THE TAWNY LEGEND

THE TAWNY LEGEND or RODERICK THE LION by Charles Stewart

2

Roderick had had a very good day. Early in the morning he had gone down to his favourite water-hole and caught a lovely juicy zebra for breakfast. Later, in the afternoon, a rather stringy giraffe had nevertheless served him as a most satisfying lunch. Then in the evening he had been fortunate enough to come upon an unsuspecting wildebeest which had turned out to be the most delicious of the three. Now, sitting under a shady tree in the lengthening shadows of the evening, he was just contemplating what might serve him as a late night snack. A small crocodile had wandered by, but he had let it go, remembering the last time he had devoured such a morsel just before retiring, when the hard bits of cracked shell had got all over his den and had kept him awake tossing and turning half the night. Only one thing had gone wrong the entire day, and that was when he had stepped on a rather large thorn which he had been unable to get out of his paw. But a kindly old Greek gentleman, who happened to be passing at the time, had removed it for him, and Roderick, remembering a story he had once heard, promised himself that, should they ever meet again, he would do the Greek gentleman a good turn in return. He cursed inwardly at present, listening to his stomach rumble, thinking that, if he had only kept the admittedly rather plump Greek gentleman there under some pretext or other, he could think of just the good turn he would now be able to do him. But, Roderick thought rather wistfully, perhaps it was just as well. The last time he had eaten a Greek meal, there was a certain something, an oiliness about the flesh perhaps, which had not entirely agreed with him. He remembered hearing, somewhere, something about a well-known giant who had devoured too many Greek sailors just before going to bed and, if he recollected the details of the story correctly, had been up for half the night. No. He would sit here quietly, waiting, and, he felt certain, something would come along. It always did. That was what he found so wonderful. Eventually something always came along. He licked his lips, growled lazily, and flicked his tail to remove the fly which was tickling his rump, looking, no doubt, for an evening morsel, as was Roderick himself. The sun, enormous on the horizon, hesitated a moment before going down, turning Roderick's whole face into one huge tawny reflection of itself. He blinked at it, yawning. Then it was gone. Twilight is short on the veldt. Roderick knew that, if something didn't turn up soon, he would be going to bed hungry.

Something did turn up.

Suddenly it grew very dark: a soft warm close velvety darkness Roderick felt he could almost touch. He knew the nights came on quickly, but this was ridiculous. And there were no stars. Roderick snorted. But when he attempted to breathe he discovered, much to his discomfort, that the darkness was indeed palpable: it got up his nose and into his mouth. He found himself panting for breath. He did not, however, panic. He lay quietly, collecting his thoughts. Vaguely he heard the voices of men, as if from beyond the darkness. He recalled a

3 story he had once been told, of a lion captured in a big sack and taken away somewhere, to a zoo or a circus. Or perhaps it had been to the arena. He couldn't really remember which. And for the present he didn't really care. He was bored with life on the veldt. He was ready for a new adventure. The zoo, the circus, or the arena, he didn't much mind, one way or the other.

There was bound to be plenty of food. And at least it would be something new.

It was. Something new. And there was plenty of food.

The old men who refused to sacrifice to the gods were a bit tough and stringy. The elderly matrons were better, but took a deal of chewing. The young men were all right, but most of them were so muscle-bound with hard work and exercise that the flesh was all marbled and sinewy. One of them had been so muscular and strong that it seemed he could very nearly have overcome Roderick. He had entered the arena naked, his body glistening with oil. The crowd had gone wild. But Roderick had kept his head. He remembered a story he had once heard about a lion, in Nemea he thought it was, who had been killed by some bruit brute of a hero who had afterwards skinned him and worn the skin as a trophy. Roderick had no intention of falling victim to the same fate. Fortunately the young man was also rather vain. He seemed to have one eye always on the spectators, adjusting his pose so that his biceps never failed to show to best advantage. Roderick was not one to waste such an opportunity. The audience had gone even wilder as he munched his squirming prey. But best of all Roderick liked the young girls.

They were so juicy and tender. One of them in particular, who had come quietly into the arena with her face radiant, looking up to heaven as if she could already see the skies opening to receive her. Roderick had pounced. The crowd had shouted. The flesh seemed to melt in his mouth. Roderick was only too happy to eat the lot, the men, the women, the boys, the girls, the long and the short and the tall. But most of all, he was glad he ate her.

Yet even such plenty palls by its very abundance.

One night Roderick dreamed that he was back at his own old water-hole. A great multitude of the zebras and giraffes and wildebeests he had been wont to hunt had silently approached and, looking at him with their huge eyes, seemed to be begging him to eat them.

Roderick was only too happy to oblige. But after a while he had grown weary of his feasting.

He had wondered why such once tasty meat had suddenly lost all its savour. Then he had woken up. Roderick lay in the dark for a long time with the flavour of sawdust in his mouth.

He knew at once what the dream meant. He remembered hearing of the two gates through which dreams purportedly came, one of ivory, through which false dreams were conveyed, and the other of horn, through which only true dreams passed. He knew this dream had come through the gate of horn. What was the point of all this food, of such an abundance of these prey-items, handed to him on a plate, as it were? Where was the struggle, where was the challenge, where was the rapture of pursuing? These Christians simply let him eat them! They didn't put up a good fight, they didn't even try to run away! He had though, on the veldt, that

4 the wonderful thing was that something always came along. Here, in captivity, the something that always came along was just another passive meal.

Roderick made up his mind, then and there, not to eat another Christian martyr, even if his life depended upon it. It was, he decided, not worthy of his status, of his honour, of his lionhood!

Next day in the arena was just like every other day. The same cheering crowd, the same big moronic he-men fighting each other to the death to please that same crowd, the same noise and smells, the same blood, the same death. Roderick, waiting for his cue, pictured the scene within, not without a certain distaste. Then it was his turn. He bounded into the centre of the arena. The crowd, as usual, went wild. He was, after all, an exceptionally well-built lion, with a wonderful flowing mane and a fearsome roar. Then a barred gate opened and a small boy was thrust into the arena after him. He could not have been more than twelve years old and was dressed only in the rude skin tunic of a shepherd. The tunic had been torn, seemingly in a struggle with the keepers, and one pitifully thin shoulder-blade was bare. He was dusty and dishevelled and, as the streaks which furrowed his dirty face clearly evinced, had apparently been crying. When he saw Roderick his knees gave way completely and he sank down onto the ground, in the one movement covering his face with both hands and curling himself up like a baby, as if instinctively believing he might avert his fate by returning to childhood, or if not, at least not be compelled to witness its fearsome approach.

This was too much for Roderick. It was a slap in the face, an insult. He, the king of the beasts, was being offered this mere infant as a suitable prey for his ravenous maw. He sauntered over to where the boy was lying. He could see, between the fingers, the eyes squeezed tightly shut, as if in a further inane attempt to avert the inevitable. Roderick lowered his head and began to lick the boy's face. He could taste the salt tears mingled with the dust.

The roar of the crowd rose in its intensity. The boy, whose curiosity had at last got the better of his fears, peeped up at Roderick between half-spread fingers. His eyes opened enormously wide for less than an instant, then his eyelids flickered and closed as his whole body went limp.

Roderick turned and walked disdainfully away.

The arena was in an uproar. Roderick felt himself pelted by all manner of missiles. He gave them such attention as he thought they deserved.

Meanwhile, at Roderick's apparent refusal, a couple of scrawny wolves and an undersized runt of a mangy half-grown lion had been released into the arena to finish off the job. But Roderick would have none of it. Slowly he circled the inert form of the boy, ignoring the shouts of the spectators, ignoring the other beasts who kept their distance, snarling

5 occasionally then turning and slinking away with their tails between their legs, as if overwhelmed at their own audacity.

The boy, recovering his senses somewhat, propped himself up with his hands in a half-sitting position, took in the scene that was going on around him, and promptly fainted again.

The Emperor was amazed. He ordered the entire arena cleared of all its animals. But no one dared approach Roderick. Or the boy. It had become a point of honour with Roderick now that no one, but no one, was going to hurt somebody he had seen fit to spare, unless it was him.

And, as he had no intention of harming a hair on the boy's head, the boy could not have been in better hands. Or paws. It was strange, Roderick thought wistfully, that a piece of meat which only yesterday he would have found a tasty morsel he now had no stomach for at all. Perhaps, if he had got to know all the zebras and giraffes and wildebeests, and all the other Christians he had eaten too, he would not have fancied them as prey-items.

Meanwhile the boy appeared to have regained a degree of consciousness. He managed to get to his feet and make his way rather unsteadily to where the Emperor, safely ensconced behind a strong wire fence, was beckoning him over. The Emperor asked him his name. It was Mamas. And yes, he was a shepherd boy. And yes, he was also a Christian. But why the lion had refused to eat him, he had no idea. He smiled wryly and shrugged his shoulders, catching his torn tunic up and holding it to his chest, as if suddenly made aware of the inappropriateness of his state of dress when addressing the Emperor. The Emperor smiled indulgently. Then he turned his attention to Roderick.

Roderick had been watching the scene from a distance. He still circled the spot where the boy had been lying, flicking his tail nonchalantly now and then, as if to show his utter disdain for the ways both of boys and of Emperors, only occasionally giving the regal interview a perfunctory sidelong glance. After all, was he not the king of the beasts! And when the Emperor appeared to be beckoning him over too, he treated this overture of royal friendship with all the contempt which he felt it so richly deserved. But when the boy came quietly back to him and asked him with his eyes if he would not join them, Roderick felt the pull of love more strongly than he had felt the constraint of power, and followed him gently, wagging his tail.

The Emperor was delighted. The sight of the boy and the lion approaching him over the sordid dust of the arena, like two old friends, pleased his sense of the ridiculous. This was even more fun, being far more unusual, than if the lion had been sitting quietly, munching a bleeding arm or leg. Besides, the boy did not have all that much meat on him. The whole spectacle would no doubt have proved a disappointment. Whereas this would furnish endless nights of after-dinner conversation, between bouts of sleeping and vomiting.

6 Roderick and the boy stood before the Emperor. The boy, who did not seem at all afraid of the lion now, put an arm around Roderick's neck. Roderick did not mind. In fact, inexplicably, he rather liked it. The boy even persuaded the Emperor to put a hand between the thick mesh of wire and stroke the lion's mane. Roderick did not like this so much and even for a moment contemplated making a meal of the Emperor's proffered forefoot, but it was so white and puffy, and so covered in gaudy rings, that almost at once he thought better of it, if only for the sake of his digestion. He contented himself with letting out a deep roar, suddenly and rather loudly, and was gratified by the unseemly haste with which the Emperor withdrew his hand and stepped back a few paces behind the shielding wire.

The Emperor was still delighted. The fact of his having reached through the wire was courage enough for him, and the obvious savagery of the lion only confirmed his high opinion of his own bravery. The unseemly haste of withdrawal was quite forgotten in the first fine flush of thrust. The Emperor looked at his own hand in wonder, as if contemplating what Order of Bravery he might be able to invent which could worthily be bestowed upon a hand capable of displaying such raw courage.

Meanwhile the boy and the lion were getting to know each other. The lion walked slowly around the boy, smelling him up and down, pausing to sniff at his fundament as one dog might do to another. The boy, blushing, thrust him quickly away. The Emperor was even more delighted. The roar of the crowd would have lifted the roof, had there been a roof to lift on the arena.

Roderick wondered what all the fuss was about. He could only marvel afresh at the odd ways of humanity. The first thing he always did, when making new friends, was to smell their recta.

The Emperor held up both hands for silence. The crowd instantly hushed. No one there felt like being selected for the lion's next banquet. The Emperor, however, was in such high good humour that he would willingly have forgiven most things. He had already decided to leave the arena early today, being firmly convinced that, after this, nothing, not the blindfolded gladiators fighting to the death, not the passive Christian martyrs weltering in dust and blood, not even the convicted robbers having their right hands cut off and the bleeding stumps cauterised, which was always guaranteed to be a good show, could possibly be anything but an anticlimax.

The Emperor left it to the spectators. Should the boy and the lion be put to death or allowed to go free? He had no doubt himself over the outcome of this democratic plebiscite, otherwise he would never have instituted it. There was an enormous roar: thousands of right fists went up, even the waiting robbers were glad of one last opportunity to use the hands which

7 for them would soon be only a memoryÍž thousands of right thumbs thrust eagerly skywardÍž thousands of kind fickle hearts decided on the easy sympathy of the moment. The Emperor grinned like a little boy given the birthday present he has so carefully ordered in advance.

Mamas was quiet. Roderick took it in his stride. He had already decided that the ways of man were quite beyond him. The only proviso was that the boy and the lion must leave the city at once and not return, under threat of a renewal of the death sentence. Allowing a harmless boy and a lion to go free on a whim was one thing, but the Emperor had no intention of letting a dangerous wild animal roam the streets at will, and a wilful boy preach his even more dangerous doctrines to the poor gullible populace. One never knew where these things might end. So the boy and the lion were assigned a military escort, a heavily armed military escort, to take them to the city gates, and, after a farewell pat on the head, on the boy's head, by the Emperor, and a stern admonition not to persist in his stubborn adherence to so base a superstition but to return to the well-tried and tested gods who had served them all for so long, the boy and the lion were taken by the military escort, the heavily armed military escort, to one of the city gates and dumped unceremoniously outside.

The Emperor, true to his word, left the arena, went straight home to his palace, and, after a bath and a massage, went in to dinner and regaled his guests with a somewhat embellished account of the story of the boy and the lion and his own part in it, of his courage and his clemency. Everyone was delighted. In fact it was the talk of the court for almost a week.

The spectators in the arena were not so tenacious of memory. At the third gladiatorial combat it had already begun to fade from their minds. And by the time the first severed hands were dropping useless in the dust, all that they could think about was their afternoon tea.

Meanwhile, outside the city walls, Roderick and the boy had been left to fend for themselves, with the city gate, so to speak, shut firmly in their faces. Roderick was delighted.

This was the something new for which he had for so long been waiting. But Mamas seemed disconsolate. Almost as soon as they were alone, all strength appeared to drain out of his body.

He sunk down onto a nearby stone and buried his head in his hands. It was as though he had been holding on, gritting his teeth, as it were, while the soldiers had been present, but now that they had departed and he was alone with Roderick, he was allowing himself the luxury of sinking at last into that despair the true depth of which Roderick had first noticed in his face, surprisingly enough, just after the crowd had unanimously voted that both he and Roderick should go free.

Roderick wondered what the matter could be. Then he remembered a story he had once heard about a Christian who had wanted to be eaten by the wild beasts in the arena, and would not allow his friends to try to save him, because he had felt that this was the quickest and safest way of getting to the heaven in which he so firmly believed. Roderick licked his lips. If this

8 was what had upset Mamas so much, he would be only too happy to oblige him. With a flick of his tail he sauntered nonchalantly over and nudged at the boy's unquestionably tasty looking right ear. The boy looked up at him. Then, overcome, he flung both arms around Roderick's neck and buried his face in the nearest soft object on which he laid his eyes, which happened to be Roderick's mane. Roderick's mane was not all that soft, but it served as a pillow for his heart, somewhere he could, as it were, cry his eyes out. Roderick was amazed. And touched.

He had never before known such affection, and such trust, in a human being. Instantly all thought of Mamas as a meal left him, despite the close proximity of such a nicely wrapped parcel of warm fresh meat. He inwardly chastised himself for even momentarily forgetting his so recent resolve to protect the boy at any cost. What could he have been thinking of?

Roderick knew of what he had been thinking. Dinner. His stomach rumbled angrily. But not the boy. Never. He determined on the spot never again to think of Mamas, not just an anonymous boy now but Mamas, his friend, as a mere prey-item. Fortunately a rather plump onager had happened to pass by at that particular moment and, catching sight of the lion, had bounded off. Roderick did not need prompting. Five minutes later he returned to where Mamas was sitting, dragging with him the only partly consumed carcass. He laid it at the boy's feet. Mamas started to laugh, the tears still pouring from his eyes. Roderick realised that it was useless. He would never be able to understand the ways of man, or of boys, no matter how hard he tried. Nevertheless, he dragged a large lump of bleeding meat from the body with his teeth and offered it to Mamas. Mamas, much to Roderick's surprise, took it in his hand and, after looking at it quizzically for a few moments, put it to his lips and began to chew it slowly, sucking out the blood, which dribbled down onto his chest. Roderick was delighted. Mamas was so thin and looked so undernourished that Roderick had been beginning to wonder just how long he could survive at all without a little solid sustenance. But, even more importantly than this, he would need water. Roderick bounded off again. Before long he came upon a small oasis. He was on the brink almost of despair, though, after first drinking deeply himself, in his efforts to think of a way of bringing the water back to Mamas, when an obliging tortoise had swum by, conveniently close. Roderick smiled to himself. Was it not this then that he found so wonderful? The fact that something always came along. It was the work but of an instant to have the tortoise's head off and its still flailing body dragged out of the water.

Another instant saw its somewhat softer underside ripped open and the carapace eviscerated with expert claws. And, after only briefly sampling a few gobbets of the tasty meat, Roderick, holding the shell carefully in his mouth between gently clamped jaws, had filled it almost to the brim with the deliciously cool water and, trotting quietly now so as not to spill too much of the precious draught, returned to the place where he had left Mamas only a few minutes before.

But, when he got there, Mamas was gone.

Roderick was at a loss. He put down the still nearly full tortoise shell carefully, then he looked around. There was no sign of the boy. Where could he have got to? For the first time in his life Roderick almost wished that he had been born a man. Then, at least, he could have

9 tried to put himself into the mind of the boy and attempted to fathom the way his thought processes must be working. But as it was, Roderick was in the dark. He knew that he would never be able to comprehend the ways of man, or, for that matter, of boys. So what was he to do? Roderick did what he always did first, and best. He acted. He sniffed around the still warm carcass of the onager, picked up the boy's spoor, then, his nose close to the ground, followed the path it so unmistakably left on the apparently blank ground. But Roderick halted.

The boy had gone back into the city. The boy knew, and Roderick knew, and Roderick knew that the boy knew, and the boy knew that Roderick knew that the boy knew, just what this meant. Mamas had gone back to be martyred. Roderick was furious. What right had this boy, this stripling, whose life Roderick had so magnanimously spared, to return and be thrown to some mangy wolf or sybaritic lion? If anyone was going to eat Mamas, it was going to be Roderick! His so recent resolve so soon forgotten, Roderick let out an angry growl and plunged back into the city.

The streets were very quiet. The games being still in progress, most of the populace remained there cheering on some fresh act of bloodletting. Occasionally Roderick passed a stray citizen who would, upon catching sight of him, either scream and run up the nearest convenient alley or else, rooted to the spot, just stand there, as if turned to stone. Roderick took no notice. He had other, more important things on his mind, even than food. Once he passed a half-open doorway and, out of the corner of his eye, caught a momentary glimpse of a young, almost naked girl dancing before a leering assembly of silent men with glazed intent eyes.

They were too intent and too preoccupied even to notice the tawny shape which passed purposefully by in the growing twilight outside. Roderick was sorry he did not have time to stop. He too would have liked to watch the dance. His own eyes glazed over at the thought of the girl and of those plump, now gently, now violently undulating hips. What a meal he could make out of so fair a bottom. He could not remember the last really good juicy rump steak he had eaten. He even contemplated pausing for a moment to partake of a quick snack. After all, he did need some refreshment, at least if he was going to have the energy left to find the boy.

Suddenly, halted by a thought, Roderick stopped in his tracks. He remembered a story he had once heard about an early martyr, a prophet, who had lived in the wilderness on locusts and wild honey. He had been friends with a lot of the wild animals and Roderick's own grandfather had had many firsthand accounts passed down to him which he had in turn passed down to Roderick. Roderick now remembered the singular manner of this prophet's death, as related to him by his grandfather.

It seemed that somehow this man, whom all the lions had liked a lot, Roderick remembered that much, had somehow offended someone in some high place or other, Roderick was not a great one for details, and this man had been arrested and thrown into prison and, some woman or other, the wife of the someone in some high place or other, if Roderick remembered aright, had disliked this man so much that she had got some girl, the daughter by

10 another man of the wife of the someone in some high place or other, Roderick was pretty sure of that, to dance for the someone in some high place or other and to get him to promise her, the daughter of the wife of the man in some high place or other, to give her anything she asked for.

Well, after the dance, the daughter of the wife of the man in some high place or other had asked her mother what to ask for and the mother had told her to ask for the head of the man, the man who had lived in the wilderness on locusts and wild honey and who had offended the someone in some high place or other and been arrested and thrown into prison. And the someone in some high place or other had agreed to give it to her. And some guard or other had gone down to the dungeon and struck off the man's head. And they had brought the head to her, to the daughter by another man of the wife of the someone in some high place or other, on a platter.

That one detail of the story had always stuck in Roderick's mind. They didn't even eat it! But Roderick had long ago ceased from his futile attempts at fathoming the mind of man. He remembered his grandfather had told him how the news of the man's death had reached the lions, even in the wilderness, and of how sad they had all been on hearing that the one man one could be with and play with and not want to eat, who was worthy to be a lion, was dead.

This it was that had stopped Roderick short in his tracks. He knew that the dancing girl he had glimpsed in passing had nothing to do with Mamas, that her undulations and the leering intent on the faces of the men were just another, inexplicable aspect of human nature which would always remain a mystery to him. But, seeing her dance, the boy's face had suddenly flashed before his inner eye, not living, as he remembered it, but lifeless, staring sightlessly up at him from a silver platter.

This boy, this Mamas, his Mamas, as he now thought of him, was, he now realised, almost this semi-legendary figure from his cubhood to the life, just as his grandfather had described him. The same wild aspect, the same rough skin garments, a little younger perhaps, but, given the chance, he could see his Mamas, after the way he had tucked into that raw meat, being quite happy to subsist on locusts and wild honey. But, and here Roderick barely suppressed an involuntary shudder, Mamas was, like his counterpart, ideal martyr material also.

At this very moment he was doubtless heading straight for the arena, eager to offer himself up to the authorities. If Roderick should arrive too late? If the boy's severed head was already lying close to his body, inert on the blood-soaked earth? No! No one was going to kill one he had seen fit to spare! And, on top of it all, if the deed was already accomplished, Roderick's pride would not allow him to devour the remains of a prey-victim he had not slaughtered for himself.

Roderick started off again, quickening his pace. He knew by the roar of the crowd that he was approaching the arena long before he actually caught sight of it. He slowed down, cautious as when drawing near some item of prey. He slunk along a wall, keeping close to it, hoping his shadowy form would not be noticed in the failing light. Then he turned a corner and

11 saw, at the end of a dark tunnel, the light which announced itself as an entrance or exit. He padded up to it and, careful to remain in the shadows himself, looked in.

An old Christian gentleman with white hair and a beard was about to be beheaded. He stood in the middle of the arena, apparently unconcerned. He had obviously suffered a great deal, as his garments were torn and through the rent patches areas of bruised skin and deep gashes could be seen. He was, as a prey-item, clearly well past his sell-by date. But Roderick had other things on his mind. His keen eyes scanned the vast crowd. Mamas was nowhere in sight. Roderick breathed a sigh of relief. At least he had arrived in time. But where, and how, to find him?

Suddenly Roderick's blood froze. A voice, the voice of a young man, the voice of a very young man, raised itself above the roar of the spectators. There was a sudden hush. The words rang out in the unaccustomed silence. "I too follow and believe the same commandments that this man confesses. I too follow and believe in the same Jesus Christ.

And I too will give away my life to further his cause."

The reaction was immediate. A number of Roman soldiers pushed their way roughly through the dense milling throng and crowded round the spot from whence the voice had come.

They seized an unresisting form and dragged it to the centre of the arena. Roderick craned his neck but could make nothing out. All was hidden by a mass of brawny soldier arms and hefty soldier legs and glittering soldier breastplates whose muscular contours no doubt faithfully echoed the equally muscular contours of the soldier chests beneath. Roderick made ready to pounce. He knew that he would be unable to overcome so many, that he would no doubt die in the attempt, but honour demanded that he make that attempt. Then the soldiers drew back, only to reveal a young man, quite another young man, much older than Mamas, fifteen or sixteen at least, who stood bravely amid the jeering crowd, smiling serenely at the astonished old man he was willingly joining in death. Roderick drew back into the shadows. The crowd roared. The two martyrs, their hands tied behind their backs, were forced to their knees and held, as the backs of their necks were bared to the sword: the two napes so different余 the one weather足beaten, mottled, wrinkled as the old man's hands余 the other tanned and firm and smooth as the face which had quite plainly never seen a razor. The execution was the matter of a moment. The crowd roared its approval. The two heads lay side by side in the squalid dust, serene, an aura of silence surrounding them in spite of the tumult. The two headless trunks, however, still pumped the warm blood out into the air, as if not yet accepting the want of a route of circulation.

Suddenly Roderick felt an arm around his shoulder. He turned, snarling. There was Mamas standing beside him. Roderick felt the joy of relief. Mamas, however, was not looking at him. His eyes were fixed on the scene which had just taken place in the arena余 they shone with an unnatural brightness. Then he turned to Roderick. They exchanged a single glance, a

12 glance which to Roderick seemed to contain all the vicissitudes the boy must have gone through since his recent disappearance and which, on Roderick's part, was intended to convey the many troubles and difficulties he himself had experienced in his protracted search. A single glance, though, was all that they had time for.

A net, a heavy net, its thick ropes entwined with metal, came between Roderick and the boy. Roderick found himself struggling helplessly within its meshes, even as he saw Mamas firmly taken hold of by two lumpish soldiers. Snarling and twisting, Roderick felt himself lifted into the air and carried, he could not help noticing with a certain satisfaction, by four very brawny, very hefty soldiers who had forced two stout poles between the mesh and were now staggering, one soldiers at either end of each pole, beneath his considerable weight. Roderick was not going to make things easy for them. He thrashed about, as far as his dignity would allow him in so far from dignified a posture, on his back with all four paws stuck foolishly up in the air and his superb tail poking out between the heavy ropes. He was, however, gratified to hear the soldiers' curses. But Mamas was what really concerned him. The soldiers were pushing him along roughly between them, giving him an occasional clout over the ear or elbow in the ribs as they went. Once the boy fell, and a soldier, laughing, drew out his short sword and jabbed him in the bottom, as one would prod a tardy animal headed for market. The boy scrambled to his feet and staggered on. All the soldiers laughed. Roderick fumed. If only he had been loose, he would have seen to it that the soldier had precious little left to sit down on.

Meanwhile, the Emperor was regaling his guests yet again with his tale of the lion and the boy. They all listened attentively, as they always listened attentively to whatever the Emperor said. They all remembered what had happened one time when somebody had fallen asleep while the Emperor was telling a joke. And so they laughed and applauded his story as enthusiastically as if they were hearing it for the first time. But lo! there came a heavy knock upon the door. The Emperor looked up, mildly annoyed at so rude an interruption. And, as if in concrete proof of the tale, the rough soldiery entered with the very lion and boy of which he had been speaking.

Everyone laughed and applauded.

The Emperor was furious. He had given the strictest orders that the boy and the lion could only enter the city again under sentence of death. He had been flagrantly disobeyed.

Everyone suddenly fell silent.

But the Emperor was in good humour. He had enjoyed a dinner of his favourite mushrooms and had only fouled himself once, which his guests had determinedly failed to notice, having pointedly looked away as two slaves had cleaned him up and brought a new

13 toga. And on top of all that, what had most impressed them was his moving account of his own clemency.

The Emperor's anger evaporated almost at once. He wanted to be loved. After all, what was the point of being an Emperor if one could not be merciful.

The Emperor came forward and, after making quite certain that the lion was firmly enmeshed, reached bravely out and stroked the protruding tail. Roderick did not even deign to roar. Then the Emperor gave Mamas another good lecture on the futility of this new religion to which he so tenaciously clung and, after ordering that he be whipped through the streets to the city gates to teach him a good lesson, returned to his guests, who loudly applauded such magnanimity.

Poor Mamas. He had sought martyrdom but would have to make do with a hiding.

Outside in the street, the one remaining shoulder seam ripped unseemly through, he was forced to run, stripped to the waist, with the soldiers laying about his pitifully thin back with their heavy whips. Their uncomprehending jeers and laughter, the lewd mockery of their oaths, the vehemence with which they appeared to carry out what was after all simply an order, was rendered all the more incomprehensible considering the incongruous nature of the object which seemed to inspire in them so much of hatred and of spleen.

Roderick was bundled along unceremoniously beside them. Each time the boy fell Roderick groaned inwardly. He did not see how Mamas could survive such a beating. His back was already raw meat. But what could Roderick do.

Never once did Mamas cry out. Never once did he show any sign of what he was suffering. Only when the soldiers had dumped him and Roderick outside the city for the second time that day and gone off home to their drink or their women or their beds, or to all three perhaps, did he allow himself the luxury, not of tears but of any human feelings whatsoever. He sank quietly to the ground, his clenched fists pressed to his groin, and just lay there.

Roderick, after struggling free of his tenacious bonds, came across and stood looking down at the boy. He did not move. For a moment Roderick thought that he was dead. But when he lowered his head and tentatively licked the boy's back with his rough tongue, a violent shudder went through the whole body. The flesh was delicious. Roderick had never tasted anything so good. He licked again. Again the boy shuddered. Why not? The boy wanted to be martyred! And besides, he would probably not survive this ordeal. Why should not Roderick reap the benefit of the situation, and, at the same time, help the boy in his search for death?

14 But Roderick's thoughts of food were rudely shattered by an unmerciful scream.

Roderick nearly jumped out of his skin. He looked around to see what had disturbed his contemplation.

Running bravely towards him out of the twilight, dressed only in a flowing gown, barefoot, her long hair streaming out behind her, a young girl who could not have been all that much older than Mamas himself appeared to be attempting to shoo Roderick away from the boy as if he had been a tabby-cat.

Roderick was furious. How dare this girl have the temerity to treat him with so little respect. Did she not realise that he could kill her with one blow of his paw? He nevertheless stepped back, somewhat in awe of such courage shown in the presence of the king of the beasts. She, however, ignoring him completely, rushed to the boy and flung herself onto the ground beside him, weeping as if her heart would break.

Roderick was amazed. Amazed at such courage in one so young, amazed at her grace and beauty, amazed at the scream which he now realised had been far from unmerciful, amazed most of all at his own lack of action, at his just standing quietly by as two such delectable items of prey went safely about their own business.

The girl was bending over Mamas's back, weeping copiously. But her salt tears, trickling into the cruel cuts made by the whips, made his whole physical frame twitch as if in convulsions. Yet he did not appear to be conscious. His ordeal had been merciful too, in that respect. Passed beyond pain, still the instinct body rebelled at the harsh things that had been done to it.

Roderick padded up softly behind the girl. She merely looked at him for a moment, blankly, as if unaware of his terrible presence, then returned to her lamentations. Roderick was touched. So many things had touched him today that had never touched him before. First Mamas, with his strength and his weakness, his courage and his frailty. And now this young girl, with her equal courage and her even greater fragility. Roderick smiled, recalling how he had nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of her scream. Again he remembered the story he had once heard of that brute of a Greek who had killed a lion with his bare hands and then skinned it and worn the skin. If he was going to be skinned, he thought, he would plump every time for this girl, easing the skin gently from his body with her delicate white hands, rather than some hero of old ripping it away with his ready roughness. And how much better to be worn over the neck and shoulders of this graceful creature than to be slung across the chest of some ruffian, who would never miss the opportunity to boast of how he had taken it and would no doubt leave it lying around, to be played with by some other up and coming boy-hero hoping to emulate his idol, as Roderick seemed to remember had been the fate of that unfortunate lion from Nemea.

15 But this was no time for such reminiscing. Action had to be taken if the boy was to be saved. Roderick, with scarcely a look back, hurried off.

It did not take him long to find the tortoise shell he had abandoned earlier. It was still nearly full of the water he had been so careful not to spill. Even more carefully now he took it between his teeth and trotted back to where the girl was still sobbing over the boy. Roderick was unable to suppress a touch of impatience, tinged, perhaps, with a certain male chauvinism.

Such tears, however well intentioned, were not going to cure the boy's back.

He laid the laden shell beside the girl and then growled, not too ferociously, he hoped.

The girl looked up. Her retinas dilated through a torrent of tears.

Half-a-dozen things, it seemed to Roderick, flashed in an instant through the brain behind those transparently blue eyes. For part of a moment she appeared about to scream. But that craven response passed almost at once. Then, an imperceptible movement towards the boy, an impulse to protect, replaced her own fears for herself, and it seemed as if she was going to throw her body over his body, hoping that, if the lion ate her first, perhaps his ravenous appetite would be somewhat blunted, if not sated completely. But that too soon passed. Hope, fear, attraction, repulsion, all seemed to take their turn in those wide blue eyes as they looked into Roderick's own. Then she glanced down and noticed the shell full of water. Roderick pushed it forward with his paw. He had almost given up hope that she would notice it for herself, so involved she seemed in her own thought processes. Already almost an age seemed to have passed by in which time she could have doubtless been helping the boy. The girl looked up at Roderick again. Wonder had replaced all the other emotions in her eyes. Wonder, and love.

For one horrible moment Roderick feared that she was going to throw both her arms around his neck in a feeble attempt at gratitude. But fortunately he was spared that acute embarrassment.

The next instant the girl was on her feet, bending, ripping strips from bottom of her long robe, dipping them into the water, crouching beside the boy and wiping the blood from his lacerated back. Each time the cloth touched the raw flesh, the boy shuddered and groaned. Yet he seemed out of it all. The girl, though, was suffering for both of them. Tears streamed again as the cloth, clearing away the blood, revealed the extent of his injuries. The occasional glimpse of a glistening white rib showed with what a will the soldiers had set about their task.

Roderick watched all this with much interest. He could but admire now the way the girl worked, and found he had quite forgiven her for her earlier prevarication.

Only then, looking at all that tasty red meat laid out so temptingly before him, did Roderick realise that not once, since the appearance of the girl, had he even thought about his dinner.

16 Nor had he time to think about food now. A bee, descending from the darkening sky in search of a last collection of nectar before the night came on, buzzed excitedly around the boy's back, attracted, no doubt, by the red shreds of flesh which seemed to blossom there like flowers. The girl shooed it angrily away. But Roderick had been given an idea. His keen eyes followed the flight of the bee. Yes. Just as he thought. The bee disappeared in the direction of the oasis where he had found that tortoise from whose shell the girl was even now attempting to minister. But water was not enough. Mamas needed more if he was going to survive. Nor could he spend his night of agony lying here under the naked stars. Roderick knew that honey was an invaluable healer. He remembered once, when a rather recalcitrant baby rhino had put up an unexpectedly forceful struggle for survival, kicking to no avail against the inevitable pricks of an existence in the wilds, but, Roderick had thought, with all the hope and courage of its tender years, the flailing horn had somehow penetrated the loose flesh under Roderick's left shoulder before he had finally ripped its throat out and dined. The meal had been good, but the wound had festered. Roderick remembered his almost chance discovery, while robbing a hive, of the powers of honey, when a little had dribbled down onto his shoulder and into the wound and had almost at once begun its process of healing. He also remembered the story he had once heard of a dead lion in whose decomposing stomach bees had set up a hive. Looking at the boy's back now, Roderick, thinking of that lion, for a moment very nearly felt that he would be willing to offer up his own life, if he were certain it could help save Mamas. A tear of altruistic pride formed in the corner of his eye at the thought of such noble self-sacrifice on his part, to be quickly replaced by a recrudescence of his more practical, not to say pragmatic nature.

Roderick had seen lionesses carrying their cubs gently in their jaws. At times he felt he could almost remember his own mother, even an aged uncle, doing the same to him. Now, although some loss of dignity was no doubt involved in the performance of so feminine a task, Roderick nevertheless determined, on the spot, to carry Mamas, despite his size, in just such a fashion. After all, it was not that far to the oasis. And no one but the girl would see him.

But Roderick realised, even as he stood looking down at the back of the boy's neck, not only that there were no loose folds of flesh worth speaking of to be gathered between his teeth, but that, even if there had been, the pain for the boy of being dragged along, albeit for such a short distance, by neck muscles upon which the cruelty of the whips had so obviously encroached, would plainly be too severe. Though Mamas might yet survive the diligence of the soldiers, he would surely succumb to Roderick's ministering care.

Roderick, however, was not one to be greatly put off by such petty difficulties. The boy's neck was strong, his head firmly planted between his shoulders. He could be dragged along by that. Without further prevarication, Roderick opened wide his jaws and took the boy's whole head, gently but firmly, in his mouth.

17 The effect was instantaneous. The girl, her scream pitched so high that even bats, Roderick felt, would have had considerable difficulty hearing it without damage to their eardrums, leaped to her feet and began pounding at his back. Roderick ignored her completely.

He dragged the boy for a few yards by the head. The girl, her screams increasing in intensity, had fallen behind them now, was holding on to Roderick's tail, pulling at it with all her might.

Roderick attempted to flick her off, as if she had been a fly, but she would not let go. Roderick was furious. How could this girl, who only a few moments before had seemed willing to throw her arms around his neck in gratitude for his gift of water, now think that he would harm a hair on Mamas's head, even if that head was at present firmly wedged between his jaws? But Roderick was also philosophical. He knew what human beings were like, particularly the female of the species. Had he not devoured enough of them in the arena? Roderick paused, a little shamefacedly, reluctantly acknowledging that the girl had every reason to be afraid of him. But how could he let her know that he meant no harm? To her or to the boy?

Roderick stopped. He relaxed his jaws and let the head slide gently from his mouth onto the ground. The boy groaned piteously, attempted to raise himself with both hands from his prone position, but the effort, stretching open the wounds on his back into fresh agony, was too much, and he again lapsed into unconsciousness. The girl, her scream subsiding into a moan, rushed to his side and flung herself upon him. Then she looked up at Roderick.

Roderick decided to attempt some kind of communication with his eyes. He knew that they were his best feature, that they could at times achieve an extraordinarily soulful quality if he really put his mind to it. Now he sought to convey with them all the mildness, the gentleness, nay, all the meekness of spirit of which he was capable.

But the girl only screamed again.

Whether or not he would have succeeded at that time in his aim, he never found out. A sound of voices, approaching out of the growing gloom, made him look up. Two men were drawing near, no doubt alerted by the unmerciful screams of the gentle maiden. And the two men were carrying flaming torches! Roderick cursed inwardly. Just when he was getting through to the girl, these two fools had to turn up. If there was one thing Roderick hated, it was flame! He remembered a story he had once heard of an old lion whose mane had been deliberately set on fire by some loutish youths. The lion had run through the streets, roaring, his mane aflame, and had later died of his burns. Not that Roderick was afraid of two puny men. He could easily have overcome them, torches and all! But something told him, some sixth sense perhaps, that Mamas would stand a better chance of survival with them than he would with a lion and a lone girl. Well, if it meant help for Mamas and his poor back, Roderick would for once be willing to forgo his usual fierce natureÍž let discretion, as it were, uniquely for him, be valour's better part.

18 Roderick slouched away into the darkness, growling ostentatiously to himself, as though rudely interrupted when about to partake of a particularly delicious meal. He did not, however, go far. Finding a convenient rock, he slunk behind it in as debonair a fashion as he could then muster. Only when quite certain that he was out of their sight did he allow himself the luxury of turning and looking back, crouching close to the rock, his eyes alone visible above its jagged outline.

But he need not have worried that he might have been observed.

Already far enough away to be invisible to their puny human vision in the gathering gloom, his own sharp eyes could nevertheless clearly make out all that was taking place by the light of the flickering torches.

He appeared to have been quite forgotten. One man was leaning over the boy, the other was in earnest conversation with the girl. From what Roderick could surmise, from their gestures and body language, the two men seemed to want to take the boy back into the city, but the girl was obstinately refusing. As the one tended to the boy, the other argued with her intently. But when the girl said something, with an angry gesture toward the boy's back as she did so, all argument ceased and both men gave their concentrated attention to the boy. It did not require much imagination on Roderick's part to guess at what she had said.

Roderick could clearly make out, even from such a distance, that the two men were quite extraordinarily alike. Brothers, no doubt, most probably from the same litter. Roderick recalled a story he had once heard about twin brothers. If he remembered aright one of the brothers was an immortal, the son of a god, whereas the other brother had been fathered by a mortal, the husband of the woman who had, at the same time as giving birth to the twin boys, produced twin girls, one of whom was an immortal and had been responsible for starting a great war, while the other, the mortal one, had murdered her husband on his return from that same war. Anyway, whatever the fate of the two girls, and Roderick was sure that the twin brothers (one of whom, the immortal one, was a boxer, while the other, the mortal one, was a horseman) had rescued their immortal sister on more than one occasion from more than one ticklish situation, he was certain that the two had loved each other so much that, when the mortal one had been killed in battle, the immortal one had beseeched his father, the god who had been responsible for bringing him into the world in the first place, for permission to change places with his dead brother, and the god had agreed, allowing the two boys to alternate, day by day, each taking his turn at tasting the life of the gods and the life of the souls in the underworld.

The two had ended up, if Roderick remembered aright, as a constellation of stars in the firmament, and were called upon by sailors in danger of shipwreck, and also by soldiers in time of battle, both of whom, it was said, were bound to be helped by them. Roderick marvelled afresh that so much of the story had stayed with him, as no lion made an appearance in it anywhere.

19 But these twin brothers, Roderick could also make out, were neither boxers nor horsemen. He noted, with a certain degree of satisfaction, that their manner of treating the wounded boy was entirely professional. Then his instinct had been right. If anyone could cure him, and a lingering twinge of regret still gnawed at his stomach as he thought of the one sure cure to all the boy's ills which he had more than once that day been on the point of taking, it would be these two brothers who, by some extraordinary coincidence or fatality, appeared to be so well versed in the art of Hypocrites. One of them was already at work over the boy's back, applying some soothing medicinal lotion, while the other (Roderick still found it impossible to tell them apart, twins, most certainly, as they bent to their tasks in the flickering light their eyes flashing, their domed heads as alike as Coccinellidae) was busily engaged in rigging up a sort of improvised litter. Roderick growled in annoyance. He could easily have dragged the boy anywhere they might have wanted to take him, without all this waste of human resources. And besides, would they know of the oasis that Roderick had discovered earlier today?

He did not have long to wait for an answer to this no doubt rhetorical question.

The two men, hoisting the boy, still lying prone but strapped to the litter with infinite care, onto their shoulders, proceeded thus to carry him, with as infinite a care, in the very direction which Roderick, with all the force of his intellect, had been willing them to take.

The girl, given possession of the two burning brands and brandishing them on high, no doubt to light the way but also to ward off the attack of any wild animals which might be in the vicinity, walked alongside the little procession as it painstakingly moved towards its destination, but almost as a sleepwalker might, as though the stress of the day had finally proved too much for her and she had gratefully lapsed into a kind of waking unconsciousness.

Roderick, keeping his distance, always just a little beyond the circle of light which, in the now fully accomplished night, the flickering torches threw onto the surrounding desert, yet padding along step for step with their, as it then appeared to him, almost funereal cortège, shuddered inwardly. He remembered a story he had once heard. It seemed that when this baby had been born his mother had been given a flaming brand which, she was told, contained the life of her son. As long as it remained unconsumed, the boy would live. She extinguished the brand and hid it in a secret place. The boy grew up to be a handsome young man. But when the young hero, after a wild boar hunt, (the part of the story that Roderick always liked best), had refused his uncle the trophy and had killed him in a fit of rage, the mother, in a like fit of rage at the death of her brother, had thrown the brand into the fire and it had been utterly consumed, taking with it the life of her son. Roderick grew pale at the thought of the fragility of Mamas's own existence, the flame of the boy's life flaring up, flickering like these tongues of fire, only to be extinguished prematurely, blown out by a mere puff of wind or confronted irreversibly by spent wood.

20 Roderick's mind went back to a day, years ago, when he was still a very young lion, and had wandered with his mother into a ruined city. The streets had been deserted and his mother had told him that a great disaster, an earthquake, he seemed to remember her saying, or perhaps it had been a volcanic eruption, he was not quite sure which, had devastated it some time before. They had gone into one of the crumbling houses where a number of bodies were lying, as though they had just fallen, and Roderick had sniffed at them, smelling nothing human, not even decay, but only a vague odour of ashes and pumice stone. His mother had assured him that they were all long dead, though their living shapes had been preserved by the lava-flow which had suddenly engulfed them. Of course, it must then have been a volcanic eruption, how could he have been so forgetful! But the thing Roderick chiefly remembered about that day, the thing which still remained so vivid in his mind, was a painting on one of the walls which had not been destroyed. His mother had called it a mural. Or perhaps she had called it a fresco.

Anyway, it was of a young man, a young man very like Mamas, who stood almost at the centre of the painting, his weight on his right foot, his left leg slightly behind him, as if just about to step over some threshold, wearing only a scrap of material around his loins to cover his nakedness. He held, Roderick seemed to remember, a flower in his right hand, and in his left hand, which was raised slightly above his head, a golden laurel wreath lightly poised for crowning. Behind him the figure of a young girl, a girl very like the girl who now bravely carried the torches, seemed to be floating serenely, her feet not quite touching the ground.

There was a bird somewhere, Roderick could recall that, and a few flowers scattered about, but the only other detail which had stayed in his mind was the figure of a small boy, a small boy with red wings, who sat on the floor to the right of the young man, propping himself up with his right hand, while in his left he held aloft a torch, its smoking flame apparently just on the point of going out. Roderick had looked at the painting for a long time, puzzling about its meaning, until his mother had come over to him and explained that the young man had just died, that the levitating young girl was death, sent to escort him across the threshold and into the other world, and that the small boy with wings was, well, was a small boy with wings, who held in his hand the dying flame of the young man's life. Roderick had pretended to his mother that he understood all about it from her explanation, but he had kept turning back to the painting, then looking down at the stone-like figures scattered on the floor, particularly that of a young man, very like the young man in the picture, who seemed to have been caught by the volcanic flow in almost the same stepping posture, not knowing, as he had done so, that he too had just planted his foot on the threshold of the other world. Roderick had puzzled about it for some time, comparing the lifelike quality of the figure in the painting with the terrible deadness of his petrified counterpart lying on the floor. In fact, if he was honest with himself, he still puzzled about it. But he had long ago given up troubling his mind over mankind's odd ideas. The life of the world around him, the problems of the day were, for him, as it were, sufficient unto the day. He was, though, just a little disturbed that this long-ago memory, these strange correspondences, should have surfaced just now, as if to prepare him for an event towards which they all seemed so inevitably to be heading.

21 But no, Roderick thought. Such fatalism could, by its own negativity, only help to bring about the disaster it prophetically postulated. He determined to put all further thoughts of death out of his mind. Mamas would live. He would get well. How could he not, when so many were intent upon his recovery?

But external evidence seemed, by its very preponderance, to be tipping the scales irreversibly back past the point of such hard-won equilibrium.

Mamas, jolted into consciousness by the roughness of being thus carried, even with so tender a care, cried out pitifully at almost every step. The girl, roused in turn from her somnambulistic state by his cries, bent over him as they moved, attempting comfort where none was possible. It seemed an eternity of trudging before they reached the oasis which Roderick had earlier so effortlessly found. He marvelled that a distance between two fixed points could, in so short a time, have grown to such an inordinate extent, as though the intervening space had been made of elastic and cruelly stretched by some malignant spirits of the night, who could not appear until the darkness had been fully accomplished. Yet, his reason told him, even as his fancy conjured up such impossible creatures, the only cause of the apparent discrepancy in the length of the journey was the fact that earlier he had been hurrying eagerly to fetch water for a healthy boy, whereas now, with that boy's condition so irrevocably changed for the worse in the same short period of time, he was dreading the approach of a place, where, he felt certain ...

No! Mamas would live! He would get well! Had not these two skilful wonder-workers, these angelic visitants, their flaming torches flashing sword-like in their hands, been sent to help him?

