Ergo exercentur poenis, veterumque malorum
Supplicia expendunt; aliae panduntur inanes
Suspensae ad ventos, aliis sub gurgite vasto
Infestum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni.
(So here punishment awaits them, and they expiate their former crimes most painfully: some, suspended in mid-air, become the playthings of the winds; others, plunged in a vast abyss, are washed clean of their crimes, or purged in the fire.
Aeneid, VI, 739 — 742).
‘Tis a custom with him
I’ the afternoon to sleep: there thou may’st brain him,
Having first seiz’d his books; or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezand with thy knife
(Tempest Act III, scene II)
The vapours of pleasure and wine had stunned my senses, and despite myself I saw the phantoms of Polemon’s imagination pursuing one another into the darkest corners of the hall where the banquet had been held. Already he had fallen into a deep slumber on the flower-strewn bed, beside his overturned glass, and my young slaves, overtaken by a sweeter exhaustion, had let their heavy heads droop against the harp that they embraced. Myrthé’s golden hair fell like a long veil over her face between the golden strings, which paled in comparison, and her sweet sleeping breath, falling upon them, continued to draw from them a voluptuous sound which faded as it reached my ears. Yet the phantoms were still there; they were still dancing in the shadows of the columns and in the haze of the torches. Impatient of this trick of drunkenness, I drew the cool branches of protective ivy down upon my head and firmly closed my eyes, tortured by the illusions of the light. Then I heard a strange noise, which seemed to be formed of voices alternately grave and threatening, insulting and ironic. One of them, with irritating monotony, was repeating several lines from a scene from Aeschylus; another, the last lessons addressed to me by my dying forebear; from time to time, like a breath of wind whistling through dead branches and withered leaves in lulls in a storm, a figure, whose breath I could feel, would burst into laughter against my cheek, and then withdraw, still laughing. Further bizarre and horrible illusions followed this one. I thought I saw all the objects which I had just looked upon as through a cloud of blood: they were floating before me, and pursuing me, with horrible attributes and accusing groans. Polemon, still stretched out next to his empty cup, and Myrthé, still leaning upon her harp, were cursing me furiously and calling me to account for I know not what murder. As I was raising myself to answer them, and stretching out my arms over the couch, cooled by generous libations of liqueurs and perfumes, the joints of my quivering hands were seized by a cold sensation: it was like an iron noose, which at the same time fell upon my numbed feet, and I found myself pulled upright between two densely packed rows of ghostly soldiery, whose lances, tipped by dazzling spear-heads, resembled a long row of candelabras. Then I began to walk, seeking the carrier-pigeon’s path through the sky, so that, before the arrival of the dread moment I was beginning to foresee, I might at least entrust to her sighs the secret of a hidden love which she might one day tell, hovering near the bay of Corcyra, above a pretty white house; but the pigeon was weeping on her nest, for the eagle had just snatched up the dearest of her brood, and I proceeded painfully and unsteadily towards the goal of my tragic course, amidst the murmur of awful glee which ran through the crowd, calling impatiently upon me to proceed — the murmur of a slack-jawed throng whose eyes were hungry for suffering, whose bloody curiosity would, from a distance, drink up all the victim’s tears that the executioner would proffer them.
There he is, they all cried, there he is!
… ‘I saw him on a battlefield’, said an old soldier, ‘and then he was not ghostly pale, but seemed a brave warrior.’
‘How small he is, this Lucius who was trumpeted as an Achilles or a Hercules!’ continued a dwarf whom I had not previously noticed among their number. ‘It is fear, probably, which is sapping his strength and causing his knees to buckle.’
— ‘Could it ever have been that so much ferocity lodged in the heart of one man?’ said a white-haired old man whose doubt froze my own. He resembled my father.
— ‘Could this be he?’ — said the voice of a woman, yet one whose physiognomy expressed such sweetness…’ Could this be he?’ she repeated, wrapping herself in her veil to avoid the full horror of my appearance…’ could this be the murderer of Polemon and of the beautiful Myrthé?…’
‘I think the monster is looking at me,’ said one of the women. ‘Close up, basilisk eye, viperous soul, may the heavens curse you!’
