The Roses of Picardie

by Simon Raven

  This consideration induced Theta to offer Len his expenses (gratefully accepted) for his new journey, and to order Q to procure him an instant flight direct to Crete. Q accordingly rang up an airline which was operating a charter flight for late holidaymakers that very afternoon. On being told the flight was fully booked, to say nothing of thirty passengers on the waiting-list, Q reminded the manager that his concession was very shortly due for official renewal by the Government which Q had the honour to serve. A fifty-year-old nursing sister, who had scraped to pay for her fortnight in Crete for the last nine months and had dreamed of nothing else for the last six, was therefore thrown off the flight and Len was thrust into her seat.

  This suited him excellently. Things were proceeding in the precise order he had planned. With any luck he could be through with the Kyrios Pandelios that very evening and off to Kalamata the next morning. It was a pity Theta would be expecting him back with the notes almost at once; but he could excuse any delay of up to (say) a week by pretending that Pandelios had not been at home in Heracleion, having gone away on business and having (for good measure) lied about his destination to his wife. And so, well equipped with a fresh overnight bag from Jermyn Street and his letter of credit from Balbo to Pandelios, Len lifted blithely off into the empyrean and followed his fortune to Crete.

  ‘So,’ said Q to Theta: ‘one pair of Blakeney’s used socks, one slightly bloodied piece of Elastoplast, and some ten strands of hair from his comb. What now?’

  Theta shrugged blandly.

  ‘These items could make up a message,’ said Lambda, ‘to the – er – denizens of the tombs. “This king has lost his Godhead. Here is your evidence. Go to him”.’

  ‘They will require to know which King – there must be several scattered over the earth – and where he is.’

  ‘They will trust others to find out for them. They themselves, I hazard, will be concerned only with one thing: getting out to join the hunt, so that each may have a share, however small, of the sacred victim.’

  ‘Still sacred although now deprived of his numen?’

  ‘Residually sacred, one might say. As to that, I am quite confident. These creatures have always, when possible, devoured their God Kings when the Sign left them. This, I admit, was only discovered recently, but it now has all the force of a law.’

  ‘Providing this new strain behaves like the old ones.’

  ‘We shall have to assume that it will,’ said Lambda, ‘or simply admit defeat.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Theta. ‘How shall we proceed?’

  ‘These relics of Blakeney’s,’ said Lambda, ‘are losing whatever virtue they have with every hour that passes. We must bring forward Operation Falx; it must happen no later than the beginning of next week.’

  ‘But how,’ said Q, ‘will this new way work?’

  ‘At the beginning of the operation, instead of producing Blakeney himself to urge them out, we deliver this message. We place it in an obvious place where it will be easy for them to find and read it. In the Crypt.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Theta, ‘we just leave these socks and the rest on the floor of the Crypt…for them to sniff at?’

  ‘Just that. Near one of the tombs they are infesting. The Dean has been warned that the crypt and the South-West Transept must be cleared for Falx, I think?’

  ‘Yes. The South-West Transept will be needed as a communications centre and the Crypt will be closed…for obvious reasons. But we do not want to cause popular curiosity or resentment by closing the whole Cathedral at the same time as we are closing Dover Castle. Since it is not thought that…er…they…will make their exit through the main body of the Cathedral, we propose to admit the public as usual.’

  ‘Very good. Simply warn the Dean that the date has been changed. Ditto the Brigade Commander.’

  ‘He won’t like it.’

  ‘He’ll have to. We have the necessary priority. So we post the troops as previously planned, and deliver our message. If our theory is correct,’ Lambda said, with (Theta thought) a somewhat brittle confidence, ‘they will be so eager to devour their God and King that they will at once leave the Cathedral – by the known routes, the routes by which we have now learned that they came in and perish in the attempt.’

  ‘And if they don’t all perish?’ said Theta.

  ‘Then presumably they will pursue their original intention,’ said Lambda. ‘Since Blakeney is with Jones in Arles –’

  ‘En route, now, for Italy,’ said Q. ‘He telephoned in at lunchtime –’

  ‘– In any case a very long way off. I don’t think we need worry about him.’