But, inexplicably, as soon as they had reached the oasis, the two men, after making sure that Mamas (who appeared to have lapsed into a state of delirium and seemed to be running a high fever) was as comfortably as possible, had spoken earnestly with the girl for a few moments, handed over to her a few jars and a small bottle, and, leaving her one of their torches for light, hurried back into the darkness again, carrying the other, in the direction of the city.

Roderick was outraged. How dare they leave a young girl, alone, in the middle of nowhere, with a sick boy, exposed to dangers Roderick did not even like to think about? If he could have been more honest with himself, Roderick would have been forced to acknowledge that the greatest danger they faced was a resurgence of his own savage nature. But at present he could not admit this, even to his own subconscious. For a time he considered going after the two and, if not successfully forcing them to return, at least making them pay for their dereliction of duty. But that would have entailed leaving the girl, and Mamas, exposed to the danger of attack from who could say what predatory creature, human or otherwise, which might be in the vicinity. No, someone had to remain to look after such vulnerability.

22 Roderick watched the two men, or rather the flame of their torch, as it diminished into the darkness, until it was no more than a point of light, glimmering, almost like a star, against the velvety night sky. They had seemed to him as two ministering angels, when they had first come running in answer to the girl's cry, appearing almost miraculously out of nowhere to bring help and succour in the face of such sore need. Now Roderick's mind could only dwell on the manner in which he would consume their bodies, if he ever laid claws on them again. He drooled as he devised dives methods of devouring such detestable specimens of humanity.

Usually he killed quickly, and as painlessly as possible. But in this case he would make an exception. He carefully considered the various ways in which he could keep the spark of consciousness burning as he slowly munched their not so vital organs. The two would know at any rate after he had finished with them that they had been well and truly eaten.

Roderick's satisfying though doubtless indulgent meditations on the more visceral aspects of moribund human anatomy were rudely returned to the proper business in hand by a particularly piercing cry from the boy. Instantly, he was all attention and contrition, overcome with shame and remorse in the face of such pressing need on the part of still living flesh which has been, perhaps, subjected to more than it can reasonably be expected to bear.

Mamas was half sitting up, his eyes staring wildly, as the girl tried desperately to restrain him. Roderick did not know what had occurred while he had been otherwise engaged with his futile thoughts of revenge, but guessed, seeing the bottle and jars scattered about on the ground, that the girl, in trying to minister to Mamas's needs, had inadvertently caused him such excruciating pain that he had been driven, for the moment, almost literally out of his mind.

Roderick had been forced to contemplate breaking his cover and bounding out of the unanimous darkness wherein which he had so scrupulously secreted himself for it seemed to him so long now, if only to save the life of the girl around whose neck Mamas's uncomprehending fingers were already tightening. But the madness was over almost before it had begun. The strange light died out of Mamas's eyes and he again slumped into unconsciousness.

Roderick watched intently as the girl carried out all the instructions which, he guessed, the two men had given her. She had managed, despite her frailty, to drag the boy to a safer place, close beside a rock, against which she could sit and watch without danger of sudden attack. Then, laying him carefully on his stomach, the only position in which even in unconsciousness he could bear to be lain, she had torn yet more cloth from the hem of her robe and, after carefully washing it the fresh water, had laid it, steeped in some substance from one of the jars, on the raw flesh of his back. Even then, when his shuddering breathing had become easier and he had fallen into a troubled sleep, she remained sleeplessly by his side, watching his ribs rising and falling, as though afraid that, if she dozed off, even for a minute, the shallow breathing might stop altogether and the poor abused back might fall, never to rise again.

23 Roderick watched in wonder. Never had he witnessed such tenderness. He wished he could make his presence known to her, let her know that she was not the only one who cared for Mamas in such a special way. But what could he do? A mere glimpse of him and she would go into hysterics, as she had done before. Why did women have to be so silly? At the same time he was forced to acknowledge that no man, no man he had ever come across, would have been capable of the tenderness he had just seen displayed by the girl. Well, both men and women were, and, he guessed, would always remain, something a mystery to him. Animals were so much simpler and more straightforward. Nevertheless, he also felt he had to acknowledge a somewhat grudging admiration for certain traits in human nature which he had not thought about, or had never been called upon to think about, before the events of today.

Roderick watched and watched as the night dragged on. The girl kept her vigil, her eyes heavy with sleep. If only he could have let her know that he was there, guarding over them both, she could have slept too. He was going to make quite sure that no brigand, and no prowling wild beast, would disturb either of them.

Roderick had remembered a story he had once heard, more of a legend than a story, but then, weren't all stories legends and legends stories, although more of a fact, really, or a supposed fact, but, then again, weren't all facts really supposed facts and all supposed facts really facts, and, when you came to think about that, weren't all facts and supposed facts really legends and stories and all legends and stories really facts and supposed facts. Anyway, he remembered hearing when he was young, from his mother he thought it was, or perhaps it had been from an aunt, or perhaps the aunt had told it to his mother who in turn told him, or perhaps his mother had told it to the aunt who, when she had been looking after him while his mother was out hunting, had told it to him in case his mother had forgotten to tell it to him herself.

Anyway, the fact, or the supposed fact of the matter, was that there were any number of lion-like creatures with wings, invisible, who spent their time watching over ordinary everyday lions like himself and his mother and his aunt, to make sure that they did not come to any harm.

Roderick had never seen one of these lion-like creatures with wings, and he did not believe or disbelieve in them, but there were lots of things in which he did not believe that he had seen, and there were lots of things which he had not seen in which he did believe. One of those things was the love which had just been exhibited by the girl for Mamas, which, although he could not say that he had really seen it, he did nevertheless believe in. Well, if these creatures with wings really did exist, no doubt they were watching over Mamas and the girl too. But what if they only watched over lions? Then where would they be? Roderick had therefore decided that, since these creatures no doubt had enough on their plates already, even if they did spend part of their time watching over mere human beings, he would keep guard as well, just in case. After all, when it came down to it, were not his the only eyes, and claws, and jaws, these heavenly creatures possessed, even if he did not have, as far as he knew, their invisible wings.

24 The night seemed endless. Never had Roderick so longed for the dawn. Nothing happened. No marauding creature came. Nothing unforeseen occurred. Roderick almost began to find himself wishing that it would, some crisis, some emergency, anything, to relieve the tedium of his strange vigil. He needed a stimulus of some sort, if only to keep him awake.

The girl too, her eyelids drooping but her eyes still fixed on the sleeping boy, seemed herself at times to be almost on the point of sleep.

Then it happened. Roderick heard a voice, distinct, in his ear. The voice itself was unruffled, placid, but the words it spoke carried a portentous meaning: Hurry brother! The child is in the water. That was all it said. Roderick opened his eyes. It was broad daylight.

He had slept. He could not even keep watch for a few miserable hours. He looked quickly around him.

The girl was slumped back against her rock, sound asleep. And Mamas was gone.

Roderick leaped to his paws and bounded out of the cover of darkness, which, he now realised, had, like a thief in the night, already crept away from him. He was beside the girl in an instant. She awoke with a start, looking up with uncomprehending eyes. His instinctive first reaction as to the weakness of women was this time tempered with the ugly fact of his own dereliction. But she, with the dawning of comprehension, shrieked, leapt up, and began beating Roderick about the face, sobbing as she did so. Only then did it occur to him that she apparently had surmised that he had eaten Mamas. All his old disgust for the gentler sex returned in an instant as he turned disdainfully away from her, other, more pressing things crowding into his mind. Then he remembered the voice. He looked quickly across to the water.

There was Mamas, floating face down a few feet out, his arms spread wide as if to embrace the watery death which would at least put an end to all his sufferings.

Roderick, as if borne on invisible wings, was in the water with one bound and heading towards the boy, using the lion paddle he was so glad now his father had taught him. He remembered a story he had once heard, but did not even have time to recall the details, so anxious was he to reach the boy. Poor Mamas! His tortured back, the girl's improvised bandages having been ripped from it, apparently in his delirium, looked, in the light of day, even more ugly. How could Roderick drag him to the bank without causing him more pain than he might be able to bear? That is, if he had not passed beyond all pain already. Then Roderick noticed his hair, the long billowing strands of which floated lightly upon the surface of the water. Of course. In the story the prospective victim had been dragged to safety by the hair. Roderick needed no further prompting. Grasping a jawful of the floating substance firmly

25 between his teeth, he gently pulled the (some sixth sense told him) not quite lifeless body of the boy back to the dry land.

Yet Mamas, once safely out of the water, seemed to Roderick to be beyond all aid. His face was blue and swollen. Breathing appeared to have stopped. Roderick was, for the first time in his life, at a loss. How could he, with his big clumsy paws, hope to rekindle the spark of life without extinguishing it altogether. He turned to the girl.

She, however, had not been standing idly by during his daring rescue operation.

Already she was hurrying towards them, a file of purple liquid clasped in her hand.

Ignoring Roderick completely, the girl crouched over the inert form, apparently undecided for the moment on her best course of action. Then, the tears welling up in her eyes, she grasped Mamas firmly by the shoulders and turned him cruelly over onto his back.

The effect was instantaneous. The whole apparently lifeless frame shuddered, galvanised into being by the effect of the sharp pebbles upon which it had a moment before been lying prone and senseless as they cut into the raw nerve-ends of the tattered flesh. The chest expanded into agonising life, seemed about to burst, then sunk again as the boy gasped and struggled for breath, the breath which his body instinctively rebelled against. The stomach, which had been unnaturally distended, seemed to suck itself convulsively in, scooping out and hollowing the abdomen as great mouthfuls of water gushed from between the lips. The girl, suffering, it seemed to Roderick, even more than the boy himself, nevertheless forced her fingers over his tongue and down into his throat, encouraging the retching which, she knew, was necessary if he was to survive. But her small hands could not reach far enough to dislodge the residue.

Roderick remembered a story he had once heard. It seemed that this lion cub, so he had been told, had fallen one day into a water-hole and had nearly drowned. When he had been dragged out by his distraught mother, none of the lionesses in the pride had been able to revive him. But a wise old lion, who had seen it all before and for whom nothing was new, had shouldered his way past the hysterically fussing lionesses and quite calmly thrust the end of his tail down the cub's throat. That, apparently, had done the trick. Half an hour later, the cub had been playing again with the other cubs, the incident for him almost quite forgotten, although not for his mother. Well, Roderick thought, if it worked then, why should it not work again now?

Shouldering his way nonchalantly past the astonished girl, from whom he had expected some foolish feminine reaction but who, surprisingly, let him by without protest, Roderick manoeuvred his rear end, albeit a trifle awkwardly, into a not too ridiculous position, he hoped, and, squatting with legs apart as if at defecation, introduced the extremity of his, he liked to

26 think, beautiful and supple tail into the boy's open mouth, ignoring the not really painful bites of the convulsively champing teeth, worked it, with a gentle undulating motion, past the protesting tonsils and uvula and down into the seething gullet.

It had worked a treat. Mamas had gagged. The entire contents of his overloaded stomach, the recently introduced water, yesterday's food, digested and partly digested, everything had, at the rough touch of the tail, welled up, 146bringing the tail with it, and had spewed out as though issuing from the reclining marble figure on a fountain, of which poor Mamas's mouth was the reluctant, uncomprehending, though alas far from marble orifice through which the apparently unending stream of liquid must pour. Then, exhausted, but with the deathly blue pallor gone from his face and his normal colour almost restored, he had slumped back unconscious into the girl's arms.

Roderick, with dripping tail and undiminished dignity, sauntered back to the water's edge and, lowering the tail again, swished it clean, knowing, despite his affection for the boy and even for the contents of the boy's stomach, that its residue would, if left unattended, make a delightful repast for the hoards of flies which, although he had nothing against them personally, would make a considerable nuisance of themselves once the full heat of the day had been achieved. Then he gave all his attention to his two charges.

The girl, Mamas slumped in her arms but breathing gently in an exhausted sleep, was holding his body away from her as best she could, trying to touch his back at as few points as possible yet at the same time anxious not to wake him. But her eyes were fixed upon Roderick.

He, drawing closer yet answering her look as reassuringly as he could, realised, quite suddenly, that the girl no longer feared him. Well, that, at any rate, was a start! At last something had penetrated her pretty head! Roderick found himself for a moment almost entertaining the possibility that some human beings might after all be taught something, even as he reminded himself that before long one of them would no doubt act in a way that would prove him wrong.

Roderick stopped directly in front of the girl. She stared at him long, as if all that he had been doing since their first fraught meeting and throughout the whole of that long anguished night which, unknown to her, they had just completed together, had suddenly, as if by some occult process, fallen into place in her mind. Then her eyes flooded with gratitude and the tears returned. Roderick, more than a little embarrassed, averted his eyes. He had not retained his illusions as to the wisdom of humankind even as long as he had hoped. But then, all at once, the girl had started to laugh. Roderick looked quickly up, wondering with what new peculiarity of human nature he was now going to have to come to terms. She was still looking at him, but laughing now, trying not to, anxious not to wake the boy yet unable to control herself, helplessly laughing like the little girl that, despite her experiences, Roderick had to remind himself, she still was. She stretched out her hand to touch his forehead. Roderick instinctively drew back. But she beckoned him forward with so fair a grace the he did not have

27 the heart not to obey. She, reaching out once more and removing something from his brow, held it out to show him.

Cupped in her palm was a tiny sea-horse, lodged no doubt in his mane as he bravely plunged.

Roderick was, for the hundredth part of a second, a bit put out. What right had this young girl, not even a woman yet, to laugh at him, the king of the beasts! Men had died, from time to time, and he had eaten them, for considerably less! But almost at once he saw the funny side of it. He saw himself, one might almost say, perhaps for the first time, through another creature's eyes. He seemed to be looking out at himself, beautifully, from her point of view.

And what he saw was a great lion, the king of the beasts, undoubtedly, who had just saved her Mamas from a watery grave, but the king of the beasts bedraggled and wet, perhaps even a little pathetic, perhaps indeed even a little ridiculous, who, to crown it all, both literally and figuratively, had, not some precious gem but one of the smallest, most insignificant, yet, Roderick had to admit it, one of the most beautiful creatures with which the Lord of the Universe had seen fit to adorn His creation, set as the centrepiece in the diadem of his mane.

Roderick looked down at the sea-horse in her hand. Yes, not only was it beautiful, but it also possessed a perfect if tiny nobility. The curve of the tail, the shape of the head, the crown of sorts which surmounted that head, all spoke to his soul of some fabulous mythical creature, fathered perhaps by a proud, amorous, but minute water divinity who, enamoured of a delicate, glamorous, but minuscule water sprite, had lain in wait behind a convenient fragment of coral and, surprising her, though not too much, had had his way, amid her not too loud protests, in some tiny, perfect, mother-of-pearl shell which an obliging mollusc had vacated and a darting bevy of small, eager handmaidens had lined with softest seaweed, especially for the purpose. He remembered a story he had once heard, many stories he had often heard, of a similar nature. But why bother to recall these old legends when his own fancy could so effortlessly create its own. He did not really know if he believed them or not, but looking down at this tiny, miraculous creature, he was almost half inclined to treat these legends as fact and to posit just such a genesis if only to account for its unexpected yet immutable perfection of form.

Roderick looked back at the girl. The laughter still lit up her eyes, although she had suppressed all outward signs of it in an effort not to wake the boy. Poor Mamas! He was oblivious to it all, profoundly asleep, although his forehead was contracted into a frown and his eyeballs flickered under their delicate membrane of skin, as though even in unconsciousness the torments his body had undergone could not be relegated to the oblivion for which his brain so earnestly longed. But Roderick, catching the laughter in her eyes, felt creeping over him, despite the boy, despite the boy's sufferings and the perilous nature of their situation, a strange inclination to laugh. It was as if, somewhere, beyond all their troubles, beyond Mamas's pain, beyond all that they had undergone and all that they would still no doubt have to undergo,

28 beyond the stars perhaps, there was, in the end, only laughter. Suddenly Roderick realised why his sudden flash of anger had as suddenly evaporated. The girl had been laughing, not at him but with him. Just as now, Roderick felt, the faint echo of some cosmic laughter which he could only just catch seemed to have joined with them both in a mutuality of common cachinnation.

But Roderick, true to his species, could not as yet quite take on this uniquely peculiar aspect of human nature which he had, for a brief moment, felt he was almost about to embrace.

After all, he was a lion. And lions don't laugh. The king of the beasts was far above such levity. That kind of behaviour was best left to the hyenas. Hyenas! The very word was like a bell to toll him back from all thought of laughter to that of their present desperate plight. He remembered a story he had once heard about a man with a gangrenous leg being stranded in the desert with his wife. All sorts of silly human things had happened to them, most of which he had mercifully forgotten. Death had come, he seemed to recall, in the form of some absurd amorphous mass which occupied space and could crouch on his chest! Really! Everyone knew that death was, well, that death was death! But there were, he had to admit, some very mouth-watering parts of the story where wildebeests and waterbuck and zebras had played an important role. These passages he was still able to peruse in his mind with zest. But the hyenas! He remembered, or he thought he remembered, that at the end the hyenas had fed off the still living man's rotting leg as he had slept in his tent. Roderick, looking at the boy now, fancied he could almost sniff that whiff of corruption which his nobility of spirit could only disdain as easy prey but which would bring the hyenas running. He did not like to think of poor helpless Mamas at the mercy of such a motley crew. But what could the girl do, if he was not there! Fortunately, he was there, he reminded himself, not without a certain satisfaction.

But what was the use of his being there if he just stood about like a certain stunned giraffe he had once devoured who, catching sight of his reflection in the water as it bent its graceful neck to drink, had frozen in panic, as though quite willing to offer itself up to his ravenous maw without struggle or flight, on a platter, as it were, an offer which he did not have the discourtesy, or the inclination, to refuse.

Roderick shook himself out of his reverie. There were things to be done. What they were, yet he knew not, yet he knew they must be something!

The girl, however, the laughter dying out of her eyes to be replaced by a gentle seriousness, lifted her left forefinger to her lips as she looked intently at Roderick, as one might do to a small infant who, intoxicated with the sound of its own newly discovered laughter and augmenting that laughter until all spontaneity is lost, succeeds in gilding the lily to such an extent that all but the most doting parent, or fond horticulturist, are, to a greater or lesser degree, totally alienated.

29 Again Roderick was outraged. She it was who had giggled at him. She had behaved like a silly girl. And now she had the temerity to admonish in him that weakness to which, he reluctantly had to admit, he had for a moment been almost upon the point of succumbing. But again his anger vanished unfulfilled. He had wanted to laugh. She had seen that in his eyes. In their situation the desire in itself was almost as bad as the deed. She was only a girl. He had the advantages of wisdom and age. And then again, all that she had done, everything she had gone through, she would go through again, would do again, only for Mamas.

But the girl, sensing that the incongruous crisis of laughter was past, seemed for the moment to Roderick to have something other than Mamas troubling her soul. Her penetrating eyes sought the depths of his own. Roderick, returning their, to him, unfathomable glance, was for the moment so lost in the beauty of their blueness that all consideration of mere humdrum meaning was swept from his mind. She, however, persevering in her occult purpose, moving only her eyes so as not to disturb Mamas's troubled sleep, glanced down at her hand, then back to Roderick, then across to the perilous stretch of water from which the boy had been, in such miraculous circumstances, rescued. Roderick followed the direction her eyes had taken with his own. In the early dawn light growing the unruffled surface of the stream was in tranquil flow, as though no tumult of flailing paws had so recently disturbed its crystal waters.

Roderick looked back at the girl. Her eyes, which still stared into his own, seemed to contain a touch now, not of annoyance, Roderick thought, not even of mild exasperation, yet a distinct hint was there which he felt sure he could detect, even as he attempted to wipe the idea from his mind, as to the quantity of osseous matter her glance would have to penetrate in order to reach the seat of the intellect. No, Roderick thought, no, he had misunderstood the import of that look, even she would not have dared to think such a thing, secretly, much less to have put that thought into a consciously considered attempt at communication. He decided, on the spot, to give her the benefit of the doubtÍž to do her more than justice for very fear of doing her lessÍž for if he had done her less, then honour would have demanded that final satisfaction which, though deliciously abating the keen sense of hunger which he had only just then become aware was insistently gnawing at his belly, would also have left poor Mamas alone with him and, well, with perhaps those tender loving hands, and perhaps a few other indigestible bits he did not really fancy, but with precious little else to minister to his pressing needs.

Then, in a flash, Roderick understood what her minimal gestures of eye and hand had been trying to convey. Of course! The sea-horse! There it was, lying lightly on her still extended right palm, more dead than alive after so protracted an absence from that customary aquatic environment which had heretofore sustained its life. He had quite forgotten the sea-horse. He marvelled yet again at the strange concerns mankind seemed to occupy itself with, particularly the female of the species. However, he was quite prepared to indulge this enigmatic whim, if only to forestall her performing the mission of rescue herself and thereby disturbing Mamas. But how was he to convey this poor moribund representative of the Syngnathidae back to its native habitat? That was the question. But she, as always, seemed to

30 have the solution at her finger-ends. Or rather, at the tip of her tongue. For the girl, much to Roderick's surprise, did just that: Separating her lovely lips in what he was now beginning to conjecture must be an attempt at a winning smile, no doubt designed to coax him gently over to her own ecological purposes, she brought forth instead from between those lips that fleshy organ of taste and speech, which seemed in its wet protrusion almost to have a life of its own, squirming and pink and dreadful, and stuck it out to its full extent, right into his face, as it were.

Roderick was, for the moment, quite put out. He did not like the idea of this girl, he did not like the idea of any girl, or for that matter of anyone or anything, sticking their tongue out at him. A spiny ant-eater of a rather obstreperous disposition he had once surprised in its depredation of a panic-stricken ant-hill had dared to look up from its feasting and, he recalled, had stuck its tongue out at him. Well, despite the spines, he had taught that ant-eater a lesson it would never forget as long as it lived. Or, to be more precise, he quickly corrected his hyperbole, a lesson it was already oblivious of ever having learned even before it had got its tongue back into its mouth. The flesh had not been worth the eating, either, despite the time he had taken getting it disentangled from the spines. But that had not been the point. He remembered a story his father had once told him. It seemed, so his father said, that one of his ancestors, a very long way back, had been voted chief of a great pride of lions. But a wise old lion, who remembered a time before any of the other lions had been born, had said that, to be the chief lion of a pride, it was absolutely necessary to have an escutcheon with a coat-of-paws and to choose a Latin motto. Well, for a coat-of-paws, his forebear had had blazoned two human males, argent, rampant, surmounted by a lionel, couchant, upon a field, gules. But for his Latin motto he had been unable to choose between NOBILIS EST IRA LEONIS, which Roderick liked because it mentioned lions and said they were noble and angry, or noble when they were angry, or angry when they were noble, or angry because they were noble, he could never quite remember which, and NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT, which he liked the sound of, but was not certain whether it meant that no one ever insulted a lion and got away with it, or that no one ever insulted a lion because they knew that they would not get away with it. Either way, the sentiment was much the same. Anyhow, Roderick had been spared the effort of choosing between the two because his ancestor, against all the rules and despite dire warnings of retribution from the old lion, had decided on both mottoes as the only satisfactory solution to an otherwise intractable problem. Well, the family had never regretted that audacious decision, and both mottoes had bequeathed to Roderick a challenge he had never heretofore found it too difficult to live up to, although, when he came to think of it, in practice they really amounted to much the same thing, or, if they did not, Roderick was not one to quibble over niceties of detail.

Yet this girl had not only laughed at him and, by implication, called him a blockhead, but was even now sticking her tongue out in his face, with impunity, and his anger had not been noble, in fact it could hardly be graced with the epithet of anger at all.

31 Roderick wondered what his ancestors would have said. Even his own father, who was very friendly and easygoing for a lion, would no doubt have been horrified. Yet what could he do! He could not eat this girl, or even seriously maul her, without abandoning Mamas to his fate. And besides, he had grown rather to like her, even though she was a woman. He had quite happily torn apart and devoured many a Christian girl in the arena, but this one, with her clear blue eyes and so tender flesh, would, he felt sure, despite that tender flesh, stick somehow in his throat.

But again Roderick was spared from further, more bloody speculations. There was a sudden commotion in the sky overhead. Both he and the girl looked up. A dove, in frantic flight, was desperately attempting to evade a pursuing eagle. The dove, sensing no doubt the double security of the gentle girl combined with the close proximity of a ferocious lion, swooped down and landed on the girl's shoulder. The eagle, frustrated of its purpose, circled angrily above them, its keen bright eyes seeking an opening. But the equally bright eyes of Roderick, and the look which he had put into them, instantly discouraged it, and disgruntled, it flew off. The dove, almost as frightened of its new sanctuary as it had been of its former vulnerability, with a quick movement of its head to check that the coast was clear, fluttered off to the nearby safety of a tree, leaving Roderick and the girl staring at each other in silent wonderment.

Not for long, however. The girl, given an idea, no doubt, by the small branch which through it all the dove had tenaciously carried in its beak as prospective building material for a new nest, a branch Roderick had not even been aware that he had failed to notice but which had struck her with the force of a revelation, had, taking the sea-horse (which still lay in her extended left palm and would have been by then almost on its last legs if nature had seen fit to endow it with those useful appendages to support its tiny body instead of the beautifully curved tail with which it had been supplied) between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, stuck out her tongue again and made as if to deposit the creature there. Roderick was amazed.

Surely the girl was not as hungry as all that! And even if she was, this morsel of aquatic life would do precious little to alleviate it! Then, something, some will to be understood on her part, or on the part of those beautiful blue eyes, got through to him. Of course! She wanted him to carry this insignificant atom of creation back to the water, while there was still time, on the tip of his own tongue! How stupid could one be! This half-formulated thought, originally directed against himself but in the course of its development and under the pressure of his always reawakening pride transferred incrementally to her, would doubtless have ended in anger, or at least exasperation at her lack of gestural clarity, had not the urgency and pity of her look taken all other things from his mind. All right! He would do it, no matter how silly and undignified he might appear! Anything, anything, to please her! He had to acknowledge, reluctantly, even as he succumbed, even as he fought against succumbing, that when she looked at him like that, he could refuse her nothing. Sticking out his noble tongue to its full extent, knowing how idiotic he must appear, knowing that no self-respecting member of his fierce

32 tawny species would have deigned to be seen in such a light, that no self-respecting member, seeing him so ridiculously placed, could ever have respected him again, he nevertheless waited patiently as the girl placed the almost lifeless body of the sea-horse upon the tip of that same noble tongue and, after a final warning from her, accompanied by much gesturing with the hands and swallowing with the throat and ending up with the stern wave of an admonishing finger, the meaning of which to Roderick was this time all too clear, he, turning on his paws, returned to the stretch of water into which he had so recently plunged, head first, on that other uncharacteristic mission of mercy.

He had not gone far, in fact there was not far for him to go but he had not gone far of that not far, before the warmth of his tongue had partly reanimated the tiny creature. He could feel its feeble movements as the almost extinct spark of life was painfully rekindled. And the taste! Some wonderful secretion, given out, no doubt, in minute drops as it struggled back from what must have been for it an almost out-of-the-body experience, pricked at his sensitive taste-buds, gradually filling the whole of his mouth. Roderick had never tasted anything like it.

The secret depths of the sea, all the mystery of an unknown world he would never know except in this fashion, nagged at the edges of his consciousness. He remembered his father had once told him that mankind in general, and wealthy mankind in particular, particularly cherishes as a prey item a delicacy which only few can afford, tiny black balls which burst on the palate and fill the mouth with the salty flavour of the sea. His father had said, he seemed to remember, that these tiny black balls were part of the reproductive system of a very rare fish. He remembered having thought, even at that tender age, what strange creatures these men must be, to go to the very great trouble, to have the time and the patience to catch so many thousands of these very rare black fish, not to eat the fish itself but merely to remove their tiny black balls and then to save them up until they had enough, not for a meal proper but a bonne bouchĂŠe, an appetiser before they started the feast. Now, for the first time, he seemed to sense the excitement these Epicureans must feel as the tiny black balls burst upon their palate. He pushed his own tongue against the roof of his mouth. The small creature struggled weakly.

But the flavour! It was quite impossible to describe. Salty, yet sweet, fishy, yet of a fishiness he had never before experienced. And, if the whole of the sea-horse should taste thus, he trembled to think of the concentrated essence of fishiness that must be stored in its tiny balls.

But how to find them, much less extract them, from such a small creature. He prided himself on his keen eyesight, but at the same time had to acknowledge such a delicate piece of microsurgery quite beyond him. Well, there was no use crying over spilt milt! A fish in the paw was worth two in the pond! Both these maxims he had been taught as a cub. If mankind could enjoy this great luxury, why should not he, the king of the beasts, savour at least once, for what it was worth, this whole creature, balls and all? Why should not he experience the joys of the bonne bouchĂŠe?

But, even as he mused thus, the girl's face came back to him, and her admonishing gesture. And with them came his own thoughts as he had first looked upon the delicate

33 structure of the sea-horse. How could he face her, how could he face himself, if he fell below his own highest standards. No, he would let the opportunity pass, he would return the sea-horse to its natural environment, his noble sacrifice would more than make up for the loss. He still toyed, for a moment, with the idea of tripping, by chance, over some imaginary object, and accidentally swallowing the beautiful creature, but almost at once thought better of it. Besides, in swallowing it whole, he would not really be given the chance to enjoy its flavour to the full.

With a sigh, regretful and self-congratulatory at once, he continued reluctantly, and at a somewhat slower pace, down to the water's edge.

Roderick was startled, as he stared down at his own reflection just before depositing his precious charge, at the mild, almost benign face which looked serenely up at him. Indeed, with minute passenger securely riding the absurdly protruding tongue, it seemed to him very nearly ridiculous. His muzzle, however, breaking the surface tension of the water, shattered the image which had, nevertheless, in that brief instant, imprinted itself on the retina of his mind. He uncurled his tongue. The wonderful salty flavour disappeared at once. The sea-horse, in a return to its native element recovering as quickly, gave, it seemed to Roderick, a quick, all but imperceptible nod of the head, in gratitude or salute or merely at parting, Roderick did not know which, and, with tiny fins whirring, moved uprightly through the water and was lost to sight.

Roderick turned away without waiting for the surface to clear again. He did not like the depths into which he had just peered. He tried not to think about it as he headed back, but found it impossible to think of anything else. How could the reflection which he had only for an instant glimpsed be of him, the king of the beasts! And yet unquestionably it was! Had he, in such a short time, less than twenty-four hours he had known Mamas and the girl, become this parody of himself! Had such a brief exposure to these new Christians, as anything other than prey items, done this to him! Roderick seethed inwardly. He remembered his father had once told him of a great great-uncle of his, of his father's that is, a great great great-uncle of Roderick's, who had been in the arena in Rome, the greatest arena of them all, when a great bishop was martyred there, brought from some great city, Smyrna, Roderick thought it was, or perhaps it had been from somewhere in Syria, or perhaps after all Antioch, yes, Roderick was almost sure it had been Antioch, it always was so difficult to remember the names of places one had not been to, well, this great bishop had arrived in the arena with a great reputation, it had been the talk of the lions' den for weeks, there had been all sorts of rumours going around that he was positively looking forward to martyrdom, that he had asked his friends not to dare to try and save him, that the lions who surrounded him in the arena would surround him with God's love, that he would be ground between their jaws like finest bread as an offering to the God in whom he so firmly believed. Well, when he had arrived in the arena, Roderick's father's great great-uncle, Roderick's great great great-uncle that is, had been the first lion to reach him.

Roderick's father had said that he, Roderick's father's great great-uncle, could never talk about it without tears in his eyes, or, to be more precise, that he could never talk about it at all. All the

34 other lions had begun to suspect that he, Roderick's father's great great-uncle, in partaking of the flesh of the martyr, had become a secret Christian himself. Roderick's father had said that the other lions did not really mind this, as most lions are fairly easy going on matters of faith, but that he, Roderick's father's great great-uncle, had refused to join the other lions in the hunt, had pined away, and eventually had died. Roderick's father had told him this, not as a warning, he had said, as he had no fears for Roderick on that score, but merely as a salutary tale with a simple moral: Never, never, on any account, allow yourself to get to know one of your prey items, or, better still, never allow yourself to get to know any human beings at all.

Roderick, with tears in his own eyes, felt that he might very well be taking heed of this advice too late. Had he, the king of the beasts, so forgotten himself and his own savage nature as to obey the whim of a silly, tender hearted girl? Yes, he had! Yet she was tender hearted! It was not too late to attempt once more to live up to his family motto. He was angry. He was noble. And he had been provoked beyond all measure. Yet how to face those beautiful blue eyes? He would, he decided, have to creep up on her from behind and pounce, even as he decided that it was not fitting for a lion, a lion descended of so many royal kings, to behave in such an underhand manner. Poor Roderick, his very heart cleft in twain, unable to throw away the worser part of it, yet equally unable to live the purer with the other half, felt nevertheless that he would surely have to try to assume a virtue he knew quite well he did not have, for, had he not heard his aunts talking once about an old story one of them had once heard a distant cousin relate in which a chief lion is murdered by his own brother so that he can be chief lion but is in turn killed by the son of the original chief lion who is then killed by a plot the second chief lion, the one who murdered the original chief lion in the first place, has already hatched with the brother of an old lion's daughter who has gone mad because the son of the first chief lion, the one who had been murdered, with whom she is in love, has accidentally killed her, or rather their father, thinking that he was the second chief lion who had murdered his father.

Well, so much of the story had been clear to Roderick. But he had got a little confused when they had gone on to say that the wife of the lion who had been murdered, the mother of the son who was to kill the second chief lion, had, before her son had carried out this undertaking, herself married the second chief lion who, unknown to her, had already killed her husband, who happened to be his own brother and the father of the son who was eventually to kill him. Still, he remembered that when the son of the first chief lion who had been murdered had visited his mother and accidentally killed the old lion who was the father of the girl who was in love with him and of the brother who was eventually to kill him and who, incidentally, he would himself in turn kill, he had suggested to her that she assume a virtue she did not have by refusing to couple with this new chief lion, her husband, his uncle, who, unknown to her, had killed the first chief lion, who was her husband also, but his father. Roderick remembered that the son had said to his mother, along with a lot of other things about custom and habit concerning her abstention from mating with her new husband, his murderous uncle: For use almost can change the stamp of nature. What this had meant he had not been too certain at the time, nor was he really quite clear about it now. But there was a definite ring about it, a something,

35 which had made it stick in his mind. For how could anything change the stamp of nature?

Nature was, well, nature was nature! Not even use could alter that! But the almost had reassured him somewhat. Nothing, nothing, he felt sure, could ever change his savage nature.

Why then should he not assume, as it were, a virtue he did not have, help the girl, help Mamas, in every way that he could, then, when his mission was accomplished, he could become again the ferocious lion who, until today, had always looked up at him from the water just before he drunk? Nature, all nature, was infinitely revertive, he felt quite confident of that, and mere use could only ever almost change its stamp.

Roderick, though more than a little encouraged by his own musings, was still sore and angry enough with himself to pause, as he made his way back to Mamas and the girl, at the pool of bile and partly digested food which his tail had urged, along with a quantity of swallowed water, from Mamas's distended stomach. He now noted that a different orifice, its sphincterial muscle apparently loosened by the strain of his retching, had deposited its other, nearly liquid load just a short distance away, the distance which separated Mamas's head, fundamentally as it were, from his other, less dignified end. Roderick sniffed at the two still warm puddles, around which flies had already begun to collect. There remained a few rather tasty looking morsels, which Roderick's interruption of the boy's natural digestive processes, or the nature perhaps of their inherent indigestibility, had left embedded in both. Roderick was very hungry. Why should he not partake? It would do precious little to fill his ravenous maw, but at least it would confirm him in the depths to which he had sunk, rub his nose, as it were, both literally and metaphorically, in the severely tattered remains of his lion's pride. He had been king of the beasts, why should he not become lord of the flies, worse even than the hyenas, about whose ignominious habits and ignoble mirth he had frequently heretofore been forced to suppress, as not befitting a lion's dignity, his own sardonically mocking laughter.

But, with his morale at its lowest ebb and in the mood for self-abasement, even as he lowered his head with a shudder of distaste to lap up the horrid stuff, a voice, distinct, the same voice which had roused him from his inexcusable lapse of vigilance such a short while ago to warn him of Mamas's plight, seemed to whisper again into his ear, not as loud as before, not as insistent, as though not needing this time to penetrate the chambers of sleep, but just as unruffled, just as placid, and, in its implied, nay, in its explicit meaning, just as portentous: Brother Lion! How could you be so disgusting!

Roderick, with an enormous effort of the will, wrenched his head away from the filthy mass of waste matter into which he had so very nearly plunged his noble muzzle. The voice was right, just as it had been right before! How could he, the king of all the beasts, have ever seriously considered consuming a thing fit only for dipterous insects, for a rabbitry, a thing at which even a self-respecting hyena would have doubtless turned up its degenerate snout!

Brother Lion, the peremptory voice had dared to call him, just as it had dared before to call him brother, he only then realised, but to add to it on that first occasion the crucial impetus of haste without which Mamas's life would doubtless have been lost. But then again, Roderick felt

36 bound to admit it also, if the voice had not dared such unprecedented familiarity, he would now be devouring the contents of the boy's stomach and intestines, or, he corrected himself with a shudder, he would probably still be fast asleep, while the boy, the contents of both stomach and intestines retained and swelling his bloated body, would be floating face down in the water, beyond all hope of recall. Roderick wondered if perhaps this warning voice belonged to one of those invisible lions with wings he had been told about so often but had never seen, who were supposed to watch over ordinary flesh-and-blood lions like him. Well, if that was the case, then it seemed quite clear that they also took a considerable interest in the affairs of mere human beings.

Roderick looked up. Just ahead Mamas was still unconscious, cradled in the girl's arms where he had slumped back, exhausted, after his more recent ordeal, such a few short minutes past, Roderick realised with a start, as he recalled the protracted adventures his own heart and mind had undertaken in the outwardly calm moments since the frantic exertion of the near drowning. It was as if time, actual time, had speeded up, had been forced to speed up, to enable the rescue to be successfully accomplished, and then, the immediate crisis over, had needed to slow down, to be stretched out in a kind of contemplative calm of slow-motion almost to the point of stasis, permitting the moments that had been stolen from it, the rubato, as it were, of immoderate action, to be paid back leisurely and in full.

But the girl, Roderick saw, had been obeying no such strict rules of tempo. She was already engaged in wiping the vomit from Mamas's chin and chest with the hem of her robe, intent, moving her right hand only, determined not to disturb the boy whose breathing at last seemed to have fallen into a more gentle, measured beat. She appeared to have forgotten Roderick and the mission of mercy she herself had instituted altogether. But no, Roderick thought, no, she had trusted him so much, had had such complete confidence, not only in his capacity to save the sea-horse just as he had done Mamas, albeit from a diametrically opposed medium, but also in the certainty that he would not fail to do so, that she had been able to return to her more pressing ministrations, calmly, with an untroubled mind.

Roderick was touched. He halted, composing, as it were, the tableau vivant before him into a picture, an artfully realistic yet archetypal representation of feminine mercy and compassion. He remembered a painting he had seen once, when he was still a very young lion.

He had gone with his mother, in the summer months and at the hour of siesta, to visit a great stately mansion while the owners were away at Baiae and the caretaker slaves left behind were either sleeping or otherwise taking advantage of their master's absenteeism. Two of his uncles, his mother's brothers, who considered themselves something of experts on all matters artistic, and who in fact were lionised within the pride and had a considerable reputation among other prides as art critics and literary lions, had accompanied them. They had indeed suggested the outing, as they had wanted their beloved sister, and her precious son, to see the wonderful collection of art works. Roderick had taken everything quietly in, looking at the paintings but

37 listening attentively to all that the others said. His uncles had been discussing a famous artist named Zeuxis of Heraclea, or perhaps it had been Zeuxis of Ephesus, Roderick was always getting the two mixed up, who had painted a bunch of grapes so realistically that birds had flown down to peck at them, thinking them real grapes. But a rival artist, Parrhasius, Roderick seemed to recall, had challenged him to a painting contest. Zeuxis had accepted, but, in his great pride, had challenged first the challenger to draw back the curtain from his own great masterpiece. Parrhasius, with a smile, had revealed the curtain itself to be but a cleverly painted fabrication. Zeuxis, gracious in his abashment, had willingly conceded defeat.

But the painting Roderick had remembered best, amid the myriad mythological subjects, with their beautiful sensual goddesses getting up to all sorts of improbable things with impossibly muscular heroes, and the multiplicity of more realistic genre scenes, such as one of a mother centaur tending her baby foals, which Roderick had particularly liked, was a sombre picture whose exquisitely tender pose had stuck in Roderick's mind and been suddenly brought back, in all its affecting detail, by the so similar disposition of the limbs of Mamas and the girl.

In the painting, a painting his mother had told him had for long been attributed to Zeuxis of Heraclea, just such a scene was depicted. The painting was of a fair young man, apparently dead, naked but for a scrap of cloth covering his manhood, lying in the arms of a beautiful young woman. Roderick had marvelled then at the skilful blend of form and colour which had enabled so flat a surface to appear to have such depth, such a paradoxical quality of continued existence, even when portraying the dead. One of the woman's tears, fallen to the young man's chest, seemed to tremble there still, as if still wet, still reflecting, not only the painted surroundings of the picture itself but, Roderick's fancy had found itself very nearly believing, the whole of the room in which they were then standing, almost, indeed, Roderick had strangely felt, the two older lions and the young lioness matron with her cub who were staring intently up at it. But his cogitative nature had been brought rudely back to more immediate mundane concerns by a contretemps which had occurred. Roderick's uncles had disagreed with his mother about the subject of the work. They had insisted that the beautiful young woman was a goddess who had fallen in love with the fair young man who, against her express wishes, had gone on a wild boar hunt, Roderick had particularly remembered that, and had been gored and killed. Hence the red wound in his side, which still glistened wetly as if just painted. But, being a goddess, she had been able to arrange for the young man to be resuscitated and to dwell with her forever in the abode of the immortals. But Roderick's mother had been equally adamant. She had assured them that the fair young man was the god, that the beautiful young woman was his mother, that he had been killed in an equally barbarous fashion, all present had at least agreed upon that, and that he, because he was the god, had been resurrected and had taken his mother with him to dwell in regions of perpetual light. Roderick's youthful imagination had deemed either explanation of the picture equally satisfactory. But, even as he had lingered before it, while his mother and uncles moved on to discuss other, perhaps more beautiful works which had signally failed to capture his attention, the private view had been rudely interrupted by the scream of a maid who, having heard the aesthetic commotion (which

38 always seemed to get far more overheated, Roderick had even at that tender age already noticed, than any mere discussion on food or difference of opinion over family matters) and coming into the room, had fainted dead away at the sight of the four unexpected visitors.

Roderick's uncles had decided on withdrawal as the better part of valour: suppressing their natural gulosity, they had stepped over the admittedly not very tasty looking intruder lying in the doorway and had quietly left the house with his mother. But she, becoming aware of Roderick's absence, had returned to find her tardy son still lingering before the work which had so deeply impressed itself upon his burgeoning aesthetic Fermenting with time, however, certain aspects of this long ago disagreement had returned to Roderick with a force, and with greater frequency, nagging at the edges of his consciousness. Had his uncles interpreted the pair subjectively, as lovers, in the light of their own undoubted maleness? And, more importantly, had his mother insisted on the mother and son relationship in the picture merely, well, merely because she was a mother? Roderick had tried to put the thought of his mother's lack of artistic objectivity out of his mind, as not befitting a dutiful son, but it would not go away. Then, one day, in his early adolescence, he had tackled her with it. Why, he had asked, if the relationship was as she had maintained, did the mother look no older than her son? Unruffled she had told him that the mother's purity of soul and character had in some miraculous way retarded the ageing process. Roderick, looking up then into his mother's still youthful face and undiminished beauty, had found it quite impossible not to believe her. But a lingering doubt had remained. Then, considerably later, when he was considered old enough to mix more freely with the adult lions, he had been present at a conversation between those same two uncles which had vindicated his mother altogether. They had again been discussing Zeuxis of Heraclea, Roderick was certain that it had been Zeuxis of Heraclea on that particular occasion, and the very painting which had done so much to help form his by then maturing artistic judgement. One uncle had informed his brother, and the rest of the company, that the latest tests had proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the original attribution of the painting to Zeuxis had in fact been a mistake. The painting was now thought to be poor copy, by a late Christian artist of quite recent times, of one of Zeuxis's most celebrated works, now probably lost, in which the original mythological subject of the lovers had undergone a metamorphosis into mother and son to correspond with the tenets of the new forbidden religion for which it had been painted. All the lions had been astonished and had congratulated Roderick's uncle on his erudition, although Roderick's other uncle had remained for a time uncharacteristically quiet. Roderick himself had had mixed feelings. First of all he was delighted that the unimpeachable judgement of his mother had proved correct and that her insistence on a filial relationship had not been the result of a more than ordinarily well developed, if understandable, maternal pride. He had been pleased too that his uncles, getting hold of the wrong end of the stick as regards the attribution of the work, had been proved, at least in relation to its origin, not altogether wrong. Then again he had been more than a little abashed that the critical faculties upon which he was just beginning to pride himself had received, if not a mortal blow, at least a serious dent, a dent his lack at the time of

39 comparative artistic experience and the fact of his undeniable infant judgement had already begun to hammer, as it were, into some sort of workable shape. Finally, he was forced to acknowledge the fact that, thought his mother had been right as to the subject of the painting, the artist to whom she had ascribed its treatment would doubtless have found her taste more than a little faultyÍž even as he himself had had to admit the puerility of his ownÍž even as he suddenly recalled, almost with a leap of the heart, the moment in the gallery of the great house when his mother had categorically stated, not her belief in its veracity, but merely her absolutely certainty as to the long time attribution of the work to Zeuxis of Heraclea.

Heraclea! The very word, echoing thus in the reverberatory chambers of his mind, suddenly shifted its perspective, thudding against and being absorbed by the obstacle of a more recent association, bringing Roderick's thoughts scudding back, down the dim corridors of time, from those distant days of infancy and youth almost to the present moment, skipping, as it were, the protracted and outwardly eventful intervening period of unpremeditated action which, though stamped no doubt with an equal force upon the hardening medium of his adult consciousness, had signally failed of that correspondent durability which the vivid, necessarily more pondered earlier impressions had had upon the soft yielding wax of his more tender, experiential years.

Heraclea! Roderick shuddered. How could he, that girl lying there with Mamas in her arms, have so completely forgotten, in his thoughtless digressive inwardness, the recent fate of the Christians from HeracleaÍž a fate which age had done nothing to mitigate, any more than would the extreme youth of the two who had only him now to watch over their precarious existence!

Heraclea! Had not the lion's den at the arena only last week been full of rumours of the coming martyrs from Heraclea! Had not the lions looked forward excitedly to the entrance of the aged and revered bishop who, when his church had been closed, had simply said that God dwells in men's hearts, not within walls, and had summoned the brethren for worship in the open air! Had he not been scourged with his deacon for refusing to hand over to the local authorities the church's sacred books! Had they not then refused to make an act of worship of the Emperor and of Fortuna and of Hercules, the city's name-deity! Had not the bishop been dragged back to jail by his feet! Had not he and his deacon, with another priest, been confined for seven months! Had not the bishop been again unmercifully beaten for his contumacy!

