Gods and Pawns (43 page)

“Quite so,” Sir Francis agreed, looking solemn. “Still, we’re not entirely withered yet, hey? I was thinking only the other evening, we really ought to have another ‘chapter meeting’ with some of our brother monks.” He winked broadly at Lewis. “Quite a bit of fun, and really nothing of which to be ashamed. Paul knows of a respectable house with the most agreeable, good-natured girls—charmers all, discreet, free of the pox, but with a certain amount of
intellectual
furniture, you know.”

“Ah! Like the hetaerae of ancient Greece?” Lewis inquired.

“Exactly!” said Sir Francis, and seized his hand and shook it enthusiastically. “Just so. And, after all, in men of our years, good conversation hath its virtue too. Not that I expect a young man to believe me.”

He popped a sweetmeat in his mouth and crawled out of the tent on hands and knees. “Come along,” he said briskly. “We’ll show you the library.”

Lewis found himself employed. It couldn’t have been easier; he had a pleasant room, was free to keep his own hours, and had a place at Sir Francis’s table. On his second evening in residence he had a difficult encounter with a dish of syllabub that proved to contain gooseberries, but managed to ignore the flashing lights and keep smiling at his host’s witticisms.

And the library was a treasure trove.

It was true that a great deal of it consisted of erotica, inclining to the eclectic rather than the perverse. Lewis found a splendid copy of the earliest translation into English of the
Kama Sutra.
And the library certainly needed putting into order:
Gulliver’s Travels
jostled for shelf space with books on the Kabbalah, or on architecture, or
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,
or Ovid’s
Amores.
There were indeed a couple of fairly ancient scrolls and codices: a second-century copy of Euripides’
The Bacchae,
and a copy of Aristophanes’
The Frogs
that was nearly as old.

There were a few fakes, too, most notably a work on alchemy purporting to have been written by Aristotle; these were well done, clearly by a someone who had had access to a cache of very old papyrus and knew a few tricks for compounding period-formula inks. Lewis recognized the hand of a certain forger active in the last century, who had worked from the Eugenikos manuscripts. This unknown Russian was quite a celebrity in the faked document trade; Lewis, noting that Sir Francis had traveled to Russia in his youth, suspected that he may have been sold a number of phonies from the same artist.

At the end of a week, he sat down at his artfully concealed field credenza and sent the message:

After an hour the reply came back, in glaring yellow letters:

“This is excellent bacon, my lord,” said Lewis, at the breakfast table.

“Eh?” Sir Francis looked up from watching the nurse attempting to feed his offspring porridge. “Ah. Good pigs hereabouts.”

Lewis wondered how to gracefully transition from pigs to the subject at hand, and couldn’t think of a way.

“I wondered, my lord, whether (since it is the Sabbath) I might not have the day to walk in the gardens,” he said.

“What? Oh, by all means!” said Sir Francis. “Yes, you’ll enjoy that. A man of classical education will find much to engage his attention,” he added, winking so broadly that his little daughter was fascinated, and sat there at table practicing outrageous winks, until her nurse quelled her with a deadly look.

Lewis slipped forth after breakfast and had hoped to spend a profitable day spying out likely places where a scroll might be hidden, but he had got no farther than the Temple of Venus when Sir Francis popped out of a folly.

“There you are! It occurred to me that you’d benefit from a guide; there’s rather a lot to see,” he cried heartily.

“You’re too kind, my lord,” said Lewis, concealing his irritation.

“Oh, not at all.” Sir Francis cleared his throat a little self-consciously and went on: “Well! The temple of Venus. Note, sir, the statue.”

“Which one?” Lewis inquired politely, for there were before him nearly thirty figures decorating the slope up to the temple, among the bright fallen leaves: boys bearing shields, various smaller figures of fauns, nymphs, cherubs, and what looked suspiciously like a contingent of garden gnomes.

“Venus herself,” said Sir Francis, leading the way up the hill. “The one actually in the temple, you see? Regard the rather better execution than in all the little figures; I got those at a bargain price, though, by God. Someone’s plaster yard in Genoa had gone bankrupt and was closing out its stock. This, sir, is a copy of the Venus de Medici; rather fine, don’t you think?”