  ‘In any event,’ said Q, ‘we have no choice. If left to their devices, those creatures will undermine the foundations and reduce the Cathedral to a rubble inside months. The only possible way of getting them out is to use this bait unwittingly produced by Blakeney, and you tell us’ – he turned to Lambda – ‘that is it losing its efficacy every minute.’

  ‘That at least is beyond doubt.’

  ‘Then the thing is quite clear,’ Theta pronounced. ‘We must warn the Dean and alert the Brigadier: Operation Falx is brought forward to the day after tomorrow at dawn.’

  ‘“And so it came about”,’ Balbo Blakeney translated from the red exercise book, ‘“that Alexander, or Iskander as he was known in the tongue of that region, took to his heart and his bed the Egyptian boy Arphisses, son of Maeris, of Egyptian Thebes. And for all the boy was of noble birth, his parents thought that Iskander did them honour, to pick a companion from their family, the more so as the boy (being then thirteen years of age) was designated a Page of the Household.

  ‘“It is difficult to trace, with precision, the events which passed in the two years during which Arphisses remained with his Imperial Lover. We can affirm, however, and this on the boy’s own showing later, that the years were happy for him. Be this as it may, the time arrived when Alexander, about to undertake a campaign, more arduous than any yet, into India, decided that Arphisses was too delicate in health to accompany him. He bade him farewell in friendship and in honour; and as a gift of parting, gave him a present of twelve fine Rubies, which he had had out of the Great King’s treasure when he overthrew him. (The King’s treasure had told him that the Rubies came from a land beyond India where the soil of the river beds yielded them abundantly, and Iskander had determined that one day he would venture to this land; yet death undid him before.)

  ‘“To escort Arphisses home across the deserts to Thebes in Egypt, Iskander appointed a mounted bodyguard of ten men. But of these five fell into a fatal fever from drinking foul water in the stews of Babylon, and soon after the other five were overrun by bandits on the King’s Road (in caring for which Iskander, with his eyes turned to the East, had lately been somewhat neglectful). The boy Arphisses, being now fifteen years of age and of a rare and tender loveliness, was eventually sold to Noah, a Jew of Joppa, who had been riding home with his caravan from Byzantium and had chanced in Ephesus on the day Arphisses was put up for sale there. This Noah was much moved by the boy’s beauty, and was most amorous of him; yet would not fondle or possess him until his foreskin had been cut in the Jewish fashion, holding him to be unclean until this item of flesh were shorn away.” ’

  ‘Really, you Jews,’ said Marigold to Jacquiz. ‘What a fuss about nothing.’

  ‘I do believe,’ said Jacquiz, ignoring this, ‘that they have at last finished the stretch of autoroute above Nice.’ He peered through the windscreen. ‘No,’ he said sadly, ‘we’re being sent off by the usual turning. It’s the same every time. One thinks they must have completed the autoroute to bypass Nice, it’s the only section for hundreds of miles either way that wasn’t finished years ago…and there it still is, all cranes and piles of concrete, and a traffic jam waiting in the Promenade des Anglais.’

  ‘It’s the Jews who are queering the thing,’ said Marigold contentiously. ‘All those Jews in Nice who want the tourists to come through the town and be skinned th
ere.’

  ‘I didn’t know there were many Jews in Nice.’

  ‘Russian ones,’ said Balbo.

  ‘Let’s hear more about this old bastard in Joppa,’ Sydney Jones said.

  ‘“When Noah’s caravan reached Joppa”,’ Balbo read on, ‘“Noah engaged a Rabbi to come and cut Arphisses his foreskin, but he was then beset by the pleas of his twin children, David and Rebecca, who were of an age with Arphisses and also of a Hellenized fashion of mind (as were many of the young in the Israel of that time). They represented to their father that circumcision would spoil the lad’s beauty, and they begged Noah to spare Arphisses, whom already they loved as a brother”.’

  ‘Now this is interesting,’ said Jacquiz. ‘We know that young Jews of the Hellenistic period infuriated the Rabbis by exercising naked in the Greek manner and some of them even wore artificial foreskins to complete their illusion of being Greek. And of course for aesthetic reasons, which would seem to have been the twins’ attitude here.’

