Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore [year 2 reading books .TXT] 📗

occur? How may a wren outweigh a horse? How may a coin plucked from a forger’s den outweigh one fresh struck from the mint itself, unless . . .

The forgery. Unless the forgery were purer, had the purest metal, purest silver, purer than the mint. But no, that cannot be. No point in forging money purer than the Empire standard, not unless . . .

Unless it is not that the forged coin is more purely struck, but rather that the true coin is found lacking. This cannot be so. I saw it, freshly minted. Held it, yet warm, closed within my hand. It is as pure as any coin in Rome.

(Outside my chamber now, a closer scuffling. Something nears, and still I cannot take my eyes from those of Diocletian, argent and severe.)

Unless. Unless we cut the coins.

The blood is scalding, simmering in my cheek that I should entertain such blasphemy. It is grotesque and flies against all reason to suppose the Empire capable of such adulteration, to the point that ounce for ounce a worthless forgery might hold more value. Why, if that were so, if all the wealth of Rome were but a gilt concealing poverty, then Rome itself would be the forgery, a sham, as good as fallen with no rampart save for promissory notes to keep the tick-scarred hordes at bay. It is monstrosity itself, this thought. It is a night-start. It is stark, and bottomless.

And it is true.

It crashes in, the fearful certainty, and breaks me. Let me die, or better yet have died before this cold, weighed fact could murder me, before I knew that we were poor and all was ruin. Though my cheeks are simmering yet, the eyes boil over, tears that sting like vinegar. Behind me now the door is opening. I hear a shuffle as of many feet, and know it is the village men, that they have come to kill me, but I cannot look at them for shame: for them to witness me, to witness Rome like this.

At last I lift my head. They stand hulked in the door with muscled cudgels in their fists, the grey man with his paunch and top-knot to the fore. Stone-faced, expressionless, they watch me, watch the little Roman as he sobs above his scales, and if they feel disgust at this display it is not sharper than my own. They pass a glance between them, and the grey man shrugs. They’re going to kill me now. Kneeling upon the floor, I close my eyes and I await the blow. A final silence falls.

Then, many footsteps, moving off downstairs, an avalanche of wood and leather. Doors slam somewhere far below. I open up my eyes. The men are gone.

They saw it in my face. They saw me as a man already slain, not worth the killing. Rome is dead. Rome is dead. Rome is dead, and where shall I go now? Not home. Home is a stage façade of paper, peeling, faded by a sun of cheap pyrites. I cannot go home, and who, who else will have me?

I crouch staring at the coins, one false, one falser yet, until the light begins to fail and they are both become pale blurs there in the gloom, no longer to be told apart, a shadow fallen on that noble brow.

The room fills up with murk. I cannot bear the darkness here, that drinks all definition, and I rise and stumble as one in a dream, first down the stairs, then, dazed, into the street. The celebrations are already under way, streets heavy with the stench of ruffian life. They piss in doorways, swing oars at each other’s heads, and laugh, and kneel in their own sick. They fornicate against the alley walls like prisoners. They fart and shout and they are all that is, and all that will be. Slow, I shuffle out amongst the great lewd push of them. A jug of ale is pressed into my hand. With rotten smiles they grip my arm, and kiss my tear-tracked cheek, and draw me in.

November Saints

AD 1064

With age, the act of waking has become a great confusion. I no longer know upon which decade of this life my eyes will open: lame and frost-burned by the old church gate or in my convent cell here, morning’s first sick blueness on the wall; blue of the dead.

My cot is hard, that I may feel the bones that are inside me, restless and impatient to get out. Not long, they think. She’s old. Not long. Beneath the rough dusk sheet a chill aches in my bad leg’s starving marrow and I know it is November. Last night, on All Hallow’s Eve, I dreamed I was a man.

Rain-blind, he rode the fierce night through upon a fever-horse towards Northampton here, though in my dream I thought of it as Ham Town and I know not why. The drizzle stung my face and cold draughts rattled in my ears, and as I rode it seemed that all the terrors of November were upon me, rude jaws snapping at the steaming fetlocks of my horse so that I wept in fright, and when I woke I did not know at first what year it was, and placed a hand upon my leathered sex for fear that I should find instead his instrument, mea culpa, mea culpa, Blessed Virgin forgive me.

Creaking inside my chest I rise from off my cot, the sour sheet flung aside, my burlap habit pulled on in a single, shivering movement; coarse folds, grey against grey dawn. I finish dressing in the half-light and I limp the damp stone passages to Matins where I offer up all thanks to God that I may limp at all and dwell instead upon the passion of Our Lord. I work the days, I count the beads and say the names.

When they are mindful of my halten foot they set me to a task where I may not walk