The Anubis Gates

Like a coachman instructed to ride around and around a certain block until his fare, ready at last, shall emerge from a house and hail him, the smiling young man began again at the top of the memorized page: “Good morning, my good man,” he said. “I am Lord Byron. May I buy you a pint of something?” The ever-smiling young man didn’t really hear the man’s answer—it seemed muffled, as if spoken on the other side of a partition—but some part of his brain, or perhaps the engine, recognized it as calling for reply number three: “I certainly am, my friend—sixth baron Byron of Rochdale; I inherited the title in 1798, when I was ten years old. If you’re wondering why a peer of the realm should be in a place like this, drinking with common laborers, well, it’s because I think it’s the common laborers that are this country, not the lords and royalty. I say—” There was the usual interruption that called for reply number one: “Innkeeper! A pint of whatever this gentleman will drink!” The young man’s hand, like a precision machine, fished a coin from his waistcoat pocket and dropped it onto the nearest level surface, and then his mouth picked up the number three response exactly where it had left off: “—to hell with these men who are supposed to govern us just because of the womb they happened to issue from! I say the King, and you, and me, are none of us better than the others, and it’s not right that some eat off silver and never work a day in their lives, while others just as good work backbreakingly hard every day and hardly taste real meat once in a week! The Americans rid themselves of that kind of artificial society, and the French tried to, and I say that we—”

He realized that the man he’d been reciting to was gone. When had he left? No matter—another would be along presently. He sat back, his blank smile returning to his face like something dead floating to the surface of a pond.

After a time he became aware that someone else had sat down next to him, and he started up again. “Good morning, my good man. I am Lord Byron. May I buy you a pint of something?”

He was answered with one of the sentences he had been warned he might get, and with an unfocussed uneasiness he responded with reply number eight: “Yes, my friend, I was travelling abroad until recently. I had to come home due to an illness, a brain fever, which still clouds my mind at times. Please excuse the uncertainty this infirmity plagues me with—do we know each other?”

After a long pause during which the still-smiling young man was aware of a vicarious sort of worry in himself, the man answered in the negative, and so with relief he went on. “If you’re wondering why a peer of the realm should be in a place like this, drinking with common—”

The newcomer interrupted the recital with a question that, frighteningly, was not muffled: “How are you coming with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage?” the stranger asked. “Oh, sorry, it’s Childe Buron’s Pilgrimage at this point, isn’t it? Ah—’Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth, who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight… ‘ How does it go from there?”

For some reason these sentences hit the young man like a splash of ice water, and as they forced his hearing into clarity they did the same for his sight; his surroundings leaped from a congeries of comfortable blurs into awful focus, and for the first time in four days he saw a face clearly.

And the face of the man who had spoken to him was one that would attract attention—perched on impressively broad shoulders and a rope-muscled neck, and framed by a thick golden mane and beard, it was haggard, lined and mad-eyed as if with fabulous and harrowing secrets.

The no longer smiling young man knew that he’d been briefed on what to do in this situation—”If things become close up, and louder,” Romany had repeatedly told him, “and you lose the veil of protection my guidance give you, return to the camp here instantly, before the people in the streets tear you to bits like a crippled dog in a ratting pit… “—But this bearded man’s words had triggered something else, something more important than Romany’s command. Byron could hear himself speaking: “‘But spent his days in riot most uncouth, and vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of night.’” A swarm of astringent memories seemed to be loosed by these somehow very familiar phrases, and they stung like circulation returning to a suddenly unconstricted limb; he remembered being aboard the brig Spider with Fletcher and Hobhouse … the Albanians at Tepaleen with their white kilts and gold-trimmed capes, their belts bristling with ornate pistols and daggers… the dry yellow hills and deep blue sky of the Morea… and something about a fever, and… a doctor? His brain shut down with an almost audible slam on that line of recollection, but his voice continued, “‘Ah me! in sooth he was a shameless wight, sore given to revel and ungodly glee; he cheered the bad and did the good affright… ‘”