During that time the towers, the streets, the entire city was fleeing before me like a harbour abandoned by an adventurous vessel leaving to try the fortunes of the main. All that remained was a newlybuilt square, vast and regular, bordered with majestic buildings and filled with a flood of citizens of all stations, who were abandoning their posts in order to yield to the call of a particularly keen pleasure. The casements were teeming with eager onlookers, young people contending with their own brothers or mistresses for space in the narrow embrasures. The obelisk raised above the fountains, the carpenter’s shuddering scaffolding, the mountebanks’ trestles, all were thick with spectators. Gasping with impatience and delight, men hung from palace cornices, their knees grazing the tops of the walls, chanting ‘There he is!’ with unrestrained glee. A little girl in a crumpled blue tunic, whose wild eyes signalled madness and whose fair hair was spangled with sequins, was singing of my execution, describing my death and the confession of my heinous crimes, and her cruel lay informed my frightened soul of criminal mysteries inconceivable to crime itself. I was the centre of this whole spectacle, along with another man, and several planks raised on posts, on which the carpenter had fixed a rough seat and a block of roughly squared wood about half a span above it. I climbed fourteen steps; I sat down; I cast my gaze over the crowd, seeking friendly features, some glimmer of hope and of regret in the cautious gesture of a shame-faced farewell; I saw only Myrthé: awakening, still holding (or plucking) her harp, and laughing; only Polemon, who was raising his empty cup and, still half stunned by the vapours of drink, filling it again with an unsteady hand. Calmer now, I delivered up my head to the sharp, chill sabre of the officer of death. Never did a more penetrating shudder run down a man’s spine; it was as startling as the last kiss that fever lays upon the neck of a dying man, as sharp as tempered steel, as engulfing as molten lead. I was drawn from this anguish only by a terrible commotion; my head had fallen… it had rolled, bounced on to the hideous square in front of the scaffold and, just as it was about to fall, ravaged, into the hands of the children of Larissa, who sport with the heads of the dead, it had caught upon a protruding plank, biting into it with the ungiving ferocity which rage lends to the jaw during the death throes. Thence I turned my eyes upon the assembly, which was withdrawing, silent but satisfied. A man had just died before the people. There was a final expression of admiration for the skill of the executioner, and a sense of revulsion for the murderer of Polemon and the beautiful Myrthé.’
‘Myrthé, Myrthé!’ I almost roared, though without leaving the plank which had proved my salvation.
‘Lucius, Lucius!’ she replied, half-asleep, ‘will you never sleep quietly when you have had a glass too much? May the devils of hell forgive you; now cease troubling my rest. I would rather sleep to the sound of my father’s hammer, in the smithy where he works his copper, than amidst the night-time terrors of your palace.’
While she was speaking to me, I bit stubbornly upon the wood, drenched with my freshly-spilled blood, and congratulated myself upon feeling the dark wings of death slowly unfurling beneath my mutilated neck. The bats of twilight skimmed around me caressingly, telling me to take wing… and I began beating some poor shreds of flesh which barely supported me. Yet of a sudden I felt a comforting illusion. Ten times I beat the sombre vault of heaven with the near-lifeless membrane I trailed behind me like the pliable feet of the reptile which coils in the sand in fountains; ten times I surged upwards, testing my skill gradually in the damp mist. How dark and chill it was! How melancholy were the wastes of shadow. At last I rose to the top of the highest buildings, and hovered, circling around the solitary plinth, the plinth so recently touched by my dying mouth with a smile and farewell kiss. All the onlookers had disappeared, all noise had ceased; the stars were hidden, the lights extinguished. The air was still, the sky sea-green, dull and cold as matt sheet metal. Nothing remained of what I had seen and imagined on earth, and my soul, alarmed at being alive, fled a vaster solitude, a deeper darkness, than the solitude and darkness of nothingness itself. Yet I did not find the haven I was seeking. I soared upwards like the moth which had just broken free of its mysterious swaddling bands to display the unavailing luxury of its crimson, blue and gold finery. If, from a distance, it glimpses the casement of some scholar keeping a lonely vigil, writing