“Profoundly so,” said Lewis, wondering whether Sir Francis was guiding him away from something. Sir Francis stepped back and swung his hand up to point at the dome of the temple.

“And, see there? Look closely. It’s a little hard to make out, at this angle, but that’s Leda and Jove in the guise of a swan.”

Lewis stepped back and looked.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh! Well. She, er, certainly looks happy.”

“I think the sculptor caught perfectly the combination of ecstatic convulsion and divine-regarding reverie,” said Sir Francis. “Pity we can’t have it down here where it might be better viewed, but…well, perhaps better not. Awkward to explain to the children.”

“I expect it would be, yes.”

“And down
here
we put Venus’s Parlor,” Sir Francis went on. “That one represents Mercury, you see? Rather an ironic reminder to incautious youth. Observe the many elegant references to sweet Venus’s portal of bliss, or, as some have called it, the Gate of Life itself, whence we all are come.”

“How evocative, my lord,” said Lewis, stammering rather.

“And that yonder is a temple to the nymph Daphne,” said Sir Francis, pointing. “Must have the laurels trimmed back somewhat, so as to disclose it with more art. I put that in during my druidical days.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Was going to worship trees, once,” said Sir Francis. “Applied to Stukeley—the Head Druid, you know—for initiation and all that. Got a charter to start up a grove, as it happened; but they grew vexed with me and withdrew it. No sense of humor, those fellows.”

“Not the eighteenth-century ones, at any rate,” Lewis murmured.

“And I don’t know that I see much to worship in mere
trees
, in any case,” said Sir Francis. “They’re not good company, eh?” He nudged Lewis. “Same thing with the Freemasons; I always did my best to behave with them, but ’pon my soul I couldn’t keep a straight face. Though I trust I give no offense, sir?”

“Oh, none, I assure you.”

“I suppose I ought to have inquired whether you were a Christian,” said Sir Francis.

“I frankly own myself a pagan,” confided Lewis. “Though I have Christian friends.”

“Oh, I too! I’d never mock Christ himself, you know; it’s the institution I can’t abide. Loathsome, cruel, sanctimonious greedy hypocrites! But regard my little church up there, on the hill; what d’you think of that, sir, hey?”

“I did wonder what the golden ball was for,” said Lewis.

“It represents the Sun,” said Sir Francis. “To my mind, much the more appropriate symbol for the ‘Light of the World,’ wouldn’t you say? But certain folk took umbrage, of course. Though I expect I only made things worse by having drinking parties up there, for I had it built hollow, you know, with seats inside. Then I slipped and nearly broke my neck climbing down out of it…dear, dear.” He began to snicker shamefacedly. “Still, you ought to have seen the vicar’s expression!”

They walked on a little, and Sir Francis pointed out the lake, with its swans and authentic fleet of small ships, useful for mock sea battles at parties (“Though last time a fire broke out—burning wadding flew everywhere—so we haven’t fired the cannons in years”). On an island in the center of the lake was another folly, with yet more statues.

“Looks rather like the temple of Vesta in Rome,” Lewis observed. Hastily he added, “At least, as it might have looked before it became a ruin.”

“Ah! You saw that, did you?” said Sir Francis. “Very good! That was my intent, you know. You
are
a scholar, sir. I sketched the ruins myself, once. Dearly loved classical Rome when I was a young man. Still think its religion was quite the most sensible men have ever made for themselves.”

“You know, I’ve thought that too,” said Lewis.

“Have you?” Sir Francis turned to him, positively beaming. “Their gods are so like
us
, you know; ordinary people, with faults and family quarrels. Some of them quite dreadful, but others rather endearing. Much more likely to have made this dirty, silly world than some remote Perfection in th’ether. Or wouldn’t you say?”

“It has always seemed that way to me,” said Lewis, thinking wistfully of his human ancestry. He considered Sir Francis, and decided to cast out a hook. “Of course, there wasn’t much prospect of an afterlife for mere mortals in antiquity.”

“Not so!” said Sir Francis. “Or what would you make of the Eleusinian Mysteries, then?”

Lewis drew a deep breath and thanked Mercury, god of schemers.