Roderick did not know if any of this were true, but certain lions, whose word he had no reason to doubt, assured him of the absolute reliability of their information. However that might be, just when expectation had reached fever pitch (not so much because of the cachet of devouring such a famous bishop, who would doubtless be tough and stringy despite the tenderising process of the many beatings, but because word had got around that the young deacon, whose flesh had also been much tenderised during his months of confinement, was plump and juicy enough to melt in the mouth, and also because the other priest who had shared their cell was a

40 muscular Christian of a handsome and tasty appearance, whose meat would be somewhat tougher, but the flavour of which, it was thought, would be excellent), the authorities had suddenly decided to burn them instead, the bishop having to be carried to the stake because of the weakness of his condition, while his deacon had joked cheerfully with the executioners as the fire was lit and all three praised and gave thanks to God. The lions had been most distressed at this appalling waste of nutriment. All except for one leo alumnus, of a rather nervous disposition, who had unfortunately met his death on the previous afternoon at the hands of a particularly vile venator, ably abetted by a more than usually barbarous bestiarous.

He did not even have time to be disappointed in the lack of good protein which disappointed all the den for a week.

Roderick was amazed at just how many were at present taking on this new religion, coming out, as it were, despite the almost inevitable consequences. Another story had been going the rounds of the animal's quarters, confided to Roderick by a large brown bear who had heard it from a cousin of his who had in turn been told by Innocentia herself, who had such a reputation among the bears as a man-eater that no one would dream of doubting her word. It seemed that during the festivities held in Tangier by a Roman legion in celebration of the Emperor's birthday a centurion had thrown off his military belt, declaring that he would serve only the eternal king. Brought before the deputy prefect, he had pleaded guilty to repudiating his allegiance to an earthly leader, and had of course been put to death. Even the official shorthand-writer, rumour stated, was so indignant at the sentence that he refused point-blank to report the proceedings, and he too had been executed in consequence. But both, because of their Roman citizenship, had been beheaded. What was the point of this plethora of new Christians, when some ended up being burnt and others were beheaded, rendering in the one case the carbonaceous residue of the flesh not worth the eating and in the other the headless corpse anathematical to any but the most debased carnivorous creature.

But what, Roderick considered, were these Christians to him, or he to them! To him, all but for two! they were merely comestibles, to be hunted down and devoured without a qualm.

And to them, all but for two! he was a predatory beast, to be feared and loathed in equal proportion.

All but for two! These words, with their unmistakably modifying provisory suggestion of mutual reciprocity (not only in the rhetorical question but also in his subsequently encouraged incitation to still further incremental rhetoric of answer), filled Roderick's already much mollified heart with an unfamiliar sense of responsibility. Christians had, until now, hardly ever impinged upon his single-mindedness as anything other than the occasional Ă la carte prey-item, to help vary the dietary monotony of a seemingly endless succession of zebra and wildebeest, and, since his confinement, as the more regular table-d'hĂ´te of the arena. But these two, almost against his will, he found himself treating more and more as, well, almost as honorary lions. And so his very real sense of his own honorificabilitudinity would not permit

41 him to do anything other than exert himself, in every possible way, to ensure their well-being and safety. How could this adolescent child, forced beyond the confines of her years into something very like motherhood whilst still retaining so much of girlish grace, with her preponderant burden at last sleeping peacefully in her arms (so like the young goddess in the lost painting, transformed by the artist's contact with this new religion into the mother of a god, yet with all the attributes of her girlhood still intact), do anything other than remain just as she was, in all her superjacent inutility, letting the recuperative power of nature do what work it could for this godlike boy, who, but for her painstaking, and his own, Roderick reminded himself, would be lying as dead now as that figure in the extant work, with the girl left merely to mourn, as it were, while he stood superfluously by, as it seemed to him he had done so many years ago in that country mansion?

No! A lion might be many things, but he could not be superfluous! Roderick looked about him. The morning was quiet. Hardly a bird yet stirred. The ring of the flat horizon proclaimed only emptiness. The girl, Roderick noted to his satisfaction, was herself almost dozing, her head drooping drowsily over the boy's bare shoulder. Roderick hesitated a moment, uncertain. No! A lion might be many things, but he could not be uncertain! The girl's cheek had come to rest now, was itself rising and falling gently on Mamas's gently rising and falling chest. They were sleeping as one. Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.

The phrase drifted lazily into Roderick's mind, but this was not the time, nor here the place, to unravel its meaning or to think about where or when he had first heard it. Action must be taken! When they woke they would both need food! Roderick's claws and jaws were the only claws and jaws they had! Besides, he was himself more than a little peckish!

Roderick, his eyes taking in the sleeping couple and making a quick 360° circuit of the horizon in less time than it takes to write, having satisfied himself, bounded off in search of food.

Never had Roderick known such freedom of spirit! Released from the oppressive shackles of his own indulgent speculativeness, from a long unaccustomed and too protractedly dwelt upon bout of fruitless cogitation, his very soul seemed to leap ahead of itself, to be surveying the countryside into which his body tardily followed, liberated at last from the dark maze of such labyrinthine thought processes. He did not even think of the singularly sagacious old lion who had once assured him of recompense after thought: that long look at the calmness of the gods. The calmness of the gods did not come into it! Everything was new to him, as if seen for the first time. A field of tall scarlet poppies, which only yesterday he would not have thought worthy of his notice, now appeared so delightfully inviting in its unanimous redness that he plunged supervacuously in, bounding about like a cub at play. He wallowed, he luxuriated, he rolled in them, as he might have done in the dust, even though they had been the fruits of the firmament! The poppies got stuck in his mane and he shook them ecstatically off, watching their trajectory through the air as if they had been gobbets of red meat torn from some

42 delicate prey. The poppies themselves, in their delicious softness and colour, seemed somehow to satisfy in him that atavistic bloodlust which, through his albeit tenuous and short-lived contact with human beings, he had nevertheless for too long sublimated. Not one poppy at any rate would escape his ravenous maw! His teeth grabbed at the delicate stalks, which gave way unresistlessly at his touch. Then suddenly he stopped. What was he doing! Was he not, in effect, devouring these harmless blooms as a substitute for Mamas and the girl? Had not the prolonged restraint upon his true nature made him hate, not only the two of them but himself as well, and was not this simply his savagery taking its own inevitable revenge? What other conclusion could he deduce from his wilful and wildly irrational behaviour towards these poor papaveraceous plants whose precious time of gentle ephemerality he was doing his best to curtail except the one necessarily just drawn, to his own intense chagrin, by his impromptu syllogisation!

Roderick stood dumbfounded amid the ruined poppies. All around their fragile slender stems were broken or bent, the fine protective hairs which nature had so painstakingly wrought as defence against insect predation now merely seeming to mock the broken blossoms still atop them in the face of such fierce and unexpected attack. One or two still raised their heads and appeared to regard him with sorrowful accusing faces. He had, without turning a hair, devoured animals and men galore, on the veldt, in the arena, wherever and whenever animals and men were to be found, but never before had his conscience pricked him with so fine a compunction. He did not need to look far for an answer. The men, the women, the soldiers and gladiators, the youths and maidens, all the various species of animal he had killed and eaten, he had killed and eaten for food, because he was hungry. Many a time he had ripped away the last tasty morsels of flesh from a gladiator's groin, from a soldier's sternum, from a bestiarous's buttockÍž often he had plunged his mouth into the juiciest and most disgusting organs in the remotest corners of his victim's still living bodyÍž but always for nourishment, so as not to waste any of the prey he had taken the very great trouble to catch and kill. Even if he had eaten Mamas and the girl, he would have killed them quickly, with as little pain as possible, and devoured them thankfully, enjoying them all the more because of the life they had sacrificed, albeit unwillingly, to supply him with food. Thinking now about that meal of which uniquely he had abstained from partaking, about the raw juiciness of the boy's back and the tender flesh of the girl, Roderick's mouth filled with an autonomical salivation and the sudden excess of liquid produced dribbled down his chin. That would have been fair game! But here, for the first time, his destruction had been wanton, destruction for destruction's sake. Roderick took in the gratuitous devastation. Never before had the quotidian scarlet carnage of bloody death so remorselessly surrounded him nor burdened his soul to such an extent as did the innocent destruction he had unthinkingly wrought in this tranquil and once beautiful expanse of blameless and bloodless blossoms. Roderick, again for the first time, hung his head in shame.

But almost at once he recollected himself. What was he thinking of, doting again upon his own foolish mentation, when Mamas and the girl might well be in peril, both of them urgently

43 required food, and his own stomach was indeed very very empty! Shaking off the last poppies clinging to his mane, he bounded away.

Roderick's quest was not long. A small deer browsing sleepily upon some tender shoots did not have time even to be frightened, much less to flee. Roderick had brought it down and bitten out its throat almost in the one lithe movement. The back legs still kicked, but this was merely the natural reflex of an animal mechanism not yet realising its ultimate severance from the vital forces of life. Roderick, in an untrammelled ecstasy of action at this albeit momentary reversal to a long dormant and too long suppressed unregenerate wild nature, had already ripped open the stomach and was greedily lapping up the blood when he suddenly stopped short, halted as if by an unheard voice which now had no need of words. What was he doing!

Surely Mamas and the girl came first, himself only then! That was the proper pecking order!

Roderick, with a laugh at the thought of his pecking anything, grasped the prey firmly in his jaws and made off.

Roderick, approaching the oasis where he had left Mamas and the girl so short a time before, saw at once that something had happened. For one thing, a donkey was tethered to a nearby palm-tree. And as he drew closer Roderick could make out a third person standing quite near to his two charges. Roderick was puzzled, but not worried. He knew he could deal with any eventuality which might arise. Nevertheless, he slowed down, laid the carcass carefully aside, and padded up quietly behind the rock where he had secreted himself the night before.

Despite his caution, the donkey brayed nervously and dragged at its tether, sensing imminent danger. The newcomer, sensing nothing, having satisfied himself that the donkey's unease was without foundation, returned to his conversation.

Roderick, from his hidden vantage-point behind the rock, took the whole scene in at a glance. He was amazed to see that Mamas was not only awake but sitting up. The girl was still beside him. The newcomer was a youth not much older than Mamas, fifteen or sixteen at the most, wearing the toga praetexta of an urban boy without enough years to have put on the toga virilis. He was engaged in earnest talk with the two. Roderick shaped his delicate ears to catch, not just the gist but every detail and nuance of what was being said.

Roderick was delighted to hear the girl (whose name he learnt for the first time was Eugenia) excitedly telling the newcomer, and an amazed Mamas (who was also hearing about it all for the first time, although he had been the chief, albeit unaware, protagonist), about the wonderful lion who, with an almost miraculous prescience, had not only saved Mamas from drowning but, with an equally marvellous presence of mind, had forced the fatal water from the boy's insides by means of his tail, a detail the girl could hardly relate without tears (whether of relief or mirth, Roderick could not be sure which) coursing down her cheeks. Mamas and the other boy too seemed to be laughing or crying as they listened to her unbelievable tale. Mamas was sure it must be the same wonderful lion he had befriended in the arena only the day before.

44 Roderick listened to them singing his praises with a growing sense of his own worth.

He had never before realised just how wonderful he really was. His tail, which deserved so much of the credit, began to beat softly upon the ground, almost as if it had a will of its own.

The smooth tawny coating of hair which covered his face, if the blood could have reached it, would no doubt have blushed gold-vermilion.

But before long, Mamas and Eugenia and the newcomer had dropped the subject so dear to Roderick's heart and had moved on to discuss the present peril of their plight. Roderick, a little disgruntled that such an interesting topic had been so perfunctorily dealt with, nevertheless kept his ears attuned in order to catch the missing details of a story which, until then, he had had to put together, piecemeal, like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, with crucial gaps in the overall design, from the pieces he had before him, on the table, as it were, of his own consciousness.

Roderick was surprised to find out that Mamas and Eugenia had not previously known each other. Mamas had come to the city from the nearby hills, where he was a shepherd, with the express intention of dying in the arena. Eugenia, who was a secret Christian and the daughter of the prefect, had not been there but had heard about Mamas and the lion from her friends and had been present in the evening when they had been brought before the Emperor.

She had, it was quite plain, fallen in love with Mamas at first sight. Just as it was also quite plain that this new boy, whom she called Justus, worshipped the ground she walked on. So much Roderick clearly inferred from the hidden looks which passed between all three. Justus's pimply nose, set somewhat askew in this curly-headed youth's swarthy face, had obviously been put even further out of joint by the sudden appearance of the romantic young shepherd boy with the fragile good-looks and a heart set on martyrdom. Nevertheless, he was bearing up well to his relegation, and only the adoring glances he gave to the girl while she was speaking, and the occasional flashes of resentment, and even of envy, which showed in his eyes whenever she touched Mamas's shoulder or gently stroked his hair, showed the anguish he was suffering, far worse, Roderick's sixth sense told him, than the terrible merely physical pain of Mamas's poor back. Roderick's romantic imagination had even gone so far as to posit the two as childhood sweethearts, with the sudden appearance of Mamas the night before sending the certainties of Justus's settled world crashing about his uncomely shoulders. Eugenia, unable to do or say anything at all without revealing her Christian sympathies when the Emperor had passed his sentence on Mamas, had had time only to ask Justus to invent some excuse for her early departure, and had disappeared into the night, leaving the abandoned boy disconsolate but determined not to give her away. She had followed at a distance the little party of soldiers as they had whipped Mamas to the city gates. Then, when the coast was clear, she had come out and discovered the boy about to be devoured by the ferocious lion who had abstained in the arena but whose savage nature had no doubt got the better of him. Roderick smiled to himself as he listened to this subjective account of his own altruistic behaviour, relegating the thoughts

45 he had in fact entertained, as he had licked the blood from the fresh wounds on the boy's back, to the deepest recesses of his consciousness. Anyway, even if the facts were twisted and the motives misconstrued, at least they had got him back to the centre of the canvas. He did not even really mind Eugenia assuring them of his being frightened away by the flaming torches of the travellers. He pitied rather her lack of insight into his true nature. And he was able to put into place a few more of the puzzling pieces of the jigsaw. The two men, who were brothers, had been doctors also, and Christians. Passing quite fortuitously by at the time, they had been unable to remain with her and Mamas, but had nevertheless carried him to the comparative safety of the oasis and had left him there in her tender care with the healing balms which had no doubt played such a crucial part in his present state of recovery. Then they had reluctantly departed, to take up their urgent duties among the hidden Christians of the city, and she had asked them to inform Justus of her whereabouts and had assured them of his trustworthiness and of his ability to find a safe refuge for them while they went about their secret ministrations.

Roderick made himself comfortable behind the rock. His sudden appearance at this particular moment, though acceptable to Mamas and Eugenia, would almost certainly alarm poor Justus, and would no doubt send the donkey into a paroxysm of terror, from whose first intimations it was only now just beginning to recover. Besides, had he not disproved the old adage about eavesdroppers never hearing good of themselves! Justus was proudly telling them now about the twin brothers, whom he had hidden in his own home, despite the danger, and of how so many poor Christians were making their way secretly there for help and medical aid.

But those fortunate Christians who had already been ferreted out were beyond the reach of such earthly succour. In this latest wave of persecutions, stories were coming in from all over the Empire, some mere rumour, others no doubt embellished by prospective hagiologists, but some which bore the unmistakable stamp of truth. Justus related them now as though half afraid he was being overheard. Eugenia listened, the ready tears, which were never far below the surface of her tender-heartedness, streaming down her face. Mamas heard it all in an ecstasy of rapture, a strange unearthly light seeming to dart from his eyes. Justus, doubtless emboldened by the rapt attention of his audience, detailed the various forms of death the authorities had been able to devise to divide the unreachable spirit as slowly and as agonisingly as possible from the all too reachable body. One old bishop had been lashed to an anchor and thrown into the sea. A young girl of extraordinary beauty had had both her breasts cut off. A matron had been left for three days to die in her bathhouse, after the clumsy executioner had botched his third attempt at cutting off her head. A young man had been stripped naked, his legs tied apart, and red-hot copper plates had been applied to his genitals. Roderick took in this catalogue of horrors with considerable interest. The old bishop would be quite tough, but the salt water would no doubt give a certain tang to the flesh. Roderick had devoured quite enough young girls in the arena to know just how deliciously milky their soft breasts could be. The matron was problematical: three days of steaming might lend a wonderful texture to an otherwise unpalatable repast. And as for the young man! Roderick had always enjoyed that particular delicacy. Depending on his mood, and the age of the victim, he would usually start or end his

46 meal with them. The penis could be disappointing, and was often tough, if its owner had overindulged it to any great extent. But the testicles nearly always had something to offer, in the spectrum of gradation, from the scarcely seminiferous tang of the young, through the vigorous pungent seminality of the adult, to the rank seediness of senility, with semination suspended and the vasa deferentia dried. Yet even Roderick had never tried them roasted or grilled! The red-hot metal plates would not cook them, but merely heat them through, giving a crisp new dimension to a dish which he thought he had tasted in every aspect of its permutability. Suddenly Roderick looked at Eugenia. His euphoria vanished. She had begun to sob openly, into her hands, inconsolable. Justus, a little shamefaced at his own over elaboration, stopped. Mamas was silent. Roderick realised, as if for the first time, though in fact for the thousandth, the vast division which separated him from the human race. He had thought he was beginning to understand them just a little. Yet all this talk of a four-course dinner, which merely tickled his taste-buds, had nearly broken her heart.

And for Roderick more proof of the unfathomableness of human nature was to come.

Eugenia, recovering her composure almost at once in the awkward hiatus so suddenly produced by poor Justus's seemingly seamless lapse into taciturnity from the garrulous relish with which he had been narrating his list of casual barbarities, got up and crossed to where the tethered donkey was lazily cropping the grass. She rummaged in the saddlebags while the two boys looked on, her back to them, bringing forth the food supplies and fresh change of clothes which Justus had brought with him. Then, turning to them after a moment with a dazzling smile, a new robe over her arm to replace her tattered one and a clean toga for Mamas's by now near nakedness, she discreetly withdrew behind a convenient rock, almost laughingly declaring that she would leave the men to their man's talk and their man's business and would freshen herself up and prepare something for them to eat. Poor Mamas, alone with the older and more sophisticated city boy, sat for a moment, nonplussed. Then, scorning assistance but failing in his attempt to rise, his tether and his wits both giving out at once, he collapsed back onto the ground, sobbing pitifully. Justus, aware of the ordeal the boy had been through, was all concern. He rushed to his side, carefully taking Mamas in his arms and letting him cry.

Roderick, from his vantage-point, could see Justus's face as it surveyed the havoc that had been made of the boy's back. There was pity in the look, certainly. And tenderness. But there was a strange fascination also. And an unmistakable hint of cruel satisfaction. Be that as it may, Mamas was, for the time being, both literally and figuratively, in his hands. Whether Mamas had sensed Justus's love for Eugenia, Roderick was not sure. But he was sure of Justus's awareness of Eugenia's love for Mamas. He contemplated for a moment rushing out and saving the boy from the hands of this jealous rival, who did not have his interests at heart the way he did. But almost at once he thought better of it. Justus was useful, Justus was necessary, for the moment, to ensure Mamas's survival. Later, perhaps, when he had served his purpose, Roderick could make a meal of him. Roderick growled quietly to himself, but kept cover.

Mamas meanwhile, embarrassed, blushing to the roots of his hair, yet desperately clutching at the only straw to hand, gradually confessed between sobs the full extent of his plight, his

47 inability to get down to the water without Justus's help, his urgent need to wash, finally, reluctantly, squirming as he did so, the accident after his rescue, his momentary reflex weakness, which he had only discovered upon coming to in Eugenia's arms. Justus, laughing it seemed in spite of himself, assuring Mamas all the while that he should think nothing of it, that things of the sort had happened to him when he was a boy, helped the unfortunate shepherd lad unsteadily to his feet and, unable to put his arm around the wounded shoulders, had to be content to let the boy cling feebly to his own as he guided him gently down to the water's edge.

Mamas, agonising at every step, completed the short distance in a state of near collapse.

Nevertheless, summoning up his meagre reserves of strength and the tatters of his remaining pride, he freed himself from Justus's supportive aid and trembling stood upright for a moment, awkwardly discarding the equally tattered remains of his garment, before lowering himself gratefully into the water at last, to wash away all vestiges of a shame which, Roderick thought ruefully, could only exist in the mind of a human being.

Roderick, seeing Mamas naked for the first time, was struck by the sinewed muscularity of the boy's buttocks and thighs. Even a lion would be proud of those hindquarters. But, Roderick pondered, no shepherd boy, even of his tender years, could help but develop in that particular area, with a life of scrambling about among the rocks after his sheep. The frailty and apparent weakness of the boy's upper limbs belied his true strength. Watching the two boys together, Roderick knew which he would choose in a wrestling bout, despite the age, height and weight advantage of the older city boy. He would like to see them fighting it out over Eugenia!

That would really be something! But Roderick's fancies were rudely interrupted by the thought of Mamas's weakened condition. Justus had all the advantage now. Roderick caught a glimpse of Mamas's back just before he sunk into the water. All that youthful flesh had been marred for life by the casual cruelty of the Emperor and the gratuitous violence with which the soldiers had set about their task. Again Roderick puzzled over the ways of men. If they had been going to eat Mamas, that would have been another matter. Still, he could not approve the unnecessary barbarity of their methods. He remembered hearing rumour in the lions' den of a young man who had been brought up away from the world so that he would not be exposed to the lure of Christianity. Inevitably he had come into contact with an old hermit and had been converted.

Then, if Roderick recalled the story aright and was not in fact conflating two different martyrs he had heard about at different times, the young man had relapsed into paganism in order to maintain the favour of his friend, the king. But all his old Christian friends had turned their backs on him. Even his own parents, who had been converted in the meantime, had told the poor young man that they wanted nothing more to do with him. Mortified by this and by his own conscience, he had eventually returned to his Christian faith after the king's death and had been condemned to suffer a particularly horrible martyrdom. His body had been hung from a beam and slowly cut to pieces. Starting with a thumb, various bits had been hacked from his still living frame and discarded. But he had refused to give way. Each piece which seemed to die before his own eyes, as it were, he had offered to God, seeing it as going down into the grave, only to bud again into eternal life, covered in glory. When they eventually got round to

48 cutting off his head, his body lay in no fewer than twenty-eight pieces. Roderick had found the whole tale, if true, highly distasteful. There was nothing he enjoyed better than a few cold cuts, he had always relished an assiette de charcuterie, but twenty-eight good pieces of meat thrown away or cast into the fire he found inexcusably wasteful. As in the case of a bishop who had recently been martyred, dragged by the pagan priests into their temple and tied by his feet to a bullock who was about to be sacrificed. The poor beast had been driven out of the temple and down a hill. The bishop's head was smashed and his brains had spilled out onto the ground. He most certainly had had the black ox tread on considerably more than his foot! Roderick's mouth watered as he contemplated these squandered delicacies. Not only the bishop's tender brains but the bullock itself, which, despite its want of masculine appendages, would doubtless have been delicious. Yet the creature was about to be sacrificed and its flesh would have been burnt as a holocaust, an offering to the gods! Why was mankind so illogical in its carnivorousness!

Meanwhile, as Roderick was pondering these quaint mysteries, Mamas had emerged from the water, after completing his ablutions and making quite certain that the girl was nowhere in sight. He stood, trembling all over, wetly ashamed of his own nakedness in the face of his perhaps unwisely confided incontinence yet having to accept the proffered aid all too conscious of the condescension which the older boy did not fail in a dozen little ways to make abundantly clear. Justus was willingness personified, but the willingness was, to Roderick's eyes at least, always accompanied by a sneer of cold contempt. He helped Mamas, who could scarcely move his arms now, to dry himself, avoiding his wounded back as scrupulously as the girl had done. But there was no love. Then he handed Mamas the toga praetexta of his own which the girl had left with them. Mamas, who had never before touched such a rich garment, taking it in his hands, stroking the fine material with its deep border of purple and suddenly made aware of his own lowly position and contemptible nudity alongside this overdressed and insolent youth, was once again, in an instant, in his debilitated condition, reduced to helpless tears. Justus, embarrassed himself this time by such an overt display of, to him, inexplicable emotion, merely stood by and shuffled his feet. Only Eugenia's voice, announcing her imminent reappearance, galvanised the two into some sort of hurried action. But alas, poor Mamas, who did not even know how a toga should be worn, found that his back, despite Justus's ready help, was unable to bear up to the weight even of such unbearable lightness, and Justus was forced to extemporise a rough and ready sarong, wrapping the beautiful garment around the other's waist two or three times and tucking it in just as the girl emerged, wearing her fresh new robe, plain in its neatness.

Roderick, watching this little comedy of manners being enacted by the three, still had room for wonder. All this business of Mamas's shame over a simple natural function? No other animal he had ever come across had the slightest reticence about defecating or rutting or discharging its urine, anywhere, at any time. He had done all these things all his life without turning a hair, or even thinking about them unduly. They were natural functions common to

49 all. Why human beings had to make such a fuss he simply could not fathom. The place where one's food came out was no different from the place where it went in. One might occasionally use one's excretion for a sensible purpose, like marking out one's territory. One large hippopotamus he had known had been able to twirl its tail at an alarming rate whilst defecating, spreading the ample contents of its bowels over a considerable area. But then, it had been large, and needed a large territory for its habitation. Even human beings, he had heard, were sometimes sensible in this respect. After all, they did use their manure to manure! And the Tyrian purple dye used to dye the toga praetexta, which had just now reduced poor Mamas to tears, would never have remained fast but for the human urinary nitrogenous waste which had been added to the fluids from the poor slaughtered murexes, thus enabling every self-respecting magistrate and child to walk recognisable in the streets. All this Roderick freely admitted. But he was again forced rather ruefully to acknowledge the fact that hardly ever before, until this display of inexplicable comstockery on Mamas's part, had the simple act of bodily evacuation even entered his head.

Roderick was rudely roused from his excrementitious excogitation by a nearby sound which, simple in itself, nevertheless seemed to harrow up his soul, freeze his young blood, make his two eyes like stars start from their spheres, his knotty and uncombinèd mane to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful Porpentine. Why the sound, which to his ears appeared something of a cross between a cat's miaow, a dog's bark, and the hiss of a serpent attempting an overture of friendship, should have filled his soul with sudden dread he knew not. Afraid to look, yet compelled by his own fascinated horror, he turned his great head towards the place close by from whence the sound had emanated. And there it was, only a few feet away, the first that he had ever laid eyes on yet quite unmistakable from the numerous and he had until then thought probably apocryphal descriptions he had heard, already quite close enough to spray him with the deadly liquid which its threatening stance and the angle of its pizzle told him it was even now in the process of preparing to discharge.

Roderick was face to face with and within easy range of the fabled and fabulous leontophonos.

Roderick for the first time in his life knew real fear. He did not cower, lions do not cower, but his soul, as it were, cowered against the rock as the leontophonos drew closer, proudly louche, displaying its ultimate weapon as carelessly as a young lioness might display her charms.

Roderick's mind raced back to all the stories he had heard as a cub. His mother had first told him of the leontophonos, warning him that it would come and spray him with its deadly urine if he was not good. He had not really believed this, but had gone along with it, partly to please his mother and partly to frighten himself, which he rather enjoyed doing at that time.

Then, when he was a little older, he had determined to find out for himself if the story was

50 accurate. He had gone to one of his uncles, his father's elder brother, who was known to be the wisest lion in the pride, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things animal and human, unlike the uncles on his mother's side, who, even at that tender age, he had begun to see through. The old lion had assured him that everything his mother had told him was quite true, that the leontophonos was the only creature whose urine was deadly to lions, but that luckily they were rare, and that he himself had never come across one. But a twinkle in his eyes had made Roderick doubt even this venerable sage. As he grew he had promised himself to inquire again, lion to lion, when he had achieved full adulthood and the old boy would no longer need to prevaricate. But one day his enquiring mind had led the elder lion, in his constant quest for new knowledge, to investigate a volcanic eruption, and he had been overcome by the fumes.

Roderick, watching the corpse brought reverently home, had wept openly, despite his years, not only for his uncle, not only for this first dead lion he had ever seen, which seemed somehow to prefigure the death of his own body, but also for his younger self who, in failing to carry out a planned task until it was too late, had, as it were, died, leaving the growing lion bereft, not only of its infancy but of a certainty about truth, which from that time forth would always appear somewhat problematical.

Roderick's first thought as he calmly waited for death was that he was being punished.

He had brought this calamity upon himself by his too long association with and morbid cogitation upon the baser instincts of mankind. How else could he explain this creature's sudden appearance, other than as a physical manifestation of his own debased musings. He had sunk to the level of humanity, now he was going to have to pay for it. He had thought, not like a lion but like a man. He remembered having heard as a cub a cautionary tale about an old lion in a zoo who, though protracted contact with human beings and their insidious corrupting influence, had killed his own admittedly disobedient daughter in a fit of rage and had promptly incurred the wrath of the gods for not remaining true to his own felinity. Divine retribution had been swift. He had been struck by lightning. Was this leontophonos then Roderick's bolt of lightning? But even as these superstitious ponderings invaded his soul, the clarity of his own objective reasoning reasserted itself. Surely he had been pulling the wool over his own eyes, albeit unconsciously, when he had congratulated himself only a few moments before upon his own, and his species, natural superiority in never contemplating its own excretive capabilities.

Lions were superior, certainly, but they were also, like man, part of the animal kingdom. Had not these half-forgotten infantile obsessions, this fascination with all forms of excreta, which had just come back to him in a rush, proved even this innate superiority, if not completely unfounded, at least not quite as marked as he would have liked to believe? Men were cruel, men were beastly, but then, to a certain extent, were not all beasts just a little manly!

Roderick's mental agility shook him out of his physical torpor. The dreaded leontophonos was almost upon him! It swaggered mightily in its smallness, squatting, smirking, letting out a long low string of strange little animal cries. Roderick watched, fascinated in spite of himself, as the glistering tip of its vermeil tube gradually emerged,

51 protruding horribly from the circumambient hirsuteness of its protective sheath. He knew that death was staring him in the face. Well, at least he would go down fighting. With any luck, he might even take the creature with him.

Roderick, his imminent demise already lived through, accepted and overcome, without another thought fearlessly pounced.

The long stream of virulent viridescence which the leontophonos produced hit Roderick in the face even before he had landed. He closed his eyes, feeling the scalding liquid burn, expecting that instant annihilation his youthful fears had promised, only sorry that he had not been able to render the full justice his smaller cousins, the Kilkenny cats, would no doubt have expected.

But, landing with a thud upon the would-be assassin, his huge front paws pinning the squirming creature helpless to the ground, Roderick realised, much to his surprise, even as he shook the urine from his mane as a dog might shake off a douching, that, not only was he not dead, but that the malodorous discharge had rather unexpectedly refreshed him.

Roderick looked contemptuously down at the whining whimpering whelp which only a moment before had insufferably swaggered with the best of them. Its tongue lolled horribly from the corner of its multidenticulate, almost lipless mouth. Its eyes squinted as they flashed forth their many-coloured fire. Its proudly poisonous penial excrescence, which Roderick now noticed was situated on the third leg as had been the case with a blind Podogona he had once come across, had shrunk in craven terror back into the loose folds of its sheaths reddish flocculence. This was the dreaded leontophonos, whose very image, whether in sleep or waking, had vexed to nightmare his childhood, and which he had imagined as waiting, always just out of range of his peripheral vision, for some inevitable crisis in his life, to emerge and spray him with a jet of its laughing, ecstatic destruction!

Roderick, about to rip its albeit not very tasty looking throat unmercifully out, stopped.

Once he had destroyed this rarest of all creatures, he might well live the rest of his life without ever coming across another. He would have forever lost the chance to discover something more about a species he had always considered extinct, if not downright fabulousÍž a species no lion of his acquaintance had ever had a firsthand experience of, and lived to tell the tale. Did he not owe it to his own species to worm as much information as was possible out of this fawning monstre sacrĂŠ before dispatching it with as much haste as was practicable to its own no doubt unenthusiastic ancestors? How could this grotesque, laughable, above all harmless chimerical being have uniquely inspired fear in the heart of a breed which, both proverbially and literally, knew no fear? Roderick was still pondering this question, and wondering how best to go about unearthing its secrets, when the leontophonos, taking the initiative, as it were, spoke:

52 THE LEONTOPHONOS (with an extraordinary mixture of whining arrogance and ingratiating subservience) Well, Roddy old chap, it looks like that shepherd lad of yours is intent on following the example of that Saviour God of his! He's already been flogged to within an inch of his life!

You mark my word, he won't rest content until he has climbed up into a tree, spread his yearning arms out wide, had two dirty big nails driven through his hands, and is hanging there dead as a doornail!

(Roderick is nonplussed, but grows menacingly. The leontophonos winks and leers in a most horrible fashion.)

Come on, Rodders old boy, we know each other too well for that!

(Roderick wrinkles his brows and pushes his face closed. He growls again, only louder. The leontophonos manages to be both snarling and wheedling at once.)

Rodders, Rodders old chum, don't be like that! That frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, cuts no ice with me! I'm sure we two can get along famously! If only you weren't such a pre-emptor! I'd strongly advise against eating me, you know! My piss may not be as deadly to lions as it is fabled to be, but my flesh is still pretty lethal! And anyway, if you kill me, there's so much that you'll never find out, about me, about Mamas and the girl, about yourself!

(Roderick's growl gradually subsiding into an interested purr. The leontophonos smirks with self-satisfaction.)

You'd be surprised, Rod old fellow, at just how much I do know! Being mythical helps one to accumulate a lot of facts about a lot of things! A unicorn of my acquaintance is even more knowledgeable than I am! And there's a sphinx who has all the answers! Admittedly, there is a failed basilisk who is reputed to be just about as successful with his eyes as I am with my urethra! But never mind! A remora I came across really was as difficult to shake off as he is purported to be! Once he had you buttonholed, that was it! I pity the poor tardy ship to whose keel he gets his tenacious sucker attached!

(Roderick's curiosity has finally got the better of him, despite the proverbial warning. His face shows it. The leontophonos laughs, proudly swelling up its multipartite, multicostate chest.)

53 Of course we all exist! As surely as I'm lying here under your paws! By the way, old chum, do you think you could manage to press down just a little less enthusiastically on the old costal region! I promise I won't try to escape! Honest Injun!

(Roderick is suspicious and presses down harder. The leontophonos gasps, blushing purple.)

Really, old boy! You don't know your own strength! You won't get a lot out of me if I haven't got breath enough in my lung-book even to breathe, much else to speak! But you do seem to go up in the air at the slightest suggestion!

(Roderick relents a little but continues to press down. The leontophonos, though squirming still, is nevertheless visibly relieved that Roderick, though not a match for it in method, at least appears to have latched on to its tone.)

That's better, Roddy old chap! I can see we're going to be friends! But trust me! Really!

Promise I won't turn tail! If you must play safe, hold me down by the old caudal extremity!

(Roderick looks on in amazement as the leontophonos slowly uncurls a long scorpioid tail from between its second and third leg.)

There you are, old chum! Rest your bloody great paw on that! At least I can breath then!

(Roderick hesitates, then lays a tentative paw on the tail, still keeping the other paw firmly pressed down upon the creature's chest. An instant and the tail whips forward, burying its sting in Roderick's paw. Roderick, realising too late his foolish credulity, closes his eyes, for the second time in as many minutes expecting instant death. But nothing happens. Amazed, he opens his eyes and looks down. The leontophonos is squirming pitifully, letting out little yelps of anguish and rage, pinned down now at chest and tail more grievously than before, its whole soft rubiginous underbelly exposed to the fury and even more justified grievance of the raging lion.)

Rodders! Rodders! I say, old boy! Give a chap a break! I say! That tickles!

(Roderick is licking the destensile segmented abdomen preparatory to taking a first bite. The leontophonos employs its most unctuous and wheedling manner.)

Roddy! Roddy! Don't take it that way! I was only testing you! Finding out if you were made of the right stuff! My sting couldn't hurt a fly! Any more than my piss can! I was only taking the piss! Ha-ha! You know! Pulling the old leg! Teasing! Ha-ha! You know, Roddy old friend!

54 (Roderick chews a disgusting tuft of flocculent matter without much enthusiasm. The smile of the leontophonos is a horrible mingling of maliciousness and good-nature.)

Roddy! Why kill me! You're a lion! You can afford to be magnanimous! I'm a harmless sort of a fellow! Despite my mortiferous reputation! Just look at the havoc my urine played! And my sting! It's not even a proper sting! Merely a rudimentary caudal appendage inherited from one of my ancestors who happened to be a particularly benign whip-scorpion from the Pedipalpida side of the family! And I'm just the poor little superfluous whippersnapper at the other end of the evolutionary rung who isn't even worth the killing!

(Roderick ceases to chew, having come across a particularly unappetising scirrhous hidden among the flocci. The leontophonos, interpreting this as a sign of weakness, is quick to take advantage of its own summing up of the situation.)

Come on Roddy! Give a fellow an even break! I'm not a bad sort when you get to know me!

I'm sure I could summon up a dozen good reasons why you should let me live, if you'd only give a chap a couple of minutes grace to collect his thoughts! How about it, Roddy old chum!

(Roderick waits. The leontophonos, after a moment's silence, begins its proud enumerating, but is gradually carried away by the sound of its own incremental rodomontade.)

Because I'm the last of my kind! Because my species was around here long before yours!

Because we antedate the Tertiary period! Because we have survived the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene and all the other Cenes to which the poor ignorant geologists have ever given a name! Because my genes contain traces of all the animal types that have ever lived, or that ever will live upon the earth! Because I'm made up of every characteristic of every creature, imagined or real, that even the most inventive fabulist ever could have devised!

Because, proteiform to your puerile imagination, once seen I become immutably fixed in the mind! Because, being mythological, I'll see you and all the rest of your pathetic animal species in your graves! Because, even if you do kill me, I shall abide in the collective nightmares of your remotest descendants! Because, never having deigned to live, I can never die! Because I'm unique! And because the elements are so mixed in me that nature might stand up and say to all the world 'This was a leontophonos!'

(Roderick is stern, though amused in spite of himself at the creature's bold rhetoric. But the leontophonos, feeling that it has gone too far, is again all whimpering contrition.)

I'm nothing, Roddy! No more than a myth-monger's mangy mongrel! Not even that! Less!

Less than the dust beneath your chariot wheels!

55 (Roderick is a little taken aback by the sudden change of mood and the apparent non-sequitur.

But the leontophonos latches onto his confusion.)

There you are! You see, Rodders! I'm not even that important!

(Roderick, growing weary of the incessant backchat, is trying to think of one good reason why he should not eat the leontophonos. But the creature cheekily appears to have read his mind.)

Common sense! Common decency! Fellow feeling! That's three for you!

(Roderick, in attempting to control both his rage and his mirth, gives the leontophonos time to come up with a fourth one.)

Because you like me too much?

(Roderick is again on the verge of partaking when he is again put off by an inflamed carbuncle's odoriferous suppuration. He turns away in disgust. The leontophonos giggles maliciously.)

Go ahead! Eat me! If you dare! But I give you fair warning, 93% of my body is putrid pus and the remaining 7% is just as epinosic! Well, if that's what whets the old appetite, go ahead!

(Roderick growls, drawing yet closer, despite his ocular, olfactory and tactual repugnance.

The leontophonos responds, discharging a loud, evil-smelling, vermifugal fart into Roderick's face.)

Preview of coming attractions!

(Roderick, in a fury, is about to rip open the sebaceous underbelly of the creature with his claws, when the leontophonos pulls out, as it were, its trump card.)

Hang on a bit, Rodders, old boy! Don't forget! The old lion's code, what! Kill for food? By all means! Kill to protect hearth and home? Of course! Kill a rival in love? Why not! Kill a threat to one's sovereignty? Indubitably! But to kill gratuitously, for the sake of killing! Kill for such a base motive as anger or revenge! Tut, tut, Roddy, that would never do!

(Roderick hesitates, a little shamefaced at his own qualmish quandary, as the leontophonos ruthlessly presses home its advantage.)

That's better, Roderick old chum! Don't let the side down! What would poor old Uncle Leo say! How could you ever face him! And after him telling you all about me! Confirming my

56 very existence and your own very worst fears, as it were! But remember that twinkle in his eye! You were never quite sure if he was pulling your leg! Thought that you'd never find out!

Never in this world! Well, Roddy-doddy my good friend, you have found out! That old boy was no Charley-pitcher! Always expect the unexpected! There are more things in heaven and earth than even poor old Uncle Leo dreamt of in his natural history!

(Roderick has momentarily reverted to childishness at the mention of his uncle's name. The leontophonos, observing this, answers the question implicit in his stare, but the braggart again soon comes to the fore.)

I told you, Rodders, old pal! Us mythical beasts know a whole lot of things about a whole lot of things! We know much more about old Uncle Leo than old Uncle Leo ever knew about us!

Poor old Uncle Leo! Remember the way he looked when they brought him back that last time!

But he was so inquisitive! He just had to see for himself! Well, they say curiosity killed the cat! And your own curiosity about me! Remember the way you used to pester your mother!

How you loved to be frightened by all those stories of my mortiferous micturition! And how she loved to frighten you!

(Roderick suddenly snarls dangerously, more than a little incensed that the leontophonos has even dared mention his beloved mother. The leontophonos realises that it has overstepped the mark. It attempts one of its instant reversals, cringing and whining as it does so.)

Sorry! Sorry, Rodders, old chap! Didn't mean any harm! That's me! All talk! Fine woman, your mother! One of the best! A lioness in a million, what! Ha-ha!

(Roderick is somewhat appeased, but is still choleric. The leontophonos, feeling that it has only just escaped, by a hairsbreadth, as it were, from being ripped open, right down the middle, from Grecian thorax to Roman hypotaurium, continues, its voice a placatory purr.)

Roddy! Roddy! Don't take it like that! Look at the lion you are today! All your mother's doing! That's why I mentioned your mother! Only to praise, Roddy, only to praise! You know why she frightened you with all those stories about my kind! Strengthen the old moral fibre, what! Most other lions I've come across were quivering wrecks by the time I'd finished with them! Quite a few simply dropped dead at the first aspergation! Asphyxia, you know!

Aspersive rumour is bound to abound when one's whole species assiduously and for so long aspires to an asocial reputation!

(Roderick is amused again, in spite of himself, but frowns. The leontophonos has, meanwhile, been squirming and blushing and squinting.)

57 I say, old chap! If you could manage not to press down quite so firmly on the old avoirdupois, there's a good fellow! One can't be too careful with the old wedding-tackle, what!

(Roderick, unaware, genuinely abashed, removes his paw from these asperous appendages, sliding it further along the tail as the creature wriggles a little freer of its still secure thraldom.)

That's better, old boy! Bloody great paw of yours! Only pair a fellow's got! Mustn't hazard the old progenitorial capabilities! Encourage a painful congenital phimosis to turn para on us, what! Slaughter of the innocents! BC! Before conception! Ha-ha! I say, old chap, even old Herod never thought of that! Rather be his pig than his son though! Or even old Nero's pig, what!

(Roderick, more than a little weary of the endless badinage, presses down harder on the still squirming leontophonos.)

Right! Right, Rodders old pal! Only be a good boy, don't press down quite so hard on the old sternum either, what! Great bloody paws! Can't risk oppilating the old pulmobranch, what!

(Roderick's patience is almost at an end. The leontophonos, sensing the peroration is over, pricks up the mobile earlap on one of its multilobulate auricles.)

Right! Right, Roddy old boy! I'm all ears! Fire away!

(Roderick, still suspicious, is nevertheless taken aback and more than a little appeased by the creature's sudden apparent willingness to oblige.)

No more circumambagious circumlocution then, at least on my part! No more digressions! No more dawdling! No more declines into downright deceit!

(Roderick, nonplussed, remains silent. The leontophonos is in an instant again slyly superior.)

Don't look at me! You're the digressive dawdler now, old boy!

(Roderick feels he is at last beginning to get the true measure of the leontophonos. But the leontophonos knows that no one has ever got the true measure of it.)

Would give you my word of honour as a gentleman! Only sorry, old boy, can't oblige you there either, much as I'd like to! You see... (lifting up its third leg on the distaff side and exposing an homologous female pudendum)

58 ... I'm not really the sort of chap who can give his word of honour as a gentleman!

(Roderick stares for a moment in amaze, then looks away in sudden embarrassment as the leontophonos bursts into an unseemly fit of cacophonous laughter.)

Rodders, old boy! If you could only see yourself now! I didn't know a lion could blush! And try to shut your mouth! You do look so foolish with it hanging open there!

(Roderick obediently closes his mouth. The leontophonos winks slyly.)

I know what you thought! You thought what everyone thinks! Never take anything for granted, Roddy old pal! Not even when you've seen it with your own eyes! The old hermaphroditical trick always raises a few eyebrows! Can't for the life of me see anything strange about it!

Can't imagine not having the old glans penis, with the old glans clitoris to back it up, just in case of emergencies! Always felt rather sorry for poor unisexual species like yours! I know us male chauvinist pigs think that we have all the fun when it comes to the old copulatory callisthenics, what! But let me tell you, us liberated calefactive callipygous girls know otherwise! Nothing queer about us, old boy! Just made that way! Another fortunate feature of fabulosity!

(The leontophonos grins hideously, almost flirtatiously, fluttering its hooded multiseriate eyelids in a grotesque parody of female sexual allure.)

I don't suppose you could ever find me attractive, Roddicles, my sweet! I'm not a bad old girl when you get to know me! I can be very accommodating when I really put my mind to it! And think of the creature we might produce! Your strength and pride and courage combined with a few of my more interesting features! Like to give it a try!

(Roderick, having recovered from his initial horror, is now more than ordinarily amused.)

But then again, supposing we produced a creature with my strength and pride and courage combined with a few of your more interesting features! What then!

(And in an instant the leontophonos is all snarling maleness again.)

Right, Roddy old prick! That would never do! Go play with yourself then, and leave me alone!

59 (Roderick, in considerable confusion at all these lightening changes, almost loosens his hold of the protean creature struggling beneath his paws, but a sudden futile effort to free itself only makes him press down the harder. The leontophonos squirms, whining pathetically.)

Roddy! Roddy! Old pillicock! Old ball-bag! Enough! I give in! The old lung-book really is a bit on the phthisical side! Congenital weakness, old boy! Just one of the dirty tricks evolution has played on us! Another of your preemptive pounces might well wind me for good! And be a good lad, shift that great paw of yours off the old tits, what! Work of supererogation, if you like! Really can't talk with all that weight on the old chest! Plant it alongside the other on the old tail, if you must! If you still don't feel you can trust me, after all we've been through together!

(Roderick cannot help but be amused by such sheer brazen chutzpah. Relenting just a little, he tentatively shifts his paw, with no small sense of relief, from the extremely unpleasant unctuosity of the chest's rebarbative empyesis to the marginally less slippery squamation of the scabbed scorpioid tail, where it joins its companion in confirming the creature's captivity.)

I say, old boy! That's a bit better! See you still don't trust me! Never mind! One day perhaps!

You lions are a funny lot! One moment ferocious as all get out, the next soft as a pussycat!

What ever happened to the old aurea mediocritas! With you it's either rapine and slaughter, or else you're off helping to excavate the grave of some venerable desert father kept alive by the kind offices of an equally ferine raven who has without fail brought him half a loaf of bread on a quotidian basis for more than sixty years! Well I ask you! Would a unicorn go on like that!

Most self-respecting centaurs and satyrs would far rather die out of folklore altogether than be seen to behave in a manner so contrary to their accepted personae! But you mere animals are all alike! O! for the gloriously consistent inconsistency of us fabulous beasts!

(Roderick is about to defend his own (and his species) consistency, as he sees it, when a new and unexpected change comes over the leontophonos. Suddenly all the squirming hostility seems to sink into quiescence. The eyes roll less wildly. The horribly lolling tongue attempts, albeit unsuccessfully, to suck at least part of its length back into the gaping oral cavity between the labile and ever-slavering though almost non-existent labia. The livid venefic muciferous discharge, which has intermittently oozed from an overabundance of inscrutable orifices, dries.

When it speaks its voice is low and soothing, yet peremptory, like that of his warning dream.)