  ‘I do see,’ said Marigold. ‘Can you imagine a Greek statue with a circumcised cock?’

  ‘Arphisses was Egyptian, so perhaps he didn’t mind.’

  ‘He minded like hell, at any rate at first,’ said Balbo. ‘“For a time Arphisses and the twins, who cherished him more each day, persuaded Noah to put off the Rabbi’s visit. But then Noah said that he must fondle the boy or die, and fondle him he could not while he carried his impure appendage; and he again summoned the Rabbi. And Arphisses, who was beholden to Noah for much kindness, and for receiving him into his household as his birth did warrant, sadly yielded and consented to the surgery.

  ‘“Now this Rabbi, guessing Noah’s intention with the boy and holding such courses of pleasure to be against the Jewish Law, did deliberately cut Arphisses savagely and with an unclean knife, wishing thereby to mar and infect him and render his manly parts an object of disgust to Noah, that he might no longer lust for them.

  ‘“But the Rabbi wrought more than he had designed. Not only did he raise a putrid sore where he had cut the boy, but he poisoned all his blood, so that Arphisses sickened to death. And as he lay dying, he bade David and Rebecca, the children of Noah, search through his hair, where they would find knotted into tufts and pleats the twelve fine Rubies which he had had from Iskander and had hidden in this wise, before ever he left Iskander’s Court, for safety’s sake. So David and Rebecca disentangled them from his hair; and when the twelve red, glistering jewels lay before him on the cover of his couch, Arphisses said: ‘“‘My master, Iskander, would have it that stones of Ruby bring wealth and happiness; yet these have brought but little to me. And so I call you to witness my last will in these matters, ye that have loved me and whom I have loved, for the brief time that Fate and Necessity have given me to be with you: from henceforth, whosoever shall possess these stones, let him have joy from them, for the two years of joy which I had with their giver and for the love with which Iskander gave them; but let him have pain and grief from them too, for the pain and grief I suffer now. And may this grief and pain be greatest when the stones come into the hands of Jews, for it is by the hand of a Jew that I am so sorely stricken now. And should my will and my words be disdained and forgotten, let the Rubies turn to baubles of coloured glass.’

  ‘“The twins bore witness to their friend’s prayer, of which they told their father after Arphisses was dead, urging him to sell the jewels or even give them away, rather than keep them, with Arphisses his Curse, within the family. But Noah did not heed them and for a time he flourished. But after the moon had waxed and waned some seven times, Rebecca said to her brother David, ‘Our father has had joy from these Rubies, as Arphisses wished all that owned them should have; but our father has yet to feel the pain and grief which Arphisses wished in his Curse, and most urgently against the Jews. You and I must ensure that our friend’s will be done. Were we not called to witness? Are we not thereby bound to Arphisses his service?’ And David agreed they were so bound, and moreover that their father deserved to be most mightily chastised for that he had caused Arphisses to be maimed in the furtherance of his own lust.

  ‘“So they poisoned their father slowly, day by day, with noxious herbs ground into his potage, thus giving him grievous agony; and they sold the jewels to a certain merchant; and being now orphans, they left their father’s house, subsisting on the money they had for the Rubies, and evermore went about the world enforcing the Curse made by their friend Arphisses on those that should possess the stones. They inflicted great sorrow on the merchant to whom they themselves had sold them (by causing his son to be tainted with leprosy, by clothing him, when he was drunk, in a leper’s garment); they brought lameness and mutilation on to the nephew of the merchant, to whom in time the stones did pass, and barrenness upon his wife, and the falling sickness upon her maid-servant, who stole them and fled away with them. And so, wherever the jewels went, went good fortune and then evil, both being inflicted, in some sort, by the Guardian Twins of the Rubies, who reward and punish, as seemeth to them meet, for the love they bore to Arphisses, wielding the Curse most cruelly against the Jews (albeit they were born Jews themselves); for they were ever mindful of the wanton crime of the Jew their father, and the vile bigotry and treachery of the Rabbi that wounded their friend.”

