsetto singers and his Greek bugger-boys,’ I said. ‘I’m bringing him a gift’ – I tapped with my knuckles a narrow box which I had been holding on my knees.
Marcus Flaminius said: ‘There is something strange about this. Diomed is not in the habit of burning up the road and killing blood mares riding through the night, to bring gifts to Caesar.’
‘I have a favour to ask of him.’
‘Out of character again, and an unpropitious time.’
‘The gift, I hope, will make the time propitious,’ I said.
‘What is it?’ Flaminius asked.
‘A sword,’ I said; and the consternation on his face would have made me laugh if I had not been so tired.
‘Now look here, Diomed – you put me in a very queer position here, you know! I protest, I’m too old and weak, now, for such games. It is not as if I had been made privy to any plan, or anything. You’re my friend, and I’ll stand by you; but under protest! Leave the young fool alone, I say, and he’ll kill himself. He’s well on the way to doing it already. Insurrection in Gaul, they tell me; Vindex showing his teeth. Galba growling in Spain. Britain in turmoil, and the Londinium garrison wiped out. Pompeii gone with a whuff – dust and ashes. Rome in chaos. Have sense, man! But here you, Diomed of all created men, here you come riding like a madman out of the night with a sword for Caesar!’
‘Oh, be quiet!’ I said. ‘Do you think I’d ride Daphne to death for a flea-bite of an assassination? I say, I have a favour to ask.’
‘For the moment I thought you were going to –’ Flaminius drew a finger across his throat.
‘No, I want him to spare me a man’s life.’
‘Well, but why the sword?’
‘Because he’ll like it. It is the sword of the Great Alexander, taken from the King of Persia’s tent; the same sword Alexander killed Hephaestion with. Complete with scabbard, attested history, affirmed pedigree, and all. It was one of the gems of Barbatus’s collection. Look and see.’
I opened the box and showed my friend the sword.
‘Aie!’ cried Flaminius. ‘Nero would give you anybody’s life you like, for a thing like that. He’s got Alexander’s shield already; or thinks he has. Whose life d’you want?’ he asked, in his pouncing way.
‘A Tarsian Roman. A Jewish Nazarene,’ I answered.
‘But the Nazarenes are in terribly bad odour, you know – they brought down the wrath of the gods on Rome in the form of heavier taxation, and what not…. Well, so long as the sword is simply a gift … even so, I’d choose my little speech very carefully before I offered a sword to Nero at this moment, my friend. But, gods! What a beauty! Let me hold it once again. What steel! … By the bye, Diomed, did you remember to bring side-arms – if I may use the expression – under your clothes?’
‘Was I born yesterday?’ I asked; and showed him a number of little bags of gold coins fastened to a sling over my shoulder.
‘I was going to say; if not, my purse is yours.’
‘Thanks. Let me bathe and be shaved, and sleep just two hours, and when my men come up I’ll dress and take my chance.’
‘The Officer in Waiting today is one Leitus Rufus. Mention my name … and give him fifty gold pieces…. What is this man to you, anyway?’
‘My friend. What would you think of me if you were under a death sentence, and I didn’t put myself to some little inconvenience for your sake?’
‘Alas, Diomed; we are the last of the old breed, are we not? Friendship was a sacred thing, in our day.’
‘Yes. And now, for pity’s sake let me be rubbed with oil, for I swear by all the gods that I feel, all at once, every ache and pain and fatigue I have endured this past seventy years, back to the very bruises of birth!’
So, my servants having come at last, flogging their jaded horses, and I shaved and trimmed and anointed, dressed with appropriately discreet richness, and went to Nero.
My name, it appeared, was not unknown. I was received without much delay, and conducted into a large, cool marble room pierced with great windows, through which came the sight and smell of the sea.
He was fidgeting in an ivory chair, in a litter of scrolls: a large young man with red-gold curls, the face of a pretty child debauched, and the body of one of those correctly-muscled men that sculptors like to use as models for athletes but blurred in its definition, curiously pasty. Yes, take some second-rate marble Apollo, give it a perfectly even coat of tallow as thick as your thumb, and there you have Nero.
‘State your business,’ he said, as from an immeasurable distance. ‘What is that you are carrying? Speak.’
I said: ‘Caesar, you have heard of Barbatus, whose eye for the rare and the beautiful was comparable only with your own?’
‘Yes, of course I have heard of Barbatus – he had some exquisite pieces, some of which have come my way. Is that one of them?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is Alexander the Great’s own sword, which he took from the Persian Darius. It is the sword with which Alexander slew his friend Hephaestion. Here are the documents to prove it’ – I offered him a golden scroll-case and a letter.
‘The sword, the sword, let me see the sword,’ he said, petulant as a pampered child.
And he beckoned to two soldiers, who stood very close behind me while I unwrapped the box. Making no sudden movements, I took out the sheathed sword and placed it in his hands. Nero looked at the jewelled hilt for a long time, and then from it to the great rings on his fingers: their bezels gripped more jewels but the hilt of that sword made the gems with which it was adorned live and glow.
He saw this, and pursed his rosy mouth thoughtfully. At last, he drew the blade, very slowly – and if true beauty lies in perfect function, that piece of steel was one of the wonders of the world.
I said: ‘Take care, Caesar – it will sever a hair at a touch.’
At this, he called: ‘A hair! Get me a hair!’
A naked boy, tressed like a girl, plucked from his head a long, curling, black hair, and offered it to Nero. He holding it at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger, touched the edge of the sword to it. There was an almost inaudible twang, and the hair was cut. Nero sheathed the sword and caressed it. He fondled the hilt, and ran his soft fingers over the carvings on the scabbard, smiling an odiously shy and voluptuous little smile.
‘They say that it is unlucky to accept a gift of a sword without shedding a little blood with it,’ he said.
I bared my right arm, boldly, and held it forward.
‘Shed, Caesar!’ I said.
But he tickled my arm with his fingertip; my spine tingled with revulsion. ‘Oh, see what an arm he has!’ cried Nero. ‘The sinews! The thews! An arm of bronze – the aged Hercules!’
‘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...