Roderick! Roderick! We're fakes! Every last one of us! Every phoney leontophonos that ever there was! I'm telling you all this, giving away our secrets, as it were, because I like you!

You've been kind to me! Far kinder than I ever would have believed it possible for a lion to be!

List, Roderick, list, O list! If thou didst ever thy dear leontophonos love! Because, once I've had my say, I'm as liable as not, more liable than not, to up and whemmle every last word of it the next minute!

60 (The leontophonos pauses for dramatic emphasis. Roderick is half-hypnotised by the sudden change in, and the apparent candour of, its tone. But when it speaks again, he is a little put out at being addressed as if he were a public meeting.)

Ladies and gentlemen, an historic moment! The leontophonos is coming out!

(The leontophonos, sensing his bewilderment, is quick to revert to its intimate manner of only a moment before, but with a new narrative tone, as if telling a fairy story to a small infant.)

Long, long ago, when the world was young, before man had started throwing his weight around, when he was still ambling about with his knuckles on the ground and the carpet of matted hair which held preponderance over most of his dermic surfaces had not yet dwindled to the few floccose tufts and whorls we see today, when nature didn't give a floccinaucinihilipilification whether the loosely rucked preputial membrane with which it mercifully sheathed his somewhat undersized membrum virile really was of an hispidity with the rest of his still flocculent hide, long before the first shaggy dog was around to fabulise the fact (a pathetic fallacy contrived merely to mitigate the meagre flocculence of the prefrontal shield protecting its own pathetic phallus), when even my primogenitor was a still somewhat unattractive amoeba, not long out of the primordial slime, with few of the comely and enticing attributes which evolution has seen fit to grace us with today, before creation had decided that we at least should have it both ways, When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born!

(The leontophonos, taking advantage of the new freedom which Roderick has permitted it and more than a little carried away by the exuberance of its own verbosity, again raises its third Ricinulei leg, proudly displaying a protuberant, pustulous and now suppurating ithyphallus.)

And here's my ancient crooked will to prove it!

(Then, wallowing in its own lubricity, it simultaneously raises its corresponding leg on the distaff side, exposing again a female pudenda which now oozes with a viscid mucopurulent menses. However, in yet another instant about-face, conscious of the look of horrified disgust which has come over Roderick's countenance, it shakes its head and shoulders, blushing with a sudden excess of plethoric pudicity and releasing a vast mass of tangled locks which cascade down over the terrible squalor of its entire body, covering the lubricious slimy humours of its double sex with an even more sordid garment of densely matted hair.)

61 Sorry! Sorry, Rodders old chum! Promise I'll stick to the point! Only don't girn so! You can't really blame a fellow, or a gerle for that matter, for trying his or her luck! After all, everybody's somebody's darling, or so they say! Maybe I'll have a little more success with the next lion! By the by, talking of the next lion!

(Suddenly its voice sinks to a rasping, almost inaudible hiss, as if not wishing to be overheard by some theoretical albeit non-existent eavesdropper. Roderick is reluctantly forced to put his ear even closer to the horrible lipless mouth in order to catch the full burden of the words.)

This, Roderick, this is what really happened when the first lion met the first leontophonos! The whole truth, Rodders old pal, and nothing but the truth! I swear it by the versatile versability of my own pulchritudinous persona! This is how all the legends and stories really began!

(The leontophonos again employs its narrative tone, but in an almost matter-of-fact manner.)

It was a beautiful summer morning, just like today! The first true lion, who had only just cast off the last of its superfluous appendages a few thousand years before, in other words, the first lion you and I would recognise as a lion, was prowling across a primordial landscape of erupting volcanoes and bubbling lava pools, thinking of the horribly hairy creature which was not yet quite a man that it had consumed for breakfast the day before - which had in the event turned out to be unexpectedly delicious - and wondering idly if it would come across another today, its whole receptively inquiring mind brimming over with apperceptive enquiration, when out of the corner of its eye it caught, or thought that it caught, the mere shadow of a movement in the lush fertile undergrowth! Suddenly its blood froze! Could this be that deadly leontophonos which its lush fertile brain had only just conceived of as the one being fatal to the king of all the beasts?

(The leontophonos pauses and grins sickeningly up into Roderick's face, its breath rancid.)

And it was, Roderick, it was! The amorphous, almost shapeless form, after toying for a time with a somewhat amphisbaenic appearance, had soon congealed into a very good likeness of the ancestor of yours truly! How could your ancestor have imagined anything quite like me!

The lion shrunk back against a nearby rock, just as you did today! The leontophonos drew near! The lion, in his last conscious moments, vaguely wondered just how this creature would go about dispatching him to the next world, which he had only just conceived of also! Then the glistering tip of that vermeil tube gradually emerged, protruding horribly from the circumambient hirsuteness of its protective sheath, just as it did today! Of course! The urine of the creature would be the thing, the only thing, deadly to lions! The leontophonos aimed and fired! The poor lion was drenched! But nothing happened! The lion, miraculously still alive, shook his mane, opened his eyes, and sat down in amazement! And that would have been it! If only the lion had not sat down upon a particularly virulent scorpion which happened to be

62 sauntering by at the time! The lion never knew what hit him! Neither did the scorpion! And that really would have been it! If only a group of those inquisitive monkey-like creatures - one of whom the lion had already sampled - which would later develop into men, had not witnessed the whole scene! Well, Roddy, you know how stories get about! The great lion, the insignificant leontophonos, the cause, the fatal effect! And that really was it! Hence the mundane geneses of all legends! A couple of lions with weak hearts who died at the mere sight of our pizzles, and the thing was firmly established! Phonos had been added to the leon once and for all, no matter how phoney! So we became more than mere facts, we became myths!

Most lions I've come across, until today, have bitten the dust at the first aspergation! But you, Roderick, are something special!

(Again the leontophonos is all venomous spite.)

You can never get rid of us, Roddy old prick! We're your deepest fears! We're the unknown, the dread you cannot shake off, the thing of which you are most afraid! We're your own death!

(Then again it is all unctuous humility.)

I say, Rodders old chum! If you could manage to move just a teeny bit further along the old tail! Those bloody great paws of yours do press down so upon the old oversensitive squamosity.

(Roderick is only too happy to oblige, having been granted, gratis, such an unexpected insight into mysteries he had never thought to penetrate. But a fear is then suddenly articulated.)

By the by, Rodders old chap! Haven't you been neglecting those old Christian chums of yours!

For all you know, they might have been rendered quite unfit by now for your fastidious palate!

Roderick looked up in sudden panic, aware on the instant of the protracted dereliction of his, as he now saw it, sacred duty. He raised his head a little above the rock, almost half-expecting to discover his beloved Mamas, with Eugenia and the new rival for her affections, if not already more than half-devoured by a pack of marauding feral creatures, at least under close arrest and in the hands of an equally deadly and almost equally feral troop of passing Roman soldiers.

But he need have had no fears on that score. The three of them were sitting quietly together, talking, partaking of the food which the newcomer had brought.

Roderick's relief was immense. He looked down, fully intending to remonstrate in no uncertain terms with the leontophonos for having worried him in so wanton and unnecessary a fashion.

63 But the leontophonos was gone.

All that remained, still firmly secured beneath Roderick's paws, was the wriggling termination of that sinuous caudal extremity upon which he had for so long exerted so supervacuous a hold, an appendage which the wily leontophonos, in so subtle and lizard-like a fashion, appeared all effortlessly to have sloughed off - a regeneratory trick doubtless learned from some lacertine ancestor of whom it was no doubt inordinately proud - and to have left abandoned there, almost insolently detached, like a piece of loose string, Roderick's sole trophy, as it were, and his only proof that the whole thing had not been merely the product of his own mind, a proof which, even as he watched, ceased its fretful thrashing and seemed to shrivel and dry, until it had lost all of its sentient nature and appeared to have taken on a non-organic, almost petrified aspect, like the recently uprooted rootstock of some long-fossilised tree.

Roderick could, for a moment, almost imagine that he had imagined the whole thing.

Then a voice sounded, distant, disembodied, distinct, as if from inside his own head, unmistakable as the warning voice which had today already twice disturbed him, yet unmistakably different: au revoir, Roddy old boy! sorry you had to be disabused about the old mortiferous pipi! gave you the old pip, what! but what's a poor pip-squeak to do! don't do a pip out on us, there's a good lad! see you again in the old pip emma! if you're not pipped at the post already by then!

Roderick looked quickly up. Out of the corner of his eye he caught, or thought that he caught, in the middle distance, the mere shadow of a movement, flickering in the uncertain haze of the desert heat. The amorphous, almost shapeless form, after toying for a time with a somewhat amphisbaenic appearance, had soon resolved itself into a very good likeness of a nearby rocky protuberance, from whence there issued, or he thought that there issued, in the silence of the early morning, the merest echo of a mocking yet not uncompanionable laughter.

Roderick had scarcely begun to debate with himself whether relief was uppermost in his mind, at the disgusting creature having so treacherously and surreptitiously slipped away, or regret that he had not wormed a little more information out of it while he still had the chance, both emotions simultaneously forced to contend with the doubtless altogether unconscious feeling that he was already beginning to miss its albeit pestiferous presence just a little more acutely than he cared to admit, when something unexpectedly blew up which blew all such superfluous cogitations effortlessly away.

64 The wind, which he only now realised had for some time been gently rustling the surrounding palm-leaves, suddenly increased in its force, becoming in an instant one of those precipitant and unexpectedly violent desert storms, the incipiency of which his habitually sharp senses would no doubt long ago have recognised without effort had they not been otherwise and more engrossingly engaged. Roderick crouched behind his sheltering stone, thinking to take refuge there for what would surely be, his experience had taught him, the storm's brief duration. Then the sudden thought of his unprotected charges brought his instantly contrite head back over the top of the rock, to face the perilous blinding gusts, the biting grains, the carried sand.

Mamas and Eugenia had, with Justus, sought refuge themselves, as Roderick's hope in and expectation of their common-sense predicted, in the mouth of the cave before which they had just spent the night. Roderick was about to sink back again, satisfied of their present safety and not too keen to face unnecessarily the punishment of the winds, when a gigantic human shape emerged from behind them out of the cave's dark recesses, seemed to fold them in its arms, and then drew them back with it into the enveloping gloom from which it had emerged.

Roderick was frozen into immobility. The thing had happened so quickly that he wondered for a moment if his eyes, through the swirling clouds of sand, had not been playing tricks on him. But the cave mouth was empty! Justus he would have been quite happy to let fend for himself. But Mamas and Eugenia were gone! Someone, something, whose shadowy presence he had only just glimpsed, had spirited them away. And that something, in the fleeting moment he had seen it, had been wearing, unmistakably, the tattered remains of a Roman soldier's uniform!

Some bandit, no doubt, some unscrupulous evil force, most certainly, had them in its power! Roderick remembered again the story he had heard of the one-eyed flesh-eating giant who lived in a cave and preyed upon unsuspecting passers-by, usually Greek sailors. That would account for the doubtlessly long-ago consumed Roman soldier whose uniform he wore.

Was it then too late! Were they dead already! Were the girl's beautiful virgin breasts already sliced off and lying on the floor of the cave, alongside the two sets of boyish gonads, waiting to serve as savoury course for the monster's cruel repast! Would Mamas's excruciating excoriation, the girl's protracted night-watch, his own excubant invigilation, prove after all to have been in vain!

Roderick bounded forth from his cover, his soul in a turmoil, forcing a painfully slow passage through the driving wind and swirling gusts of blinding sand, his own tawny coat, its sandiness of hair and swirling mane, become almost invisible as he painstakingly passed, at one with the camouflage of an almost identical hue and texture which was ceaselessly swirling about him.

65 Roderick was glad of the unanimous anonymity with which the elements had decided, not only to screen his progress even as they hindered it, but also, it seemed, to echo in some strange way the tumult which was raging within him. Never more so than when, as he approached the dark of the cave-mouth, the nearby tethered donkey, sensing the presence of such proximate danger, began hysterically to bray. But, peering into the swirls of the raging sand-storm and perceiving only a swift shape as of swirling sand, it quietened perceptibly, allowing Roderick to pass soundlessly by, disdaining so easy a prey and such craven fear with an equal equanimity.

But something, some sixth sense, almost an invisible barrier, halted Roderick at the threshold of the cave. He stood there, framed in the entrance amid the eddies and swirls of the storm outside, all but invisible save for a pair of tawny lion eyes, in full view of any who might care to look out.

But no one cared to look out.

The interior of the cave was austere but comfortable. Candles, whose steady flames seemed unaware of the violent commotion without, were dotted about in niches, illuminating even the darkest recesses. A large painting decorated one wall, crudely executed, portraying a bearded young man, a shepherd lad not unlike Mamas himself, with a young lamb over his shoulders, its front and back legs dangling down over his chest but held, respectively and securely, in the right and left hands of this ovine champion. Roderick recognised the image and its symbolism at once. In front of the picture Mamas and Eugenia and Justus were kneeling in prayer. And beside them stood the towering figure of the man Roderick had glimpsed in his role of abductor. But Roderick's quick intelligence instantly took in, from the evidential obviousness of a situation which, as it were, hit him straight between the eyes, the true nature both of the kidnapping and of the kidnapper. They had most certainly been abducted, but abducted from the perils of the storm outside to the comparative warmth and safety of this, he had by now surmised, hermit's cave, where the former Roman soldier - a fact not only made plain by the now elderly man's military bearing and the still impressive hugeness of his muscular development but also by an overt and continuing pride in the profession of blood boldly displayed by the tenacious retention of these pathetic remnants of a former garment which should by all rights have been anathema to his newly pious and yet manifestly still proud existence - had clearly taken them, as it were, under his wing. Roderick, seeing all this at a glance, was glad that these three so guileless children had at last found, and as if by chance, so willing and so plainly capable a protector.

Roderick had often heard tell of such desert hermits. Many had sought to escape from the religious persecution which, though still raging, did not often trouble to seek them out if they kept quietly to themselves without attempting rashly to convert others. One of them was even supposed to have befriended a lion, whom he had taught to fetch and carry for him.

66 Roderick did not readily believe such tales, but he was determined to maintain an open mind on this, as on most other subjects, until he had been proved wrong. His interest had been much whetted, as had his appetite, but he had never thought to have been given the opportunity to view one, and a reformado at that, at such close quarters and in his chosen natural habitat.

Therefore, drawing a little closer yet careful not to overstep the boundaries of the anonymous elemental disguise which still so fortuitously whistled and whined about him, he narrowed his eyes and pricked up his ears, determined to miss nothing of whatever might be about to take place.

However, for a considerable time, nothing did take place.

Eventually the hermit, without a word, went to each of the three kneeling figures in turn, taking them gently by the shoulders and raising them from their knees. Then, leading them over to a corner of the cave, he sat them, one by one, in a circle on the floor. Mamas he treated with especial care, walking behind him, a hand lightly on one shoulder, surveying the havoc others, of his own kind, had so cruelly inflicted, his dark eyes shining in the dim candlelight. Removing his own upper garment, still without a word, he let them view the deep furrows and the white lumps of scar-tissue which disfigured his back, visible signs betokening just such a flagellation as Mamas's, but at some far distant time. Then, disappearing into one of the cave's darker recesses, he returned after a moment with a large basket, filled to overflowing with the fruits of the earth. And so they sat, in their little circle of flickering light, all of them silent, eating their fill of the rich bounty which such unexpected kindness had so miraculously provided.

Roderick watched and watched. He watched the old man, marvelling. He watched Justus too as he greedily ate. He watched Eugenia, her mind still so obviously intent on Mamas's welfare, as she offered him the choice-drawn cherries and grapes. But most of all he watched Mamas.

Poor Mamas. At first he seemed to be enjoying the fruit as wholeheartedly as the others. But this had gradually subsided into an almost sullen repose. He chewed endlessly, yet seemed unable to swallow. Roderick had thought that the sharp returning pain of his wounded back had perhaps driven away his appetite. But then he saw, in a fleeting unguarded glance, that the hurt went far deeper. He had seen Mamas's eyes as the old man had shown him his back. He had seen the careless cruelty of the soldiers as they wielded their leaden whips. And he now sensed that the glee with which they had set about their task had cut far deeper into the fibre of the boy's soul than the mere physical effects ever could have done into the flesh of his back. Mamas was suffering from a sickness at heart from which he would perhaps never recover.

67 But Roderick did not have long in which to ponder such lugubrious things. The soldier-hermit, wisely sensing in Mamas, Roderick felt certain, the same deep spiritual malaise which he had caught a glimpse of, rose from his supper and, still without a word, laid aside his garments and, taking a towel, girded himself with it. After that he poured water into a basin, and began to wash his visitors' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.

Eugenia and Justus responded merely with their silent wonder. But when he came to Mamas, Mamas, with just a hint of the old fire suddenly rekindled in his eyes, stopped him, saying, Lord, dost thou wash my feet? The hermit, the flame of response mirrored in his own eyes and speaking for the first time with a voice as deep as that of a Bulgarian bass, answered, What I do thou knowest not nowÍž but thou shalt know hereafter. Mamas, the now brightly burning flax spreading almost into a smile, stated firmly, Thou shalt never wash my feet. And the hermit, staring him solemnly out of countenance but with more than a hint of answering laughter, answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me. Mamas, forgetting his mortal acedia of only a moment before and almost beginning to enjoy himself again, was careful to come up with the correct response, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.

The hermit, sensing the wound to the boy's soul, if not fully healed at least sufficiently soothed with the balm of Gilead, and too long accustomed to his own ascetic practices to indulge to the point of coddling, spoke, as it were, his antepenultimate thoughts on the matter, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.

Then, giving rather a hard look to poor abashed Justus, who shifted uncomfortably, he solemnly proclaimed, Ye are not all clean. So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them, finally, Know ye what I have done to you? And all three, knowing exactly what he had done, responded with smiles and blushes and tears, none of which pleased the old hermit's heart half so much as the spark which he had seen again so miraculously lit in the eyes of the boy in whom he now saw his own self of so many years before, that self who, to recover such faith, had been driven to endure half a lifetime of penance and fasting and prayer, all of which he now realised, with a twinge almost of regret, could have been achieved so much more readily if he had only encountered, at precisely the right moment, that older self which he had, after so many years of painstaking effort, eventually become.

Roderick, if his habit of mind had accustomed him to framing such thoughts in ecclesiastical terms, might have considered himself more than a little eucharistically disposed at that moment and fortunate indeed to have been granted the grace to be present at, and evidential witness of, a rite of nipter so extemporaneously conceived and unceremoniously performed, and to have seen, furthermore, displayed therein the pattern of such spontaneous evangelical perfection. Roderick though, whose habit of mind had not accustomed him to framing such thoughts in ecclesiastical terms, was merely thankful, as he pondered, that circumstances had led him here, at this particular time, to see the old man's sudden sharp insight into Mamas's morbid condition and the humble, matter-of-fact, almost homely way in which he had put it right.

68 Roderick, in the ensuing minutes, or half-hours (which, he could never be quite certain, so out of time was he and oblivious to its passing, though it, as surely as the heaps of sand which were mounting up around him, was heaping up unawares its own incremental additions to the nethermore section of that unseen hour-glass it was forever implacably netherwards turning), was to find out more about these singularly odd creatures than he had heretofore been ably to discovered, although not so much as he might have hoped for, as a considerable amount of what was being said was rendered all but inaudible by the wild tumult of the sandstorm which ceaselessly raged outside. He learned, for instance (learning incidentally also not to jump so precipitously to conclusions), that at least part of Mamas's reluctance to partake more fully of the repast he had been offered was a certain over-scrupulousness concerning the day, which happened to be the start of the forty day period leading up to the great feast of their religion, a period, and a day especially, which was traditionally given over to fasting and abstinence. Roderick's anger at the sick boy's foolish qualms was more than echoed by the three others, who rounded on him as one, incensed that he, in his enfeebled condition, should even think of considering such mortification. But Mamas, with tears in his eyes, had spoken with such ardent longing of his desire to subdue the supposed thorns in his already so cruelly mortified flesh, that even the old desert hermit had been reduced to an humble and abashed silence. The boy had gone on to tell how, as a shepherd lad in a distant province, after his father had been killed by a pack of ravenous wolves who had decimated the sheep, he had decided to drag his aged mother in a cart to seek a new and better life in the hills surrounding the city, but that, hearing of the latest outbreak of persecutions, he, a Christian by birth, or, as he blushingly corrected himself, by baptism, had decided, with his mother's blessing, to seek martyrdom. The rest Roderick knew. Or thought that he knew. But when Mamas came to the flogging he had endured at the hands of the soldiers, a strange reluctance took possession of him. At last, sobbing and blushing, he had broken down and begun to explain. But a sudden gust of wind had obliterated his words. Roderick had watched Mamas's tearful public confession, Eugenia's downcast eyes, Justus's smirk of satisfaction, the old hermit's sorrowful countenance, as if at a mime play. When the wind dropped, the boy, in an agony of contrition, was blurting out his final admission. To add to the grave nature of his fleshly sins, he, waking early in the morning and finding an unknown girl asleep beside him and recalling, in a flash, the shameful flogging of the night before and his own body's sinful complicity in it, as he saw it, had, in a moment of despair and - his rigorous scrupulousness had also to admit - of near delirium, torn the bandages away and sought his own death - a mortal sin a lifetime of penance could never atone for - hoping to forget his long agony both of soul and of body in the one watery oblivion which - he too late had realised even as he had lost consciousness - would not be oblivion at all but merely the start of an eternity of agony no power on earth could ever then alleviate. Roderick, despite, or perhaps because of the loss of the words, saw, as in a flash of illumination, the root of Mamas's shame, the ritual of his obsessive washing, the inexplicability of his despair, all come together and form a clear design, like a jigsaw puzzle whose last crucial piece has suddenly been fitted into place.

69 The old hermit, clearly deeply moved by Mamas's confession, took him in his arms and held him close, letting the tears, which he knew from experience more than a little rooted in the fact of his debilitated condition, run their natural course, assuring him that his total lack of consent to and want of complicity in the sin made it not a sin at all but merely a natural bodily function in which there was no culpability. The graver sin of seeking his own death plainly troubled the old man more deeply, but, quickly latching on to the boy's admitted delirium, he, perhaps to ease his own mind as much as Mamas's, explained it away as such and, laying both hands upon a head still bowed with shame, solemnly granted the absolution and gave him God's blessed. Mamas, looking up at him as though some great weight had been lifted from his heart, spoke.

But an increase in the uproar of the storm again left Roderick in the dark, as it were.

Roderick's only real auricular satisfaction on Eugenia and Justus, apart from a few new facts learnt during the infrequent lulls in these elemental activities, was that of having his elementary suppositions actively confirmed. Yes, the two had known each other all their lives and, yes, they were childhood sweethearts and, yes, Justus was desperately jealous of Mamas, as each sullen glance and inadequately disguised note of proud hostility had all too patiently announced. Justus had become a Christian himself largely due to her influence, while she, though totally unconcerned for her own welfare, was desperate to keep her new religion from her father, the prefect, whom she dearly loved and whose career, if it once became known, would be in ruins. Then the hermit had spoken himself of his past life. His name was, it transpired, Joannicius. He had, it seemed, until the age of forty, been a general commanding one of the armies of the Emperor. Then he had had a sudden conversion, involving, or not involving, an orphan, a little girl whom he had helped, or not helped, Roderick could not quite make out which as most of the details were lost in a particularly violent gust of wind which all but carried his words away. Anyway, he had been imprisoned and savagely flogged, but had continued to plough a lonely furrow, refusing to renounce his new-found faith. Then, released from prison on remand, he had set fire to a pagan temple to show his contempt for the old religion. Confined again, he had suffered further agonising torture, to which fact his back still bore silent yet eloquent witness, as the already congealed and drying wounds had been ploughed into afresh and mercilessly laid bare to their exposed nerve-ends. But he would not apostatise. Condemned to death, he had been comforted by a vision of heaven. Then he had managed to escape, carrying his chains with him, in what appeared to have been almost miraculous circumstances. Unfortunately, most of the details of this were again lost on the wind. The next thing Roderick had caught was the escapee's account of how, thanking God for his deliverance, he had hung his chains on the wall of a clandestine church and, in order to avoid further cruel persecution, had headed for the wilderness, where he had been taken in by an old hermit who had nursed him back to health. His wounds healed, he had stayed on and, after the hermit's death, had taken his place.

70 The storm raged and raged. Roderick watched and listened. Or rather, Roderick attempted to listen. He did not mind missing the finer details of the hermit's long years of eremitic existence, which brought a look almost of adoration to Mamas's eyes and were doubtless filled with much hard-won spiritual wisdom. He did not even mind not catching all of the exciting vicissitudes of a shepherd boy's life, which Mamas now narrated with much enthusiasm, earning looks of both admiration and wonder from Eugenia and of scarce concealed jealousy and scorn from Justus. He certainly did not regret losing most of the tales of a pampered childhood and youth which Eugenia and Justus, feeling a little left out of things, were forced to cast about for, when it had been Mamas's turn to fall prey to childish scorn, and only the understanding and experience which shone from the old hermit's face cast a light of dignity and even of heroism over what were, in effect, merely the humdrum trivial events of city life. He did not even really mind doing without the hermit's long explanation of his so tardy appearance during the recent tempest and of his failure to make himself known earlier despite the almost equal commotion of Mamas's last minute rescue from drowning - which, Roderick more or less made out, seemed to have something to do with the religious ecstasies into which he habitually fell every Wednesday and Friday, particularly the Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent - the season which had only that day commenced - when his awareness of what was going on around him was so severely impaired that not even the violence of the sandstorm would have impinged upon it had not a peremptory voice, urgent from out of the midst of his ecstasy, warned him of the perilous plight of the three young persons and, as it were, severely reprimanded him for his own spiritual overindulgence. Roderick wondered if the warning voice was the same as the one which had spoken to him, and marvelled afresh at the implication that, if it was, some unseen power must somehow care both for lions and for human beings. But Roderick did draw the line, emphatically and straight, when the girl had brought up the wonderful lion who had not been so lost in an ecstasy as to fail to notice Mamas's body floating face down in the water, as her own unforgivable weariness and negligence had done, her inability to watch with him even for one hour, a lion who had bounded out of nowhere and, in the most wonderful manner possible, saved, not only Mamas's life but, as it had consequently turned out, his immortal soul also. Then Mamas, scarce able to contain himself, had excitedly chimed in, with his own tale of the wonderful lion he had befriended in the arena only the day before tumbling out in a torrent of words, the same wonderful lion, he was certain. The torrent of words was, it is true, almost unintelligible, but, with the rushing of the wind suddenly increasing again in volume, leaving only the four indecipherable faces with their four meaningless mouths still going ten to the dozen, but now discussing him, then it was that Roderick emphatically decided that a straight line had to be drawn. He had been satisfied to remain an observer, emerging from the shadows, as it were, from time to time, when called upon by that insistent voice, or when the need was great, but now, unable to read between the lines of their no doubt fulsome praise, or for that matter simply to lip-read, he decided on the spot that he was no longer willing to toe the line he had so rigorously and needlessly imposed upon himself. Shaking the sand from his mane, he slowly but deliberately entered the cave.

71 The tawny form silently emerging from the sandy chaos into the shadowy cave-mouth, as if the sand itself had suddenly coagulated and taken on the shape of a living being, albeit a fearsome one, was for a time unnoticed. Roderick, hesitant, still partially concealed by the darkness into which the light of the flickering candles only dimly penetrated, paused. Tardily he pondered his likely reception. He was fairly sure that both Mamas and Eugenia would welcome him, without fear or question and, as it were, with open arms. Justus's reaction was just as predictable. He would, Roderick felt certain, apart from turning white and perhaps fainting, do nothing. Nothing detectable, that is, unless one was unfortunate enough to be standing directly behind him. But the old hermit worried Roderick. Despite his age, despite his apparent humility, he was at heart still a soldier. And Roderick had had enough experience of soldiers to know just how dense and determined they could be. He had, admittedly, had no previous experience of hermits. But he had heard stories, alarming stories, which seemed to indicate that they could be just as unreasonable. Some, it was said, spent all of their lives on the top of high pillars in the desert. Others were supposed to subsist on the most meagre of daily rations. One of them, whom he had heard talk of, who lived in the open air and often lost himself in the trackless wilderness, would always carry about with him under his arm a copy of the sacred writings of his religion. One day he had met a naked beggar. Having nothing but the one garment he was himself wearing, he had stripped it off and continued on his way in puris naturalibus, still carrying his holy book faithfully under his arm. When asked by the helpful wayfarer, or the merely curious, 'Who has stripped you?', he would hold out his book and answer them, 'This has stripped me.' Well, Roderick had enough first-hand knowledge of the military mind to see all around it, as it were, and was confident that he could predict even its unpredictable predictability. The soldier, he felt, by always and quiet rightly taking the enemy to be as stupid as himself, fell into the fatal error, in his attempt to put himself into the enemy's mind, of succeeding so completely that both sides usually ended up doing exactly what the other expected. The poor soldier, it seemed to him anyway, regardless of the victors, was always the loser. The impenetrable contours of the breastplate, with the hard mastos on either side proudly erect, as if to trace the lineaments of an equal thoracic invulnerability, merely served to emphasise the soft vulnerableness of the tender flesh beneath. The eremital mind, on the other hand, Roderick knew only by hearsay, but sensed, from what he had heard, that the old peripatetic hermit at least, breasting the desert barechested, his holy book under his arm, was quite impervious to real injury and more durably armoured with his spiritual lorica than any poor soldier ever would be. Whilst acknowledging the impossibility of forming a plan of action concerning such erratic behaviour, which seemed neither logically motivated nor founded upon some foreseeable pattern, Roderick nevertheless felt his powers of extemporisation to be such as to be able to deal more than adequately with any contingency which might arise. Sure of his ability to handle a soldier, equally convinced of his capacity for impromptu dealings with a hermit, Roderick still held back, ruefully admitting to himself the undeniable fact that this wily old customer, not at all as innocent as a lamb but most certainly as cunning as a serpent, had mixed in him the elements of both soldier and hermit.

72 Roderick need not have worried. Poor Justus, catching sight of him first, did not quite evacuate his bladder and bowels but looked as though he would at that moment have dearly loved to employ one of his trembling hands as an urethritic pinchcock, even as the other would have doubtless been engaged clamped to his already tightly pinched buttocks to contain them.

Mamas and Eugenia, puzzling the cause of his sudden pallid petrifaction and looking in the direction which his fixed eyes indicated, more than lived up to Roderick's hopes of a welcome.

And the old hermit, the one unknown and unknowable quantity in his leonine equation, after an uncertain moment of almost atavistic fear in which the soldatesque side of his character very nearly reasserted itself, with his foremost thought being to reach to his side, in a gesture at once superfluous and automatic yet not without its pathos, for the trusty gladius which was no doubt long since little more than rust, seeing Mamas and Eugenia with their arms around the lion's neck, as fearless in their youthful inexperience as he himself might well have been were it not for the fact of his experiential old age, suddenly relaxed into a smile and, in the next instant, aware of what he now felt sure to be Justus's needless terror and clasping the trembling boy gently but firmly by the hand, he led him reluctant across to where the two amis de le lion were excitedly waiting to make the appropriate introductions.

Roderick rather enjoyed the confusion of the next few moments. He was, after all, the centre of attention. And he found a curious and novel delight in confounding expectations.

The pleasure he had always taken in being a lion, anteriorly, was largely founded on the living up to and at times perhaps even the exceeding of the boundaries of his fearsome reputation.

But now, for the first time in his life, he began to find an equal if not greater satisfaction in doing the reverse. He smiled inwardly as he let Mamas and Eugenia, little more than children themselves, play with him as though he were a pussycat. He took a like pleasure in feeling the hermit's rough hand, still firm as a soldier's and without a trace of the feebleness his age implied, as it moved in a rough soldierly manner through his equally rough mane. He even enjoyed the tentative touch of poor frightened Justus who, after screwing up all his courage, would dart forward an occasional trembling hand, a hand which appeared to move almost of its own volition as it lightly stroked a nose or ear then instantly withdrew, as though amazed at its own apparently autonomous temerity. All this Roderick took in his stride. But the unexpected was, as always, suddenly upon him, surprising him, as it always seemed to do, despite the fact that experience should by then have taught him to expect its very unexpectedness. The old hermit, in the midst of all this laughter, even as his hand's firm assurance was massaging a particular spot just behind Roderick's left ear which, much to Roderick's surprise, seemed, when so touched, to release within him a secret substance which, like tears or saliva, he had no control over but which, unlike tears or saliva, he had until then not readily associated with the race of man, had suddenly frozen. Distraught, his hand dropping from Roderick's mane, his eyes brimming with tears over which he likewise seemed to have no control, the old man had sunk to the ground, overcome by a weakness which refused to recognise either his discipline or his authority.

73 Roderick was amazed. As were Mamas and Justus. All stood, as though rooted to the spot. Eugenia was the first to recollect herself. She rushed to his side, her own ready tears already flowing. Mamas and Justus were quick to follow. All helped the old man as Roderick merely looked on. The hermit's head resting on Eugenia's breast, gradually the whole story had come out. The hermit, it appeared, had had a son, Maximilian. When he had reached his twenty-first year and was expected to do his military service as the son of a centurion, he had refused. He, like his father, had already embraced the new religion. But he, unlike his father at that time, was not willing to keep it dark. He had been brought to trial. When ordered to take his badge of rank, he had threatened to deface it. His army, he had said, was the army of God, and he could not fight for this world. As a Christian he must not wear the seal of lead around his neck, as already he carried the sacred seal of Christ. When threatened with the prospect of joining his Christ immediately, he had answered that this was the greatest thing he desired, that he should not die, that when he departed this earth his soul would live with Christ his Lord. His centurion father had been told by the court to correct Maximilian, but had only said that his son knew what he believed and would not change his mind. The youth had been sentenced to death. After taking a fond farewell of his father and of his friends, he had been beheaded. And his father, much to his own surprise, had gone home happily, thanking God for having allowed him to send such a gift to Heaven.

Roderick wondered what other contributory causes must also have been involved in making the old soldier decide, as it were, to come out. What long chain of events must have led him to this, his own living martyrdom. He also wondered what it all had to do with the story of the little orphan girl of which he had been able to catch only the most tantalising of glimpses amid the raging of the storm. But he had no way of asking, and, as it appeared most unlikely that the subject would ever again come up, he reluctantly reconciled himself to yet another unsolved and unsolvable mystery, the number of which seem to have accrued at an alarming rate since he had first become aware of their existence upon the death of his beloved uncle Leo. Eugenia, however, was already comforting the old hermit in the only way she knew, the only way that could have occurred to her, scraping the rust, as it were, from the weapon which had wounded into the wound which it had caused, telling him the tale of an old Roman senator, Apollonius, a man learned in the philosophy of the pagans, who had been denounced by one of his slaves and sentenced to death for embracing Christianity. He had been brought before the prefect but had pointed out that everyone must die and that it was better to die for the sake of true belief and the true God than to die of some ordinary disease. He enjoyed his life, he had said, but because he loved his life, it did no make him frightened of death. There was waiting for him something better: eternal life, given to the person who has lived well on earth. Then he had given the whole court a reasoned explanation of his Christian faith. The sentence had been carried out. His legs had been crushed, and then he had been beheaded.

74 Oddly enough, Roderick thought, the folly of all this did appear to comfort the old hermit. His eyes shone as the girl enumerated each of Apollonius' teachings: to pacify anger, to take part in pity, to moderate desire, to increase love, to put away sorrow, to cast away vainglory, not to be vindictive, not to fear death. Each adage she serenely trotted out seemed as a soothing balm to the wound which had suddenly broken out afresh in the old soldier's soul.

Roderick could but marvel that such a set of beliefs, no doubt similar to the ones this hermit's son had been happy to die for, should, like some sympathetic magic, paradoxically cure the very thing which logically they should have exacerbated. Then there came back to him the manner in which, such a short time before, the old man had snatched Mamas back from what had seemed to be the very brink of despair. Now, in his turn, not as a reward or even in recompense but more as an inevitable consequence of an act of kindness so altruistically intended, a chemical reaction as it were, an involuntary movement of the occult moral laws of nature and of the universe, a cause and effect as determinate as when, in reacting to the stimulus of a tap, a crossed knee will spontaneously send its proximate foot kicking, the comfort the old man had given had been carried far off, as if on some gigantic cosmic tape-loop which paradoxically took but the winking of an eye, and returned, intact, augmented even, to comfort the breast of the comforter.

Roderick yawned. Such metaphysical musings, thought fascinating enough in their way, were not really much to his liking. They always ended up where they had begun, usually tired him, and more often than not gave him an headache. He was, he reluctantly conceded, more a creature of action than of thought. But he felt it to be his duty, especially when he remembered poor old Uncle Leo, who had always been so interested in everything and was wont to spend the moiety of his time, the half when he wasn't investigating some curious natural phenomenon which had caught his fancy, in contemplating just such intractable philosophic matters as this, to not, as it were, let the side down. Well, enough was enough. The active side of his nature, the riding into battle at the head of an army, so to speak, rather than the passive waiting for the axe blow on the head, had been dormant for too long. Roderick was forced to conclude, albeit reluctantly again, that he only ever really felt fully alive when he was racing across the veldt in pursuit of some frantic fugacious ungulate or squaring up in the arena to some beefy gladiator whose muscularity of build and overdeveloped pectoriloquy were very nearly matched by an almost equal brawniness of cerebration, but who might, just might, if one failed to keep one's wits about one, get the better of, even, him. Such culinary thoughts reminded Roderick of just how hungry he was. He remembered the carcass of the small deer he had abandoned not so far from the rock, was it really such a short time ago? He could go and fetch that. But he was so tired. More tired than hungry. So much thinking had doubtless taken its toll. Not forgetting the aftereffects of a night very nearly without sleep. The sandstorm was still raging outside. He felt safe here. And warm. He trusted his friends, his charges as he had begun to think of them, as they trusted him. They were so taken up at present with the grief of their new friend. They would probably not even notice his vigilance lapsing for a moment into silent dormition.

75 Roderick woke from a deep sleep almost with a start, as if called again by an insistent voice but this time without words or urgency, so that, instantly recollecting himself and receiving no further peremptory instructions, the jolt back to reality which had accompanied his first moment of consciousness was so cushioned that, within the time it took him to open his eyes the full awareness of what he would find when he did so had already returned with a force, thus easing to a considerable extent the difficult transitional period between deep sleep and wakefulness but also, much to his chagrin, totally obliterating the dream he remembered he had been enjoying as he had slept but which, even as he opened his eyes, he felt slipping further and further back into the depths of the unconsciousness from which it had come, so that, closing his eyes again in a futile attempt to suppress the self he had recollected with perhaps too much promptitude only succeeded in embedding the dream even more firmly in that tantalising region somewhere between fully satisfactory recollection and an almost equally satisfying total forgetfulness. Try as he might Roderick could recall nothing but a single image: The sandstorm through which he dreamed he had been making his way had suddenly cleared and he had found himself standing in a strange sunlit landscape, almost without shadows; on the far horizon blue hills disappeared into the distance; in the middle ground strange trees with thin leafless trunks were surmounted by fern-like fronds which fanned out at the top like giant ostrich­feathers while others with spiky branches were bare of leaves altogether; beneath one of these, against a smooth green hillock, Eugenia was standing, in a red dress, almost in an attitude of flight; there was no sign of either Mamas or Justus; suddenly the old hermit had appeared in the foreground, no longer old but as he might have been in his prime, magnificently clad in black and gold armour, a gold ostrich plume surmounting his black helmet very much as the fern fronds surmounted the strange trees, riding upon an equally magnificent white horse, his black cloak billowing out behind him; Roderick had been glad to see him and had jumped up on his hind legs to greet this new friend, but the white horse, apparently thinking it was about to be attacked, had reared in alarm, and before Roderick could make any overtures of friendship the soldier-hermit had raised his lance and buried it deep in Roderick's breast, the lance breaking into three as he did so, two parts clattering to the ground while the third remained firmly imbedded; Roderick had been hurt, not so much by the wound, which strangely enough did not seem to hurt at all, but by the fact that the soldier had not trusted him; he had jumped up again, in the hope that he perhaps might not have been recognised, but the horse had been even more alarmed and had reared wildly, while the soldier, a great sword brandished over his left shoulder, had brought it crashing down; then Roderick, much to his surprise, had found himself looking on at the scene as if from the outside and had discovered, to his even greater astonishment, that it was not him at all who had been killed and whose body was lying at the feet of the mounted warrior but a bizarre unlikely looking mythical creature, not at all unlike the leontophonos Roderick thought, which had been coming, he apprehended in a flash of intuition, not in friendship but to devour the fleeing Eugenia, when the soldier-hermit had ridden up, true champion of all ladies in distress, glorious in his glittering armour, to deal it the death-blow it doubtless so richly deserved.

76 Roderick remained for some time with his eyes closed, trying to salvage a little more of the fabric of his dream, the wreckage of which was already floating away in all directions from the shattered barque of his sleeping mind. But, try as he might, the nearer he approached any individually tantalising piece of flotsam, the further the others seemed to drift off, until, unable to decide on any one in particular, he was forced to tread water, helplessly watching the whole flotilla of scarce-remembered incidents receding, as it were, to the horizon of recall and then soundlessly slipping over it, to be lost forever in the no-man's-land of the unconscious to which the waking mind has no ready access. Nevertheless, Roderick continued to swim, against the current, as it were, keeping his head above water, his eyes scanning the now empty sea in the hope of spotting one last remaining treasure still afloat and bravely bobbing in what was, he had from past experience to admit, so distinctly unpromising an element. But, strangely enough, although nothing presented itself to his inward eye, Roderick received the distinct impression that someone was swimming alongside him - he could put it to himself no more precisely than that - someone who was there, matching him stroke for stroke, not to help him in his quest for the matter, or even the meaning, of some lost dream, but there simply to be there again Roderick could put it to himself no more precisely - to accompany him, as it were, on his lonely journey, to be his companion on the perilous flood. Roderick opened his eyes. The cave presented itself to his view, as he had expected it would. But when he closed his eyes again, although he knew he was not dreaming, he sensed even more strongly that the someone whose presence he had felt a moment before was still there, swimming along beside him. Roderick, sceptical of such subjective manifestations, opened his eyes. The cave presented itself. He repeated the experiment several times. Each time the impression was renewed, increased, almost as if he and the invisible companion with whom he seemed to be swimming in tandem had indeed covered a considerable distance together, side by side. Roderick was mystified. He closed his eyes again, determined to throw off a sensation which, though not really disturbing, nagged at the unfamiliar corners of his consciousness. He struck out, feeling certain that, before long, he would leave this fellow-traveller well behind. But lo! as he pulled away, he felt himself leave the watery habitat to which he had grown accustomed and ascend into the air, still swimming, although now through an impalpable element which nevertheless seemed miraculously to support him, shaking the water from the wings which appeared equally miraculously to have sprouted from his shoulders, effortlessly rising above a medium which, its last lingering drops flicked disdainfully off with a nonchalant flapping, he now gazed down upon, only to perceive how far below him it already was, how waste and bare, how empty of those tantalising fragments of the dream for which he had been so superfluously looking, empty too of that insistent travelling companion he had attempted to shake off but which he now seemed intuitively to understand was none other than this beautiful winged creature he had all at once become, this darting, dancing flame which he could accept with such ease as dwelling all the time within him, this unexpected yet inevitable imago he never would have suspected as lying dormant in the perfectly ordinary instar with which he had heretofore been more than satisfied.

77 Roderick remained for a time, his eyes closed, strangely moved by this dream which was not a dream. Then he heard a distant sobbing. Who was crying there, he wondered, if not simply the wind, at this hour alone, with such an extremity of diamond-sharp sorrow? Who was crying so close to him, who was himself almost on the verge of tears? Roderick opened his eyes. The old hermit was lying face down on the ground, as if at prayer. Eugenia was bending over him. She it was who was crying. As were Mamas and Justus. Roderick got up and went over to investigate. Then he realised that the old hermit was not at prayer at all, but was dead.

The remembered grief for his lost son, Roderick thought, so vividly brought to mind, must have been too much for an heart whose hidden wounds seemed to be manifested and magnified in the cruel scarring on his back. Then Roderick noticed that the healed lash-marks seemed to have broken out afresh in death. Congealing blood oozed blackly. Roderick looked to Mamas, who was kneeling over the corpse. Mamas's back was healed. The untouched flesh had all the dark glow of his fifteen years, of a shepherd's life spent shirtless in the sun. The ribs, which only yesterday had been laid bare to glint cruelly white among those bloody lacerations, now nestled snugly under unbroken skin, their visible structure alone the only intimation of mortality. Roderick was amazed, but not really surprised. He noticed also that the sandstorm seemed to have abated. The sun showed hotly at the cave entrance. Well, Roderick thought, they must waste no time in getting the body buried. But Eugenia and Mamas and Justus, despite their grief, had recognised this harsh necessity also. Justus seemed somehow to have discovered an old cloak, no doubt among the hermit's few possessions, a cloak which, despite its tattered condition, still carried about it fading memories of a past glory, the glint of gold threads, the threadbare hints of painstaking needlework, which all too plainly announced the grandeur of its origin. This he had laid out on the ground. He and Mamas tenderly lifted the body onto it, while Eugenia showered the wounded back with her tears. They had wrapped the dead hermit in his martial cloak, as it were, and left him alone with his glory! But first they must lovingly carry their burden outside, for the burial. There, much to Roderick's surprise, another lion had been waiting. Roderick, after an introductory sniff or two, reciprocated by the strange lion, had found everything satisfactory. Mamas and Justus had begun to dig, with spades taken from Justus's saddlebag. But their progress was slow. And the body was already beginning to putrefy in the hot sun. Roderick and the other lion, as though at the command of an unheard voice, had simultaneously stepped forward, united in purpose, and pushing aside the surprised boys had willingly taken on the role, as it were, of gravediggers. Their excavation of the grave had been swift. The sun had been hot. But Roderick had felt no weariness. Then, just as the two boys had been about to deposit the now stinking body in the tomb, the makeshift shroud had moved. Eugenia had rushed to it, thinking the old hermit to be still alive, but had shrunk back, horrified, as the leontophonos had triumphantly emerged, purple pizzle proudly protruding from retracted prepuce, its whole body a mass of vermifugal corruption, and had proceeded to spray the entire burial party with the urine which Roderick tardily comprehended, as he felt its scalding potency, must indeed be deadly, not only to lions but to all healthy sentient life inhabiting the earth.

78 Roderick woke with a start. Only then did he realise that this too had been a dream. An instant of conscious wakefulness was all that was required to still the mental panic which, not so easily allayed physiologically, still beat insistent in his heart. But after a short time that subsided also. Amazed, not so much by the reality of his dream as by this dream of reality which substantially presented itself to him, he shook his head, determined not to be deceived again by any visions, whether welcome or unwelcome, which might perchance find a respective passage through their horn or ivory gate. It did not take him long, however, to convince himself of the veracity of the scene with which he was confronted, despite the surreal aspect of many of its incidentals.

The sandstorm had ceased. The sun blazed hotly at the cave mouth. That much of the dream had at least been true! Mamas lay on his chest fast asleep, the cruel disfigurement marking his back convincing evidence still of a harsh reality which had no truck with dreams.

Eugenia lay curled up beside him, sound asleep also, her head nestled into the curve of his side, her lips parted, as if fallen reluctantly from grief into a much needed sleep in the very process of kissing better, like a small child, a hurt which no amount of childish games could ever spontaneously cure. They looked indeed like the small children they in fact were, as if all the terror and pain of the past day, which had so prematurely plunged them into a world of adult experience, had suddenly melted away leaving two exhausted siblings, as it were, locked together for comfort in each other's arms. Justus was gone. For a moment Roderick could not find the old hermit. Then he made out, in one of the cave's darker recesses, a shadowy figure kneeling at prayer. Suddenly Roderick's mane bristled. Two serpents were playing about him there, licking the soles of his bare feet with their forked tongues, while two others, which Roderick only then noticed, were slithering over the bodies of the sleeping boy and girl, pausing occasionally to lift gemlike heads and look nonchalantly around with glittering beady eyes, then stooping again to lap a little blood from the boy's back or a few drops of sweat from the girl's naked shoulder.