“Well, what can one make, my lord? The Eleusinian rites are unknown, because their initiates were sworn to secrecy,” he said.

“Ha! I can tell you how much an oath of secrecy’s worth,” said Sir Francis, shaking his head. “Depend upon it, my young friend, people blabbed. Life everlasting was offered to mortals long before St. Paul and his cronies claimed the idea.”

True enough
, thought Lewis, reflecting on the Company’s immortality process. “So it’s rumored, my lord; but, alas, we’ve not a shred of proof for that, have we?”

“That’s as may be,” said Sir Francis blandly. “If I were to tell you that there are certain sacred groves in Italy where satyrs yet dance, you’d think me mad; yet I have seen something pretty near to them. Ay, and nymphs, too!”

Lewis did his best to look like a man of the world. “Well, I could name you a nymph or two here in England, if it comes to that,” he said, attempting a nudge and wink. Sir Francis clapped him on the back.

“I dare say you could! Yes, we really must have another chapter meeting. I’ll sponsor you, if you like.”

“Oh, sir, what kindness!”

“Not at all,” said Sir Francis, looking immensely pleased. “We’ve needed some young blood in our ranks. I’ll send to Twickenham for Whitehead; he’ll arrange it.”

Lewis looked at the box of fragments and shook his head sadly. The pornographic papyrus was in shocking condition, nearly as bad as some of the Dead Sea scrolls would be; though this damage seemed due to recent abuse of some kind. Worse still, some of the little bits were gummed together with something, and it wasn’t gooseberry jam. Lewis had begun to have a queasy notion as to the circumstances of his immediate predecessor’s departure.

“Well, let’s see if we can’t put things to rights,” he muttered to himself, and set out the larger pieces. Three nymphs, five satyrs, and…possibly a horse? And a flute player? And a lot of bunches of grapes. Three sets of unattached, er, bits. Part of a…duck?

Frowning, the tip of his tongue between his teeth in intense concentration, Lewis sorted through all the fragments of wildly posturing limbs. With a cyborg’s speed in analysis, he began to assemble the bits of the puzzle.

“There…and
he
goes there and
she
goes there and…no, that doesn’t look anatomically possible, does it? Ah. But if this leg goes up
this
way…no, that’s an elbow…oh, it’s a
centaur!
Well, that makes much more sense. Silly me.”

The door to the library opened, admitting a draft and Sir Francis. Lewis spread out his hands to prevent the reassembled orgy scene from sailing across the tabletop.

“There you are, Owens,” Sir Francis said. He sounded a trifle hesitant. Lewis looked up at him sharply, but he did not meet Lewis’s gaze; instead he kept his eyes on the papyrus as he approached.

“Well! H’em. What a splendid job you’re doing! Deplorable state that one was in; should have had this seen to ages ago, I suppose. But, then, I’ve been busy these last years bringing myrtles to Venus myself, rather than reading about other people doing it. Eh?”

“Very wise, my lord.”

He pulled out a chair and sat at the table, looking on in silence a moment as Lewis went back to fitting fragments together.

“I remember acquiring that one as though it were yesterday,” Sir Francis said. “I was seeing Naxos. My guide was a shrewd man; you could trust him to find you absolutely anything. Girls fair or dark, plump or slender, whatever your mood; and the very best houses for drinking, you know, whether you wanted wine or stronger spirits. If you wanted to see temples, he could find those too; and I had but to mention that I was interested in antiquities, and, by God, sir, he showed me…”

“A certain shop?” said Lewis, carefully applying Papyro-Fix from a plain jar, with a tiny brush. He fitted two fragments together. They reunited so perfectly it would have been impossible to say where they had been sundered. “A dark little place down a winding street?”

“Look at that! I declare, sir, you are a very physician of books!…But no, it wasn’t such a shop. I’ve seen those places; they’re all too eager to snare a young fool on his first Grand Tour, and sell him Homer’s very lyre and Caesar’s own laurels to boot. All impostures, you may be certain. No…this was another sort of place entirely.”

Lewis was silent, waiting for him to continue. He looked up and saw Sir Francis gazing out the window, where the autumn forest showed now black branches through the drifting red and gold.