To that serville phalanx of rabbits that lurks in the broken cargo of Chorazin over a wide extent of country, the KING. Himself defenceless, spoke smiling…
R. G.]
Thistles of controversy, coney-burrows,
Injured the fanning of our frontier lands:
No more the Roman sword with straight plough-furrows
Securely drove through all marauding bands.
Soon rabbits everywhere swarmed over-ground -
Constantine took to him a rabbit bride,
A white scut to his purple back he bound
And two long ears exchanged for laurel pride.
Rabbitopolitans, long sunk in shame,
You bribe the fox, the ferrets and the stoats
To constable your warren in Rome's name:
So blood spurts frequent from your furry throats.
The next morning my mistress was thoughtful and silent, and I asked her at last what was on her mind.
She replied: 'Did you notice that boy Belisarius? Last night after the banquet he declared his love for me.'
'There was surely no harm in that, was there, Mistress?' I asked.
'Such a strange declaration! Eugenius, imagine, he spoke of marrying me if I would have the patience to wait for him, and meanwhile he would look at no other woman. A boy of fourteen, indeed! Yet somehow I could not laugh.'
'How did you answer him?'
'I asked him whether he realized who I was – a public entertainer, a charioteer's daughter, a Megaraean Sphinx – and his answer was: "Yes, a pearl from the muddy mussel." He was evidently unaware that marriage between a man of his rank and a woman of my profession is forbidden by law. I did not know what to answer the poor fellow. I could not even kiss him. It was a foolish situation.'
'And now you are weeping, Mistress. That is more foolish still.'
'Oh, Eugenius, sometimes I wish I were dead!' she cried.
However, the melancholy fit soon passed when we were back again in Constantinople.
*
The story of how I had come to be in attendance on the dancing-girl Antonina, my mistress.
There was a Syrian merchant from Acre, by name Barak, and his trade was in Christian relics. If any of these relics happened to be genuine, it was accidental, since I cannot remember that he ever handled any object for which he had to pay a fancy price. His chief talent lay in investing a worthless object with a spurious sanctity. For example, on a voyage to Ireland he carried with him a relic which he confidently ascribed to St Sebastian, martyred under Diocletian. It was a worn-out old military boot (appropriate because Sebastian had been an Army captain) picked up from the roadside in a suburb of Alexandria. Barak had been to the trouble of drawing out the rusty nails from the boot-heel and replacing them with golden ones, and lacing the uppers with purple silk cords, and finding a crimson-lined cedar-wood casket to hold this fine relic. He also brought with him the harsh, heavy loin-cloth of St John the Baptist, enclosed in a casket of silver and crystal. It was made not from linen but from asbestos, a substance which can be shredded and woven into a rough, fire-proof cloth. To the ignorant Irish it was an undeniable miracle that this loincloth could be passed through a fierce fire without cither changing colour or crumbling away. He also had with him the jewel-cncrustcd shin-bone of the martyred St Stephen; and the backbone of a sliark, its vertebrae bound together with gold wire, which he said was the backbone of the giant Goliath whom David killed; and a rounded piece of rock-salt, mounted in silver, which was supposedly the forearm of Lot's wife; and many other such wonders. The ricluicss of the settings seemed to prove the objects themselves authentic, and he had with him parchment letters of testimony from Eastern bishops, recounting at length the miracles of healing which these relics had already effected. All the letters were forged. The Irish petty kings paid enormous sums to secure these treasures, and genuine miracles were soon reported from the churches where they were stored.
Barak returned by way of Cornwall, the extreme western cape of Britain, and touched at the Channel Islands, where he bought me, a six-year-old boy, from a captain of Saxon pirates. My name was Goronwy, the son of Geraint, who was a British nobleman. The Saxons had carried me oft, together with my young nurse, in a sudden landing in the Severn estuary. I remember the grey, yellow-licheiicd keep of my father's castle, and my father himself as a grave, black-bearded man dressed in a speckled cloak and saffron-dyed trews and wearing a chain of gold and amber about his neck; and I remember the harpers in the rush-strewn hall, and even some fragments of the ballads that they sang.