Roderick froze. For a moment he almost convinced himself that he was still dreaming.

But an ant, crawling along his tail and making its presence felt by an occasional nip, soon convinced him otherwise. Still he froze. Of the snakes he had no fear at all. He had come across quite enough in his time to know exactly how to deal with them. Some could even be quite tasty. But he knew that one false movement on his part, even the flicking of his tail to remove the temerarious insect, might result, if not in instant death, at least in something approximate to it, not only for Mamas and Eugenia, who were so unsuspectingly oblivious, but also for the good old man who was doubtless so caught up in his devotions, so removed from the humdrum reality of the world which others inhabit, that he had not even noticed the stealthy entrance of these four deadly intruders into his cave, nor become aware of the tongues that were even now at work, drawing their nourishment from the scraps of food and morsels of edible matter which had accumulated between his toes, not to mention those more crucial substances their boon companions silently lapped from the two children who were all innocently sleeping.

79 Fortunately, for once in Roderick's life, the initiative was taken, as it were, out of his paws. The old hermit, finally disturbed enough by the two serpent's incessant licking, suddenly stirred and, getting wearily to his feet, bent down and picked both of them up by the scruffs of their necks, one in each hand. Roderick was amazed. Did not the old man know how venomous these creatures were? He well realised that one false move on his part could be fatal.

But the hermit, taking the whole thing in his stride as a matter almost of quotidianity, held the two writhing reptiles close to him, letting their bifid tongues lick at his face as though they were pet puppies. Then, after gently reprimanding them for having interfered yet again with his prayers, he laid them back upon the ground, from whence they slithered guiltily off to a dark corner of the cave, with their tails unmistakably between their legs (if they had only been graced with these useful appendages), and cowered there invisible in the shadows, their glittering eyes alone betraying their presence. But mere amazement was in no way adequate to describe Roderick's feelings when the old man, perceiving at last the other pair of serpents sliding silently over Mamas' and Eugenia's sleeping bodies and imperilling, or so it seemed, their lives at every instant, merely clicked his tongue as if in mild annoyance, crossed soundlessly over so as not to disturb the rest which had so mercifully come to them, and, lifting the reptiles as before, one in each hand, began to reproach them (albeit rather more vigorously, although still in an undertone) for having threatened, not the lives but the repose of these two children, the former being no doubt to a large extent now dependent upon how much of the latter they might be able to snatch, in these precious hours of hiatus, in order to allow their youthful biological systems time to begin the crucial work of regeneration. Then, mumbling to himself the while something about Robertus having been right concerning the nuisance value of these little pets of his, he deposited the snakes rather more roughly upon the cave floor, from whence they too scuttled away, no doubt to join their companions in disgrace in the dark recesses of the cave's temporary banishment. Roderick suddenly had understood. These snakes were pets. They were the hermit's friends. They visited him here, perhaps lived with him here in this desert cave, in some strange accord with that closeness to nature which those long years of lonely penance had imparted to his soul. Roderick had not only heard of such things (he had but to think of the stories of the holy man in the time of his ancestors who had lived on locusts and wild honey and had been on close terms even with the lions), but now, from his own recent experience, he knew, at first hand, as it were, that the hand which had with impunity picked up and carelessly handled these deadly snakes was the very one which had caressed him gently behind the ear not all that long ago, a hand which had, in some mystical way, released within his physiological mechanism something he could associate only with love, a hand which, if it had dared to aspire to such intimacy even a few days before, would no doubt have become first course in a banquet which would have continued unabated through the various portions of the human anatomy to end, in all probability, as it so often did, with those deliciously tasty morsels without which neither lion nor man could produce that precious substance which was, after all, the origin of all species.

80 Roderick could but wonder, a memory of early childhood tugging at the uncertain borders of his consciousness. He remembered his Uncle Leo, whom he had admired then, and still admired, for his exhaustive and inexhaustible interest in all things (not only in all things vulcanological, but also in all things archaeological, anthropological, mineralogical, meteorological, biological, ecological, astronomical, astrological, mythological, metaphysical, theological, ontological and historical, in fact, not only in all things ethnological, climatological, geographical, botanical, zoological, ornithological, ichthyological, limnological and orthographical, but also in all things palaeethnological, palaeoclimatological, palaeogeographical, palaeobotanical, palaeozoological, palaeornithological, palaeichthyological, palaeolimnological and palaeographical, in short, in all things, past, present and future, visible and invisible, logical and illogical, proved and unproven), had one day told him, while they were discussing things hagiographical, of a story Uncle Leo's grandfather had told him, a story Roderick had at the time doubted but about which he had since begun to doubt of his doubting. Uncle Leo's grandfather, Roderick's great-grandfather on his father's side of the family, had been a famous lion in the arena in the earliest days of the Christian persecution. He had, it seems, been particularly looking forward to devouring an equally celebrated Christian, said to be the leader of all the other Christians, who was to be martyred the next afternoon. But, on the night before the big day (he had heard the day after, the day upon which he might reasonably have been expecting to enjoy his prize) the holy man, unbelievably, had been offered his liberty by two Roman soldiers, his chief gaolers no less, who, previous to that night, had had a reputation for barbarity making even that of the fiercest of the animals in the arena seem more applicable in describing a Vestal Virgin. The old man, so the story went, had struck a rock on the floor of his cell and a spring of water had gushed forth, with which he had initiated the two wondering men into the mysteries of his religion.

But he would not accept their offer of freedom. Instead he had stayed and accepted martyrdom.

But he had been crucified, like a common thief (as, it was said, his Master had been), only upside down. And the two soldiers had themselves been put to the sword. Hence, not only had Roderick's great-grandfather been denied the cachet of killing and devouring one of the most renowned Christian of the time, but he had also missed the opportunity of repaying in kind a few pieces of casual cruelty which the two soldiers had inflicted upon him, as it were, in passing. He had been somewhat mollified, he had later admitted, and even reconciled to his loss, when the two soldiers, passing his cage under guard on their last journey, had begged their captors leave to stop for a moment and, amid the derisory laughter of former comrades, had knelt, with tears in their eyes, and had begged him for his forgiveness for the few paltry whip-strokes and spear-jabs which, he had also to acknowledge, had hurt nothing so much as his pride. He had, however, much to his surprise, watched them disappearing into the bright patch of sunlight at the end of the corridor with tears in his own eyes, hearing the shouts of the crowd announcing that contradictory darkness into which they had then gone with something very like sorrow. And from that day onwards, as a very old lion he had assured a very young Uncle Leo, he had lost a great deal of the relish he had formerly taken in Christological-gourmandological matters.

81 Roderick had doubted all these things. But, after experiencing the last few weeks in general and the last thirty-six hours in particular, even the aspect of the story he had found it hardest to swallow at the time, his great-grandfather's loss of relish for swallowing anything at all, anything that walked, crawled, flew or swum, he had had to re-evaluate in the experiential light of his own sentimental education during this same period regarding Christians in general and Mamas and Eugenia in particularÍž an education which he realised in his heart, with a mĂŠlange of curious and disturbing feelings which he could only think of as pain, had to be realigned yet again in the light of a new and rapidly expanding moral consciousness which seemed to him then to have lightly taken on board experientialist doctrine and still to be capable of an almost infinite expansion to incorporate, eventually, everythingÍž an education now being forced to encompass, not only the wonderful old hermit and his strange rapport with wild animals (among whom Roderick had reluctantly to include himself) which he would not have believed possible had he not seen it with his own eyes and felt its subliminal unctuosity spontaneously proclaiming itself within his own body, but also, almost unbelievably, even poor, pimply, unlovely, overgrown Justus.

What had become of Justus? Roderick found his heart troubled, almost against his own will, by the thought of the fate of this great lump of a boy who, such a short time ago, he would gladly have killed with one blow of his paw and happily devoured, if only because of his scarce hidden disdain for poor Mamas. What was Justus to him, or he to Justus? Roderick had always prided himself on his heartlessness (he had dreamed once that he had seemed in a vision to see his own heart and that it was made of steel and he had woken from that dream laughing and exultant) and was more than a little disturbed by the appearance of such tender feelings in an organ he had hitherto considered adamantine. How, in what Chalybean cave of the heart, as it were, had such a steely substance, admittedly not forged in some noble metal (the one part of his composition in fact he conceded not wholly noble, noble metal being in his view not of an obduracy to conform with what he considered congruous in the makeup of the lion-heart, which he nevertheless had always thought of as containing perhaps just a trace of carbon but otherwise unalloyed with any baser plumbaginous elements), been transmuted, and by what mysterious process, first into a kind of crystallite, black, opaque, hard, wherein nothing at all for a time could be discerned, then, only gradually, to have cleared and crystallised, as if in some further cubic system of its own, to become a vast structure, not unlike a diamond, at the heart of which he now wandered lost, as in a Daedalian labyrinth, a dazzling edifice where innumerous versions of himself stared out from the multifaceted walls into which he peered, where a myriad glittering faces reflected, not only his own face but also the faces of the four human beings into whose company he had been so precipitously plunged, the missing face of Justus, he suddenly realised, looming unexpectedly larger in his consciousness by the very fact of its absence, an absence which quite firmly placed it out of Roderick's protection and control, a thought which left him puzzled, even wonderstruck, but only to find his own puzzle and wonderment staring intently back at him from the crystal maze of his own heart?

82 Roderick, in a blinding blaze of illumination, seemed to see himself lit, as it were, by lightning, in the dark recesses of the quiet cave. He looked around him, half expecting to hear that clap of thunder which, in the past, had sooner or later always followed such a flash. But nothing came. Mamas and Eugenia were there, sleeping the exhausted sleep of children. The old hermit had returned to his prayers. Justus was still inexplicably absent. The snakes were no more than glowing pinpoints of light, their glittering eyes as drops of moisture formed on the dank cave walls. The sun blazed outside. The lightening then, if not the thunder, had come from a clear blue sky. But it had, in that instant, shown Roderick an image of himself he was never able to forget. The past, the he of the past, the he in the past, seemed no more than a magic lantern figure projected onto the walls of the cave. He knew it to be himself, he accepted the reality, but it seemed, at the same time, to have lost any reality it had once had. What was he, now, to it, and what was it, now, to him? His heart, which he had liked to think of as steel, which he knew in its depth to be flesh, and which now appeared nothing less than pure diamond, seemed not only to reflect but to refract the light, concentrating his thought, as through a burning-glass, to a point of focus icy in its clarity. And he saw that he was the only flaw in the great diamond. His pleasures, his appetites, his satisfactions, his dissatisfactions, all these seemed to him to rob this precious jewel of part of its worth, each defect, however small, to reduce, somehow, its ultimate value. No other lion possessed his heart, no other had had for a mother his mother, for a father his father, for ancestors his ancestors, for an uncle Uncle Leo. No other had had, or ever would have, the exact experiences which had formed him, become part of him, made him what he was. And with this moment of fell insight had come another, a moment from his past, a moment no other lion could ever know, experientially, no matter how hard it might try, or in what detail he attempted to elucidate it. He was still an adolescent, standing, under a blazing hot sun, beside an old but still vigorous Uncle Leo, looking down in wonder at a wonder he had been unable, with his still puerile intellect, fully to comprehend. At their feet lay a fragment of rock-crystal, a beautiful jewel-like object, formed, Uncle Leo had told him, of pure hexagonal crystal quartz, with at its heart, embedded in the depths, a large and very angry looking wasp. Roderick had wondered and wondered. Uncle Leo had tried to explain that this wasp, which had once lived, a very very long time ago, had been caught and encased in the still unstable crystalline structure and preserved thus, perfect, large as life, so that Roderick might be able to view it today. But Roderick had been disturbed. Uncle Leo had not been able to explain, to his satisfaction at any rate, how something Palaeozoic could also be palaeocrystallographic. And something else had disturbed Roderick too, at an even more profound level, something he had, inexplicably, been too embarrassed to discuss with his uncle, or with his parents, almost as though it had been a matter of his then burgeoning sex. Why, he had then wondered, had this poor wasp, who had had in its time no doubt many moods, been remorselessly preserved for posterity in an attitude of helpless anger, almost as though its tiny outrage at having been trapped for future ages, as a specimen, as it were, was not merely a passing humour but would persist, in some limbo from which it could never escape, throughout the whole of eternity?

83 Roderick, trapped, as it were, in this crystalline structure his heart seemed to have become, saw relentlessly reflected, as if from that immutable eternity he had then glimpsed, the many facets of himself he had but recently divined, but in myriad duplication, dazzlingly vertiginous, vanishing into distances which appeared to have no vanishing point but continued to reflect in ever diminishing surfaces well beyond any infinity of which he was able to conceive, aspects he had always regarded as ephemeral and which he would not wish to see endure beyond the moment of their own fugacity, but which he suddenly apprehended, with something like horror, as permanent states of being, like the futile anger of the wasp, in the flawed diamond of himself which was forever, always, now.

Poor Roderick was at a loss. This hall of mirrors, which reflected, as it were, the inner being, seemed also to distort, so that the tall, short, fat, thin, squat, elongated, hideous, fair, good, bad, pure, corrupt lion which looked quizzically out at him refused to be pinned down as the real him. Was he really that proteiform at heart? Really that good? Really that bad? Yet the poor wasp, who had no doubt been all these things too, was now no more than an atom of impotent fury, endlessly raging against a fate by which it had long since been overtaken. On the instant all the silly, shameful, petty misdeeds of which his life seemed to him then to be chiefly composed crowded tumultuously back, things all but half-forgotten or relegated to the back of his mind as unworthy of consideration, jostling each other for elbow-room, jigging up and down, leering, frowning, blaspheming, splenetic, clutching distended stomachfuls, grasping tumescent phalli, each seeking for the absolute attention they felt their own particular peccadillo alone deserved.

Roderick, who was in some ways a very sensible lion, knew when enough was enough.

To dwell endlessly on this sort of thing could lead to madness. Had not the leontophonos already shown him that! He marshalled his thoughts, sending these morbid personifications of his sins, as it were, scuttling off in all directions, grotesquely diminishing down the long corridors of crystal from whence they had first come, losing themselves amid a maze of reflections in the infinite distances to which the clear light of his intellect had again instantly relegated them. Roderick, in this shadowless glare which reason had reasserted, saw himself at last for what he really was: No virtuous part virtuous enough to proclaim him totally goodÍž no villainous part villainous enough to consign his soul to everlasting perdition. He was a lion.

Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again. Therefore, he confidently concluded, while never forgetting those shadier parts of his character which the purity of the diamond that had been his heart had shown up to him in such harsh relief, by not dwelling upon them unduly he just might, he supposed, eventually amass enough of their counterparts on the obverse side, if not to clear this clouded jewel of its innumerable flaws, still to render its surface translucent enough at the last to reveal a countenance, blent not with ungovernable rage at the dying of the light, he could but hope, nor yet with untrammelled beatific joy, but at least with more of sorrow than of anger.

84 Roderick shook his mane, as if to clear his head and at the same time recover his soul, which had been so dangerously depleted in accumulating those gifts its thought had bestowed upon it. He paused, letting a fuller awareness of his surroundings rush back in to fill, as it were, with its merely human presence, the encroaching void which had threatened to overtake him.

No, he thought, not the void. The void was nothingness, a lack of anything, with which one could very easily be accommodated. The emptiness of the soul did not worry him half as much as what crowded in to fill that vacuum which nature very properly abhors. Now, watching the children quietly sleeping, the old hermit once again lost in his prayers, the silence undisturbed except for the occasional hiss of one of the invisible serpents discussing, Roderick felt certain, even this hallowed scene in their usual venomous tones, the last trace of all the teeming horrors which only a moment before had seemed to cluster about his head was wafted away and scattered, dispersed like some baleful fog unable to resist the dawn wind of such homely goodness. Roderick stretched himself, almost feeling the effects of this spiritual breeze ruffling his mane, luxuriating for a time in the freshness it gave back to his soul. But Roderick had never been a great one for luxuriating. Especially when there were things to be done. Despite his altruistic resolutions, or perhaps because of them, Roderick realised, by the weakness in his limbs and a hollowness in his stomach which was almost a physical pain, that he would have to think of himself first, now, if he was to think of others first, later. He did not like to think how long it was since he had last eaten. In his present debilitated condition he would be worse than useless should any emergency arise. He arose thus, stealthily, padded softly past the two sleepers, hearing the snakes' faint hisses of alarm from out of the darkness, and stopped just behind the kneeling hermit. The old man's body, still robust but bent now in prayer, was only covered by a goatskin shirt, a skin coat hung loosely over the shoulders, the callused feet, which Roderick had thought bare, were barely protected by palm-leaves woven roughly into sandals. Roderick did not wish to disturb this holy anchorite at his devotions. But no, he was not praying, he was crying! The whole body was shaken with silent tears. A hand reached out, blindly, fumbled in an inner pocket, brought forth a large sudarium. Roderick circled, silent, wonderingly. But the old man was unaware. The hand was automatic, wiping at streaming eyes, eyes that were open, unblinking, unseeing, in another world. Roderick, wondering still but a little disgruntled, realised, with something like outrage, that nothing could ever disturb a piety such as this, that such single-mindedness of purpose, which had helped him achieve high rank in the army, which had made him adhere just as strongly to his new religion when he had eventually found it, which had let him watch with equanimity his own son martyred, which had permitted him to spend half a lifetime in the desert in repentance and prayer, would equally allow him to see Mamas and Eugenia (perhaps even gladly, despite his care for them, despite his love and kindness) fall victim to that same persecution which had robbed him of a son, as the shortest and safest way (through all the vicissitudes which had made him, and them, and perhaps now even Roderick himself, what they were today) to achieve an end which his whole life (and their whole lives too, Roderick had to admit, if not his own) had been inevitably leading towards.

85 A great wave of anger swept over Roderick, anger that this pious old man, who had, after all, lived his life, more than enough for one lifetime, should be willing to see these two scarcely open buds go down into the dust, and the dust of the arena at that, in the hope that they would blossom in the depths of some problematical eternity in which admittedly they all so fervently believed. What right had he to consign such experienceless youth to death, even death of their own choosing! They were too young to know their own minds! By what authority had he the power to choose for them! With what robe of sands had he made good cable so to bind them to his will! Why should not Roderick devour him now, before he could deliver them up unto their enemies, starting with those callused palm-shod feet and working his way up by degrees! That would teach him! But as he raved and grew more fierce and wild at every word, Roderick thought he heard one calling, Child! and would have replied, My Lord, if he had known from whence the voice had come and whom it was that had thus addressed him. Remembering, however, the warning voice which had prompted him twice already today, once into taking precipitant action when it had been called for and the other against taking it when it would have been demeaning, Roderick paused in the midst of his fury, his anger evaporating as surely as if the owner of the voice had simultaneously held up a mirror in which he could observe such waspish wrath reflected. Instantly contrite, he retraced his steps, tracking his own thought processes, as a clew through a labyrinth, in an attempt to untangle the knotted chain of ideas which had so cunningly led him from this old man's innocent if single-minded devotions, his gift of tears, as it were, to a bloody conclusion which he now realised had been forged, not on the anvil of the hermit's no doubt pious prayers but in the sanguinary furnace of his own brain. Roderick's anger, redoubled now in force and doubly rebounding against himself (ostensibly for his uncharitable and wilfully subjective misinterpretation of the motives of another but crucially, and perhaps on a deeper, more subconscious level, his growing apprehension of its source in his not yet fully acknowledged fears of a certain diluting of his own long cherished ferocity under the influence of such unfamiliar mildness), turned his mind from thoughts of contrition to those of restitution. But how could he ever make up to the old man for what he, in his heart, had done to him? Those callused feet, which only a moment before he would gladly have eaten, calluses and all, he now saw as infinitely precious, items not of prey but almost of worship, to be cherished, to be washed with his tears and dried with his mane, to be anointed with expensive bottles of perfumed unguents, not only as partial reparation for his own sins but in the hope of a restoration, through the ointment's progressive treatment, to something of their former healthfulness. But even as Roderick wallowed, as it were, in his own self-abasement, the uncomfortable thought struck him, a thought which made him pause and hold back from any such excesses, that any contrition based almost entirely upon anger, albeit righteous anger against oneself, had at its roots that same anger which had distorted the poor wasp's dying moments, and that any action based on a like emotion was bound to failure and would no doubt end up, in spite of all the good intentions under the sun, in that same glassy stare of rage, redounding endlessly upon itself in the relentless reflecting mirrors of eternity.

86 Roderick had come a very long way. But there was still further to go.

He was not, he decided, a saint, despite his goodwill towards these Christians with whom he had been so precipitously thrown into contact, despite a certain odour of sanctity that appeared to have rubbed off, impregnating his very fur, as it were, from so long and such close proximity. He was a lion. He was not the raw material of martyrdom. Rather he was that raw material whose very roar was material enough to make martyrs quake, whose unsheathed claws were meet indeed to translate living flesh into raw meat. How could he be otherwise that what he was? He had been created with an appetite for the chase, to kill and eat whatever it was that could not run faster than him. He had devoured many a Christian, happily, until that day, was it only yesterday, when he had decided enough was enough. Well, he had not gone back on that.

No Christian blood had passed his lips, with the single exception of those few tantalising drops sipped at Mamas's back, from which only his iron self-control had permitted him to turn away.

Now he was hungry. He would not, he would never (he underlined this and italicised the word) break his own vow, especially now that he had got to know these particular Christians so well and learned (he could come up with no other word that sufficiently expressed it) to love them.

The very though of ripping open this old man's carcass, of gorging himself on the tender young breasts of Eugenia, of sampling those two tasty titbits which Mamas could not have had for all that long so temptingly dangling about his person, even of consuming some unpimpled portion of poor Justus's melancholy anatomy, if such existed, filled him with disgust. Yet Roderick's ready salivation put the lie to his better intentions, if not to his firm resolve. But he was hungry! He turned his thoughts, with an effort of the will, from those prey-items which were near at hand to others that he knew not of, not dwelling on the coward which his new-found conscience thus had made him, temperamentally unable to dwell for long on cowardry of any kind within himself without attempting to put it to rights, knowing that if he did put it to rights, then and there, in a temporal way, he would put himself to wrong for all eternity. So, he would kill, he would eat, he would do such things, what they would be, yet he knew not, but they would be, for the unknown and unknowing victims, the terrors of the earth! He had already made up his mind that this new dietary rĂŠgime, whilst strictly forbidding the consumption of Christian flesh, must have nothing of the harsh or rigorous about it. His physiological mechanism had been made to digest meat, and digest meat it most certainly would! Apart from the one small proviso, anything else was fair game! Yet a strange foreknowledge oppressed his spirit as he silently padded towards the sunlit cave-mouth, the certainty that, after the first fine careless rapture, the bounding freedom of the open air, after the other rapture, of pursuing, which he knew from past experience nearly always ended in the vanquished gaining no prize at all and losing everything, after his hunger had been satisfied and his thirst slaked, the liberty for which he believed he had pined would suddenly appear more like captivity, and the dark restrictions of this narrow cave in which he imagined himself so confined would take on the aspect, to his exile's eyes, of a haven of rest, the glowing gateway to some lost paradise which he would longingly wish to regain.

87

Roderick's prophetic insight had been, in all but inessentials, correct. He had bounded out of the cave-mouth and into the open air, rapturously, it was true, yet thinking already of his return. He had roamed about, even diving into the pool on an impulse, a thing he would never normally have contemplated, coming up for air, spluttering, astonished himself at this new found spirit of freedom which had taken possessed of him, yet worrying already if his noisy ablutions might somehow have disturbed Mamas. He had made off into the open country in search of food, and had rapturously pursued a beautiful gazelle which had been unlucky enough to cross his path, yet, even as he ripped a particularly juicy morsel of flesh from the thigh of the still kicking creature, the quiet scene in the cave was already returning to his thoughts and he had been unable not to wonder idly, as he munched his vanquished game, whether Mamas and Eugenia were by now perhaps awake and, if so, whether their exhausted sleep had restored their spirits somewhat, in which case, the acute agony of Mamas's back being no doubt a little ameliorated by an unerring combination of rest, medicamentary care and the fabled recuperative powers of the young, the old man was in all probability explaining to the two wondering children at this very moment the seemingly unaccountable presence of the poisonous snakes. Roderick's informed imagination almost half-convinced him of the actual enactment of the whole scene: the old man's almost embarrassed confession͞ Eugenia's amazement turning before long into hand­clapping delight͞ Mamas's grownup acceptance of the situation attempting to mask an astonishment which his little-boy's laughter would have no doubt given hopelessly away. Even as he pictured it to himself, Roderick smiled. But what was he doing! This was the meal he had been looking forward to for so long! And here he was, thinking of something else, when he should have been savouring each and every mouthful! Roderick made a concerted effort to put all other things from his mind as he ate.

But it was no use. The harder he tried, the more these real and imagined scenes shouldered their way back into his consciousness. He managed to suppress, however, his incipient anger, even as he felt it seeking to gain ascendancy over him yet again. After all, he had only himself to blame! And had he not, only a short time before, definitively dismissed the possibility of self-anger, as not sufficiently worthy of his lion's honour? He was, nevertheless, a little disgruntled. This new burden of care, which had seemed at the outset not really likely to disturb his equilibrium or put him unduly to the test, which he had carelessly taken up in order to raise, first Mamas, and then Eugenia, to a position of eminence high above the swollen stream of endless dangers and possibilities which threatened, was unaccountably grown (both in heaviness and significance, having easily accommodated both the wonderful old hermit and poor unprepossessing Justus along the way and seemingly set fair, as if by some mystical increment, to encompass the entire endangered species of which they were so lucently representative), until it felt to Roderick as if he were bearing, if not the weight of the whole world on his shoulders, at least so crucially precious a portion of it that, rather than shrug the troublesome burden vexatiously off into the sea of troubles now raging, he saw himself in honour bound to bear it, even to the limits of his strength and beyond, and, that theoretical barrier passed, was resigned to engulfment with his load tenaciously retained.

88 Roderick shook his head and yawned. All this unaccustomed thinking wearied him. He would return to his cave, all too soon, he knew that. He would take up his duty again. But not for a little while yet. He was going to enjoy this meal, if it was the last thing he ever did! The gazelle, on the point of death, turned a no longer terrified but seemingly resigned and pitying eye full upon him. Roderick, more than a little abashed at his thought having temporally routed his much vaunted mercy, tardily administered the coup de grâce. Well, it was his duty now, his duty to the poor creature he had let unnecessarily suffer, to at least relish its offered flesh. He sucked out the now glassy eye. Delicious. As were the lactescent udders his claws ruthlessly lacerated. He momentarily pondered going in search of the young, who would no doubt die now through lack of sustenance and might provide a delicious savoury finish to their mother's more full-bodied main course. But almost at once he thought better of it. What might happen, back at the cave, while he was tracking, and perhaps tracking fruitlessly, even such fair game?

Roderick, with a sigh of resignation at the failure of his futile efforts not to think, even for a few moments, about his dear cave-dwellers, shrugged it at last, all comically, all tragically away. Well, if this was how it was going to be, he might as well get back to them now, and cease plaguing his mind with such vivid, and perhaps needless, speculations. Yet something in him still resisted. He did not like the thought of being at their beck and call, as it were, all the time. Was he not his own lion! Yet even as his conscience waged war within him, a memory of his early childhood came back. He had been listening with a favourite aunt to some of Uncle Leo's more philosophical thoughts on the nature of the universe when his mother, much encumbered about her work, had roundly upbraided them, in general, and her sister in particular, for wasting their time on such useless speculation when they could be doing something useful about the den. Uncle Leo had been mockingly gentle. The aunt, he insisted, had chosen the better path, by deciding to listen to his fascinating theories on such deep topics, yet he had acknowledged, not without a twinkle in his eye, that if his sister-in-law had not been busying herself so usefully about the den, they would all be going to bed, if not hungry, at least without the inestimable advantage of one of those sumptuous suppers for which she was so justly famous. This diplomatic answer seemed to have satisfied everyone, his aunt quietly pleased with so fine a compliment to her own much cherished intellectual capacity, his mother grumbling to herself yet going about her work with a certain lightness of step and brightness of eye which gave the lie to her previous no doubt just but perhaps unjustly motivated complaints.

And it had satisfied Roderick too. Perhaps not then, at that stage in his development, but as it were now, as he recalled the scene, realising that his aunt, whom he loved dearly, had had the leisure to listen to Uncle Leo and to his own childish prattle, whereas his mother, who was, well, who was his mother, may not always have had the time to pause from her many household duties to hear some puerile complaint of his, yet cared so much about him that she willingly sacrificed her own time, her leisure, even the very hours she might have spent with him, in looking after those needs that only a mother can look after, thus teaching him those priorities which always come first following our first realisation that we love another more than we love ourselves.

89 Roderick chewed, wonderingly. All the stories he had heard, stories of martyrs spitting on idols and being condemned to death in the arena, of wild beasts like himself refusing to touch or to harm them, of hardened gladiators brought in to cut them to pieces with their swords, stories which he, while not actively disbelieving, had listened to somewhat askance, as embroideries of the actual truth at any rate (even following his own recent and inexplicable abstention from partaking of the flesh of Mamas, which he had rationalised to himself as a special case, as he always tended to consider everything concerning himself to be a special case), all these tales now appeared to fit somehow, like missing pieces, into the jigsaw puzzle which life had always seemed, together with a growing realisation of his fellow felinity with others of his kind, whose actions and motives recent experience had taught him not too hastily to judge, and of a wider fellow feeling which seemed set fair to encompass eventually all created things, not just with man, who was really not all that hard to like, but even this poor gazelle, whose flesh had now become part of him, even, God help him, the dreaded leontophonos, which, when all was said and done, had merely turned out to be nothing more than an amalgam of the worst aspects, physical, moral and spiritual, of all the creatures he had known in his life or ever would know, including himself, only writ large. Well, although moral theology had never really been one of Roderick's strong subjects, despite the time and the effort Uncle Leo had expended in trying to expound it, enough of moral law had got through, between the more immediately appealing pleasures of aesthetics and philosophy, to imbed deep within him a strong moral sense, even if the full ethical implications of the adjective were as often as not, more often than not, writ small. Nevertheless Roderick prided himself now, even as a particularly tender portion of the gazelle's anatomy which he could not quite place fairly melted on his tongue, that enough of Uncle Leo's teaching had sunk in to enable him to realise, retrospectively at any rate as had just been the case with his fuller understanding of his mother's care, that everything he did, everything he had ever done in fact, even the simplest, such as eating this flesh and drinking this blood, had been done in the past, albeit unconsciously, and was done now, if not to the greater glory of God, at least to the greater glory of Whatever it was that had led this creature to cross his path, to leave her young and go searching for food even as he was searching for food, to endanger her own life and perhaps the life of her species on the altar of an instinctive urge destined to end in the lion's mouth - not the enemy's mouth but a friendly mouth because his mouth - a predator who, humbly accepting her sacrifice, nourished both physically and spiritually, would finish his necessary repast and, palpably strengthened by it, head back in the direction of the cave, where her very substance perhaps, working inevitably within him, would enable him to offer that help of which he alone was able to those who unknowingly waited, all of them unaware of the parts they were to play in a destiny which was being so carefully and painstakingly prepared.

Roderick, humbly accepting her sacrifice, nourished both physically and spiritually, finished his necessary repast and, palpably strengthened by it, headed back in the direction of the cave.

90 Approaching the cave, Roderick was surprised, but not too much, to find Mamas and Eugenia sitting outside with the old hermit in the shadow of a huge palm, which rustled and sparkled above them in the light breeze. It pleased him to see Mamas looking so much better and busily engaged in conversation. But what surprised him, if only for a moment, was the palm-cat which sat beside them, purring contentedly as the old man stroked him gently under the jaw. Roderick was well aware of the vicious reputation of the small creature. He understood though, almost at once, remembering the snakes in the cave, that this must be another of the hermit's unlikely companions. Mamas and Eugenia seemed to have taken the presence of their old protector's paradoxurine friend in their stride. But the terrified creature bristled and snarled as Roderick drew near, and, scrambling up the convenient palm, remained there in a paroxysm of fright which both Eugenia and Mamas laughingly but unsuccessfully sought to allay. Even their arms circling Roderick's neck as he padded up signally failed to calm such an atavistic fear. The old hermit winked at them conspiratorially, and at him too Roderick fancied, as if to imply that time would be needed for the poor creature to grow accustomed to so hugely unexpected and so unexpectedly huge a companion. Roderick, unfazed however, flopped down beside them, as naturally as if he were returning to be part again of some accustomed familial circle. And Mamas, his own familiarity with Roderick needing no renewal at all, after having slid an arm around the apparently fearsome lion's mane, his eyes shining, the pain of his back already almost forgotten, continued to rehearse, as it were, his own eagerly awaited martyrdom.

Roderick was amazed, and a little put out, that this ungrateful boy, after so much pain and so many miraculous escapes from death, should still have his heart so firmly set on such an ignominious end. And Eugenia, not to mention the old hermit, who should have known better, were just as bad! They listened in breathless excitement as Mamas regaled them with the story of two schoolboys from Spain, one of them thirteen and the other only nine, who had deliberately given themselves up to the authorities, so far as Roderick could make out, in order to show that their own Christian faith was as strong as that of any of their elders. Both boys had been savagely flogged but neither had flinched, instead the two had shouted words of encouragement to each other, which had only whipped their tormentors to further fury. The authorities had been put to shame by their bravery but, still wanting them killed, had had them beheaded secretly outside the city walls, where some fellow-Christians, finding their bodies, had buried them where they had died. Roderick found the whole narrative distinctly distasteful.

He had never eaten a nine-year-old boy, and the idea of such a wasted delicacy, albeit one he had himself forsworn, filled him with disgust. Yet Mamas appeared transfigured by the very thought of such a death. That is until, the unnatural excitement produced by his own narration of what Roderick would have thought should have been a painful memory abating, he became aware of the effect that his elaboration of the details of the whipping was having upon Eugenia.

Shamefaced at his own enthusiasm for horrors which were patently so painful to the girl, he hastily changed the subject, to reminisce at length about his own life as a shepherd.

91 Roderick, despite all his fine resolutions, finding himself in such close proximity to so much tender young flesh, with the odour of fresh blood making its relentless way to his nostrils from the back so recently flayed, was unable not to dwell for a time upon the delicious meal which could so easily be his. Mamas, in spite of all Roderick's efforts to thwart it, really did want to die. Roderick was certain now that the boy would never be satisfied until he had been martyred for his faith. And Roderick, because of a silly impetuous vow, would have to forgo the pleasure of granting him such a wish and leave this delicate prey to the jaws of another, or perhaps to be wasted utterly, stoned to death or beheaded in the arena and the earthly remains eaten up, not by the ravenous maw of some lucky beast but by the equally ravenous yet insentient funerary flames. But Roderick could not at first even permit himself the luxury of this useless regret, all his imagination taken up with the thought of the nine-year-old martyr so recently and so lovingly described. The flogging which, from Mamas's account, must have been far more thorough and destructive of tissue than in his own case, would have left the boy's flesh, at that tender age already tender, inconceivably delicious. Half-stripped from the bones, the shreds would have come away without effort and all but melted in the mouth. Roderick's fancy could very nearly taste itÍž his tongue, involuntarily pressed against the pink cavern of his palate, almost felt the rich bloody juices as they trickled down his throat and spilled over to ensanguine the tawny splendour of his dripping jaws. But what was the use. That particular repast, no matter how meticulously reconstructed or vividly realised, would always, only, ever, be in his imagination. The fancy, even his, Roderick thought with a sigh, cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do. But the banquet at hand, or rather with its hand gently stroking his mane, came back to him in a rush and was a far more difficult matter to dismiss from the mind. He was thankful that he had so recently and so copiously eaten. He cast a sidelong glance at the boy. Despite a slim build and a lack of flesh on the ribs, there was enough meat on the breasts and enough muscular development there to guarantee a tasty meal from that part of the anatomy which Roderick had always found, even in its masculine rudimentary state, of an especial flavour and succulence. The only thing which had sometimes impaired his enjoyment, in man, as opposed to woman, was a certain hirsuteness he had come across in more than one bestiarous. But the soft down of adolescence which covered Mamas's chest, little more than fine gold hairs all but invisible except in the bright sunlight, though not as bald as the breast of a nine-year-old, would in no way diminish his pleasure in a luxury which, he had forcibly to remind himself, was not for him. Only then did he notice a small birthmark, just above Mamas's heart. Roderick's blood froze. The birthmark, insignificant enough in itself, carried nevertheless, to his unnaturally heightened sensibilities, a tragic import which, try as he might, he could not shake off. For the stain which so curiously disfigured the purity of the boy's chest was unmistakably formed in the shape of a cross. This it was that had in the bright sunlight made of his heart ice. And zero at the bone. For were not all these efforts of his, all Eugenia's painstaking, all the old hermit's care and even Mamas's own wishes as nought, if his God had already marked him out from birth in so special a way in order eventually to honour him with a share in so agonising and ignominious a death?

92 But Roderick's sudden premonition of future horrors, and Mamas's own bucolic recollections upon which he had so resolutely embarked in an attempt to erase from Eugenia's face, and from her eyes, that which his boyish enthusiasm for past horrors had so inadvertently elicited, were both relegated to the back burner, so to speak, by an unexpected present horror which in an instant wiped all supervacuous pondering upon occult futurity and all gratuitous harking back to preterite irreversibility inevitably and absolutely from everybody's mind.

Mamas, who as he spoke occasionally placed a morsel of fish between his lips (a fish caught no doubt and cooked whilst Roderick had been attending to his own nutritional needs), consuming it hurriedly without bothering to abate his by then almost obsessional loquacity, was suddenly brought up short, in mid-sentence, as it were, clutching at his throat with both hands, his eyes bulging, his chest heaving in a vain attempt to get the breath it now quite plainly found itself incapable of inhaling. Reaction, after an initial moment of surprised, even of amused, disbelief, was swift. Roderick, realising at once the cause of so drastic, perhaps even fatal an effect, leapt to his paws, only to recognise, even as he did so, his powerlessness to help in so delicate an operation. His tail, if inserted into the boy's mouth this time, must surely result in the fish-bone, which Roderick knew must be lodged somewhere along the trachea, being driven even further into the tender flesh. The girl, clasping Mamas to her breast, began firmly to beat him upon the back with her clenched fist in an effort to dislodge the bone, realising too late, and to her extreme horror, by his pathetic writhings and whimperings, the excruciating agony she had inadvertently caused. She raised the hand, immobilised by the sight of the blood which now covered it, realising at a glance the damage her instant of thoughtlessness had wrecked upon the dear back whose wounds had once again opened as though dumbly to cry for mercy, a cry rendered even more terrible by the boy's inability to cry, his smothering screams caught, quite literally, in his throat, screams that seemed, by their very silence, to have momentarily turned the girl, Medusa-like, to stone. Only the old hermit remained calm. Rising purposefully, disengaging the boy from her near-fatal ministrations, taking him gently under the armpits and in the one movement revolving him like the vans of a windmill until his head pointed downward to the ground, he grasped both ankles firmly, one in each hand, and, vigorously shaking the poor, bared, forked animal which is unaccommodated man as though it were nothing more than a rag-doll, did not desist until a rush of vomit and the anguished cry which followed told him that the fish-bone had been dislodged and that the boy would at least be spared the banality of such a commonplace death. Then, with infinite gentleness, he lowered the limp form onto the ground, straightening out the limbs, rearranging the toga to cover the nascent intumescence, leaving a prone, almost broken Mamas to the care of the girl who, galvanised out of her temporary petrification, hurried across to where her sachet lay and, after rummaging around in it for a moment, brought forth a crystalline phial containing a rosaniline-hued substance, doubtless left her by the physician brothers, which, applied to the back of the boy, who was helplessly groaning as much from his utter failure to mortify the flesh as from his flesh's evident success in mortifying him, seemed to ease at once the purely physical pain and also somewhat ameliorate the arduous anhelation.

93 Roderick, looking on, was reminded of a story Uncle Leo had once told him of a cave-dwelling hermit, he seemed to remember that it was a cave-dwelling hermit, who, as a young man, had lived a wild and dissolute life. Well, this cave-dwelling hermit continued, as a young man, to live a wild and dissolute life until his mother had told him that she had dreamed in her pregnancy that she would give birth to a wolf. The young man, who was later to become a cave-dwelling hermit after a wild and dissolute youth, realising that his life until then had been little better than that of a wild animal, instantly reformed and became a monk. The monk, Roderick seemed to recall, who had lived a wild and dissolute youth until his mother had told him that in her pregnancy she had dreamed that she would give birth to a wolf whereupon he had realised his life was little better than that of a wild animal and had instantly reformed, then began to live in a cave to escape from the persecutions, and while there had looked after the injured animals that came to him. An old woman, hearing of the old hermit who had lived a wild and dissolute youth until his mother had told him that in her pregnancy she had dreamed that she would give birth to a wolf whereupon he had realised his life until then was little better than that of a wild animal and had instantly reformed and become a monk and who now looked after the injured animals that came to him, had come to him herself and begged him to recover her pig which had been taken by a wolf, and the old hermit who had become a monk after a wild and dissolute youth because his mother had told him that during her pregnancy she had dreamed that she would give birth to a wolf, had gone to the wolf himself, because his mother had told him that in her pregnancy she had dreamed that she would give birth to a wolf, and had been able to communicate with the wolf in its own language and persuade it to give the pig back to the old woman. And another old woman, whose son had got a fish-bone stuck in his throat, hearing of the first old woman who had recovered her pig after hearing of the hermit who had lived a wild and dissolute youth until his mother had told him that in her pregnancy she had dreamed that she would give birth to a wolf whereupon he had realised his life until then was little better than that of a wild animal and had instantly reformed and become a monk and who now looked after the injured animals that came to him, came to him herself with the son who had got a fish-bone stuck in his throat, and the old hermit who had lived a wild and dissolute youth until his mother had told him that in her pregnancy she had dreamed that she would give birth to a wolf whereupon he had realised his life until then was little better than that of a wild animal and had instantly reformed and become a monk and who now looked after the injured animals that came to him and had been able to recovered the pig of the first old woman from the wolf by communicating with it in its own language, had also been able to remove the fish-bone from the boy's throat and thus to save his life. Roderick had always been a little puzzled by the story, wondering why an ability to communicate with animals should also enable one to be adept at removing fish-bones from boy's throats, but now, having seen both of these marvels performed, so effortlessly and so lovingly, by one and the same person, albeit a soldier and a hermit, he resolved never again to doubt of anything reported, no matter how unreasonable it might sound, until he had tried and tested it himself upon the cutting edge of his own unimpeachable senses and unerring intellect.

94 The miraculous medicine appeared to be accomplishing its task, physically at least.

Mamas's breathing was significantly easier with each shuddering inhalation, the cruel wounds opening less agonisingly at each diminishing expansion of his distended thorax. But his boyish shame seemed to grow in direct proportion to the subsidence of his bodily torment. Propping himself up on his left elbow, his right hand flat on the ground for support, his furtive glance constantly and blushingly sought confirmation that the disturbed toga, still awry and scarcely swathing his loins, sufficiently concealed all traces of his aroused manhood. And Eugenia, crouching close beside him and delightedly discovering the cruciform naevus adjacent to the left mastos which Roderick had only noticed himself just a moment before the brouhaha of the fish-bone had put everything else out of everyone else's mind, made matters worse by at first tenderly caressing it with the tips of her fingers and then, on an impulse, as it were, lightly putting her lips to it as doubtless she would have done in piously venerating some holy image or relic. Poor Mamas, in an agony of spiritual and sexual confusion which in its intensity seemed to lacerate the very fabric of his cloven yet verecund nature, merely burst into floods of helpless tears. But the old hermit, seeing and understanding as only one can who has lived in the world and watched a son's puberal nascency run its tumultuous course through adolescence, raised the girl from her once again guilelessly misconceived ministrations and, whispering softly in her ear of some no doubt pretextual errand of mercy, stood by the boy until she had disappeared into the cave, only then kneeling by his side, taking him gently in his arms, and letting all those passions which still so relentlessly vexed his soul and body spend themselves in shuddering sobs and groans. When Eugenia emerged, carrying a napkin-lined basket in which she had fondly arranged three small apples and three red roses, her own eleemosynary nature's equally effective method of dealing with both spiritual and physical needs, both Mamas and the old hermit had sufficiently recovered their composure to smile an indulgent smile of male condescension at her feminine notions of comfort, while they had been fighting the good fight, struggling against and subduing their respective thorns in the fleshÍž in Mamas's case a puerile dread of that inborn urge which had all but made a Triptolemus of him, an urge which, he believed, if sufficiently denied in this world - letting the seed die, as it were, unsown, in its oscheal pouch - would enable it, in some wonder-working way, to germinate and mature an hundredfold in the life to comeÍž in the case of the hermit a senescent fear of the recrudescence of that personal pride which had enabled him to reach the rank of general, which had let him watch a lovely son go down to dreadful death, which had impelled him to pyromaniacal excesses while on remand from prison, which had permitted him to bear the most fearsome of tortures, and which, he secretly feared, had helped him through these long lonely years in the wilderness after his final gesture to the world, a gesture itself partaking a little of spiritual smugness, when, hanging his broken chains on a church wall in thanksgiving to God for his deliverance, he had proudly compared himself with another prisoner who, released from captivity of a different kind, had hung his dripping cloak on the wall of a pagan temple, with other votive tablets, as a offering to the stern god of the sea.

95 Roderick, his fine intuition taking in all these nuances at a flash, once again marvelled at the audacity of his own daring in believing he had at last begun to fathom the depths of the human soul. Mankind, Womankind too for that matter, Personkind then, he reluctantly but correctly concluded, was a deep well, a well at the bottom of which no verifiable truth, as his and the dictionary's understanding of the word would have it, could ever readily be discerned.

Such a quotidian inguinal intumescence as he had seen revivify briefly the penile flaccidity of the boy and which was almost belied by the smooth, scarcely shadowed baldness of the pubescent pulchritude above it, such an equally commonplace hubristic tumefaction as he felt sure he had witnessed swell for an instant the obversely shaggy-haired and, as it were, concave spiritual chest of the old hermit, both of these natural phenomena Uncle Leo had explained to Roderick at quite an early age, and Roderick had always considered them part of the nature, not only of lions but of all other sentient beingsÍž everything he had come across in his dealings with men, certainly everything in his period of captivity, when the centurions and gladiators and bestiaries he had carefully observe, both on and off duty, in the arena and in the communal baths, had more than confirmed Uncle Leo's apparently wise generalisation on the universality of the two, both by a pride in themselves, as exemplified by a laughing expansion of the one, and by an equal pride in their common manhood, as exemplified by an unforced erection and extension of the other. But all of Roderick's certainties, and more disturbingly all of Uncle Leo's for so long accepted assertions, had suddenly been thrown into confusion and doubt by his brief encounter with this strange adolescent, who appeared to regard that part, which other men boast of and cherish, as something to suppress and deny, and this old man, whose very natural pride in himself and in his own commendably fortitude seemed to fill his soul with horror. As for the girl, she was as mysterious to Roderick, he not without a certain grim satisfaction also conceded, as she so patiently was to the hermit and to Mamas. Her enigmatic feminine nature made the relative simplicity of these two rough togaed things, as he still could not help but think of them, seem in comparison breezily capable of decipherment. She appeared to him as one who, like some Vestal Virgin possessed by a god, could, by the very purity of her heart, unearth secrets others could not even enumerate, prophases things others could not even conceive of, find hidden springs of healing water where others might find but dust. He remembered Uncle Leo telling him of a Christian girl who, each Thursday, would fall into a kind of ecstasy, her body re-enacting the sufferings of her God, from the time of his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, through his scourging, his trial, his painful journey to Golgotha and his crucifixion. The following day, Uncle Leo assured him, she would be quite herself again. The young Roderick had openly confessed to finding the whole story bizarre, even foolish, daring to hint to his beloved uncle his suspicion of a leg-pull. But Uncle Leo's gravity of countenance, and seriousness of tone, as he had insisted on the great self-control and stern practical common sense of the girl in all other respects, made Roderick blush for his temerity. Still a skepsis had troubled his mind. Now, with Uncle Leo dead these many years and after meeting this girl, he only wished he could apologise, realising that the other, if anything like this one, would be capable of almost anything.

