ILL SEEN IN TYRE
Steven Saylor
“What are those curious pictures on the walls?” I said. The tavern’s pretty serving girl, a voluptuous blonde, had just delivered my third cup of wine, and the pictures were looking curiouser and curiouser.
Antipater, my traveling companion and erstwhile tutor, furrowed his snowy brows and gave me that withering look I had come to know all too well during our journey. Though I was nineteen, and a man by Roman law, his look made me feel closer to nine.
“Gordianus! Can it be that you do not know the stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser?”
“The gray what?”
“Mouser,” he said.
I frowned. “I know what a mouse is, but what on earth is a mouser?”
Antipater sighed. “It is a term used for the common Egyptian house cat, a creature renowned for its hunting skills, particularly as regards rodents. Thus, mouser: a hunter of mice.”
“Ah, well, we don’t have cats in Rome, you know.” I shuddered at the very thought of such a creature, with its sharp claws and vicious fangs. I had encountered a few in our travels, living on ships. Supposedly, the captains prized their ability to keep a vessel free of vermin, but I had kept my distance from these exotic creatures. Like most Romans, I found them vaguely repellent, if not downright menacing. I had been told that the Egyptians actually worshipped these furry beasts, allowing them to roam the streets and even to live in their homes. I had not yet been to Egypt, but the idea that the Egyptians lived with cats did not make me eager to visit.
Eventually, of course, Antipater and I would have to visit Egypt, for it was home to the Great Pyramid, the oldest and some said the grandest of the Wonders of the World, and it was our intent to visit all seven of those marvels. We had just come from Rhodes, home of the Colossus, and were on our way to Babylon, home of the fabled Walls and the Hanging Gardens.
At the moment—between Wonders, so to speak—we found ourselves in the port city of Tyre, which had its own long and fabled history. Tyre was perhaps most famous for the production of dye from the murex shell; every king in the world insisted on being robed in Tyrian purple. Tyre also happened to be the birthplace of Antipater, so our visit here was in some ways a homecoming for him.
Thus did my thoughts ramble as I sipped my third cup of wine. Antipater was actually ahead of me, on his fourth cup. It was uncommon for him to indulge in immoderate drinking. His abandonment of sobriety had something to do with being in his hometown. What could be more poignant than an elderly poet surrounded by childhood memories?
“Egypt, cats, mice, pyramids—but what were we talking about?” I said. “Oh, yes—the curious pictures in this place.”
The tavern was called the Murex Shell. A large picture of its namesake was painted on the outside wall, and a border of clay tiles, impressed with such shells, surrounded the doorway. Inside the tavern, however, no murex shells were to be seen, and the frescoes on the walls had nothing to do with the production of purple dye. Instead, these pictures, painted on every available surface, appeared to depict the exploits of two heroes unknown to me. One was much taller and broader than the other, a brawny giant with a fiery red beard. The smaller of the two had a snub nose and wore a gray cloak with a peaked hood. Both carried swords, and in many of the pictures, wielded them with devastating results.
“What did you say they were called?” I said.
“Fafhrd—”
“Yes, I heard you say that the first time. I thought you were clearing your throat.”
“Very funny, Gordianus. I repeat: Fafhrd. An exotic name, to be sure. They say he was a veritable giant and came from the far north, beyond the Ister River, beyond Dacia, beyond even the wild lands of Germania.”
“But there are no lands north of Germania—are there?”
“None that any man I know has ever visited. Still, they say that’s where Fafhrd came from.”
“Fafhrd! Fafhrd!” I tried saying the name a few times, until a nod from Antipater indicated that I had it right. “And the other one? This so-called Gray Mouser?”
“He seems to have been a local boy, growing up on the streets of Tyre. Darker and smaller and wirier than his companion, but equally adept with a sword. Indeed, it is said that the two of them were the finest swordsmen of their day.”
“And when was that?”
“Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser lived in Tyre about a hundred years ago. My grandfather met them once. According to him, they were not merely the greatest swordsmen of their day, but of all time.”
“A bold claim. Why have I never heard of them?”
Antipater shrugged. “I suppose they are best known here in Tyre, where they made a great impression on the locals. And in Tyre, they are best remembered here, inside the four walls of the Murex Shell, where they spent a great deal of time drinking and wenching—”
“This smelly little place is a virtual shrine to them!” I laughed, looking at all the pictures on the walls.
Antipater sniffed. “Just because you never heard the tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, growing up in far-off Rome—”
“But Teacher, you and I have been traveling all over the Greek-speaking world for over a year—to Ephesus and Halicarnassus and Olympia, and to all those islands in the Aegean—and I don’t recall ever seeing a single image or inscription about either of these fellows, anywhere. No priest ever invokes them. No poet I know of—including you!—recounts their exploits. Could it be that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are just local legends, known only here in Tyre?”
Antipater’s grumbling was as good as an admission that I was right. But even as a callow teenager, I could imagine that the heroes of an old man’s youth must be particularly dear to him, so I desisted from casting more doubt on the renown of these supposedly great swordsmen.
“It’s funny,” I said, “what an odd couple they make. In some of the pictures, you might think you’re seeing a tall god and his dwarfish servant, and in others a diminutive sorcerer and the lumbering automaton who does his bidding.”
“Very imaginative, Gordianus,” said Antipater sourly. We had both emptied our cups, and he called for the serving girl to bring more wine.
“So what are we seeing in these pictures?” I said, striving to show more respect.
Antipater looked elsewhere and pouted for a bit, but his natural urge to play the pedagogue, along with the chance to revisit one of his boyhood fascinations, was too powerful for him to resist. “Well, since you ask … in that picture over there, we see their encounter with the Sidonian smugglers; and there, their legendary run-in with the Cilician pirates, and the rescue of the kidnapped Cappadocian princess. That image shows their encounter with the female Cyprian slave-dealer—how formidable she looks!—and there we see the rendezvous that turned into an ambush. And there, the Idumaean brigands come galloping out of the desert, in search of the priceless tomb-filched Egyptian jewels that no one ever saw.”
“And yet, we see them in the picture.”
“Artistic license, Gordianus!”
“What about that picture?” I pointed to a particularly bawdy image above the window.
“Ah, there we see pictured the night that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser together enjoyed the lascivious favors of Laodice of Egypt, who afterwards sent a troop of Nubian eunuchs to behead them. But our heroes escaped, as you can see, taking the ebony chest of Laodice with them—which turned out to contain not only her fabulous collection of aphrodisiacs, but the very cup from which Socrates drank the hemlock.”
“Fantastic!” I said. “And over on that wall—those images seem to represent a whole other set of adventures.”