Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

brown breasts. Yellow dogs sat on their haunches and grinned.

There was a moon, later, and even later, an owl, their god.

I was going to float among them when the Consiliarii came to me, quickly, like lighting birds in an opposing wind, and said, No, that I could not consort with the barbarians.

They said their name, a word with too many syllables and with the accent impossibly on the penultimate. He was a commander of weather and water, their god. His brother is a snake. He is pleased by drums. By bells, gongs, chants.

Firelight on the grease of their cheeks kept me ahover just beyond their gray horses, and the beautiful chink chink of their kanoon by which the womenfolk sang lullabies to their young.

Their time is not yours, the Consiliarii said as they shooed me back.

— Give me, then, I said, my bee! My sponsor across the Styx. My evangelical bee.

They smiled, the tall Consiliarii. Where we were rose with a jolt, tilted, and shot forward. A music as of birds and laughing children went with us, though measured like a Lydian dance.

And on that silver line between the brown earth and the blue deep of the sky, in a field of clover red and green the whole horizon across, we came to my bee.

— O golden-thighed mite! I cried.

— Wax hexagon! said the bee. Right deflection under azimuth, earthspin downward polaroid greens in quanta red shift, dip and shake, forward zoom.

— Brother! I said.

— A shake and a shake, it sang. Angle, angle! Citron ginger sugar green.

— Brother!

— Buzz off, Onion Bulb, it said. Go jump in your jug.

THE FIRST TIME they got in their rabbit brains that we were magicians I was sentenced to an island. We worked the oars going out, we arrived so glad to be rid of the sea and the whip that we scarcely asked what our punishment was to be. Labor, we assumed, a bitter existence we assumed, the life of a slave.

But there was no garrison there, no master of the whip. Nothing. Rock, bushes, weeds, and the winking glare of the sea all around.

And no water. We looked, the miserable lot of us. There was no water on the island.

We were murderous pimps, men who had lost all to the exactors’ moneylenders, one-handed thieves, highwaymen, merchants of children, magi, philosophers.

Here in the Great Corinthian Ditch we at least know we shall have our swill, and even when. It’s a kind of frog spawn with iron beans. But it is always there.

Discipline is our Orcus and our salvation. Rome itself is a shapeless bundle of shitten pissburnt sweatscalded bubonic rotten rags held together with a bronze wire of discipline. Our Centurio gets drunk every sixth day, you can tell by the silly smile and the cinculus on backwards. Every Ides the Dux puts on his yellow frock and goes off with the sergeants and corporals to their Mithraeum they have here in the wilderness. They call each other Brother Lion and Brother Crow.

Even I am here by law. I am a wizard.

The catchpoll described me to the Magistrate when I was hauled in on the charge that landed me here as a subverter of the laws of the State and a blasphemer against the gods.

— Crap, I said.

— What? said the Magistrate.

— Crap, your Honor. Merda.

The Accusator read from the charge: Teaches that women are the equal of men and that their status as infants in the adoption of their husbands is pernicious and against nature. Advocates that women should be educated. Teaches that the gladiators are inhuman and that the spectators at the Circus are bestial and coarse of mind, including his Divinity the Emperor. That taxes are collected by usurers, who keep half, that Roman history is largely fiction, that few barbarian peoples have ever exhibited such moral degradation as the Roman mob, that the Roman gentry are more firmly enslaved to their vices than their slaves to their bondage . . .

He read on, and on, flicking his tongue across his teeth at the items he considered scandalous and raising his eyebrows at the parts clearly definable as sedition.

— To whom, the Magistrate thought to ask, were these ridicularia being taught?

A shuffle of tablets, and a list held up, as if by this token damnation was sealed.

— Clavis, a cobbler, Passer, a catamite, Hispana, a bawd, Tacita, an old woman who keeps a goat, Virga, another catamite, Modestus, a slave, Minicius, a poet . . .

— Scum.

— Vero.

— Why do you do this? the Magistrate said to me, with no uncertainty that my perversity was not as clear to me as it was to him.

— To teach men what is in their power to control and what isn’t, so that they may cultivate their character and make a garden of their soul.

My failure is to address men as if they were classrooms.

The Magistrate rearranged his chins, milked the lobe of an ear, and asked how many offenses I had committed against the Roman Senate and People.

— Five times jailed and once exiled, the Recorder recited. All for sedition. Repeatedly reprimanded for conducting sessiuncula philosophica, so called, to no purpose, as the accused is pigheaded.

So they sent me to Corinth to dig a canal through solid rock from this bay of the ocean to that bay of the ocean.

In my time the world was mad.

CONSIDER GLAUKOS, the Consiliarii said together, who fell into a jar of honey as he chased a mouse, and drowned. I saw the consonance of image with image, his jar and mine, the honey in his, the bee in mine. But I was bald and fat, briefest of emperors. Glaukos, they smiled, was a little boy, his hair coppery and finished, neat cross his forehead and snug around his ears. His limbs were so kin in color to the honey in which he fell that the first astonished eyes thought that only his shirt was what they saw.

At first they did not know where he was. Minos sent