96 Eugenia was capable now, Roderick instantly perceived as she bore down on the three mere testicled creatures who looked up almost in awe as they dutifully awaited the approach of so much charity made all but impregnable by so much goodness, of not only treating Mamas and the old hermit as if they were suckling infants, but of not treating him at all, of taking for granted the king of the beasts who could, if he so wished, kill her with a blow. But if was the operative word. Who could wish anything but good towards this irresistible force? She, Roderick ruefully admitted, could get away with anything. And for a moment it very nearly seemed she had. All three submitted in turn, with unimpeachable docility, to her loving offer of an apple, accepting it with something approaching reverence, as a lover might accept a valentine from his beloved. Each unprotestingly allowed her to fasten a rose gently behind the left ear, even Roderick, who, as she threaded it through his mane, heard himself, much to his surprise, almost purr. Nothing, it seemed, could for long in her presence remain an immovable object. Until Mamas, even as his teeth bit into the apple's fleshy sweetness, was suddenly overcome with an almost physical nausea. All his recent sufferings, all his present anguish, all his future pain as the cicatrices slowly formed and dulled an acute agony something inside him did not want to see dulled, even the thought of his own young flesh someday resembling the aged back of the hermit, perhaps seventy years from now, rose like bile into his throat, making the act of swallowing impossible. He staggered to his feet in a frenzy of revulsion, throwing the apple from him, tearing away the rose, determined to suppress the cunctatory part of his nature which had for too long been in ascendancy, seeing no further point in convalescence and cure, or even mere nourishment, of a body which was, to all intents and purposes, already a corpse. Eugenia, horror struck, intuitively sensing his sudden resolve and dimly perceiving her own unconsciously erotogenic part in that decision, dropped to the ground, flinging her arms around his knees in a desperate attempt to play the remora to his already full-sailed progress.

But Mamas, disengaging himself from her closeness, not daring to turn back or to look into the eyes of the old hermit who was watching the drama's inevitable dĂŠnouement with all the glittering resignation of one who has long ago witnessed the final dress rehearsal, staggered blindly away. Roderick unhesitatingly followed after. Mamas's fate was his own fate now.

Their destinies were inextricably linked. But Eugenia, already on her knees and clasping her hands together in fervent prayer, seemed to have decided to have recourse to an higher authority. And almost at once, much to the surprise of everybody but Eugenia, not least Roderick, who had thought that his knowledge of the desert already encompassed quite enough to enable him to predict, when not otherwise engaged, any approaching elemental turbulence, the sky darkened and the incipient signs of the sandstorm which was again about to engulf them were everywhere in evidence. The old hermit raised Eugenia to her feet, but she, waiting serenely for Mamas, who after a moment's hesitation had reluctantly but inevitably returned to join them, met his reproving look as he drew near and held it with her own laughing eyes that seemed to say, "You refused my request when I asked you. When I asked God, he granted it."

Then she had boldly led the submissive boy, the wondering hermit, and a resigned but resolute Roderick, into the safe haven of the cave.

97 Roderick was later to recall the time that followed as a sacramentally contemporaneous now. Nothing which had occurred before it, or would occur after it, could ever sufficiently efface the ineffable presentiality Roderick already felt growing and gaining future preponderance over his mind even as he experienced a hodiernal period no amount of former hindsight or foreseeable foresight could have fully prepared him to envisage as so uniquely and obstinately enduring. And yet nothing happened. Or almost nothing. But perhaps that was it.

As the storm raged outside, Roderick somehow sensed that here, in this cave, they had all been bequeathed a gift, a timeless gift, which no amount of past suffering touched, no amount of future's worst could ever tarnish. Suddenly, in the teeth of the wind, as it were, in the midst of the cyclonic events in which they were all caught up, this eye of silence and calm had unexpectedly opened and appeared to be observing them with a benignity that seemed to say: This is for all of you, here and always. A place you can inhabit at any time. It was not always like this, it cannot always be like this, but remember, it is like this, now, why therefore should the future you dread or the past you abhor be any more real, less true.

Mamas, upon entering the cave, had thrown himself face down on the ground, not in pain or exhaustion, Roderick had sensed, but rather in a fit of pique at having his turgent plans for an immediate martyrdom so rudely pricked, not merely by Eugenia but, or so it would appear, by God Himself. Roderick was forcibly reminder that Mamas, despite his manliness, his courage and his fortitude, was in some very crucial ways still a little boy. His little boy pride had been dealt a severe blow, first by the intense bodily sufferings which had so debilitated him, then by his lack of control over that youthful priapism which, to most other boys of his tender years, would have seemed merely an occupational hazard, if growing up might be regarded in the sense of an arduous if somewhat ephemeral occupation. But Mamas would have none of it. His prickliness insisted on complete control, even over those things of which the conscious will has no control. He would not give an inch. Even to God. Especially not to God. Now God, his God, the God he had been willing to die for, after humiliating him out of both countenance and continence, had yielded to the whim of a silly little girl and sent down this storm to prolong for he knew not how long his miserable existence. Yet despite all this, he would not give way to tears. His cold dispute with God and with himself would not permit him to give to either one even that satisfaction. He lay there motionless, his breathing shallow, inaudible, almost imperceptible. Eugenia, for her part, in her usual occult manner, seemed to have grasped all this in an instant. She stood, looking down at him with infinite tenderness and understanding, her gaze caressing the ruined back she dare not touch with anything more corporeal. Then, closing her eyes and clasping her hands but still on her feet, she fell again, as it were, to praying. The wind howled outside, seething and swirling at the entrance of the cave as if in mockery of Mamas's anguish and shame within, taking up his soundless cries in a wild high elemental language that seemed to echo the turmoil of his soul.

But as he raved and grew more fierce and wild at every word, he thought he heard one calling, Child! And he without a word replied, My Lord! And thus began, it seemed to Roderick then, the season of their uttermost communing.

98 The immediate effect of Eugenia's effectual calling on God was a absolute change in Mamas. He sat up, all resentment vanished into air, all pain melted away from his so recently anguished features, almost as though his face were wax and the candle-flame of her faith had smoothed out the last remaining signs of his recent ordeal. He was, Roderick could think of no other way of describing it, transfigured. He stood, taking Eugenia's two clasped hands in his own, leading her to a place apart, inviting her to kneel opposite him, not upright, as though in formal prayer, but relaxed, sitting back on their heels, as comfortable as two children about to partake of some awaited repast. But their food was love. And, strangely to Roderick at any rate, music seemed to be the food of that love. He heard a deep chord sounding, somewhere in his inner ear. His eyes sought the old hermit's, which, meeting his own, instantly told him that he had heard it too. Both then, as though at an unspoken command, dropped to their knees, a little apart, settling themselves comfortably in obedience to an equally peremptory warning which told of a period of incalculable duration. The chord sounded again, unheard, but followed this time by others, a succession of chords which seemed to form a ground-bass to a melody too beautiful for mortal ears. Yet when it did come, all of them appeared to hear it.

Roderick and the old man listened, as it were, enthralled, as Mamas and Eugenia, always in time with the strange music which surely could never end, spoke without words of the many lives that they might live, the simple happy life of a shepherd and his wife, the hard work, the rest, the evenings by the fire, alone, together, after the children had been lulled to sleep by some beautiful berceuse which had doubtless becalmed Eugenia's own childhood, that grander life in the midst of which she had herself grown up, the parties, the leisure, the pleasure, but in the end the same evenings, the same quiet contentment in their offspring and in each other as the simple shepherd would have known, then, with these more mundane possibilities summarily abandoned and the inevitable pain of their martyrdom already behind them, Mamas' and Eugenia's fancies seemed to take flight, to rise on a cloud of unknowing into some aethereal region they could not even conceive of, a place of endless impossible delight which their dull earthly senses could only inadequately express in terms of bands of cherubim tumbling through clouds and hosts of angels continually dancing, linked as one, around the unimaginable throne of God. Then, after one last ascent, to verify, as it were, that beatific vision of which they had both been granted a fleeting glimpse, they had reluctantly returned to earth, to the cave, to a knowledge of their surroundings, to an awareness of the old hermit and the young lion wondrously watching them, to an inevitable sadness buoyed up for a time by the unheard music which still seemed to be playing, albeit slower, softer, in a minor mode, until, the melody itself running out, as thought exhausted, lulled to rest by its own sweetness, the ground-bass continued for a few moments, as if unwilling to let go of so much beauty, then, after a final cadence of infinite regret and longing tinged with an achieved peace which seemed most certainly to pass all understanding, it too faded, and the voice of the storm returned to fill the sudden vacuum which nature so very properly abhors.

99 But the inevitable drop from the high poetry of their heavenly-minded musing, after the swift implosion of that heaven-gifted bubble, left them for a time but the dull prose reality of their surroundings and the ponderous weight of their bodies to compensate for such lost splendours. At first they sat, almost sullenly, their eyes cast down, not daring to glance at each other, or even to risk catching Roderick's or the old hermit's eye, lest the least glimmer of celestial light retained and recognised therein should reduce them to helpless tears. Roderick, taking his cue from the hermit's tactful withdrawal which betokened a lifetime's familiarity with such aerie flights and their precipitant descents, patiently abided. He did not have long to wait. A sudden gust of wind, as if the elements themselves were grown weary of procrastination, sent a fine shower of sand deep into the cave. Eugenia, reaching across to brush the particles from Mamas's toga-sarong, was surprised and hurt at his angry, almost violent response. Pushing her hand roughly away, he mumbled a few unpremeditated, almost incoherent words, the gist of which seemed to imply that she was more concerned over the welfare of Justus's precious toga than she was over his own, a toga which was in any case too good for a mere shepherd and far better suited the soft decadent boy who had so patronisingly bestowed it. But Eugenia, after a moment of almost stunned disbelief, turned angrily upon him, her eyes blazing, and, in a volcano of words which seemed to gush from her like molten lava, roundly upbraided him for his ungraciousness, for his ingratitude, for his ignorance and lack of charity. Then, her eyes refulgent with tenderness, she enumerated Justus's virtues. Roderick, only a little less stunned than Mamas himself by this unexpected viraginous side of Eugenia's nature, was nevertheless grateful, not only to discover what had become of Justus, but to learn of inner depths which he would not have believed possibly in one of such an unprepossessing exterior. Justus had, it appeared, until recently, although a childhood friend of Eugenia's, been something of a dandy, a ladies' man, a lover of the theatre and of the arena. Then he had fallen ill and had vowed to God, and to Eugenia, that, if he got well, he would become a Christian.

But he had recovered and had drifted back into his old ways. Then he had become dangerously ill again. Still, even after a second recovery, he had hung back, tempted by the pleasures of the world. Only when his beloved sister had died of the plague did he wholeheartedly join Eugenia in her new religion. But he had more than made up for his former lack of zeal. No task was too menial, no peril too great, for this passionate new convert. No beggar came away from his door empty-handed. A nearby blacksmith, who was also a Christian and specialised in making keys, helped him in securing safe houses for any fellow-Christians seeking shelter. The two medical brothers, who had tended Mamas the previous evening, were at the present moment no doubt reaping the benefits of this, and of their own, charity. Justus, who had returned to the city while Roderick had slept, would be assisting them in every way he could, even as he waited for the sandstorm to abate in order to bring fresh provisions to his little group of fugitives hiding away in their close but secret cave. And this boy, Eugenia had concluded, her eyes still blazing with indignation, whose sandal-strap Mamas was not worthy to untie, was happy to be martyred daily, in helping others, rather then seeking out that easy way with which lesser souls were seemingly content.

100 Mamas, during the whole of this long tirade, never stirred. He had looked up at her, with anger in his eyes, when her hand had brushed the sand from his garment, an anger directed as much at himself, for his inability to maintain that stratospheric level of spirituality which their souls had together so briefly achieved, as at her for her touch's brutal reminder of that unruly flesh which had seemed only moments before to have fallen asleep forever, even as his spirit wakened in the presence of that God who, his scrupulous equity was forced to admit, had fashioned both. But the polarity of his anger had been forced to find a scapegoat, and his glance, resting for an instant on the rich purple folds of the toga, had inevitably narrowed the aperture of his mind, focusing his thoughts on its bestowal and bestower, and a long unacknowledged resentment had suddenly surfaced, finding a fatal outlet in words which he would instantly have withdrawn. But Eugenia's glance had told him at once of the irremediableness of things said. So he had been content to sit back, as it were, and enjoy the full force of her wrath as it washed over him, never averting his eyes, even for an instant, looking full in the face the many deeds of heroic self-sacrifice so tenderly enumerated, his soul instinctively flinching from her accounts of his rival's loving care of the plague victims, a care utterly heedless of his own health, a patient, painstaking, selfless care which he knew he could never hope to emulate, yet letting the tide of her righteous anger engulf him, penetrate every pore, struggling at times to maintain a foothold, sputtering to get his breath, wallowing even in his own self-abasement, the intense shame of his spiritual intumescence far exceeding that of its merely physical counterpart, until at the end he felt himself to be more like the boxer in the arena, punished beyond endurance, each justly weighted fist having found its mark, achieved its desired effect, yet still miraculously standing, still conscious of a profound sinfulness which deserved even more, which deserved that longed for coup de grâce which, when it did come, he knew would be merciful, because delivered by his beloved Eugenia. But strangely enough, when she did cease, after she had consigned his soul irrevocably to that inferior heaven quite properly reserved for such lesser mortals, while his whole frame had been burning with the silent acknowledgement of his own worthlessness in the face of such heroic sanctity, her eyes, which the whole time had never left his, suddenly lit up with a scarcely concealed mirth that had, after a moment, spread to her mouth and erupted into peals of tinkling laughter. And Mamas, deeply hurt for a moment, realising that she was laughing at him and at his distraught countenance, suddenly saw the joke, saw his own deadly seriousness reflected in her sparkling eyes, saw a gaiety there that would doubtless remain up to and including her own death, beyond too, he was certain of that, and, unable despite all efforts to contain his own laughter a moment longer, he too was reduced to helplessness, both of them seeming to understand, as if by mutual agreement, that, after their recent marriage in Heaven, their flight beyond all earthly unions to an eternal one, some such first quarrel was not only inevitable but right, in their still earthly setting, and that anything else would be not only presumptuous but also absurd. And Roderick and the old hermit, their own eyes meeting for an instant in a quick unpremeditated glance which seemed to take in all this, and perhaps more, could only finally agree with them.

101 But, as Roderick could, he prided himself, have told them almost at the outset, despite their mystical propensities Mamas and Eugenia were both still very much creatures of the earth.

Mamas, as though ashamed of yet another merely human appetite, confided gently to her that, in spite or perhaps because of their recent high spiritual flight precipitantly followed by so rude but inevitable a drop, with its concomitant bump, he was, he blushingly had to confess, a little peckish. His stomach, so recently evacuated of most of its contents, noisily proclaimed the truth of this shy assertion. But the old hermit, noiselessly withdrawing to a corner of the cave and returning a moment later with a plate upon which a piece of ham, its almost white fat luminous in the half-light, glistened temptingly, was wise and worldly enough to recognise a bodily need and to answer it without fuss. Roderick's mouth watered. But he, at least, had enough pride not to show his interest in so mundane a thing, except, perhaps, by a certain light in the eye and a gently thumping of the tail. Eugenia, though, missed nothing. Cutting the ham, inexplicably to Roderick, into five pieces, she threw the first morsel to him, laughing as she did so, only then offering the other pieces around. Roderick, who was too polite and well brought up not to join them in so welcome a repast, pounced upon the ham with all his accustomed suavity. Even while in the process of manducation, however, he glanced up to ascertain for whom the fifth and, still to him, so mysterious last segment had been intended, only to have Eugenia laughingly throw it between his paws, as if in recognition of his bulk and consequent greater need of nutrition. Roderick was touched. He was always touched when some other creature thought first of him, as if by this simple act confirming those airy heights upon which he always placed himself. Dutifully, gratefully, he consumed the second morsel.

But lo! when he looked up again, regretting the paucity of so frugal a meal and wondering vaguely if perhaps a secondi piatti was forthcoming, he was astonished to behold the plate upon which the ham had been brought, a moment before empty, he felt sure, still bearing the same five pieces, as though they had not been eaten or had in some occult way been magically replenished. His eyes automatically sought again those of the old hermit, as if he alone might have the answer to so insoluble a riddle. But the old hermit was not looking at him. The old hermit's eyes were fixed upon Eugenia. Roderick did likewise. Eugenia's hair appeared to be on fire. Tongues of flame seemed to dart from the almost unrecognisable contours of her still so plainly expensive coiffure. Roderick again turned to the old hermit in amazement. But the look on the old man's face stilled all his questions and permitted only wonder as an appropriate response. In the light of the flickering glow which transfigured his features, Roderick, touched no doubt by a like illumination, felt he could make out a lifetime of hardship and cruel suffering, of tortures and escapes, a son given over to death and for so long mourned, years of penance and prayer in cave and desert, in short, as it were, an eternity of self-abnegation, brought suddenly, not to nothing, but to a nothing which encompassed everything, in this moment of vision granted him, and, Roderick could not help but feet, himself also, by proxy, which seemed to consummate a life of contumacy with a nunc dimittis that would permit him to quit the earth at any time now, having seen, if not his salvation, at least an approximation of it that would suffice until eternity.

102 Roderick, marvelling, turned once again to Eugenia. But the mystic conflagration had already died down. Her face though still shone with a supernatural light which he knew, at a glance, must forever preclude, in spite or perhaps because of the rigorousness of his Pyrrhonic mind, even the possibility of future scepsis. Her features feateously flamed as with a high febricity. Besides, the five pieces of ham were still there on the plate. Roderick remembered Uncle Leo telling him once about a young lion who had fallen into a stream and, blindly reaching for the nearest thing to paw, had discovered only a floating leaf. Uncle Leo had nevertheless insisted, rather implausibly, Roderick had felt, that the leaf had grown to accommodate the cub to such an extent that she (the cub was female, Uncle Leo had also pointed out, which gave the whole story to Roderick's mind something of the air of an old wives' tale) had been able to float upon it to the safety of the nearest bank, much to the joy of her parents, who happened to be of royal blood, and to the delight of the pride as a whole. But when Roderick had asked for more details, Uncle Leo had inexplicably held back. Only after much pestering (Roderick was, at the time, a very young lion) had Uncle Leo admitted that he too found the affair most puzzling, as, after such a miraculous escape, the poor cub had grown up somewhat hunchbacked and not a little pockmarked, so much so that even her father had grown to dislike her, as he could not find a young male of similar rank willing to take her off his paws. Eventually a marriage had been arranged. But, rumour had had it, the marriage was never consummated, and the couple had decided to split up, rumour had it again, when the male found a young lioness more to his liking. Roderick, who, for his tender years, was finding out more than he had bargained for about an adult world he would have liked to but could not quite understand, ended up by getting the whole thing confused with another story Uncle Leo had told of a lion who had put away all of his wives but one at the instigation of a high-minded teacher of a religious disposition who, one of the rejected wives complaining of him to the appropriate leonine authorities, had been condemned to death for preaching against the customs of the tribe. This, and yet another tale of a lion who had at first disapproved, then later approved, of the pictorial representation of notable lions of the past in more or less faithful images, had so made Roderick's head spin that Uncle Leo, sensing his confusion, had smilingly ceased. He had, he assured Roderick, not been forward in his elaboration of these narratives, but had hoped Roderick might learn the lesson not to judge by worldly standards, as the despised hunchbacked lioness had eventually become, by her very acceptance of misfortunes, a beloved and much reverenced member of the tribe, as had the posthumously exonerated religious teacher, both of whom had been depicted, more or less faithfully, in many of the true images Roderick had no doubt seen of them. Uncle Leo had at last concluded his homily (the youthfully sceptical Roderick had already begun to think of it as such) by insisting that miraculous events might or might not happen, he himself, he freely admitted, was not at all sure on that point, but that, whether they did or whether they did not, he was certain of one thing only, and here Roderick, for reasons he had never cared fully to go into, had remembered his exact words: ÂŤWere God to choose me to do such things, I would ask him for one miracle only - that by his power he would make me a good lion.Âť

103 A sudden wave of sorrow flooded Roderick's whole being. He had not till that instant realised just how much he had loved and now missed his Uncle Leo. During his lifetime, Roderick had, a little guiltily, it must be confessed, gradually come to believe that he could see all round this aged relative. He was a nice old boy, it was true, with an host of fascinating anecdotes, most of which Roderick had long since begun to take with a not inconsiderable grain of salt. He had always been scrupulously polite to him, but if he was honest with himself had secretly to admit that his attitude had more than a touch of condescension about it, not unmixed with a generous sprinkling of contempt. Even on that memorable afternoon when his body had been recovered from the untoward volcanic fumes by which he had been overcome, Roderick had wept more for himself and for his own lost innocence, in a first encounter with death, than he had for the good old lion. Indeed, as he had looked down at the face of this counsellor of his formative years, now in death most still, most secret, and most grave, Roderick had been unable to suppress the thought that all that erudition on which his uncle had prided himself had not helped him to ward off mortality, and concomitant with it a growing awareness that a lifetime of study appeared to have been wasted, that all that remained of so much thought and speculation was this dry and empty husk already almost unrecognisable, which Roderick found it impossible to believe had ever partaken of sentient life. If all would eventually be lost, what was the purpose of acquiring anything at all, either material or spiritual? This thought had nagged at Roderick as he had contemplated the dead face of his uncle, filling it with a growing rage that someone he had loved could have cheated him so badly. In the weeks which followed the old lion's death he had sunk deeper into this state, almost forgetting all the good times they had had together, the wisdom and patience that Uncle Leo had lavished upon him, the seeds of knowledge and experience he had scattered so freely and with such an unstinting hand on the arable soil of Roderick's receptive consciousness, even to the point of thinking, in the face of a demise such as this, that his deceased uncle had been in life a foolish prating knave. But he had always drawn back from such total nihilism. Something, some seed of hope, no doubt sprinkled on the same soil by the same generous hand, had begun to germinate. Over the years Roderick had slowly come to terms with his uncle's death, had almost begun to think back on him as one might remember a lost pet or toy from one's childhood, with a kind of patronising indulgence.

Now, all a once, in a miracle of spiritual agriculture, as it were, everything the old lion had ever taught him, all the cleverness and all the wisdom, had indeed sunk into nothingness and been lost, as Roderick had always feared it would, to be instantly replaced by the miracle that was Uncle Leo himself, the one miracle only he had said he would ask for, that simple goodness which could not perish, as Roderick at times also secretly feared it had, but which appeared, not merely to have budded and blossomed in the distinctly unpromising loam of his own soul, but, in the equally unpromising surroundings of this cave, to have inexplicably set, coming to full fruition in this one illuminative moment which seemed, as when a lightning flash announces a sudden shower of rain instead of that revival or exhilaration at one time supposed to precede death, unmistakably to predicate an Eternal Agronomist of quite exceptional skill and power.

104 But all Roderick's regrets and his belated exculpation of poor old Uncle Leo were rudely driven from his mind by a piercing cry which lifted the bristles of his mane like those of a youthful porcupine in imminent danger of extinction. Roderick swung around, expecting to see the beautiful Eugenia engulfed in a return of those spiritual fires which somehow in abeyance had taken on all the flammiferous characteristics of their more corporeal brothers.

But even the flickering light had died out of her face, to be replaced by a deathly pallor.

Roderick's blood froze. Mamas and the old hermit had both jumped to their feet. Surely their lovely young saint was dying. Both her hands were pressed to her mouth as she stared in horror at the innocuous plate of ham lying on the cave floor. Could the good old man have brought them poisonous meat? Perhaps some hidden piece of bone had stuck in her throat, as had been the case so recently with Mamas, as though even inanimate nature wanted to spare them the long agony of the martyrdom they both so fervently desired and, sensing their single-mindedness and their intransigence, had, in its blind mercy, sought to expedite matters and end things quickly here? Could she have bitten down on something hard, something hidden and unexpectedly lethal, and would she at any moment spit out all her lovely teeth as surely as if she had been struck in the mouth by the club of some brutal Roman soldier as she was being dragged unresisting to her inevitable doom? But no, none of these more likely explanations fully satisfied Roderick as to the primary cause of so violent and unexpected an effect. Then, the same expression of horror spreading over the face of Mamas, Roderick had turned again to the old hermit for elucidation. But he was smiling serenely to himself, as though nothing whatever had broken the tranquillity of his little retreat. Roderick could but gape. Eugenia was horror-stricken, Mamas was white as death, yet the old man appeared to be taking the whole thing in his stride. Roderick noticed that he alone had not yet partaken of the meat the others had already consumed. Reaching forward and taking up a small piece of the seemingly miraculously restored yet now somehow anathematised ham, he placed it between his lips and, quite deliberately, almost ostentatiously, began to chew. Mamas and Eugenia were both frozen with horror. Roderick was nonplussed. But he did not have long to wait for an answer to his unspoken question. Laughingly, the old man had assured the two terrified children that, as none of them had remembered the nature of the day they had so unwittingly defiled, a day of fasting and of abstinence from all meat, God, in his infinite mercy, would no doubt forgive them, and, to prove his point, he had consentingly joined them in their sinfully carnivorous repast, as his forgetfulness had been to blame for their self-indulgence in the first place. The old hermit had looked so holy in his wickedness, and Eugenia and Mamas so relieved in their pious juvenescence, that Roderick had found it quite impossible to believe that anyone at all, be he cruel Emperor or brutalised soldier, especially an all-loving and all-forgiving God, could ever confine them, in the first case to a bronze bull or a blazing pyre, in the second to those eternal fires of punishment which Roderick had heard rumour of during his late night chats with other great cats after a day's hard work in the arena. Surely such shining goodness deserved only reward. Surely Uncle Leo was himself smiling down now from that blessĂŠd abode where he need but wait a short time for them to join him.

105 Roderick marvelled afresh as he remembered all that had happened since Eugenia had, as it were, called down this storm to prevent Mamas's too precipitant progress to martyrdom.

Yet what really had happened? Nothing. Well, hardly anything. Yet when he looked back on the seemingly unimportant incidents which had occurred (Mamas's sullen iracundity, his sudden change of heart, his and Eugenia's wonderful moment of communion when, kneeling together, they had seemed to live out a dozen possible lifetimes and an eternity of impossible bliss to the unheard strains of an unearthly music whose sweetness could promise anything, their first 'lover's quarrel' in which Roderick had unexpectedly found out so much about poor uncomely Justus and had been forced, in consequence, to overturn his first impressions utterly, to do him full justice, as had Mamas, the two children's sudden mutual laughter, which had soothed and healed their disagreement as only laughter can, and just now the trivial incident of the ham which had lead, not only to its miraculous replenishment and to the inexplicable transfiguration of Eugenia, to the wonderful old hermit's nunc dimittis and, incidentally, to Roderick's belated and yet overdue reappraisal of how Uncle Leo had affected his own life, of what Uncle Leo was, and even more importantly of what Uncle Leo would become, but also to this almost farcical scene of forgotten fasts and remembered graces which, perhaps more than all the rest, had set Roderick straight on the very real difference between mere piety and true religion), it seemed to him that a whole year might well have passed rather than a few minutes, so changed was he and so quickly had his soul become accustomed to such lightning thought processes, if one may talk with any degree of sense of the soul thinking. Be that as it may, Roderick felt, perhaps for the first time, an uncomfortable sense of his own unworthiness at having been granted the privilege of being permitted to come so far so fast, both morally and spiritually. The thought disturbed him. One did not think, at least he did not think, in terms of privilege where lions were concerned. Nothing in creation was too good for them! For him!

Was it not the very nature of the beast? Did he not, as King of those Beasts, deserve in fact everything! This pondering on the ponderability of his own worth might well have made his spirit ponderous had not his ability to ponderate with such ĂŠlan on the ĂŠlan vital responsible for the growth and evolution of an organism such as his taken preponderance over all other considerations. He thought, therefore he was! And he was? Well, he was King of the Beasts!

If some Being, some lionlike Creature he could barely conceive of, could nevertheless conceive of him, and conceive of him as worthy to be King of the Beasts, who was he to disagree with so august a Personage? All the elements, therefore, of the scene of which Roderick was now so integral a part (the good old hermit, the wondrous girl who had accepted with so much irresistible grace, as had the marvellous youth, such a supremely delicate and magnanimous yet unspoken rebuff over her religious over-fastidiousness and whose eyes once again shone with a serene light, as though in her heart she always saw, and would always see, as it were, some beautiful lady dressed in blue, with roses on her feet, who would never desert her but would offer healing consolation, even at the worst of times, which, her transfigured face seemed also to imply, would often prove to be the best), were no doubt worthy of him, as he was worthy of them.

106 Roderick noted with some alarm that the elements outside had, as had those within, undergone a considerable change in the few minutes which had elapsed since the storm had blown up but into which an experiential year at least seemed impossibly to have been crammed.

The raging sand had subsided as suddenly as it had come, leaving bright sunlight streaming in at the cave mouth. Eugenia and Mamas had, as with one accord, risen and together stepped lightly over to the entrance. They stood in a nimbus of light, haloed already, to Roderick's mind, with such aurea as unmistakably proclaimed, not only their present sanctity but also their imminent death.

The old hermit seemed to sense it too, rising and crossing, standing monstrously behind them, a great hand on each of their fragile shoulders, nimbused between the two as if sharing at second-hand in their inevitable but glorious end. Roderick growled and rose, at a loss as to how to keep them from their own foolishness other than by taking the drastic and irreversible measure of eating them himself. But his own uncogitable Lenten discipline, as it were, of abstinence, if not from all flesh at least from their flesh, had long since rendered even such ineluctable succulence inesculent. His present alarm, however, dropped almost at once, as the recent experience in the cave appeared to have driven all thought of immediate martyrdom completely from their minds. Coming up behind them and thrusting his head between the old hermit's knees, if not to share in their sanctity at least to get a glimpse of whatever it was they appeared to be looking at, Roderick saw two doves, the recent sandstorm already forgotten, strutting and preening themselves in the sun. Roderick remembered in a flash that today, as well as being the movable start of the Christians' holiest season, was also the immovable and immemorial day upon which, according to tradition Uncle Leo had assured him, the birds were fabled to choose their mates. Eugenia, watching them, her eyes shining, reached out a hand and took Mamas's own. But these two, Roderick pondered disconsolately, were choosing a partner, not for life but for death. Uncle Leo had also mentioned two brother doves, Roderick recalled, who, in times long past, had come among the lions and made friends with them, even communicating in a language they had worked out for themselves which was comprehensible to both. Roderick smiled to himself. These two doves were certainly not brothers, and they needed no language to communicate with one another, let alone anyone else, other than the soft cooing and the unmistakable body language which they now employed. The cock strutted his stuff, as it were, chest puffed out, eyes glistening with desire. The hen, like all women, Roderick conceded, teased him unmercifully, feigning disinterest, wandering off as if distracted by some other, more fascinating prospect, always keeping a weather-eye on him to see if he was following. Then, with a sudden flurry of feathers, he had mounted her in a brief, ineffable coupling and, satisfied, had lost all interest. Roderick looked at Mamas. His face scarlet, he had disengaged his hand from Eugenia's and was looking down at the ground in an agony of embarrassment. She, laughing, taking such natural doings in her stride, merely tossed her hair in a manner, Roderick thought, not unlike the female dove, but Mamas, turning his back, not only on sex and on her, Roderick felt, but on the sun, on the beauties of the day, and on all that life offered in general, retreated into the darkness of the cave and into his own self-abnegation.

107 Roderick, following Mamas back into the cave, had paused for a moment, after the brightness of the sunlight, until his eyes became accustomed to the gloom. Mamas was slumped in a dark corner, staring dejectedly down at his lap. When Eugenia, returning also, discovered him and laid a sisterly hand on his shoulder, he angrily drew away, drawing his knees up to his chest, wrapping both arms tightly around them and lowering his head as if in shame. She, determined on comfort, sat beside him, not speaking, merely letting him know by her proximity that she was there if he should need her. But she was just what Mamas did not need. What comfort could she conceivably offer, what comfort was there to offer, in the face of being alive! Mamas's sudden, almost unintelligible, unexpectedly harsh and harshly unexpected ejaculation stung her as a whiplash might have done. She shrunk back from him, began sobbing quietly, buried her face in her hands. For once the old hermit did nothing. He stood, pensively silent, confronted by a comically tragic scene which was, apparently, unparalleled, even in his own considerable experience. Roderick too wished that he could do something. But what could he do, what could anyone do, with three such theoretically united yet in reality contradictory and opposing forces to contend with. The old hermit, divided himself, Roderick felt sure, despite his long years of asceticism, between spiritual and bodily needs, between his desire to save the children from themselves and his longing to see them given over to a care which would always be far finer than his own. Eugenia who, as Roderick could certainly see, had grown to love Mamas in a way which was not entirely spiritual, something Mamas himself had sensed, yet, unwilling to admit it to herself, had been forced to have recourse, as did all women, Roderick thought wryly, to her only weapon, tears. And Mamas! What could one say about Mamas! This boy, this monster of purity, as Roderick now found himself constitutionally unable not to regard him, this orgulous youth who made such a song and dance about the turgescence of an organ fitted to him by his own God for carrying out a natural and vital operation, an operation he not only rejected but denied in an almost Origenistic though less violently physical a manner, who seemed to treat the very touch of Eugenia's hand as the invitation of an orgiast, reminded Roderick inescapably now of a Christian girl Uncle Leo had once told him about who, rejecting both her father and her suitor (who had in turn rejected her, with perhaps, Roderick was forced to admit, just a shade too much violence, even to the point of torture and imprisonment), had, while in prison, been visited by a winged devil who, disguised as an angle of light, had vainly tried to convince her that all the things she had rejected, the things of this world, were indeed good. Nevertheless, she had flung him to the ground and, after a long struggle, bound him with chains. Later she had been either charcoal-grilled, or deep-fried, or simply had her head cut off, or all three perhaps, Roderick could never for the life of him quite recall. He was, however, more than a little alarmed at the prospect of having to consider - if he considered Mamas right - this wonderful old man and this beautiful girl, in their perhaps vacillating loyalties, not only as wrong but as agents of the Enemy, who, as such, the implacably youth might, at any moment now, fling to the floor of the cave in a last desperate attempt to overcome, not only the evil and impurity all around him but the evil and impurity which he must inevitably find within himself.

108 Yet Mamas was not himself. Roderick acknowledged this fact. Eugenia tacitly acknowledge it with her tears. Even the old hermit - this handsome and holy looking man, with ruddy cheeks and shining eyes, his hair streaked with white - acknowledge it by his silence.

Roderick knew that the old hermit acknowledged it, as he knew that the girl acknowledged it.

The old hermit, Roderick felt sure, knew that he, Roderick, and the girl both acknowledged it too. And the girl, Roderick was certain, with her profound empathy and all-encompassing sympathy, knew that he, Roderick, and the old hermit could not fail but acknowledge it also.

With poor Mamas so acknowledgeable in his transparent acknowledgability and their mutual acknowledgement of it, how could they not fail to acknowledge it to each other and to themselves? The problem was, therefore, to get Mamas to acknowledge it to himself. The lad really was impossible, Roderick thought. What other boy of his age, in his still febrile and debilitated condition, with so many agonising nerve-endings, both physical and spiritual, so mercilessly exposed, would have the inclination to consider the testosterone playing havoc with their pubescent metabolism, even should it add, almost on a quotidian basis, an uncial inch or ounce to their burgeoning manhood. The uncomely pimpled face of poor Justus made clear to all the hidden changes in his body, but Mamas, almost in defiance of his own nature, with his dark unblemished complexion still proclaiming to the world the tattered remnants of a boyhood he clasped desperately around him like a cloak, kept everything within, as if, by the outward denial of their very existence, he might overcome even the workings of his own glands. One thing only let him down. And this he could not forgive. It really was quite funny, Roderick conceded, if only it had not been so tragic. Any other shepherd boy, of a coarser and less ascetic disposition, would doubtless have found an outlet for such an excess of energy, if only when alone with his flock and high in the hills. Roderick remembered Uncle Leo mentioning such things, if only in passing, during the course of a long evening of lucubration during which he had been attempting to teach his recalcitrant nephew the finer points of hexametrising from one language to another and which had had to be protracted even farther into the night as Roderick had been quite unable to grasp the admittedly convoluted history of a certain piece of leonine literature largely concerned with the plight of various shepherds and goatherds, a work of which Uncle Leo had been most inordinately fond. But Roderick had become confused almost to the point of tostication because Uncle Leo had been talking, earlier in the day, about a group of seven men who, in answer to the civil strife in their home city and a certain mal du siècle prevalent at the time, had gone into the hills to form a community devoted to peace and reconciliation. This was all very well and no doubt most proper, but the thing which had got Roderick into so hopeless a tangle was the diversity of the numbers, higher mathematics never having been a strong point with him, so that, at the end of the day, he had been quite unable to be sure whether seven shepherds and goat herds were the founders of a small community devoted to writing dactylic hexameters, or whether six men had spent the moiety of their time writing septenarius verses, in trochaic tetrameter catalectic, in order to escape from the ruinous civil strife which was tearing apart their community and, incidentally, having a quite similar effect on poor Roderick's addled brain.

109 Uncle Leo had peremptorily persisted. And his painstaking perseverance had at last paid off. Roderick, at the end of six weeks - or was it seven weeks? - of intensive lucubration, was able to lucubrate with the best of them, had indeed become a lifelong and devoted lucubrator, even if his scholarly discourses sometimes had about them a whiff of the lamp. Roderick did not mind this. He rather liked the smell of oil consuming itself as it gives out heat and light, thought of it as an appropriate metaphor for the rich fruits of his years of protracted study under Uncle Leo, in fine, as an appropriate metaphor for Uncle Leo himself. Roderick tried now to reassemble in his mind some of the details he still recalled about this famous work of leonine scholarship. The text, he was certain, had been written first in Greek. Then a renowned Roman poet had turned it into Latin, transforming it considerably in the process, reworking it to such an extent that it became a new work of art, one indeed which many eminent critics considered even finer than the original. The thing had become so well known that a body of literary lions got together to commission a version of it in Lionnaise. But there had been much disagreement. At first forty translators had been assigned the task, but they had argued so much among themselves that half of them had eventually walked out, claiming that they had had to do the lion's share, and the donkey-work to boot, and forming a clique of their own to continue the translation as they saw fit. But the remaining half, being of a conservative nature and fearing that the work of their former colleagues, whom they now considered their enemies and dangerous radicals, would be too free, invaded their den in an attempt to ensure that nothing would be lost in translation and, in the ensuing mĂŞlĂŠe, many of the older combatants were seriously injured. Eventually the whole thing had gone to the Lion Court and the Lion King-at-arms had written a long letter, now known as the 'Tome of Leo', in which he set down rules and regulations as to what was, and what was not, permissible in translating verse. His main point was that the work had to be both a true poem in the original language and a true poem in the language into which it was being translated. This had been such wise advice that everyone had accepted it for a time as definitive. Before long, however, there were rumblings of discontent which might well have erupted into conflict yet again, had not a neighbouring pride, in their pride of force, invaded and overrun the whole territory, subjugating Roderick's pride for over five years. This would have been an unalloyed disaster, according to Uncle Leo, had not a sage old lion, already lionised among his colleagues and contemporaries as a poet and philosopher, set about translating the entire work, so long abandoned, into beautiful silky limpid alexandrines (the natural metre of so much of the greatest leonine poetry, if not of the original, which had been dactylic hexameters), and during the course of the long, hard, bitter struggle he had remained steadfastly at his task, lion-hearted as he was, even as the occupying forces had continued, as it were, to twist the lion's tail of another neighbouring pride, until, the completion of his labour not long preceding the end of the conflict, this in turn had preceded by only a few months his own death. There had been general mourning and a state funeral, with a guard of honour of admiring young lions, who even then had begun to realise that, although so much of what they had been fighting for was already consigned to the past, he had built a monument more lasting than bronze or marble.

110 But, with the prolongation of Eugenia's lachrymatory state, and the consequent continuation of Mamas's own adamantean response to it, or rather lack of response, Roderick was eventually brought out of his extended reverie. How could this unfeeling boy let the poor girl go on so? Only a few minutes before they had seemed to be living together in an endless state of being, the passing moment, as it were, already passed awayÍž they had bloomed, they had thrived, they had flourishedÍž decay itself seemed very nearly to have decayed! Yet now the sullen introversive fellow appeared to have forgotten her entirely, so intent was he in contemplating the fluctuating fortunes of his own unruly pillicock. Roderick, in one of his wilder flights of fancy, imagined what Mamas and Eugenia's destiny well might have been had fate decreed for them other circumstances and conditions of life. In his mind's eye he saw Mamas now, not as a simple shepherd boy but as an arrogant nobleman, his pride unchanged but his uncontrollable sexuality given full rein. He saw Eugenia, a simple but beautiful peasant girl, succumbing to him, as now she spiritually did, but with her whole body. He saw a long, unlawful liaison, a life of luxury and worldliness, the birth of a son, her longing to marry, but his proud refusal to be tied to a person of such low rank. But what then, Roderick thought.

Things could not go on, with him being as he was, and she as she. No doubt his arrogant disdain would get him into trouble, not with her, who would be faithful unto death, but with others. Roderick pictured her, riding out one day, coming upon his murdered body decaying in a ditch. Poor Eugenia! What would she do then? Roderick's fancy soared. She would be distraught. She would wish to die. But she would think first of her son. Given that her temperament was the same, she would probably place him in a good Christian home, then give herself up to a life of penance and mortification and self-denial. She would certainly retreat farther and farther from the world, the world she had enjoyed once with Mamas but which had cruelly taken him away from her. She would most likely look after the poor, or something of that sort. Her son, being her son and Mamas's and educated from earliest childhood in usum Delphini, as it were, would no doubt follow her example, becoming a priest of their religion.

And she would live on, praying, giving advice, converting sinners, receiving many supernatural communications of encouragement, until she was at last called to join her Mamas in that changeless eternity which neither perhaps had ever really left. So all would be well. Very much as it would be now, with circumstances and conditions just as they were, whether Eugenia and Mamas escaped from the persecution and lived on to be an agĂŠd couple or whether they offered themselves up for martyrdom and died together in a few moments of unspeakable horror which would doubtless appear as less than nothing in that same changeless eternity which come what may they were destined to inhabit. But such flights of fancy on Roderick's part, despite or perhaps because of their considerable duration, seemed destined to land with something resembling a physical jolt. In a moment of awful insight he realised, even as he recovered from the initial shock, that not only was he, the King of the Beasts, beginning to reason like a human being, albeit through too long association, but like one of these human beings, these Christians! And, which was worse and infinitely more disturbing to his leonine consciousness, he did not really seem to mind all that much.

111 Roderick wondered at the changes that had occurred in his own nature since he had first met Mamas and Eugenia, was it really only a day ago? One of Uncle Leo's stories, which he had considered far-fetched at the time, had an elderly Christian martyr being dragged into the arena, unable to bend to fasten his own sandals yet unwilling to sacrifice to the Roman gods and blaspheme his own, being thrown into a fire which would not burn him, which seemed to billow around him like a ship's sails, while his body in the midst of the blaze had been more like a loaf of white bread in an oven, or like a nugget of gold or silver being refined by the flames, until eventually an only too willing Roman soldier (the only part of the tale Roderick had found at all plausible) had been called in to deliver the coup de grace with his gladius.

Now, after seeing with his own eyes the apparent blaze in Eugenia's hair which had left her unharmed, he was sorry, antecedently as it were, not to have given to even the more farraginous of Uncle Leo's accounts a modicum of credence. Poor Eugenia! Her hair now looked as though it had indeed been flamed, so lacklustre it appeared as she helplessly sobbed, almost as if her state of mind had somehow penetrated even into the whorls of her still so patently expensive coiffure. And this Mamas, this farouche shepherd boy, just dully sat there, as though the sufferings of one so high above him could barely penetrate the thick graceless matter of which his being then seemed to Roderick to be composed. In a fury Roderick's eyes sought out those of the hermit, for he alone might conceive of suitable chastisement for such ungratefulness, but, much to his astonishment, the hermit's eyes were already seeking out his, as though the austere old man was, or so Roderick interpreted the glance, hoping to plumb their tawny depth for wisdom and advice. The hermit, satisfied, smilingly arose and, after crossing the cave to a dark corner and rummaging for an moment, returned with an agĂŠd parchment scroll which (after a further look and a gesture at Roderick which the lighting agility of his lion's mind instantly picked up) he placed carefully between gently opening jaws and, taking Mamas by one hand and Eugenia by the other, led them in silence, with Roderick padding softly behind, to the mouth of the cave. The children were so surprised at the suddenness of it all that both meekly followed, Eugenia's sobs subsiding almost at once, as did Mamas's still tenacious intumescence.

And there, after seating himself in a convenient place in the sun and gesturing to Mamas and Eugenia to make themselves comfortable at either side of him, the old man, recovering the mysterious scroll, as it were, from the lion's mouth, unrolled the crumbling document and began to read. Roderick could hardly believe his ears! The old hermit was reading, in faultless flowing Latin hexameters which Roderick instantly translated into the beautiful Leonine alexandrines Uncle Leo had once taught him, the very poem of which he had been thinking only a few moments before! But, after the initial surprise had worn off, Roderick accepted the situation and settled down to enjoy a thing which had been so much a part of his childhood.

After all, he reasoned, why should not the old hermit, seeking some way to distract the distracted children, look to him for advice? And why should not he, seeing the unasked question in the old man's eyes, answer, by the occult power of his own, with an unspoken response which, in the crescive rapport developing apace between the two of them now, already had far transcended the need of mere words?

112 Roderick was amazed at just how many memories were kindled as the old man read.

His childhood, which had always seemed to lie in a vale of hushed sunlight, returned to him in a rush, forever to delight his eyes. His mind and his heart also. Even nature seemed entranced.

A wood dove fluttered up and perched on the hermit's shoulder, as if to listen too, or perhaps to coo its encouragement at his lips and ears. But Eugenia and Mamas were too enchanted even to notice. Roderick himself barely acknowledged the presence of two or three of the hermit's pet snakes, which had slithered to the cave mouth and settled beside him, to bask in the sun, as it were, of their master's voice: he was too caught up with the suns of his own earliest childhood. He remembered with a smile his childish misapprehension when Uncle Leo had tried to explain to him that the second verse of the poem was very nearly a perfect golden line.

