The hangman, whose attention was so suddenly besought by many cries and movements, pressed on. Vergil noticed that the hangman pressed on.
What Quint, with his blood shot eyes, pale thin face and dark thin hair, noticed, was not known to Vergil.
Who made up the mob rabbling and howling? The meanest class of citizenry, whose leather badges and SQPR[2] stamped in gilt served to prove citizenship, made up the largest part. They had no money to buy anything and no mind to read anything, so a procession to the gibbet was an absolute gift for them.
Men, too, from all the peoples of the Empery were there: fair Franks with long hair and Celts with short and Egyptians with none; pale Berbars from the Solitudes of Syrtica and of As’hara, sand as high as mountains and hills of solid stone pierced with holes where the Troglodytes live; dark Numidians who had seen the Sphynges flying in their thousands to drink of the waters at the sources of the Nile — of all other waters drink they not, of all the waters of Ægypt drink they not — and Gauls with bearded chops, the wailing of whose dead fills the islands and the highlands of the misty great green darkling Sea of Atlantis between shore to shore of whose vasty waters might no bird fly; and Æthiops with emeraulds in their ears. Many indeed could be seen (though not so many) to be aliens from outside the Empery, and even the Œconomium.
Vergil was indifferent at seeing or smelling the so-called Foul or Infamous Crafts such as the knackers and the carriers of dogs’ dung for the tanneries, for he still had the muck of the farmyards and the fernbrooks on his legs and feet, and the odors of dead beasts and dung-heaps were fresher to his nose-holes than those of ambergrise and nard.
And here and there, as so often of late (and some said, more and more often, and they darkly mumbled their gums about laws graven on the twelve Iron Tablets about the artificial production of monsters and other omens … no one of course was ever able to find such laws) here and there through the mass went wandering a satyr or a centaur of, say, the size of a goat-kid. There were no weanling Lapiths to be seen, however; and who would know one, had there been? memory of one Ciuco, a night-soil-man little wittier than a wittold, in Vergil’s home-hamlet in the Bail of Brundusy, who used to stop any one too purblind to avoid him, and confide, “My granddam, now, she seen a Laypith, she seen ‘un ‘ith a horn in the muddle o’ his forrid: which be the reason, she bein’ then six months gorn wi’ child, that I has six finger on my left ‘and.” What the logical, or even the illogical connection between the two things was, no one was ever able to conjecture; certainly all local priests denied that ever there had been stories — “myths”, you might call them — of monoceroid Lapiths; and neither was anyone, lay or cleric, able to credit Cluco’s being able to invent such a story. But, however invented, tell it he did, lustrum after lustrum, decade after decade, to whomever could not trot faster than he could, and who — usually was glad or let us say willing enough to avoid the presence of Ciuco, polydactylous or not (for rhododactylos assuredly he wasn’t, and neither was he rosy-scented) by the dole of a very small coin or a not-quite-so-small chunk of bread: at which see Ciuco become unseen; this may or may not have been more profitable than the night-soil business, but was certainly much easier.
When one mentions the size of a goat-kid one refers to the centaurs, for the satyrs were man-sized, and very near each creature was someone (invariably a shill) mentioning confidentially the name of the thaumaturge who’d made it, in some such words as, “That ‘un’s the work of that same Septimus as keeps his crib atween Apollo’s Court and the Steps of Woe.” — why would anyone want a confected satyr or centaur? perhaps one of those newly-rich who kept a baby oliphaunt in his atrium might want one, and for the same reason: show.
Thieves were there in the vulgus; as they could not steal the golden spikes from the ridge-poles of the temples and the other public buildings, they cut the thongs of purses with their knives so much sharper than mere razors; sellers of snacks were there, for many a man had neither cook nor kitchen to dress a meal of victuals, and if he turned aside into a cheap eating-place he might miss something: but whether a rabbleman stewed hog-palates in vinegar or cut the thongs of purses or did, as was the right of citizens, nothing at all, something there had now changed and perhaps everything had changed. But the hangman wished to behave as though nothing had happened. The lictor, whose attention was now besought by many cries and movements, strode on, eyes down, and in fact by now he had gotten away ahead of the procession. The hangman pressed on. A bit the woman’s sunshade slipped and a bit the veil, revealing to Vergil a face of such extraordinary loveliness and purity that his breath was stopped.
The word coming up from the populus now was pardon: the hangman would not stop for it; why should he? He received the deadman’s clothes as a perquisite even if they were rags (and they were not always rags) they had their value and their price as ingredients of the Black Rite; he got to receive everything which was, or at the time of imprisonment had been, on the body of the dead-man-to-be; and he also received his fee for making the liveman’s body dead by pushing it off the ladder at the gibbet and at once leaping onto his shoulders and jumping up and down on them — thus assuring that the caitiff’s neck must break if it had not already broken by the drop. Of these benefits the hangman would receive none at all in case of pardon, so why should he stop for it? and lastly, it would deprive him of all the pleasure of the death scene: the hangman, howl the mob as it would, would not stop. And who might stop him?
(The lictor, fasces bundled into his arms, was by now very far ahead, stooped, aloof, deep in thought: of what, who could say, perhaps that time there was, ere Roma’s woes began … perhaps not.)
Who else? Himself, the August Caesar? where was he? not here. From what other place, then, did the musty multitude seem to think that help might arrive. The woman in the wagonette commenced to rise, in a slow and flowing motion like an hieratical dancer: though, perhaps actually not: only … somehow … it seemed so. The brute would not see her. Vergil caught her eye, and, again, that ambiguous impression, that impression deep yet perhaps false. Had he caught her eye at all? Erect, like a statue of the golden age, she seemed.
The lictor, perhaps grown somewhat aware of the hideous shriek and hum from that mass of men — here and there some women: not trulls alone: vendors of fragrant citrons, of pickled samphire for relish, of sieves and baskets in many sizes, fishwives going down to the river to renew supplies of mullet and sardines and dogfish with double-lobed livers; others — the lictor turned: at once saw all. Quint, keenly enjoying everything, was telling Vergil nothing; scarcely he raised a thin and hairy hand to brush the ever-deliquescent ointment from his bleary eyes — his physicians were generally agreed twas from an excess of some humor, but they never yet agreed on which humor, though there were not many, but prescribed this salve or that; they might as well, Vergil thought, have told him to graze grass like an ox … whoever saw a blear-eyes ox? And, Ow! shouted the throng, and Yow! shouted the throng. “Pardon! Pardon!” it howled. And, ever and again, “Up-tails, all!” and “A louse for the hangman!”
The hangman may or may not have gotten a louse (close-pressed in that stinking swarm, it would have been no surprise if he had) but what he very quickly got was the lictor at his side; and the lictor said to him, more in astonishment than anger, “where are you going, turd of a toad? Don’t you see the high-born Virgin lady? Stop! — Or I’ll let the populus have you, and may they eat your arse sans salt.”
2
SQPR: Senatus