Nicanor - Teller of Tales : A Story of Roman Britain

by C. Bryson Taylor

So he came to a fire burning in a ring of stones; and around the fire men were sitting, eating and drinking, and the light played on their faces. With them were women, at whom Nicanor stared agape. For they were very fair to look on, with jewel-bound hair and slumberous eyes, lithe as snakes, with bare shoulders and dress of strange clinging stuffs. These were dancing girls, being taken to the great inland cities for sale or hire. And near by, huddled close for warmth, were slaves,—men, women, and children, chained in long strings, on the way to be sold in Gaul. Here were fishermen, also, and boatmen, gathered by themselves, a noisy crew, with loud jokes which Nicanor heard and did not understand. All about him was a babel of voices and laughter, boisterous and profane; now and then an altercation, short and violent. It went to Nicanor's head like wine. Never had he known anything like it; life like this had passed his bleak northern home entirely by. He drew nearer the groups around the fire, drinking it all in greedily,—new sights, new sounds, new impressions. His face was flushed with excitement, his breath came short; so much he found to interest him that he stared bewildered, uncertain what to look at first. The smell of cooking food was in the air, mingled with the aromatic pungency of many fires of wood. Horn cups clashed; at intervals hoarse laughter drowned the shouts of teamsters and the creak and strain of wheels.

And suddenly, under the intoxication of it all, Nicanor found himself speaking in a new, fierce mood of exultation. What he was going to say he did not know; but his voice fell into the old measured chant, regular as the tramp of marching feet, which carried through all the tumult of sound around him. His heart beat hard, his hands clenched, but he flung back his head with eyes which glittered in the firelight. Those nearest looked on him in amazement, ready to scorn. Then they held silent, and listened. Others drew closer, to see what might be going on. More came, and more. Women left men's knees and joined the little crowd, smiling, then with parted lips of wonder. Nicanor neither saw nor heard them. For the first time in all his life he was carried beyond himself; in a physical ecstasy he spoke out that which clamored at his lips, caring nothing for his audience, unconscious of them utterly. And because that is the one thing which will grip men's minds and compel them, he held them spellbound, in spite of themselves,—until, abruptly, in a flash, he became conscious of himself, seeing himself, hearing himself. That moment he lost his hold of them. And he knew it, and stopped short. And for an instant there was silence.

Then a woman drew a long breath which was like a sigh, and a man muttered something into his beard. The spell snapped; and like a flood let loose their talk leaped at him. They shouted, "More!" They would know who he was, and whence he came, and he must finish the tale for them. But Nicanor shook his head, dumbly, with a new and strange emotion surging through him. He was frightened at himself, at his feeling, at what he had done. And back of his fear lay something deeper, something which he could not name,—half exultation, half truest awe, as though he stood in a presence mightier than he and knew himself for but the tool with which the work was wrought.

There came a woman, very wonderful, and hot as flame, and put into his hand a broad piece of silver, looking into his eyes. A man with a broken nose thrust a copper coin into his palm; others followed. For a moment he stood staring at the fire-lit faces around him like one foolish or in a trance, with his own face quite white. That he might receive money for his soul had never entered his head. Then he broke away from them all and ran—ran as though for his life—back to the house of Tobias, and clambered through the low window and flung himself upon the bed, laughing and sobbing and shaking, and clutching his coins in sweating hands.

For he had entered into his heritage at last, and the Future had become the Present.

V

The working-place of Master Tobias was a small room half underground, with three windows on a level with the street. Long boards on trestles were ranged upon three sides, leaving the centre free; these were much chipped and scarred, and black with oil and dirt. On these tables were small list-wheels for polishing, formed of circular thicknesses of woollen stuff clamped tightly between two wooden disks of smaller diameter which left a pliant edge of wool projecting, held firmly in wooden frames and turned by hand. There were trays of tools for carving and graving and scraping, and boxes of fine sand and of glass-parchment. In a corner was a grindstone; and the unclean floor was littered with sawdust and scrapings of bone. Here half a dozen men were working, in oil-stained aprons of leather. The wheels hummed continuously, with a steady droning; at intervals the great saw shrieked and grated; from the storeroom a boy brought long tusks ready for the first cutting.

Men have worked in ivory before ever history began, and of all known arts it is the most ancient and one of the most beautiful. And no two master-workmen have gone about it after precisely the same manner, but each has followed his own method of treating the bone, of cutting, which is a delicate business, of smoothing, and of polishing. At different ages widely differing means were employed to bring about the same effect. There were many curious things to be learned in the way of what and what not to do,—how to treat bone with boiling vinegar, and secret processes of rolling out ivory and joining it invisibly, for the making of larger pieces than could possibly be cut from any one tusk. Lost secrets, these, to us; and being lost, by many doubted as having ever been. These things Master Tobias had learned, many years before, from a workman of Byzantium, where the work was already famous, and far and away ahead of all. This man, dying, had left Master Tobias all he knew, and tools such as never otherwise could he have obtained. So that the fame of Master Tobias went abroad through the province; and he did much work in the way of tablets, diptychs, caskets, figures of gods and goddesses and of Christian saints. Many a carven comb and jewel-box found its way to some haughty Roman beauty's dressing-table, the work of Master Tobias's own fat hands. He found good markets for his wares, since Roman love of bijouterie was strong, and he had few competitors. It was not until the establishment of Saxon dominion that the art obtained a permanent foothold in Britain; and then it went back to its first crude beginnings, as did nearly all other things at that second conquest.

So behold Nicanor, bare-armed and in leathern apron, carrying tusks to and fro, cleaning them after their arrival from the merchants' hands, and giving them out to the workmen as required. Thus he came to learn the various shades of coloring; how to tell when bone was healthy and might be expected to take the cutting well, or when it would be apt to crack and split under the saw. Having come to know the differences in degree, he was put to checking off the lots as they arrived, according to kind and grade. Mammoth tusks of elephants, sometimes ten feet in length, weighing close on a hundred pounds, solid to within six inches of the tip; teeth and tusks of the wild boar, walrus-bone and whale-bone, used for coarser work and filling,—all these he must tell apart at a glance. For to the untrained, bone is bone.