He had seen in his mind's eye just that: a perfect Golden Lion. Then, at his inquiring insistence, matters had been made infinitely worse by Uncle Leo's elucidation: a golden lion, he affirmed, had been definitively defined by one of the very greatest of all the classical Lionnaise poets, who also happened to be Poet Laureate, as 'Two substantives and two adjectives, with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace.' Roderick, who had heard of verbs and adjectives and even of something called a substantive clause but had little conception of abstract thought and only a vague idea of grammar, was unwilling to admit of his own deficiencies and had therefore said nothing. Thus the idea had begun to grown in his mind of a Golden Lion, with two sets of substantial claws, being kept from fighting the two objectives of his desire by some curious creature called a Verb, who was constantly interfering with everything and trying to spoil some harmless fun. Roderick laughed now as he vividly recalled the naiveté of his younger self, even as the memorable verse issued sonorously forth from the lips of the old man. Roderick remembered it in the famous Leonine translation Uncle Leo had so determinedly drummed into his brain as a cub: «Orru grrhergrrhez zuur oaar oaaûte urrn perrtiit arrer grrhampêtrre.» He still found the alexandrine verse beautiful, though it did not quite carry the weight and density of the original hexameter. But than Latin and Lionnaise were such different languages. With such a different system of prosody. The truth of this was brought sharply home to Roderick as the hermit read. It all came back to him: The two old shepherds talking. One having had his lands confiscated, to be given up to returning veterans. The other happy, having petitioned the great Emperor-God in Rome and having his property reinstated. Roderick particularly remembered the blood from a tender lamb which was to be sacrificed in thanksgiving at the alter. And the other, the unfortunate shepherd, whose prize goat had dropped her twin kids, the hope of the flock, on the naked ground, almost certainly to perish. Roderick, as a cub, had wished he had been there, could almost picture himself lapping up the blood of the one and greedily devouring the still warm and no doubt deliciously tender flesh from the carcasses of the other. There was a nice bit near the end, too, with, rather fancifully, a nimble stag grazing in, of all places, the air. But the poem had ended sadly, with the poor shepherd going into exile, in Africa or Scythia or even Britain, while the fortunate one had invited him home for one last evening meal of apples and chestnuts and pressed cheeses, as the shadows of the mountain peaks grew ever longer.

113 Roderick looked forward eagerly to the next poem, but, inexplicably, the old man hesitated, his ruddy countenance growing in rubicundity. Mamas and Eugenia, ever sensitive to his changes of mood, attempted to peer over his shoulders at the scroll, but he, holding it at an impossible angle for their inquisitive eyes and after rather ostentatiously clearing his throat, began to read. Roderick was amazed. He remembered the poem well. Yet when the old hermit came to the end of the first verse, without blinking an eyelid, as it were, he seamlessly substituted Alexa for Alexis, thus changing the sex of the antagonist and turning the whole piece into the lamentation of a shepherd for the unrequited love of his little shepherdess. Roderick was nonplussed for a few moments, then the light broke. Of course. The old man was in so many ways just like his Uncle Leo. He recalled with delight this aforesaid relative's acute embarrassment the first time he had read him the poem. Poor Uncle Leo had spluttered and stuttered at the start in a quite unaccustomed manner, and Roderick, missing nothing, had gleefully latched on, pestering the old lion until he had received a satisfactory explanation.

Uncle Leo, being what he was, had eventually given in, describing to Roderick, in some detail, some of the things some human beings of a certain sexual orientation did to one another.

Roderick could not believe his ears. How could one use either end of the alimentary canal, particularly the neither end, for anything other than sniffing and, to put it perhaps a little too bluntly, for nourishment and excrement? But Uncle Leo had assured him that he had actually observed two men in flagrante delicto, as it were, and had even desisted from eating them until after the consummation of their act, as both had seemed to be enjoying themselves so much.

Still Roderick was a little doubtful. He tried to picture himself, creeping up behind one of his own male friends and attempting such a thing, but, however he imagined the scene, it would always end with both of them in fits of helpless laughter. Now, though, it did help him to understand the old hermit's reluctance 'to bring a blush to the cheek of the young person', as Uncle Leo had put it to him, snapping a vanilla pod (one of his favourite delicacies) between his teeth as he did so. Besides, Uncle Leo had also said that in the Greek text the genders had been mixed, but that the Roman poet, being of that particular persuasion himself, had adapted it to suit his own purposes. Well, Roderick conceded, the old hermit was merely going back to the original! The shepherd boy, in love with his cruel Alexa now, sings of cattle seeking the cool shade, of green lizards hiding in the spinney, the cicada's high voice at one with his own.

He even promises his belovĂŠd a thousand lambs, an offer Roderick would have found it difficult to refuse, regardless of sex! also the two roe-deer, their hides still spotted with white, who between them drain a ewe's udders twice a day. He does go on a bit about playing upon reed pipes and Nymphs bringing baskets overflowing with flowers (whose names, Uncle Leo had assured him, were most ingeniously fitted into the metre, fruits ditto) and of laurel and myrtle blending their sweet odours. But Roderick liked the end best, where the poet, speaking in his own voice, assures the youthful shepherd that the grim lioness (why grim? Roderick still wondered) follows the wolf, the wolf the goat, the lascivious goat the flowering clover, and the shepherd his belovĂŠd. Each led by his own liking. For what limits can be set to love. Besides, if Alexa does spurn him, there are lots of other good fish in the sea!

114 Roderick's heart sank just a little as the old man started on the third poem. Despite his uncle's enthusiasm, he had always found this specious and banal 'singing contest' between two rather unconvincing rustics, a dull shepherd and his equally tedious rival, a goatherd, excruciatingly boring. Uncle Leo had tried to defend itÍž it was, he affirmed, the earliest poem of the collection, the one most closely modelled on the Greek original, written before the Latin master had truly found his voice. All right, Roderick had thought, why should one bother oneself with apprentice work? He had said nothing, however, and dutifully listened. Uncle Leo's 'footnotes', as it were, were what chiefly had caught his interest. Just near the start, when the two are hurling insults, and one accuses the other of murdering tunes on his flute at the cross-roads, Uncle Leo had expounded a theory of his own that this was a reference to the famous old legend of a man who had met and murdered a stranger at the cross-roads, answered a riddle, married a queen and had several children before discovering that the stranger he had killed had been his own father and the queen he had married his mother. Roderick had wondered what such an everyday story had to do with the present poem, but Uncle Leo had been so caught up with his own ideas that again he had kept mum. He had rather enjoyed the description of the wooden cups the two offered as prizesÍž the one's embossed with a pliant vine entwined with spreading clusters of pale ivy (an exact golden line, Uncle Leo had assured him, adding that a later poet of another pride which had at the time been ruled by a famous lioness had translated it and put it into a poem of his own written in her praise), with in the midst two astronomers (one of whom, Uncle Leo also affirmed, had been deeply involved in averting a royal scandal involving a queen, for whom he had 'discovered' a new comet, purportedly made from a lock of her hair, to cover up its embarrassing disappearance)Íž the other's worked with twining acanthus, while at the centre was the carved image of the most famous of all the poets who, Uncle Leo had insisted, sang so beautifully that even the trees and the rocks came to listen to his voice. Then a third person, a neighbour, had come upon the scene to judge between the two singers, and the whole thing had degenerated into an amoebaean farrago of flowers and golden apples being thrown or sent, with each praising his sweetheart (or sweethearts) to the skies. The only real interest Roderick now found in this recitation, despite talk of sheepfolds and wolves, of new-weaned kids, of bulls and calves and the like, was the easy grace with which the old hermit substituted names, always in metre, whenever one of the singers seemed to prefer a member of his own sex. But Eugenia and Mamas would hardly have noticed. They appeared to be as bored as he was. Only one of the snakes, who was dozing beside Roderick in the sun, roused himself a little, raising a glittering head and lazily licking thin lips with forked tongue, when some boys picking flowers and strawberries are warned of a chill snake lurking in the grass. But even he lost interest and soon dozed off again. At length, after some dreadful impenetrable riddles, which even Uncle Leo had been forced to admit he did not understand, the whole thing had ended with the judge saying he was not fit to settle so high a contest (a fine time to decided that, Roderick had thought) and that both boys deserve the prize heifer, as do any who fear the sweetness or taste the bitterness of love. Roderick would have devoured the lot of them, prize and all!

115 Roderick was well pleased with himself. Uncle Leo had, by his very method, taught him not only to perpend but to discriminate, to persevere, to cultivate, in a word, the perseity of his own critical judgement. But, as with glittering eyes the old hermit began the next poem, Roderick could but bend the knee, as it were, not only to Uncle Leo but to the general critical consensus. How could the same poet have perpetrated the last piece and then written this one?

Here the beauties of the Latin had defeated even the distinguished Leonine translator. Roderick listened to it, as if for the first time, in wonder. In the very first verse not only does the poet pay tribute to the Greek master he is about to supersede but humbles himself in the face of inspiration, at the same time announcing his ambition to write a great poem. Which he does forthwith. The short prolegomenon over, the years just seem to melt away, the cycle of the centuries begins again, and the new Golden Age unrolls itself before our very eyesÍž or ears, ratherÍž Roderick laughed inwardly at the vividness of his own sensory confusion, even as he acknowledged both truths, watching the scroll unroll slowly under the old man's hands. The forthcoming birth of the child about to be announced, Roderick, prefiguring Eugenia's and Mamas's response, fixed his eyes upon them. He was not disappointed. Uncle Leo had told him that the Christians had from the very first taken this passage as a prophecy of the birth of their Saviour. In a flash Roderick saw why the old hermit had so eagerly taken up his telepathic communication, a flash quickly followed by that reverberant thunder which, coming out of a clear blue sky, seemed to him positively to proclaim the reason why he had made his occult suggestion in the first place. Marvelling but a little disconsolate he watched the children's eyes as they listened, watched, almost passively, as their God, the old hermit's God, his own God too he all but acknowledged, prepared them ever so gently for the steep ascent of that slope which could only ever lead to one end. With tears in his own eyes he pictured a world where the last vestiges of guilt had been swept away, a world released from its perpetual dread, a world where the child's gift of divine life would be free to all. Roderick could almost see the untilled soil giving forth its first fruits, could view with equanimity the goats uncalled bringing home their udders swollen with milk, could even conceive of the herds not fearing huge lions. The unfortunate snakes at his side grew a little restless when they heard that they were to perish, but settled down again at the thought of purple grapes hanging from wild brambles and stubborn oak-trees distilling dewy honey. There seemed to be something of a hiccup here, with men still going down to the sea in ships and still fighting wars, but when the child had grown to full strength this too would cease and all things would be well. Even the sheep would of themselves grow fleece of various hues, of purple and of saffron, and the grazing lambs would be clothed in scarlet. And this the Fates had declared the fixed will of Destiny. The poet had hoped that he would still be around to tell of these things. Well, he was not. But Roderick was.

His only doubt, a textual doubt Uncle Leo had once pointed out to him, as to whether, in the penultimate verse, the baby boy smiles at his mother or whether the baby's parents smile at him, was at last swept beautifully away as Roderick remembered his own mother and recalled that, when he was in her presence, the question of who was smiling at whom never even arose. The whole world was smiling.

116 Roderick recalled Uncle Leo's exegesis of the next poem with particular vividness. The thing had started unpromisingly enough, with yet another song contest between shepherds.

There had been the usual conventions: singer and musician seeking the shade of a cave, the carving of verses on the green beech-bark, etc. But then, without the terrible drawback of amoebaean song, things had suddenly got interesting. One singer had sung of the death of a shepherd, a poet all had loved. His mother, clasping his corpse, had cried out against the cruelty of both the stars and the gods. The beasts had refrained from eating and drinkingÍž even African lions, the mountains and woods told us, had moaned over the death. There had been some mention of Armenian tigers yoked to a chariot, which Roderick had found a little puzzling. Yet all nature seems to have mourned. The very violet and narcissus were replaced by the thistle and thorn. But Uncle Leo insisted that the poem had been written, as he had put it, at the cusp of history. In the original Greek the poet had merely mourned that the singer's voice had gone down into the darkness. But this poet had been Roman and uniquely close in spirit to that Christianity he had in the last poem foretold but which he did not live to see. Suddenly, as if transcending this scene of bleak desolation, with darnel and barren straw growing in the furrows where barley had been sown, the other shepherd begins his song, and seems to leap, as it were, with one bound, the very restrictions of the page:

Roderick remembered all this as the old hermit read. But he also remembered other things which brought him back to earth with a jolt. He remembered that the children of the martyrs, of whom the boar had informed him, were left motherless. He remembered how quickly they would be forgotten by the bloodthirsty crowd awaiting the naumachia. He remembered Uncle Leo telling him that some critics had considered the whole poem purely symbolic, and that the dead shepherd was in reality a great Roman leader who had been murdered and later deified.

Most of all he was reminded, as the old hermit's reading came to an end, of how even such a divine poet as this could finish his inspired flight of fancy with a few banal references to earlier pieces, and then have his two self-congratulatory singers offering conventional compliments to one another and awarding paltry gifts as if the whole thing were merely an invidious contest.

117

In radiant beauty the dead shepherd marvels at Heaven's threshold, and beneath his feet beholds clouds and stars. He has himself become a god! All nature again rejoices. The wolf plans no ambush for the flock, nor snares for the stag. As long as the boar loves the mountain ridges, as the fish the streams, as long as bees feed on thyme and the cicadas on dew, so long will his name and glory survive. Roderick had loved all this, and thought now of a wild boar he had met in the arena who had told him of how, with a leopard, a bear and, of all things, a savage cow, he had once attacked six Christians who had been condemned to death. Never, the boar had assured him, had he seen such faith! With gay and gallant looks they had entered the arenaÍž the piercing gaze of one of the girls had abashed all eyes. There had been much talk of visions. The leopard himself had later affirmed that, at the very moment of their death, he had seen them mounting a ladder to Heaven. Merry once in the flesh, they are there merrier still!

With every tear wiped away from their eyes they eternally play, in perpetual felicity, around the throne of God!

118 Roderick forgave the youthful poet his paucity of taste almost at once, however, when the old hermit began, with equal promptitude, his reading of the next. Speaking directly to some great personage, the poet excuses himself for not writing of kings and battles and reminds us that a shepherd should feed sheep that are fat but sing songs that are fine spun; should sing not of war but of peace. Then two lads, finding the chief satyr lying asleep in a drunken stupor, bind him with his own flowery garlands; emboldened by a water nymph, who, as he wakes, paints his face with mulberry juice, they insist on a song. The smiling old reprobate agrees, if they loose his fetters. Released he sings of the Creation of the world; of a Titan filching fire from the gods; of a beautiful boy stolen by water nymphs and of the Hero who loved him searching disconsolately and repeatedly calling his name; of a young girl's passion for a snowy white Bull; of the sisters of a lost brother becoming tall alders; of sea monsters tearing trembling sailors apart; of a cannibal feast in which a father unwittingly devours his own son.

There was so much the young Roderick had found delightful that he too had regretted the evening star's announcement of its end, as had the unwilling sky, so the poet tells us. Though Uncle Leo had insisted that the main point of interest in the poem was the introduction of a real person, a soldier and fellow poet, into this fanciful agrestis, Roderick delighted in the stories themselves which, told in such a general way, allowed his imagination full rein to fill in the gory details. But he was also aware, as the old hermit read, that, even today, after so many years, he still associated the piece with the circumstances in which he had first heard it, as with so many other things still potently alive from his childhood. Just as Uncle Leo had finished his reading, a lion nuncio had arrived with news of the latest martyrdom of Christians. Forty soldiers, it seemed, had refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods. They had been stripped naked, then forced to lie on a frozen lake, with the constant temptation of a hot bath awaiting them on the shore if they should give in. Only one had succumbed, but the sudden change in temperature had instantly killed him. Another soldier, inspired by their example, had willingly taken his place, stripping off his own clothes and joining the others. By morning most of them were dead, the last to die being a young boy, his widowed mother shouting encouragement to him from the bank. This story, coming as it did hard on the heels of Uncle Leo's recitation, had had an extraordinary effect on the young Roderick's mind. At first his thoughts had been full of the wonderful assortment of gonadic titbits, as it were, shrunken by the cold and freshly frozen in their oscheal pouches. Yet he did not really like chilled food. Then gradually each soldier had acquired an individual existence in the fertile and freshly fertilised ground of his imagination. He saw, in his mind's eye, the young comforting the old, the strong helping the feeble, even felt sorry for the weak link in the chain and his deserved but terrible fate; he thrilled with the brave replacement, mourned with the bereft mother. In a word, these men gradually achieved a sort of mythological status borrowed, as it were, from their ancient pagan counterparts and becoming, in his malleable psyche, every bit as romantic and numinous as their more fleshly rivals. He saw now, with a sudden shock of recognition, that this, perhaps, had been the first stirrings of a lifelong passion about to find its terrible consummation in the present situation.

119 Roderick, so disturbed by this thought, barely listened as the old hermit commenced the next. He remembered only too well that it was yet another amoebaean song contest (why, he had asked Uncle Leo at the time he had first heard it, did the poet have continually to go back to those boring Greeks?). Again a third shepherd leaves his flocks (or was it herds?) to graze and to drink at the river's green banks fringed with rippling reeds, while he judges the alternate choruses of the two competing shepherds. A fourth shepherd is present too, the very one who, if Roderick remembered aright, had died just two poems ago. But the celebrated poet did not seem to bother overmuch about such inconsistencies. Roderick's brain, though, was still in a state of turmoil, his over active memory (he had always been, as it were, a devoted disciple of Mnemosyne) recalling in a rush the many tales of Christian martyrdoms (heard not only from his Uncle Leo but from so many other sources, from beasts encountered in the arena and elsewhere) which he saw now had been conditioning for so long his current mental landscape.

In this 'spiritual meadow', as he now thought of it, not shepherds but martyrs and saints (who had done their best to render to God the things that were God's) were at play: Here was an old Bishop who had for so long defended his faith, forced to take a pagan conqueror around the holy sites of his religion and dying in the attempt余 here another who had taken in an apostate pagan girl whose life he had vainly tried to save, the two of them being beheaded within four days of each other and resting in the same grave余 here an erudite but excitable Christian who had fought to the end for his rights, flinging himself to the ground when he thought a point of law had been breached, needing six men to restrain him, eventually so trying the patience of his judge that he was granted the death he had seemed to be seeking and had been thrown to the wild beasts余 all now appeared to Roderick to inhabit the same Christian Arcadia of which he could so vividly conceive. But gradually, as the old hermit read, the charm of the old Arcadia (the one he had learned of in his childhood and grown to love at his uncle's knee) had penetrated his musings and eventually preponderated over them. The alternating choruses, which only a few moments before had so tried his patience, were now bathed in the warm glow of a remembered happiness. The head of a bristling boar and the branching antlers of a long-lived stag swept away the sanctity so recently pondered upon and flooded his mind with more preyful thoughts. And then the beauty of the verses (with one shepherd comparing the sweetness of honey, the whiteness of swans, the loveliness of pale ivy unfavourably with that of his beloved) filled his soul with delight. In his mind's eye he lay upon grass softer than sleep, while nature itself seemed to smile in the presence of such an unattainable ideal of feminine, or even (Roderick smiled again at the old hermit's interpolative skills) masculine beauty. The poplar, the vine, the myrtle, the laurel, even though loved by the gods, all were dismissed in favour of the beloved's favoured hazel余 the ash, the pine, the poplar, the fir, all would yield to the beauty of the beloved. Roderick, hearing the hermit finish his reading, felt a surge of anger rise up inside him as he contemplated this foolish if fond old man and these ungrateful if misled children who were willing to give up all this beauty their God had bestowed upon them for some perverse idea they considered more pleasing to Him.

120 Roderick's anger, however, was quickly replaced by impatience as the hermit began the next poem, which was, he recalled with an inward yet almost audible groan, yet another of those amoebaean pieces. But the start, where the rivalry between the two singers makes the marvelling heifer forgot to graze, the lynxes to stand spellbound, and even rivers to stop and change their course, soon put him in better humour. Then the poem is dedicated to a friend of the poet who, Roderick seemed to recall Uncle Leo telling him, was either a soldier, or a poet, or an emperor, or a soldier who had been a poet, or an emperor who had been a soldier, or an emperor who had been a poet, or an emperor who had been both a soldier and a poet, but Roderick could never quite remember which. Uncle Leo had also told him about an emperor who had been troublesome to his widowed mother because she had favoured his younger brother over him, or the younger brother being quarrelsome because his older brother had been elected instead of him, or both brothers joining forces to accuse their mother of being too generous to the poor, but these, he recalled, though soldiers and emperors, had certainly not been poets! Anyway, the first shepherd sings of his beloved's rejection of him, which seems to reverse the course of nature, so that griffins mate with mares and the timid deer comes down with hounds to drink. Uncle Leo had called this adynaton, but Roderick had thought it plain silly! Then, after a charming passage in which he recalls having first seen his beloved when, as a child in the garden with his mother, he had been picking apples and was just big enough to reach the fragile boughs, he returns to 'adynaton', with wolves fleeing from sheep, oaks bearing golden apples, alders blooming with narcissus, tamarisks distilling rich amber from their bark, owls vying with swans, poets charming woods and dolphins, the earth flooding and the singer himself plunging headlong from some lofty mountain into the waves, not a moment too soon, Roderick had thought! The second sings of one disdained by her beloved, who resorts to magic to regain his affection. But the things she gets up to! Roderick quite liked the idea of the moon being drawn down from heavenÍž he liked very much the thought of men being changed into pigsÍž he didn't even mind snakes bursting asunder in the meadowsÍž but when it came to tying three threads of three different hues three times round an image of the beloved and drawing it three times round a shrine because 'the gods delight in uneven numbers', Roderick gave up: If the gods delight in uneven numbers, what did they make even numbers for in the first place!

Weaving chains of love, my paw! Roderick did affectionately recall a heifer searching for its mate (or was it a cow searching for its calf, even Uncle Leo had not been sure on this point), sinking down sadly by the brook, not even noticing the coming night. But herbs that change a man into a wolf, spells that call spirits from the grave, corn being charmed from one field to another, embers (of an incinerated snake, if Roderick remembered aright) being tossed over the head into a running brook without looking back, such things, the poet implies, are really supposed to work, as the poem ends with fire igniting of its own accord at the shrine as a good omen. But, Uncle Leo had insisted, the poet is not as credulous as he appears, as the dog barking at the gate, ostensibly to announce the arrival of the beloved, may just be another example of wishful thinking on the part of the lover.

121 Roderick looked around as the old hermit finished reading to see how all this talk of snakes bursting asunder and being reduced to ashes had affected his ophiolatrous friends (as he now thought of them)Íž but they had quite vanished, slipping away, no doubt, into the relative safety of the cave at the thought of such ophiological carnage. Then he noticed, for the first time, the old hermit's staff, planted, as it were, beside the entrance of the cave and looking for all the world like a part of that nature it had all but become. It must have been there for many years, Roderick realised, as it appeared to have taken root and had burst into tiny leaf. Upon closed inspection, however, he plainly saw that this was an illusion, as a small green clover-like plant of a type he had never before come across had sprung up round the base and had circling climbed to the very top, giving to the staff the appearance of organic growth. It must be good to eat too (for those who fancy such things, Roderick laughingly pondered), as a mouse had climbed halfway up and was in the process of nibbling one of the curiously shaped leaves.

Roderick, a keen botanist ever since his days with Uncle Leo, studied the plant with much interest: Like clover, each leaf was divided into segments, but, unlike clover, into three, not four, as if to mock his own earlier mockery of the gods delighting in uneven numbers. Well, Roderick was always willing to learn. For a moment he even considered devouring the little rodent, to find out at first hand what flesh nourished on such delicate greens would taste like, but the poor fellow seemed to be enjoying himself so much that he did not have the heart.

Besides, had not Uncle Leo told him that a great lion does not bother himself with a mouse! So engrossed was he by all this that only gradually did he become aware that the old man was already well into the penultimate poem of the collection. Two other shepherds appear to have had their lands confiscated, as in the first poem, and are facing exile. But here the poet seems to be making the point that, though poems cannot change the hard facts of life - are as doves when the eagle comes - yet they can offer consolation. Feeding goats, in song, driving them to water, avoiding the butt of the he-goat's horns, can perhaps comfort a little for the loss of the real thing, even though pleadings and promises of glory in verse may not soften the heart of the one about to dispossess. The two shepherds vainly recall each other's songs, the one persuading a sea-nymph to come to him from the waves, the other watching a new star go forth which promises good crops and rich fruits for his children's children to gather. But in the end both have to admit that time robs them of everything, even of memory. In boyhood the songs that they sang put the long summer days to rest, now they have forgotten all their songs. Yet homeward bound still they singÍž to make the road less irksomeÍž for the song's own sake.

Roderick still found this very moving, as did plainly the old hermit, whose voice wavered and surged as he finished it and was only kept in check by the strict dactylic metre in which the poet had been wise enough to compose the work. Yet he could not help marvelling, as his gaze returned to the mouse still busily contented munching the triphyllous plant, at how this diminutive creature could eat, and from an apparently barren staff, without nostalgia for the past or apprehension over the future, but accepting the triune miracle so bounteously set before it matter-of-factly for what it so patiently and beautifully was, one.

122 Roderick's heart became sorrowful as the old hermit began the last poem. Not that he did not like it; he did, very much. But so much seemed to be coming to an end contiguously with it. His cubhood memories of Uncle Leo were already drifting away into the past. But not yet. Not for a little while yet. Tenaciously he clung to the passing moment, even as it passed.

The sadness in Uncle Leo's eyes as he told the young Roderick of the background to the poem: the friend, soldier, statesman and poet to whom the poem is dedicated, who had been a friend of the Emperor himself and who actually appears as a living character, amid all the fictional shepherds and goat-herds, but whose own life had ended in disgrace and suicide. Yet the poem had not been lost; the woods, as it were, still echoed each word as the old man read. The hero still pines for the mistress who has deserted him; the laurels and tamarisks weep, the mountains and crags still weep, the sheep, too, are standing around, as they were then; the shepherd comes, the swineherds come, the gods themselves come to this Arcady he still inhabits, to remind him that Love takes no heed of all this, that cruel Love is not sated with tears, any more than grass is with rills, or bees with clover, or goats with fresh leaves. The hero still sadly sings, still wishes himself a shepherd among willows or under the vines, with his rustic love beside him, dark-skinned as the violet or the hyacinth, while acknowledging the call of the hard god of war. Yet, despite the heartlessness of his beloved, who seems to have forsaken him for another whom she has followed to Alpine snows and the frozen Rhine, he still prays that the frost may not harm her, nor the jagged ice cut her tender feet. Again a simple shepherd he plays upon rustic pipes; amid wild beasts' dens he carves his love on young trees, so that, as the trees grow, his love may grow also; again he roams with nymphs over the mountains or hunts the wild boar, all the while admitting the uselessness of such distractions - the futility of even woods and songs, when the bark dies and withers on the lofty elm ­ to heal the wounds of Love; conceding at the last that Love conquers all and that we too must yield to Love. Surely, Roderick thought, his bones must softly rest, with all of them here now still singing of his love! But, as the old hermit concluded, Roderick's mind was troubled. Behind him the cave still sounded with the sinister sibilance of the snakes, as if its darkness was already waiting to swallow them all; the hermit and the two children seemed as bright and as frail as three fountains of water which had suddenly sprung up in the desert, as quick to dry out and go under as they had been spontaneously to appear; the voice of the poet, even as it spoke of his love growing hour by hour, was like a knell announcing this as their place of rest, the place appointed for them to cease from their labours forever. And Roderick, sensing the lips of the ancient singer still moving in unison with those of the old man as he urges them to rise and solemnly warns them of the triple peril of the shade, realised with a start that he was already thinking of this as an interlude, a thing of the past, a pagan pastoral idyll in the midst of their Christian destiny, which, though the sun still brightly shone from a cloudless blue sky, still, the increasingly oblique angle of its rays told him that night must before long fall and that they, unlike the full-fed goats, had no home to go to but must wait here under an ever darkling heaven for the first faint glimmer of the evening-star which, if it be not now, yet it would come.

123 A great sense of lassitude took possession of Roderick's soul. He felt weary in a way he could not remember having felt before. So many memories had been brought back to him by the old man's reading. But strangely enough, the distant past which had been evoked was closed to him now than the events of yesterday. His whole life seemed to curve away in a gigantic circle and come back as a moment of haecceity, but the infant cub he had been when he had first heard the poems might well have been yesterday, whereas the young lion who had gone out into the world to confront its destiny, the proud-minded lion who had made a conscious mental decision - was it only yesterday? - not to devour any more Christians, the innocent lion who had not as yet encountered Mamas or Eugenia or the old hermit, even the protean lion who had changed, minute by minute it seemed to him, as it had lived through the past twenty-four hours, each of these seemed variously placed along the circumference of that circle yet all of them infinitely more remote from the lion he had become than was the wide-eyed cub who quizzically stared him out of countenance while these circumgyratory selves of incremental experience withdrew to their distant fixed points along a boundary-line which appeared almost boundless. Yet the same lassitude seemed to have affected them all.

Mamas and Eugenia, both of whom had rested their drooping heads on the old man's shoulders, one on each, as the reading had drawn to its close, appeared to have fallen asleep. The old hermit himself, speaking the last in an undertone and finishing with a long diminuendo so as not to wake them, carefully lowered the scroll and remained rigid as a statue, almost as if the gorgonian stare of the future had suddenly caught his eye from the middle distance as he carelessly looked up from his task. Even the hissing of the snakes from the cave's depth had lapsed into a sort of ominous silence. But Roderick felt this only partly explained the extraordinary wave of weariness which seemed to have come, unannounced, from the desert, which had washed over them, engulfed them all, and in the wake of which they had been, quite literally, unable to move. Yet the last lines of the poem still echoed in his ears, with their dire warning. The threefold perils of the coming night, the thirty times threefold perils, Roderick conceded, were all too apparent. Get you gone, the poet seemed to be insisting, get you home with your full-fed goats, the evening star is coming! But where had they to go! The darkness, it seemed, was the only place spacious enough to contain them! Roderick, lost in a waking vision, seemed to see them all as new constellations, himself included, after their superb downfall, their so soft ending, delighted to forget the struggle, to stretch out their bodies on the naked moss, as after a dance. Never before would they have known such a glow as these glimmerings of summertime upon their sweat-sprinkled brows which had no triumph to celebrate. Touched by the evening twilight, their great bodies that had done such things, that had danced, that had worn out Hercules, would be no more than a mass of roses. They would sleep under the starry paths, conquerors so slowly scattered, because the Hydra fit for heroes would be spread out to infinity... O what Great Bear, what Bull, what Dog, what objects of tremendous conquest, when they were out of time's resources would their souls impose on formless space. An ending supreme, a glittering such that, past the monsters and the gods, would proclaim to the universe at large the great deeds that are in the Skies!

124 But Roderick's high flight of fancy was brought down to earth with a bump. Not that anything happened. Nothing did. That was just it. The old hermit remained motionless. The children still dozed. The snakes maintained their unaccustomed silence. And Roderick too was the same as he had been a moment before. Yet in an instant the whole cloudy fabric of the edifice he had constructed out of nothing returned to nothing. The catasterisation he had supposed for himself and for his three companions, so possible in the the night sky of his own imaginings, did not so much plummet to earth in a shower of shooting stars or fall like lightning from the heavens as merely fade out and disappear in the light, simply, of the indifferent blue of the sky which was still so patently with them and would be there again, tomorrow, with or without them. The day, which had been on their side, as it were, only moments before, now seemed to mock at his nocturnal hopes of mythic immortality. So often had Uncle Leo led him forth at night under the blazing stars to point out the various visible constellations and to give them names. And the invisible ones! Roderick had loved them best of all. Those vast distant groups of stars which he could not see but which, Uncle Leo had assured him, others could see from those parts of the world he could only imagine. The whole scheme of the heavens seemed to have been set out and made comprehensible in a zodiac whose signs, Uncle Leo had also assured him, corresponded in some mystical way to truths that we could only glimpse, occasionally, in their glimmering light. Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, Pisces, all seemed in Roderick's imagination to loop away into space as the seasons came and went, only to return again with the burgeoning year, brighter than he had remembered them, the last catching the first and beginning again upon their eternal round. It had all seemed to his youthful mind as concrete, or as abstract, as that key system of tones definitely related to one another in an harmonic scale which his mother had attempted, patiently but unsuccessfully, to teach him, and which he still imagined looping off into silence in a similar manner and returning to audibility, burnished and bright and ready to emerge again as sound. But the majors and minors, the sharps and flats, were always a little beyond him, just as the figures of the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, the Crab, the Lion, the Virgin, the Scales, the Scorpion, the Archer, the Goat, the Water-carrier, the Fishes, which Uncle Leo had attempted to show to him, had always remained a little fuzzy, and he had in the end been forced to bluff his way with oohs! and aahs! as his straining eyes had attempted but failed to make out the various mythical creatures towards which his uncle's infallible finger pointed. He had accepted them all by faith. Suddenly now his imagination failed him. He tried to picture the new constellation of Himself, but it was even more impossible to conceive of than the Lion his uncle's failing eyes doubtless believed that they could see. The Virgin, the Twin (how else could he find room for Mamas), the Archer perhaps, all similarly failed to take concrete shape in a brain from which fancy seemed suddenly to have decamped. The wonderful poetic outpouring of only a moment before dissolved into thin air and he was left with only a few tattered shreds of remembered images which he attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to wrap like a blanket around him, to warm and protect and to guard him, no doubt equally unsuccessfully, against the coming night.

125 But the dark nights of Roderick's soul seemed perpetually to recur, fortunately for him, in close proximity, as it were, to the period of the summer solsticeÍž no sky was sufficiently tenebrous as to exclude the possibility of sidereal profulgency. The stars, just now to his eyes a random scattering of accidental lamps illuminating the heavens, were in an instant transformed, as if at the touch of a magician's wand, into meaningful constellations of light, not rams or bulls or twins or crabs or lions or virgins or scales or scorpions or archers or goats or water-carriers or fishes or whatever else the meagre minds of ancient astrologers had pictured in their patterns, huge cloudy symbols of some high romance rather, which neither he, nor anyone else, had the right to interpret didactically or definitively establish, with their admittedly finite intellects. Uncle Leo had always taught him to question with an open mind everything that others taught, at the same time acknowledging the possibility that he could very well be wrong and that they might be right. This Roderick had tried to live up to. He smiled as Uncle Leo's benign countenance again came back to him, just as it had been in life. How could such patent goodness ever be lost? Its presence now, in his mind's eye, seemed in itself to contradict even the possibility of death. He recalled one long afternoon sitting in the shade of a tree with Uncle Leo when he had learnt such quantities of information that he had wondered later how even the leonine brain could contain so much. It seemed that once, when Uncle Leo was still quite a young lion, there had been a period of much trouble, trouble both from without and from within. The chief lion had died and a time of near anarchy had ensued. Some young wags had taken hostage a leading lion from a hostile pride, whom they subsequently held for ransom.

Young Uncle Leo, always a tall and imposing figure, had attempted to intervene, but the others had turned on him and in the ensuing mĂŞlĂŠe the hostage had been killed and Uncle Leo had only narrowly escaped with his life. Things had gone from bad to worse. Eventually the elders of the pride had got together and agreed that something had to be done. But none of them knew exactly what. A king had to be chosen, but the last had left no progeny, and no one could decide upon a suitable monarch. Some had expeditiously voted merely for the oldest member of the pride. But he was already in his dotage and was thought to believe himself a man.

Eventually, much to his surprise, the elders had, despite his youth, chosen Uncle Leo. Roderick was amazed. He had not known until then that Uncle Leo had once been king and had thought that a king was a king for life. But Uncle Leo, with becoming modesty, had explained the conditions of his acceptance: once all the troubles, both internal and external, had been thoroughly dealt with and the so necessary reforms brought about, including the method of choosing a successor, he must be allowed to abdicate and return to his own preferred life of study and meditation. This had been agreed. And Uncle Leo, after much wearisome toil and effort, an effort which Roderick could see, as the old lion had talked, had taken its toll, an effort which had even entailed leading the other lions in an unsuccessful battle against an enemy pride and subsequently being taken prisoner and held captive for a time, a captivity in which he had taught himself Greek, the now prematurely aged lion had been allowed to return to the life he had formerly loved. Thus, even at an early age, Roderick had been taught, both by word and example, to put a high price on fortitude and duty.

126 Roderick yawned. All this thinking was making him tired. The late afternoon sun was warm on his face. Mamas and Eugenia seemed to be asleep. Even the old hermit's head was nodding. The unaccustomed silence of the snakes continued. Only a large bumble-bee buzzed lazily about, but he soon settled in an accommodating flower, the soft vibration of his abdomen alone showing his delight in the anther so bountifully set before him. Why should not Roderick sleep too. He laid his head softly between his paws. How calm and peaceful everything was.

And his eyelids were so heavy. The law of gravity itself seemed to demand that they must close. Roderick found himself back in the cave. It was night. A few candles glimmered from dark recesses. Or were they serpents' eyes. He could not be sure. By their flickering light he could make out shadowy forms. Winged creatures they seemed, who were hovering close to the kneeling figure of Eugenia, feeding her bread. Then they were gone. Eugenia remained, lost in prayer. When she arose, however, Roderick was surprised to see a sleeping baby cradled in her arms. He smiled. After all her talk of chastity, she had at last succumbed to Mamas's not inconsiderable charm. Roderick was not surprised by this. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. He was glad now that the responsibility of motherhood must surely drive all thoughts of martyrdom firmly from her mind. But where was Mamas. Mamas was nowhere in sight. And the old hermit also was missing. Where had they got to. Roderick was angry. What right had they to leave a poor defenceless girl alone in the cave, at the mercy of who knows what wild animal which might be lurking in the vicinity, especially now that she was a mother with a baby to consider. Roderick approached. Eugenia seemed not to see him, so intent was she on the precious burden she carried. Suddenly there was a noise at the entrance of the cave.

Roderick looked around. Mamas and the old hermit were standing there. But they were not the Mamas and Joannicius Roderick remembered. Mamas had filled out and grown into a fit young man. The old hermit had done likewise, only in reverse, returning to what he must have been like in his prime. Yet this seemed quite natural to Roderick also. But both men were in tears. Roderick turned back to Eugenia to try to ascertain the cause of their grief. Eugenia had changed also. She had grown old. The baby was gone. A chaplet of the Seven Sorrows had replaced it. She crouched on the cave floor, eating bread, drinking a little water. The two young men came over. She looked up for an instant, then turned away, lying down, resting her head lightly on a stone. She was, it seemed, dying. Both men stood above her, grieving. But she, with an immense effort of the will, turned back to them, raising herself on one elbow, smiling up with a clear radiance which at once removed all signs of ageing from her face. She chided them as if they were naughty children, telling them that they should rejoice, saying with laughter in her eyes: ÂŤYou will discover that I have not abandoned you. You will possess me for ever.Âť Roderick opened his eyes. Everything was just the same. He had dozed only for a moment. He shook his mane to clear his head. How could so much have happened, so many years have passed back and forth, as it were, in the blinking of an eye? Roderick wondered.

He had had good dreams before and he had had nightmares, but this dream, unlike any other, seemed to cheer and comfort him in like proportion, even as it filled his soul with hopeless grief.

127 Roderick, if his fine sensibilities had inclined to a more poetic mode of expression, might well have contented himself with saying: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? The music, as it were, most certainly was fled. And he had little difficulty in deciding whether he woke or slept. The troubling vision, however, instead of leaving his creative mind in a state of postpartum tranquillity, had rather the reverse effect, as of unintentional coitus interruptus, sending the fertile seeds of his imagination speeding, not only into darkly remote and long unvisited corners of the past but also into unknowable areas of the future, areas of which a certain spiritual phimosis on his part would rather have left unfertilised and unplumbed.

Something told him that Eugenia would never give birth to a child of Mamas's, nor achieve that venerable condition of life his dream had so clearly envisaged, even as his high imagination could no more entertain the possibility of Mamas becoming that fine if inevitably coarser young man who had appeared so vividly with her than it could seriously consider the old hermit throwing off the burden of his wearisome old age and returning, big-boned and hardy-handsome, to all his more boisterous years of soldierly carouse. Nevertheless, he tried to avert his spiritual glance from the all too probable future. But the dream, the vision, had meant something, Roderick was certain of that. Uncle Leo, who had once pronounced himself no expert on prognostications of any kind, had all the same firmly believed in the importance of dreams. Dreams, he had told Roderick, could be both warnings and illuminations. But one had to discern between true dreams, dreams that came, as it were, through the Gate of Horn, and illusory dreams that passed before midnight through the Ivory Gate. Roderick, waking early in the morning and dutifully jotting down his dreams after this, would present them in the afternoon for his uncle's perusal. He could still recollect Uncle Leo's face on one particular occasion. Roderick had dreamed of a desert, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretched far away. Suddenly the sun had grown dark, as if it had gone into mourning. A beautiful young girl had run up, pursued by a dark and angry looking young man. Roderick had wanted to go to her aid, but his paws had been rooted to the spot. The young man, having been violently repulsed, had drawn his sword and struck off her head with one blow. Then the earth had swallowed him. The severed head had stared vacantly at Roderick. Still he had been unable to move. An old man had appeared. He had bent down and taken up the head, lovinglyÍž then, fixing it again to the bleeding trunk, the young girl had risen from the ground and gone off with him. A fountain of water had suddenly gushed forth at the place where the head had lain. All at once a crowd of people were there, bathing in the miraculous spring. But when Roderick, his paws suddenly released from their thraldom, had attempted to join them, they had all run away in fright. Then he had woken up. Uncle Leo had pondered long and hard.

Eventually, his face as blank as the desert his nephew had just described to him, he had murmured something about understanding something of the truth which his heart believes and loves. Roderick had been nonplussed. But, upon asking for further elucidation, all he had been able to coax from his inscrutable kinsman were the words: I do not seek thus to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order that I may understand. And Roderick, despite being more in the dark than ever, had had to be satisfied with that.

128 Roderick's spiritual substance shuddered. The girl in that far distant dream, he now recalled, had been much like Eugenia. And the old man who had restored her to life, he realised at the same instant, was the very likeness of Joannicius. And though the countenance of the youthful assassin had been nothing like that of Mamas, Roderick could almost convince himself that it bore a striking resemblance to Justus. What could it mean! Had Roderick's first impressions been correct after all? Was the weak, spiteful, pimply youth even now reporting to the proper authorities the hiding place of his erstwhile friends and co-religionists? Was he seeking a full amnesty for himself at the expense of his former colleagues? If he was, the earth would have no need to swallow him, Roderick gleefully pondered, he could manage that very well himself! But no, he was being silly. How could poor Justus, even if he had wanted to, give them away? He was at this very moment hiding the twin-brother doctors in his own house. How could he sell Mamas and Eugenia without selling himself as well? All the same, Roderick's uneasiness would not subside. He knew, from past experience, that the influence of dreams could often exceed their actual duration, continuing to disturb the mind, sometimes, for weeks, months, perhaps even for a lifetime. Some dreams he forgot at the instant of waking.

But others, silly, inconsequential dreams, dreams he had not even bothered to tell Uncle Leo about, hideously lingered. Once he had dreamt he had come across the body of a girl, who had, apparently, been sawn asunder. He had pounced, devouring the remains greedily, dragging the delicious innards from the corpse in huge mouthfuls, only to realise, as he lazily gnawed the last bones and glanced for the first time at the face, that what he had actually eaten had been a beautiful young lioness. He had woken, sweating, nauseous, and had been unable to eat for the whole of the day. He had never bothered to tell his uncle about it, he now realised, not because of the intrinsic unimportance of the dream itself but because of his own shame. Now this most recent dream, nagging at the corners of his consciousness in conjunction with these two others from the distant past, filled him with foreboding. That the beautiful Eugenia might be no more, that she might grow old or be beheaded or sawn asunder and be eaten by him, even unintentionally, was a thought unsupportable. But when the rose is plucked, Roderick knew, nothing can give it vital growth again, it needs must wither. Yet age could not wither her, his dream had already proved that, nor could custom stale her infinite variety, as a scant twenty-four hours of her incomparable company had as conclusively established. Uncle Leo, thought Roderick, if only you were here, now, to advise, to counsel, just to be here! But the very thought of Uncle Leo, of his wise, sensible, always moderate nature, of his calming influence on controversies within the pride (as when certain austere young lions had envisaged the end of the world as nigh and had counselled strict fasting and abstinence even as others had insisted on wild indulgence and the unbridled pursuit of pleasure as the only proper response while he eventually had won the day merely by his mild insistence upon the aurea mediocritas and had been more than amply vindicated by the signal failure of the eschatological threats to eventuate), the thought of Uncle Leo alone, like a cruse gently pouring oil on troubled waters, was enough to quiet in Roderick's soul the sea of troubles which his noble mind had been only too ready to take arms against.

129 Roderick nevertheless brooded. He had dreamt so much in the past twenty-four hours.

And these other recent dreams, still so vivid, some comforting, some disturbing, some which had not even appeared like dreams at all, seemed to mingle now in his subconscious mind and to curdle, as when the juice of the fig speedily thickens the white milk that is liquid, making them take on new and unfamiliar shapes which, although very nearly shapeless, can, like the mould marks which form upon damp walls, be interpreted in as many ways as there are conscious minds to interpret them. He had dreamt of Eugenia old and dying, did this mean she would live to a ripe old age, or was this merely wishful thinking on his part? He had dreamt of Mamas grown to full maturity, was this wishful thinking also? He had dreamt that the old hermit had died, but he had also dreamt of him young and strong and even killing him, Roderick, who was himself threatening Eugenia! What could this mean? Could there still be enough savagery left in his gentle nature to contemplate, even in dreams, ever hurting her? But he had not meant to hurt her, only to be friendly! The old man, in his youthful fury, had misunderstood his motives! And then again, a voice in his sleep, as in a dream, had woken him, warning him of Mamas's imminent peril. Enough! Roderick told his conscious mind to call a halt. Where could it lead? No sooner had one likely explanation offered itself than another, equally credible, was jostling for position! Dreams, he had ruefully to concede, were as impossible to interpret as those so-called prophetic utterances about which Uncle Leo had so frequently told himÍž they could, to a malleable imagination willing to receive their finite stamp, be made to mean almost anything! Or nothing! Still, his mind could not help harking back to that dream-image he had had of himself (was it still only today? it seemed like years ago!) when the instar of his earthbound body had suddenly sprouted pinions and he had risen high above the sea in which he seemed to be swimming, a winged lion, glorious in its full imago.

Yet this too, he felt reluctantly bound to acknowledge, was merely wishful thinking. This was a dream in which he wanted to believe. The image of Justus came suddenly came back to him.

No dream image, this, but the Justus he had seen peep out from behind the eyes of the uncomely adolescent as he had helped the helpless Mamas with his new toga. That look had burned itself into Roderick's consciousness. Even now, in his mind's eye, he could picture the traitorous youth planning, if not some terrible revenge, at least some underhand ruse to make the heroic shepherd-boy appear ridiculous, to humiliate him in front of Eugenia and the old hermit, returning perhaps with news of the latest martyrdoms, finding some excuse to lay hands on the borrowed toga, snatching it from him, accidentally of course, leaving poor debilitated Mamas in all his pathetic vulnerability, foolishly stripped before the gaze of the blushing young girl and the sorrowing old man, to run away naked through the garden by night. Roderick, in a flight of fancy extravagant even for him, pictured his mythical self, with the wings his dream had prefigured, taking off in search of the approaching Justus, sighting him far below, swooping down out of a clear blue sky, like Jove's thunderbolt, catching up the terrified stripling in his ready claws, carrying him away, high, high, watching as he lost, first his dignity, then his pride, then all pretence to manhood, then, finally, Roderick's lion eyes making out a stretch of countryside cruelly uninviting enough, his very life.