  ‘There follows,’ said Balbo, ‘a long note.’ He flipped over the pages. ‘It is signed Bernard Comminges, who purports to have written it after he had made his translation of the above from the original Greek of Hermogenes. Shall I read it?’

  ‘Exhausting, all this being read to,’ said Marigold faintly.

  ‘Treasure-hunting,’ said Jacquiz, ‘is an exhausting business. And worse, perhaps.’

  ‘Read it,’ said Jones, S.

  ‘“It is the work of the Guardian Twins which we read of down the ages. They it was who, by whispering rumours in the ears of the soldiery, brought about the butchery of the Jew of Antioch, whose own curse means nothing because it was made some 1300 years after the first and true Curse of Arphisses the Egyptian Catamite, They, the Guardian Twins, intrigued to enrich and then undo the first Marquis de Maubeuge, and the Comtes de la Tour d’Abbéville who came after him; they gave Constance Fauvrelle her escape from the plague in Montreuil, but at the price of marriage to a base man from whom she had no refuge even after his death; they made André Comminges a prosperous privateer but killed or crazed his children; they made the Comminges rich in Arles but also inflicted disease and misery upon them, as they have upon me up to this day; and they tore to pieces Clovis du Touquet, when I wished to pass the Roses on to him.

  ‘“All this I know because the Twins, David and Rebecca, who live in my house and pass as my nephew and niece, have given me a full account, far fuller than I render here. Such of it as I have written here, I swear to be the truth. (Signed) Bernard Comminges, Canon Resident of the Cathedral of St Trophîme.” ’

  For a long time there was absolute silence. An Italian face came through Jacquiz’ window and asked for their passports. Without a word they all passed theirs over, and without a word received them back.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Jacquiz at last, as they entered the first tunnel on the Italian side of the border, ‘those two did say to me this morning that they were called David and Rebecca.’

  ‘People do not live over two thousand years,’ said Marigold crossly. ‘And another thing. There is gross inconsistency here. The Canon told us yesterday morning, and more or less repeated at that séance thing, that he was trying to rid himself of the curse of the Jew of Antioch by finding out his true heirs in order to give them the Roses. And now here he is, telling a completely different tale. A totally different curse, and two officious adolescents, who apparently stopped growing when Alexander was invading India, to enforce it. If we are to believe any of that, what possible meaning could last night’s performance have had?’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Syd Jones, ‘that His Reverence told the one story, and though this new one was apparently written by
him, it’s the children who want us to know it, because it’s the children who gave the exercise book, along with the family tree, to Jacquiz here…and were waiting in the Cloister, it seems, for just that very purpose.’

  ‘So,’ said Marigold, ‘we deduce that the Canon had one plan for us, while the children, though pretending to go along with him, in fact had another. And when the time was ripe they bumped the old fellow off somehow and left us to cope with the cadaver…presumably knowing that we were bound to spot that chart on his tummy. It looks as though they’re trying to give us the come-on – to guide us, for whatever reason, to where the jewels are hidden. And at the same time they politely provide this rather unnerving account, translated from the Greek and then transcribed by the Canon, on oath, from their own utterance, of the very peculiar creatures whom they claim to be…an account,’ said Marigold, ‘which has to be rubbish. Anyhow, those two don’t look Jewy, not in the least.’

  ‘Not all Jews look Jewy,’ Jacquiz said. ‘I had a cousin who kept wicket for Oxford. You’d never have rumbled him.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Marigold, going off on another tack, ‘there is one connection between last night’s conjuring show and today’s hot story. We did have the Jew of Antioch, last night, squealing away about “Iskandrou Paidika”, presumably meaning that boy we’ve just been hearing of. So I suppose the Jew of Antioch was trying to tell us it wasn’t his fault, it was this Arphisses to blame. But why did anyone go to the trouble of faking up that scene? The Canon wanted us to believe that the curse came from the Jew of Antioch, and the twins were planning to let us know about the Catamite by giving us that exercise book later. So who brought the Jew on to spill the beans, and why?’

  ‘Two things are plain to me,’ Jacquiz said: ‘first, whoever or whatever those children are, they are resourceful and dangerous. And secondly: they have some purpose for us. Even now we are fulfilling it, by going towards that necklace.’