by the light of a cheap lamp, or that of a wife whose young husband has stayed too long out hunting, it climbs the pane, tries to settle, beats fluttering wings against the glass, flies off, returns, hums and falls, shedding the transparent dust of its fragile wings. Thus did I beat the cheerless wings which death had lent me against the vaults of a brazen sky, which answered only with a dull echo, and I sank down once more, hovering in circles around the lonely plinth so recently touched by my dying mouth with a smile and a farewell kiss. The plinth was no longer empty. Another had just lain his head upon it, throat uppermost, and his neck revealed the trace of the wound, the triangular scar of the lancehead which had taken Polemon from me at the siege of Corinth. His golden curls lay twined all around the bloody block: yet Polemon, serene, with eyelids lowered, seemed to be sleeping the sleep of the just. A smile, not yet the rictus of terror, played on his opened lips, and called forth new songs from Myrthé and further caresses from Thelaire. In the light of the pale morning which was beginning to spread through the precincts of my palace, I recognised the still indistinct forms of all the columns and the vestibules, amongst which I had seen the evil spirits weaving their funereal dances throughout the night. I sought Myrthé; but she had abandoned her harp and, motionless between Thelaire and Theis, she allowed a cheerless and cruel gaze to linger upon the sleeping warrior. Suddenly Meroé thrust her way forward among them: she had removed the golden asp from her arm, and it hissed as it slithered beneath the vaults; the echoing rhombus spun and whirred; Smarra, summoned for the departure of the morning’s dreams, had come to claim the reward promised by the queen of night-time terrors, and was fluttering beside her with a hideous display of affection, his wings humming so fast that they did not darken the brightness of the air with the slightest shadow. Theis, Thelaire and Myrthé were dancing, all dishevelled, and uttering cries of glee. Near me, frightful children with white hair and wrinkled foreheads, and dull eyes, were seeking diversion by tying me to my bed with the frailest gossamer spun by the spider which casts its treacherous web between two adjacent walls to catch some poor straying fly. Some were collecting those silky white threads whose light filaments escape the fairies’ miraculous spindle, letting them fall with all the weight of a lead chain upon my pain-racked limbs.
‘Arise’, they were ordering me with insolent laughter, shattering my already crushed chest by beating it with a straw bent into the form of a flail, which they had stolen from a gleaner’s sheaf. Meanwhile I was trying to disengage my hands from the frail bonds which held them, hands once redoubtable to the enemy and whose power had often been felt by the Thessalonians in the cruel games of the cestus and the boxing ring; my much-feared hands, those hands skilled in lifting the death-dealing iron cestus, were lying slackly on the unarmed chest of the weird dwarf, like a storm-tossed sponge at the foot of an age-old rock which the sea had assailed unavailingly since the dawn of time. In just such a way does the myriad-coloured globe, that dazzling, fleeting child’s plaything, vanish without trace, even before skimming the obstacle towards which the eager childish breath propels it.
Polemon’s scar was oozing blood and Meroé, drunk with desire, was raising the soldier’s torn heart, which she had just ripped from his chest, above the avid group of her companions. She withheld the fragments from the blood-crazed young girls of Larissa, taunting them the while. Swooping and hissing, Smarra protected the dread conquest of the queen of nocturnal terrors. With the tip of his proboscis, whose long spiral uncoiled like a spring, he caressed Polemon’s bloody heart, to beguile his eager thirst awhile; and Meroé, the beautiful Meroé, basked in his love and watchfulness.
The bonds which held me had yielded at last, and I found myself on my feet, awake now, at the foot of Polemon’s bed, while all the demons fled, along with all the sorceresses, and all the illusions of the night. My very palace, and the young slaves who were its ornament, all that transient panoply of dreams, had given way to the tent of a warrior wounded beneath the walls of Corinth, and to the mournful cortège of the officers of death. The funeral torches were beginning to fade before the rays of the rising sun, the death knell began to toll beneath the underground vaults of the tomb. And Polemon… O despair! In vain my trembling hand sought out a feeble flicker in his breast. — His heart would beat no more. His breast was empty.