130 But Roderick's happy daydream was rudely shattered. As was the peace of the late afternoon. Yet nothing happened. Only the old hermit (surprising Roderick, surprising the dozing children, surprising it seemed even himself) stood bolt upright, as if struck all at once by a random, imperative thought, and remained so, leaving Mamas and Eugenia (only half awake and with heads still drooping a little as though not yet fully aware of the sudden want of shoulder) to bring their minds back from whatever wonderful or terrible things they might have been dreaming and attempt to recollect themselves in a tranquillity which had been so unexpectedly interrupted but it now seemed as instantaneously restored. All though was different. Mamas and Eugenia gazed quizzically up at the old man's face without saying a word, as if waiting for him to explain his odd behaviour in his own good time. But the hermit was far away, his eyes scanning the distant horizon. Roderick, confident that his own vision was considerably better than that of any human being, stood up, the better to apprehend the approach of danger. But nothing was visible. The horizon was as empty as the sky. Yet the old man, still stock still, bowed deeply, as though responding without a word to some invisible call which, unbeknownst to the others, had sounded to his soul alone, a call the more urgent because of its very silence, a call which could not be ignored. After what seemed an eternity but was in reality little more than the space of a heart-beat, he turned and went back into the cave, still without a word, as if unaware of the state of uncertainty in which he had left his erstwhile companions, or expecting perhaps their heightened sensibilities to pick up the fine motive thread which plainly to him required no further explanation and with its aid find their way into the maze of his heartÍž out of which labyrinth none of them, without its reassuring touch between their fingertips, as it were, would have even the slightest possibility of ever escaping.

But the two children, as if instinctively understanding something which seemed so alarmingly to have passed Roderick by, stood as at a peremptory command and, without so much as a glance at the threatening horizon which still occupied so much of his thoughts, followed as with one accord the old man back into the cave. Roderick was quite put out. He did not like things going on which he could not understand. And just when he had felt that he was beginning to penetrate the workings of the human mind a little! He would seriously have to consider taking these three totally unworldly creatures in paw, if only for their own good. But, for the present, as they seemed so totally indifferent to danger, his own fierce lion pride would not permit him to consider what new hazard the old hermit's occult knowledge might point towards, be it the imminent arrival of some civilised barbarians who, after clubbing to death the former shepherd-boy and stretching the old man upon the rack in a futile attempt to elicit from him information on other Christians, would doubtless bury him alive up to the neck so that he might watch the rape and murder of the hapless Eugenia and then be left to die slowly and agonisingly surrounded by the still bleeding relics of his noble unconcern. But all this thought of food was making Roderick hungry. So, with a somewhat surreptitious last glance at the vacant horizon, long enough to reassure himself of the lack of imminent peril without compromising his haughty disdain of security, he too turned tail, as it were, and without another look behind him, made his way aristocratically back into the darkness of the cave.

131 Roderick, after the brightness of the sun outside, took a few moments to adjust his vision to the interior gloom. Gradually the forms of his three intransigent companions emerged, kneeling in front of the image of the Good Shepherd who gazed benignly down at them from the cave wall. Roderick, though still a little put out by this calm acceptance of theirs in the face of who knew what approaching danger, could not help feeling a certain admiration for their undeniable ability to reject all thought of such earthly things as they appeared to consider beneath the dignity of their exalted religious conceptions and to concentrate their minds to such an extent that, no matter how dire the eventual outcome of these things might prove to be, nothing could disturb an achieved peace (God's perhaps) which most certainly passed all Roderick's understanding. Even the partial eclipse brought about by his huge bulk, hesitant at the entrance of the cave, whose sudden tenebrific effect no doubt penetrated their closed eyelids, did not for a moment divert them from their rapt devotions. And yet this shadow (they knew it, and Roderick knew that they knew it) could be, well, could be almost anything.

Roderick moved farther forward into the cave, permitting the last of the daylight to flood unrestrictedly past him, not to allay their groundless fears (he knew they had none, groundless or otherwise) but rather to alleviate his own very well grounded fears of their total lack of them.

In the sudden superabundance of light Roderick saw that Eugenia's hands and feet were stained with blood. His own blood froze. How could this have happened? Who could have done such a thing? Only moments before she had been perfectly sound, outside the cave, dozing peacefully in the sun. Roderick snarled and padded closer. Instantly the blood disappeared.

He halted, nonplussed. Eugenia, out of the sun and again in his shadow, was perfectly sound.

Roderick stepped back. Again the cruel wounds appeared. He repeated the experiment several times. Each time the same phenomenon occurred. What foul demon of the cave was playing tricks on him! He was about to growl in sheer frustration when he happened to noticed, on the floor near the mouth of the cave, a small red cut-glass flask which lay empty and on its side, no doubt the container once of some medicine or unguent. The rays of the late afternoon sun, refracted at an uncanny angle from its many-faceted surface, had sent those blood-red beams of light to the depth of the cave, targeting the delicate hands and feet of the beautiful Eugenia as she prayed. A fifth beam, he also noticed, had penetrated, or so it seemed, her side. Roderick, appalled, stepped forward, shielding her from the cruel light with the shadow of his own body.

Eugenia was unblemished again, her prayer undisturbed. But Roderick was very much disturbed. He knew enough about Eugenia's religion to know what this portent meant. But the portent had not been for herÍž she was blithely unaware that anything had happened. The portent had been for him. He was the only one who had witnessed the event, if event it could be called.

What this might mean Roderick did not care to contemplate. He moved back, expecting more light to flood in, but the whole cave was again plunged into Stygian darkness. What could this mean? Had the sun, as if in mourning, suddenly and unexpectedly eclipsed? Roderick, seeking to ascertain the cause of this apparently natural effect, turned, but perceived at once that it was not natural. The gigantic figure of a man was silhouetted in the cave-mouth, blocking out the sun.

132 Roderick's mane bristled. A dozen possibilities ran through his brain at once. Was this man a scout, the advanced guard of the local authorities who had discovered their hiding place and were on their way even now to arrest them? Was he a traveller, merely stumbling across the cave by accident? Was he a friend, coming to warn them of approaching danger?

Roderick, whose first thought was always of action, had to restrain his pre-emptive nature almost at once. If he pounced, he could, he knew, dispatch the intruder with one blow of his paw. But if it turned out to be an harmless stranger, this could well prove unnecessary violence. And if it turned out to be a friend, it would most certainly silence the crucial warning before it had even passed his lips. And even if it was an enemy, that enemy would no doubt be followed by many others, too many, perhaps, even for Roderick to handle. But what a fight it would be! Roderick could not help pondering, if only for a moment, the wholesale slaughter that would ensue if a legion, or a cohort, or even the tenth part of a cohort, a mere straggling company of soldiers should turn up at the cave-mouth and attempt anything with him! How long he might hold them off he did not know. But one thing he did know: he would drive his mighty jaws through many teeth and skulls and helmets before going himself at last gloriously down into the dust. Roderick was so taken up with this thought that it took him a conscious effort of the will to remind himself what precious good his own, albeit magnificent death would be to the two children he had, as it were, taken under his wing. Only the old hermit would be left to protect them! He therefore put all pleasant notions of dying soldiers clutching ripped-open bellies and bleeding stumps of limbs firmly out of his mind. What must he do now, that was the question? He decided, almost at once, on mousy discretion as being by far the better part of leonine valour. Silently he slunk back into a shadowy corner of the cave, hoping the intruder, after the bright glare outside, had not glimpsed his tawny shape in the shaft of sunlight before he had had time thus to secrete himself. He need not have worried. The stranger, stepping fully into the cave as he discreetly withdrew, seemed to have eyes only for the old hermit kneeling in prayer. Roderick, thus given a far finer opportunity for observation, saw that the man was not as huge as the considerable bulk of his silhouette and the elongated shadow occasioned by it had at first made out. Still, he was a formidable personage. A great white beard came almost to his waist. He was dressed in an ancient robe cut from some roughly woven isabelline fabric, one which, however, despite its sordid appearance, could not disguise the air of honorificabilitudinity which so patently hung about him. His feet were sandal-shod. He carried with him a large, seemingly heavy leathern bag, which he transferred wearily from hand to hand, as if to distribute its weight. Roderick watched this threatening presence inumbrate the three kneeling figures as it advanced, ready to pounce at a moment's notice should the situation arise. But the stranger, pausing, returned to the cave entrance, gently depositing the bag under the lintel before again approaching. He stopped a few yards behind them. The old hermit, without looking around, without it seemed in any way disturbing his devotion, merely said aloud, as if as part of his muttered orison, Brother Theodosius, and Brother Theodosius, taking these words as all the invitation he required, knelt silently down beside them, seamlessly becoming part of their little community of prayer.

133 Roderick's mind, bounding backward and forward in time, had, in the next few moments, so many anterior loose ends which only present hindsight could attempt to untangle and so many others which posteriority alone would be permitted to tie off, that it seemed to him the mental chase, as it were, was far more exhausting than any merely physical pursuit of deer or gazelle or antelope, no matter how swiftly the terrified creature might run in a last desperate attempt to avert its inevitable fate. One fact was clear. The two old men knew one another.

Hard upon this came the realisation that the old hermit, standing and bowing, apparently to nobody, such a short while ago, was in reality acknowledging the no doubt simultaneous salute offered by his approaching friend which he had, in some occult way that far surpassed even Roderick's own extraordinarily acute sixth sense, been able to apprehend and of whose coming he had thus been forewarned. How he had done this Roderick could not even begin to understand, but he freely acknowledged it as a fact, having witnessed the result with his own eyes. Now this old man, this Theodosius, who had clearly not come on a courtesy call, whose whole demeanour spoke of urgency, even of imminent danger, was quite calmly kneeling in prayer with perhaps his one-time comrade-in-arms and (Roderick found it impossible not to make the pun, if only to relieve his own metaphysical tension) most certainly present-day comrade in knees. But even as he smiled at his own wit, and almost as if in admonitory answer to it, the stranger, tapping the old hermit on the shoulder and holding one finger up to his own lips in a gesture whose import was not lost on the other, rose silently with him and, after a quick glance at the two children still lost in prayer, together they retreated to a quiet corner of the cave where, out of earshot, they conversed in whispers. Out of his earshot too! Roderick, in sheer frustration, could but silently growl. Yet he dare not stir from his own sequestration.

Any precipitant movement on his part might, he knew, fatally loosen those few precarious stones to which they still clung and could easily start an unstoppable landslide under whose scree they would all be buried. He strained his ears, trying to catch a few words, but it was useless. He had, however, the immense satisfaction of seeing the old hermit point out his shadowy form to the newcomer, a fact which, a little to his chagrin, hardly seemed to surprise him. Well, Roderick told himself, how could his fame not have got around. Reassured, he was about to emerge from his now supererogatory concealment when he noticed that a hyena had crept up to the entrance of the cave and was busily engaged in sniffing at the bag which the old man had left there. Outraged, Roderick bounded forth. The small hyena scampered away in terror. Roderick glanced down, wondering why this bag had attracted the pathetic scavenger in the first place. It seemed a very ordinary bag. There was nothing to make a fuss about. Upon a closer examination he observed a certain reddish tinge, no doubt caused by that same bottle whose blood-like effect upon Eugenia had so startled him earlier. But no. The bottle lay within the cave, the last rays of the setting sun could not curve backward. Approaching nearer he could make out an oozy black substance which bedewed the surface of the bag. That would account for the colour. And the hyena's interest. But why? The supersensitive hairs of his nostrils twitched. Yes, he had to admit it, albeit rather ruefully, how could either of them ever mistake the odour of blood.

134 The nothing we know is the something we learn, Uncle Leo had rather ambiguously said one day to the young Roderick. But he had refused to elucidate upon this remark. Roderick had puzzled and pleaded. But he had had to be content with Uncle Leo's assurance that he would understand it when he was old enough and that any attempted explanation before that time would be not merely ill-advised but well-nigh impossible. But when he had been old enough, Uncle Leo was dead! Roderick did not know for certain whether he really understood it yet, whether he had reached that age which Uncle Leo had assured him would make it perfectly comprehensible. How could he, he had no one to ask! But he felt that the something he had just learned from a mere Hyaenidae confirmed yet again the nothing he himself still knew.

This thick-necked, coarse-maned creature, with its sloping body and hideously blotched hide, had in a flash been onto something which he, so large, so fierce, so noble, so magnificent, had not even deigned to notice and seemed even now to be making fun of him, at a safe distance outside the cave, its hysterical-sounding laugh echoing through the quiet of the late afternoon.

Roderick, determinedly putting all such taunts, imagined or otherwise, out of his mind, as not worthy of his dignity, fixed his thoughts on the immediate future. What had this newcomer, this Theodosius, brought in this innocent seeming bag? And why had he brought it? Was it food? Why did it smell of fresh blood? If food, why had he left it at the entrance of the cave instead of bringing it in with him? If not food, what? Each of these propositions sought predication in turn in his questing brain without any one of them finding full acceptance.

Would not the simplest thing be just to look? Roderick proceeded to nuzzle at the opening of the bag, whose orificial neck had been tightly tied off with a leather thong. Yes, the first taste confirmed his original supposition, blood, most certainly, delicious too, but, he was almost sure of it, human blood. This new revelation again put his mind in a whirl. What was this kindly-looking old gentleman doing carrying a bag containing human remains? And why had he brought it here? Roderick felt like a traveller newly arrived in a strange country whose habits and customs were unknown to him. No, not yet arrived, still floundering about, approaching alien landfall, hopelessly at sea. These Christians, whom he had felt he was just beginning to get to know, were still to him, he had to admit it, a closed book. But he did not have long to wait for the turning of the pages to begin. The old hermit's hand was at his muzzle, forcing it gently away from this new delicacy which, its firmness told him, was not for him. Roderick was surprised at how little he minded this apparent affront to his autonomy. He did not even really mind the newcomer's lack of fear, no, not lack of fear but total indifference, he had to admit it, to his awesome presence. He was just a little put out by the thought of what his reaction would have been, only yesterday, to such a situation. Both men were standing beside him, concerned now only with the bag which lay at their feet. Theodosius, bending low and reverently gathering it up in both his hands, held it while Joannicius, with infinite care, picked loose the knot which had become slippery and stuck with blood. Then, reaching inside, he drew forth by the hair, in all its uncomeliness, yes, there could be no mistake about it, the unique conjunction of so pimply a face with such a crooked nose was a thing impossible of duplication, the freshly severed head of poor pubescent Justus.

135 Theodosius, this mild-seeming old man, in the most blood-curdling details imaginable, told Joannicius, this hermit, this centurion, who paled nevertheless (though always Roderick wonderingly listened as the newcomer, sotto voce so as not to disturb the children, but a sotto voce, fortunately, that was not this time beyond the range of Roderick's eager hearing), of the terrible death of the unfortunate young man. Roderick was inevitably reminded of a Christian he had once heard rumour of among the wild beasts in the arena who, it was said, talked like a lamb but preached like a lion. He had not understood this simile at the time, but hearing Theodosius expatiating now he could well appreciate the juxtaposition of these two such seemingly irreconcilable opposites. This white-bearded, ovine presence was, when roused by carnage and blood, truly leonine in his awful grandeur. As he lingered over certain parts of his grisly narrative, Roderick could but wonder if his motives were of the purest, only to feel thoroughly ashamed of himself a moment later on looking into his ancient glittering eyes and seeing, reflected in their transparent depths, as it were, not the torment of the torn and abused body he was so lovingly describing but its heavenly transfiguration, clearly visible to him already, in all its glory, attached again to the dripping head his friend (and Roderick had been right, both were former members of the praetorian guard) so reverently held aloft. It seemed that Justus's house had been raided (how the authorities had found out no one seemed to know) while the two doctor brothers who had tended Mamas only the previous evening had been engaged in operating on the rectal fistula of a poor old Christian whom Justus and another boy, a fourteen-year-old from Phrygia, had been attempting to hold firm as he writhed in agony.

The guards had stormed into the room, dragging the two doctors forcibly away, throwing the patient roughly to the floor, laying hands on both adolescent boys, whose tender years, they plainly felt, might make them more amenable to threats of torture. But 'I am a Christian' was all either of them would deign to say. The soldiers, laughing furiously but without mirth, had stripped them and laid them side by side on the bloody operating table, holding them down and forcing their legs wide apart. One grinning man, who had peeled a stalk of bitter vetch to let the stinging juices flow freely, had inserted it into Justus's now considerably elongated urinary tract as far as the bladder, while the tense Phrygian youth's already crescive intumescence was brought to shuddering climax by rough hands. Yet both boys, despite the agony their sinews and muscles, standing out all over their bodies, quite plainly testified to, remained determinedly taciturn. Other, even crueller methods had also been tried. But all to no avail. Eventually, at their wits' end, the soldiers had found the Phrygian youth's younger brother hiding tearfully in a closet and, dragging him forth and forcing him to watch yet further indignities inflicted on both boys, he had broken down completely and told them all they wanted to know. Satisfied, the soldiers had dragged everybody in the house, including the half-dead patient who was still groaning on the floor, to the afternoon games in the arena where, after a public show of brutality that almost outdid the cruelty of the private one and which delighted the large and enthusiastic audience, the two doctors had been crucified and then stoned to death, while the others, being found to be Roman citizens, had been granted the immense honour and privilege of a surcease to all their sufferings by a quick kind blow of the waiting headsman's sword.

136 But the barbaric spectacle had, apparently, been accompanied by many signs and wonders. Roderick, watching the old man's eyes as he spoke, could almost believe that some of them had occurred. When the two doctors had been stoned to death, with a handful of eager archers adding their winged shafts to gain the plaudits of the crowd, many of the stones and not a few of the arrows had inexplicably rebounded, injuring and even killing a considerable number of the soldiers and spectators. Then a brave young girl, who had been burnt alive at the stake, had momentarily silenced the whole multitude by the quiet dignity with which she faced her ultimate ordeal. When Justus and the Phrygian boy had been dragged naked in, more dead than alive, their bodies so abused that they seemed scarcely human, even the most hardened members of the audience drew in their breath, feeling, no doubt, their own mortality in the thought of what a few minutes of torture could do to even such firm healthy young flesh. The whole arena had watched in almost unprecedented silence as the two youths, suddenly seeming to gain some superhuman strength at the last, had stood up straight, on their own, freeing themselves from the grip of the astonished soldiers, blindfolding themselves and kneeling down, stretching out their grateful necks, like lambs to the slaughter, of their own free will unflinchingly awaiting the coup de grâce. As the two heads had been struck off, a threatening cloud, in an otherwise clear blue sky, had suddenly passed in front of the sun, plunging the whole arena into almost total darkness. The spectators were terrified. Some felt the gods were angry with them. Others swore that they saw the sun, before it had disappeared, spinning and dancing in the heavens. All felt that they were in the grip of chthonic forces. The thin veneer of civilisation crumbled in an instant and primordial atavism took corporate possession. Even the soldiers were frozen with horror. One man, however, a keeper of wild animals, who was a secret convert, took advantage of the moment of panic. A good man, though fearful of martyrdom, he had spent an idle youth and had even gone into voluntary exile to escape persecution, but he had returned incognito and had taken his humble appointment in the hope of helping other Christians, if not to escape, at least to die that brave death of which he himself was so terrified. With a woman friend he had founded a house, as yet still flourishing, where Christians could gather for secret worship. Many times he had nearly been discovered, once being forced to spread blood over himself and even to inflict several large wounds, posing as the corpse of a martyr in order to escape detection. He had managed to snatch a few words with poor Justus as they waited outside the arena. Pretending gruff cruelty, for the benefit of the onlookers, he had been privilege to Justus's last gasped request: the wish that his head be taken to Eugenia for burial. Using the darkness and the sudden terror into which the crowd had been plunged, he had made his way into the arena under some pretext or other and had been able, without being observed, to secrete the freshly severed head of Justus in the leathern bag, from which the old hermit had only just now withdrawn it. Then, passing the bag, with a few necessary words of instruction, to Theodosius, who had seen everything, he had returned to his post only just in time to observe the crowd, recovered from their fright with the passing of the cloud, hailing the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of the martyr's head as yet another marvel.

137 Roderick, studying that severed head now, was amazed at the dignity which death had given to the unprepossessing, pimply youth. Held aloft in the darkness by the old hermit, just inside the cave-mouth, a shaft of late sunlight throwing half the face into shadow, the effect was quite extraordinary. All the ugly disfiguring pustules seemed miraculously to have disappeared, as though awkward adolescence had been successfully navigated and manhood fully achieved in those last few hours of revolting barbarity. Even the swarthy complexion had taken on a tone at once sallow and greenish, which lent to the head, in some strange way, an almost painterly beauty. The nose, so prominently out of joint, appeared, in the slanting light, if not straightened out, at least marginally less askew than it had in life. A trickle of blood ran down the chin from the loosely parted lips. The eyes, still half-open, stared sightlessly. Were they looking back, in anger and outrage, or forward, in hope, to some future of which they could barely conceive? Roderick could not tell. Their blank mystery gave nothing away.

Roderick, looking back at this brief life, a life that had nevertheless encompassed dandiacal excesses and worldly pleasures before those two bouts of illness and the death of a beloved sister had brought about a change of heart, wondered if Justus, had he known its terrible end, would have done things differently. Would his zeal have been so great, his charity so bountiful, had he foreseen the horror of those final moments? The horror, most certainly, but the glory also! The silence he had maintained, the finger which he had kept presses tightly to his lips, as it were, in the face of unimaginable outrages to his body, told unmistakably of a soul unbreakable and unbroken. His torturers, the men who had done those things to him, they were the real victims. They, not so much in the performance of their task as in the relish with which they had carried it out (a relish Roderick could well imagine having witnessed only yesterday the unmerciful flogging of Mamas), had fatally compromised their own humanity. Roderick glanced over at Mamas and Eugenia, who were still deep in prayer. The furrows that the lash had made in the flesh of his back were dark now with clotted blood. And the two men who had helped facilitate even this degree of recovery were themselves lying dead in the arena!

Physician heal thyself! Roderick smiled bitterly at this further cruel irony of fate. Yet he marvelled afresh at the recuperative powers of youth. Or was it perhaps of love? Eugenia's love, Roderick felt, had done more for the boy's spiritual malaise than any mere medicinal emollient could hope to do for the physical. And he marvelled also at Mamas himself. This shepherd lad who only this morning had seemed on the point of death was now lost to the probabilities of this world in contemplating the possibilities of another. Roderick imagined him as he might once have been, in the distant hills of his recent childhood, surrounded by his sheep, so lost to the probabilities of that world that they might wander off at will and damage neighbouring vineyards (or other such crops as might be in close proximity) while he knelt at his devotions unaware, so lost in contemplating the possibilities of that other one that, even as he must have been then, in his simple shepherd's attire, even as he was now, kneeling in the late afternoon sun in all his damaged glory, nimbused as it were by the gold of his own body, he seemed to show forth, far finer than any mere words could ever do, the numinousness of that Godhead with Whom he so firmly believed himself to be a co-heir.

138 Roderick's habitual propensity towards ponderation was interrupted by a change in pitch of the monotonous undertone of the two old men. Only his supersensitive ears would have noticed the subtle modulation, yet it was nevertheless there. Roderick's mind returned to the business literally in hand, namely, what to do with the pathetic relic Joannicius still held aloft.

Theodosius had inevitably been reminded of another severed head (that of a martyr of seventeen who had been scourged, burned with flaming torches, hanged upside-down over a fire, had all his teeth knocked out, his jaw broken, had been thrown to lions who merely licked his feet, then tossed over a high cliff and finally had his head cut off) and had been in the process of narrating some other, even more remarkably endured wonders to the old hermit when he had noticed that even his remarkable endurance was at last giving out under the considerable weight of the head it so stoically bore. The question therefore arose, what to do with the headÍž and even more crucially, how to tell Eugenia about the death of her beloved companion. But these considerations had been taken, both literally and metaphorically, out of their hands by the unexpected appearance of Eugenia upon the scene. Soundlessly she had risen, as they had been talking, as if silently called, leaving her devotions and Mamas still deep in prayer and, unobserved, was listening intently to their demonstrably supervacuous debate over her own immediate future. A smile, almost superciliary in its condescension to these two overgrown men-children with their puerile well-meaning chatter, had momentarily crossed her lips. Then she had boldly stepped forward to relieve them, not only of the burden which weighed down their spirits of communicating to her her loss, but also of the merely physical burden under which the old hermit imperceptibly yet incrementally drooped. Taking the head into her own hands from the astonished old man's loosening grasp, she held it effortlessly aloft for a time in the late rays of the setting sun, looking long into the dull lifeless eyes, as though still half-expecting from them at least some delitescent acknowledgement of past intimacies, or even the fugacious glimmer of present familiarity, then, a trifle disappointed perhaps but seemingly well content with the unseeable hope of a future recognisance which she alone glimpsed, she bore it at last lightly into the cave and, finding a loculus which had been roughly cut into the wall, no doubt for some long vanished funerary urn, she reverently deposited the head there and went off in search of water and a cloth. Roderick, Joannicius and Theodosius were all frozen into silent wonderment. Returning in a moment with a dazed Mamas, whom she led by the hand like a small boy, she instructed him in peremptory tones, while he in an almost somnambulistic obedience held a small clay vessel into which she occasionally dipped a rag torn from her own toga. Then, setting about this humblest of tasks calmly, matter-of-factly, she lovingly washed the severed head, wiping away the blood which had blossomed and dried on the dehiscent lips, cleaning off the sand and the dust of the arena, seemingly unaware of the living and dead eyes which seemed nonetheless to be watching her every ministration. Finally, after shutting the lids and nonchalantly removing a small gold comb from her own hair, attempting, albeit unsuccessfully, to brush back from the waxy forehead the unruly curls, as doubtless she had done many times before in life, she stood back, satisfied, like a mother who, having put her child to rest, watches him as he soundly sleeps or dreams.

139 Roderick looked on in amazement. He had heard of, indeed seen for himself, many instances of heroic sanctity as Christians faced their ultimate ordeal in the arena, be it brazen bull or real bull, fiery tar or faggots, whips or rods, a quick death by the sword or a slow and agonising one, with the smaller intestine, duodenum, jejunum and ileum following in turn the greater as it is literally drawn out of the still-living body and relentlessly wound onto a windlass. But never before had he witnessed such love and tenderness displayed over what was, after all, merely a cranial cavity containing those two cerebral hemispheres, the cerebrum and the cerebellum, which, being dead, seemed to him to be of no good whatsoever for anything but food. Eugenia, he conceded, was still as much of a mystery to him as ever. Not so Mamas. Mamas, he felt, he could now well understand. He had observed him carefully as Eugenia was carrying out her protracted task, a task she had performed with scrupulous care, like some corban or lustration. Mamas's somnolescent stare had gradually evaporated as he had watched, leaving him at first appalled, as the full horror of eyes that he had looked into such a short time before now staring blindly back at him fully sank in. This had changed to disgust at what appeared to him, in his own enervated state of necrophobia, Eugenia's wilful necrolatry.

And this in its turn had given way, Roderick, albeit reluctantly, could think of no other words to describe it, to sheer terror. Mamas was, as it were, shaking in his shoes, had he been wearing any. His face, dead white, showed fewer signs of vivacity than that of Justus. He was trembling spasmodically, little muscles twitching out of control all over his body, most especially in the popliteal regions, so that he seemed in imminent danger of collapse. And Justus's head, by its very insentience, had somehow acted upon Mamas's nervous system as a kind of diaphoretic, opening every poral passage in his skin, releasing a sudoriferous flood which gathered in puddles at his feet, looking for all the world as though nature had been forced to find an even more shameful vent for his fear. Roderick saw upon the instant that the head which Mamas now saw before him was his own. But Eugenia saw it too. Occupied as she had been with her task, she had not noticed the radical change in his appearance. Looking up, she let out a little gasp of dismay, dismay perhaps at herself for having neglected the living in favour of the dead, her heart melting at once at this present distress as it had not for an instant done over all Justus's past agony. Taking Mamas by the hand, she led him over to the Good Shepherd who smiled gently down at them from the wall of the cave, whispering into his ear, calming his terror as only she knew how. Roderick, unable to hear a word, nevertheless received the distinct impression that her comfort, far from being sentimental, had about it the steely strength of the girl herself. She was, he felt certain, despite her own tender years, calming, not with talk of safety and security but as a noble mother might comfort the fifteen-year-old boy she knew he still was, as Roderick felt certain she would do again, even in the face of death, in the amphitheatre itself, too soon now, he also felt certain, encouraging him to the last, not only with words but with her own example, beckoning to him to follow her, to endure any torment, suffer any indignity, accept whatever martyrdom God might choose, in the sure hope that it would lead on to that glory which He had also chosen for them, even before the foundations of the world were made.

140 Roderick, tempted beyond endurance like the proverbial Greek youth at a game of kottabos, not to seek his fortune in love but merely to find out if he had been correct, drew silently nearer, smiling to himself with satisfaction, as he caught Eugenia's words, that not one drop of the wine of his conjecture had, as it were, missed the mark, but relentlessly continued to fill the waiting vessel he had so accurately divined. Eugenia was more than fulfilling his wildest expectations. At present her comfort consisted in relating a tale of such savagery that even his taste for the bizarre boundaries of the horrible waned at its excesses. A woman, converted by a famous preacher who devoted most of his time and energy to wandering around the wild hilly country in which she lived, had, after his death on a particularly arduous mission, fled from a particularly brutal wave of persecution with her three-year-old son. But her faith had caught up with her. She had been recognised as a fugitive in the very city where she had sought refuge. Brought before the governor, she had refused to admit anything but the fact of her Christianity. Ordered to be stretched on the rack and then beaten, she had been dragged forcibly away from her son who, frightened and angry, had fought to remain with his mother.

The governor, in an attempt to pacify the child, had taken him onto his knee. But the child, even more terrified, had kicked the governor in the stomach and then scratched his face.

Furious, the governor had flung the struggling infant down a steep flight of marble steps, spilling his milk-white brains out over the pavement. But the mother had not wept. She had merely thanked God for granting her son the crown of a martyr. This had made the governor even angrier. He had decreed that her sides should be ripped apart with hooks, and only then was she beheaded. Later, their remains had been flung outside the city, on the heap of bodies belonging to criminals, but two devout maids had rescued the corpses and buried them in a nearby field. And this pure sacrifice, Eugenia seemed to imply, this three-year-old child with his mother, was it not far preferable to anything they could offer? They had lived far too long already! Had not Mamas, by his own admission, sinned, not only in his heart but also in his flesh? While her sins, Eugenia's direct gaze seemed to insist, were of so vile a nature that only a martyr's death could wipe away their stain. Only if washed in their own blood, which was also the Blood of the Lamb, could they ever hope to be worthy enough to be arrayed in everlasting garments white as snow. And Roderick, watching the reaction of all that she said and all that she left unsaid on Mamas, seeing the pallor leave his face, the muscles cease their fretful twitching, his very frame straighten as if strengthened by her, on the bald face of it, far from encouraging words, words which, nevertheless, in their very calmness of acceptance, bestowed a certain chaste charm upon even the charnel-house, realised, with a sinking of the heart that was, disturbingly, not wholly without its contrary motion, that nothing he could do, short of devouring them both alive, nothing anyone could do or say, be it angel or devil, could ever hope to dissuade them from seeking out that haven they so ardently craved, that place of peace to which they had both, in the past twenty-four hours, so thoroughly earned the right, but which was also, paradoxically, freely given, far indeed (and Roderick could not but laugh as, gladly innumerate, he cheerfully mixed both mythologies and metaphors) from the Scylla and Charybdis of the World, the Flesh and the Devil.

141 Roderick suddenly, inexplicably, thought of Uncle Leo's older brother, Basil. Uncle George, as he had been called in the family, had died when Roderick was quite young, so his memories of him were somewhat vague. But Roderick did distinctly recall the venerable old lion, whose mane was quite white, who walked with a slight limp after an accident to his hip while playing as a cub, who was respected by the whole pride for his wisdom and learning, for his holiness of life, yet was never rigorous, never too pompous or preoccupied to take time off to play with the young lions, whom he particularly loved, stooping down one day and taking him up by the loose folds of skin at the back of the neck. He had proudly shown his new young nephew around to various members of the pride, then carried him down to the bank of the river, pretending to lose his grip for a moment, almost dropping him, or so it seemed, into the swiftly flowing current. Yet Roderick had not for a moment been afraid. He had felt so safe, so secure, held firmly but gently in those terrible jaws, that the mere thought of it, even today, calmed and comforted him, made him look out again at the world with the eyes of the cub he had then been. When Uncle George was dying, he remembered the sorrow of the whole pride, a grief both greater and less than that of the immediate family, but most vividly he remembered Uncle George himself, his quite dignity in the face of death, his calm but firm insistence that, above all, he wanted no fuss. Roderick, nonplussed for just a moment by the sudden intrusion into his usually rigorous chain of thought of this apparent non-sequitur, this nonpareil of an uncle who had died so many years ago, nevertheless found himself tracing a way back without recourse to clew through the lucid maze of his mind and with little real difficulty soon managed to disclose the elusive link. Scylla and Charybdis were, of course, the affectionate if somewhat disrespectful sobriquets coined by his mother for Uncle Leo and Uncle GeorgeÍž alternatives, he later found out, not of evil and disaster but of two different ways of life, ways of thoughtÍž the way of constant questioning and inquiry and the way of simple acceptance and of faith.

Roderick marvelled a little at the speed with which his own horizons seemed to be expanding, smiling to himself yet again but unable this time to avoid a trace of bitterness. Were not the two ways, after all, really the same? Did they not both lead, in the end, to evil and disaster?

Were not the expanding horizons he had only just now been marvelling at contracting and narrowing into a single path they would all at the last be forced to take? Uncle Leo and Uncle George had gone that way already. As had his mother. Poor Justus had joined them. And Eugenia, Roderick felt certain, had reached the catastasis of the meagre drama that had been her life and was preparing for the catastrophe in the only way she knew how, by encouraging Mamas yet again with further fanciful romantic tales of distant martyrdom, of rivers retreating to let the martyr pass dry-shod, springs bubbling up to quench his thirst on the flowery hill of his execution, of executioners who declined the task being themselves martyred, executioners who did not having both eyes drop out as they dealt the fatal blow, all those fond foolish fables with which she still attempted to embroider the single inescapable fact of death, make acceptable, even desirable, to Mamas and perhaps even more importantly herself, that Cross she had for so long been convinced she above all others wanted and in whose ultimate Triumph, both for herself and Mamas, she undoubtedly still believed.

142 Roderick looked around him. Just outside the mouth of the cave the sun, huge and red on the horizon, seemed to be watching them from the distorting heavens like an enormous eye as it prepared to sink out of sight. Its sanguine glow flooded the whole interior with a garish light. Joannicius and Theodosius stood near the entrance, silent now and merely observing Mamas and Eugenia as they conversed on heavenly things. Yes, there was no two ways about it, the bright day was done, and they were for the dark. Roderick freely acknowledged this.

Yet even as he did so he noted that the sun, hovering just above the horizon, seemed to refuse to set. Its bronze disc still hung there, reverberating throughout the cave, as though an actual cymbal had been struck somewhere in the heavens and its echoing sound, transformed into pure light, continued to shed its immortal beams upon them, could never be done until the world itself was done. Roderick puzzled over this apparent phenomenon until at length it came to him. Of course. Today was their summer solstice. A curious fancy gradually took possession of his soul. The sun, in its disinterested solstitial calculations, had simply taken the word at its word, had been made to stand, as it were, as it touched the tropic of Cancer and was simply waiting for who could say what higher orders before continuing its inevitable progression so that night might be fully accomplished. But Roderick, even as he smiled at his own conceit, recognised the core of truth which it contained. Of course the sun must set, of course they must all go their various ways, some to life, others to death. But somehow this longest day which they had shared together in this particular cave had made of them, as it were, People of the SolsticeÍž people who, no matter what future might lay in wait for them, what unforeseen destiny, would in a very real sense never leave this cave, would always be here, as they were now, no matter how hard life might make them run to whatever distant point in space or time, no matter how firmly fate might draw back the bowstring of their existenceÍž their souls were wedded, Roderick knew, to this moment and place forever. Mamas would be always as full as he was now of this same enthusiasm, would eternally call out to the young of whatever century or clime by his life and if need be his death, as Eugenia would always encourage his failing soul to even greater heights of sanctity. Poor Justus would be here too, all the pity and terror of his death forgotten in the strange peace which seemed to have descended upon his head as Eugenia had shut the eyelids and washed away the blood. And how could Joannicius and Theodosius ever leave the tableau - a tableau which Roderick knew, even without the aid of hindsight, must be eternally vivant - of which they were so integral a part? And what of Roderick himself? Roderick, in a sudden blinding flash of insight, understood, as if for the first time, that he was here merely as a witness, understood that all of the embroidery which the hagiographers employed, those things which just moments before he himself had thought of as fond foolish fables or fanciful romantic tales, were in fact only poor fumbling attempts to account for, metaphors by which they sought to explain, things far more romantic, far more fabulous, than they could ever hope to dream of, things homely, commonplace, yet somehow transcendent, things belonging to the real world yet utterly transfiguring it, in short, those thing that he had been elected to witness, here, today, in this cave from which the sun must soon go yet would never depart.

143 Roderick, Mamas, Eugenia, Joannicius, Theodosius, even poor Justus, stood for a moment alone, as it were, on the heart of the earth, transfixed by a shaft of sunlight: and suddenly it was evening. The sun was gone, as if forced by the rubato of its hesitation to hasten its fugacious journey downward into night. Ichabod, most certainly, but not without the hope of Immanuel. And everyone seemed to sense with what urgency that moment of stolen time demanded to be repaid. All, as if by common consent, went about the tasks which fate had appointed for them. Only Roderick, and Justus's head, appeared to be at a loss. Until that is Eugenia, after taking up the head and pressing her lips for an instant to the livid dead ones, carried it across to the entrance of the cave and, laying it down on the stony ground outside, crouched beside it, in a patiently futile attempt to scrape away the refractory surface with her fingernails. Only then did Roderick understand what his own particular task was to be.

Intransigence, and its implacable opposition, be it of the animal, vegetable or mineral variety, whether ibex, cactus, or impacted earth, was a subject upon which he particularly prided himself. He had therefore, before long, amid clouds of dust which his delighted claws made into a sandstorm of their own more than rivalling the desert's earlier feeble efforts, excavated a grave, big enough for considerably more of Justus's remains than were at present to hand and deep enough to keep the alluring smell from the enquiring nose of any passing hyena.

If the head decayed at all, that is! Already more than a little of the once despised hagiographer was stirring in Roderick's soul. What if, some sixteen years hence (and by sixteen he also meant sixteen months or sixteen hundred years), some future relic-hunter should disinter the head and find, not mouldering flesh and corruption but the whole thing intact, recognisable, with even the wounds, perhaps, miraculously healed by that process of time which should, in normal circumstances, have done quite the opposite? But these metaphysical speculations were interrupted by the more pressing physical need to bury that precious burden which Eugenia had already so lovingly yet dispassionately deposited. Roderick did not even really mind being one of the dead, as it were, who are left to bury the dead, so far had he travelled and in such a short time. And by keeping busy he could keep his mind off those things for which he was being kept busy. But not for long. The grave was soon completed. Satisfied he padded down the last traces of disturbance with his paws. Eugenia, strangely calm, knelt for a moment in an almost cursory manner, then standing, abstractedly dusted her gown, as though the dust which the grave contained was no longer that of a beloved friend but merely dust, to be shaken from her sandals, as it were, and left forever behind her. And Roderick realised, watching her there as Mamas draw near after tying up any loose ends of his own which had needed to be tied, that, although not fit himself to fasten the straps of their sandals, he had been seen fit to witness the mystical marriage, as it were, of this brother and sister in heaven, to see its chaste consummation in this cave, and was now being granted the immense privilege of sensing the child which had thus been conceived between them leaping for joy in her womb at its father's approach, a child calumniated in all ages, by all peoples and in all climes, but which here, in this particular place and at this particular time, trailed after it those clouds of glory and promise always associated with parturition, that child ill-thought of, death.

144 Roderick could but watch the last minute preparations for departure. Now that things had been tacitly agreed between them, Mamas and Eugenia seemed anxious to be off.

Joannicius and Theodosius silently concurred. But Theodosius had also made it clear that none of them could safely remain here, now that their cover, as it were, had been blown. Soldiers would arrive by tomorrow afternoon, at the very latest. But the old hermit had little to pack, despite his long years of residence. Roderick sensed his sorrow at leaving, but nothing showed in the stoical face of the old soldier. Not even when Eugenia, in a last luxurious indulgence of feeling before setting her face like flint toward the future, buried her head in his chest and wept.

He merely called Mamas over, who, doing likewise but without tears, remained with the girl a long time at his side, both drawing strength for their ordeal to come from this old man who had suffered so much for his faith and was quite willing to let them suffer also and to suffer still more himself. But even farewells must end, or they would not be farewells. Eugenia and Mamas though did not forget Roderick. At the very last, just before being led away through the deepening shades by an equally impassive Theodosius, back to the city from which they had come - was it only yesterday? - Eugenia had flung both arms around Roderick's neck and smothered his face with kisses, an action which would, at any other time, have embarrassed him severely but which, at this particular time, seemed not only well done but fitting. Mamas merely placed a hand on his mane and rested a thigh against his earÍž a thigh in which Roderick fancied he could hear, not only the fear in the beating of the blood as it coursed through familiar veins which it knew would soon be drained dry, but also a strength, a determination, which bravely reassured him of its continuing circulation, up to the point of death and, perhaps, somewhere, somehow, beyond. Then Roderick was standing at the mouth of the cave with Joannicius beside him, watching the two children disappearing into the dark, guided away by an even more tenebrous Theodosius. Roderick felt the old hermit's hand on his head, hard, unyielding, without any apparent pulse, almost as if the blood had dried up at its source and only a cracked river-bed of veins remained where once human warmth had flowed. But he was, he knew, being fanciful. And who was he to judge? The blood in his own veins barely liquefied, to keep time with his sluggish heart. He nevertheless turned away, not in disgust but because he felt so very tired, retreating alone to one of the farthest recesses of the cave. There, with only a few snakes, whom he suddenly, inexplicably found to be not at all unpleasant company, he eventually settled down, listening to their occasional hissing and to the distant sound of a storm which, rumbling ominously outside, seemed always to be on the point of yet not quite able to manage to break into even a local shower, much else a full downpour. Then at last weariness overcame him.

The old hermit stood at the entrance of the cave, the rain running down his face.

Meanwhile, at the back of the cave, Roderick was sleeping again.

Come off it, old man! How the hell do I know what the lion was dreaming about!

145 And that is all the information that can be definitively ascertained. There does exist, in a very fragmentary state, a letter, apparently by a young woman to her parents, explaining to them her reasons for becoming a Christian and asking their forgiveness for the suffering she has caused them. Scholars have pondered over her use of the phrase os homini sublime dedit caelumque tueri jussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus, some even considering the letter a forgery from a later period, thinking it unlikely that a young Christian convert of that time would quote from a pagan source. But who are we to say? Did not a great Christian writer of the 2nd Century speak of those things, admittedly Christian things, which he kept, not on paper but in his heart, 'for' as he puts it, 'the things we learned in childhood are part of our soul.' Had she not been brought up a pagan? And was she not writing, albeit from a Christian standpoint, to pagan parents? How better to help them understand than to quote from a beloved pagan poet, a point of reference that they could share? Be that as it may, the letter concludes with a hint of further sorrows to come for her parents, which most scholars have agreed is a veiled reference to the martyrdom she was seeking. But did she gain her crown? We know of a St Eugenia, who is buried in Rome in the cemetery of Apronian on the Via Latina and whose feast falls on the 25th of December, but legend tells us she ended up in male attire as Abbot of a monastery in Egypt! Her dates are unknown. We know of a St Mamas, who was martyred in 274 in Caesarea in Cappadocia under the persecution of Aurelian and who is venerated by the Greek Church on August 17th. The legend tells of wild animals unwilling to touch him, of his eventual stoning to death while still scarcely more than a boy. We know of at least two Sts Justus: one, celebrated on October 18th, a young boy who was killed by Roman soldiers during the reign of Diocletian, somewhere between Beauvais and Senlis, for concealing the hiding place of Christians and after whom the town of Saint­Just­en­Chaussée is named; the other, a patron saint of Alcala and Madrid, who, when just 13 years old, was savagely flogged and then beheaded along with another boy, Pastor, only 9, just outside Alcala, when Dacian's persecution had reached Spain in 304. Their bodies were later buried by fellow Christians. We know of a Joannicius, born in Bithynia in 754, who served as a soldier in the Byzantine army, seeing active service against the Bulgars, but who repented at 40 and became a monk and hermit on Bithynian Olympus, dying at Antidium in 846 when over 90 years of age. His feast is February 4th. And we know of Theodosius the Cenobiarch, born in Cappadocia in 423, who at 30 became Abbot of a small community of monks in Palestine and died near Bethlehem in 529 at more than 105 years old. But most or all of these revered saints lived in different countries and at different epochs of our Christian era. How then could they have known or aided one another? Yet most or all of these names were, or were later to became, common names. Hence the perpetual possibility of our saints meeting and mingling, in that particular place and at that particular time, which is after all every place and every time, in that particular cave where, if the sun can, even for a moment, stop, why then should not they have spent together, not one day but a lifetime in one day, a day in which Ash Wednesday can in the blinking of an eye become the summer solstice, where the ordinary everyday laws of time and space, as Roderick instinctively realised, do not apply!

146 And what of Roderick himself? Here the mystery deepens. So many legends and folk-tales exist. We know that St Jerome, when he left Rome after the death of Pope St Damasus in 384, settled at Bethlehem with Paula and Eustochium, a mother and daughter who had followed him, and there completed his translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, in 404, which the Pope had first commissioned. His emblem in art is a lion. Some reports suggest that this lion, after Jerome's death in 420, returned to his pride and there translated the whole work into Lyonnaise. But Jerome's Latin name, Eusebius Hieronymus, is also thought to have led to the confusion of the saint with St Gerasimos, an abbot from Lycia, who left Asia Minor for Egypt and Palestine and settled near the Dead Sea, establishing a laura near Jericho in 455.

He also attracted many followers. His feast is the 5th of March. A legend exists of his extracting a thorn from a lion's paw and of the grateful beast, whom he named Jordan, being taught to fetch and carry for the monks. When the saint died, in 475, the disconsolate lion is said to have sat by his grave and pined away with sorrow. This saint's emblem in art is, naturally enough, also a lionÍž a lion, some think, expropriated by hagiographers for St Jerome.

But Jerome's death preceded his by some 55 years. Yet Jerome did say: 'Plato located the soul of man in the head, Christ located it in the heart.' The head tells us things are impossibleÍž the heart believes that all things are possible. In the Lernaean swamp of the past the Hydra of time can grow many heads. And many hearts. Thus a third century limousine bishop can become, during the course of the centuries, the boy who fetched loaves and fishes for their miraculous multiplication and who later became a disciple sent by St Peter to Gaul where, with the aid of his staff, he raised boys from the dead, struck blind pagan priests who opposed him, and to whom a young Christian girl whose head her pagan fiancĂŠ had struck off carried that head in her arms before falling dead at his feet. Preposterous? Of course! As no doubt is the unreliable report which has come down to us of the skeleton of a lion being found in a cave with that of an old man, the cause of death in both cases been unknown and unknowable. And the perhaps more reliable account existing alongside it of a lion who, having left his pride to seek adventure, returned one day without any fuss and simply took up his place again, a lion who, it was rumoured, had either consorted with John the Baptist in the wilderness or killed and eaten Christians in the arena, no one was quite sure which, who had disappeared for a time and suddenly reappeared, without anyone knowing where he had been, who never talked about his experiences but who, in the nature of things, by his suppositional experiences being talked about, became a sort of mentor among the young for whom he always had time, a wise counsellor to whom they listened, in the hope perhaps of hearing some story of his adventures but listened nevertheless, a thing they may not so readily have done had he been more forthcoming, and who in his old age became the most loved and respected lion of the pride, not so much for his learning, which was considerable if somewhat random, not for his knowledge of Latin, which was vast but similarly erratic, not even for his capacity for scientific enquiry, which somewhat unusually went alongside a spiritual profundity that no one ever quite plumbed, but for his ability, as he picked up a young cub by the back of the neck and playfully dangled him over dangerous waters, to be, quite simply, himself.