The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series

by Avram Davidson

  “Yet he did rule Asia,” murmured Sparga.

  “‘He did rule Asia,’ but he ruled Asia by virtue of some other marvel, that marvel which was Magnus Alexander,” insisted Vergil.

  Still murmuring, Sparga, “Even so. Oft one reads and one hears that the Philosopher’s Egg may be sliced open with a single stroke of a sword, its wonders to expose. But never does one hear or read an explanation which is satisfactory, as to what.” Sparga used more vessels of crystal and glass than Vergil was accustomed to seeing in an elaboratory: how they all sparkled there in the summer sunshine of Verona! “… as to what is the Philosopher’s Egg and as to which sword or what sword.”

  The subject was fascinating, but Vergil with a sigh unvoiced set that one ring adown and took up the other. And this was ornamented and enchased with a design of many small flowers; his eyes were keen enough to make out, to his great enchantment and pleasure that every petal of every flower was itself a smaller flower; and he felt certain that, were his eyes keen enough, he might find that these tiny flowers were composed of flowers tinier yet. “Each ring, Master Sparga,” he said, murmuring low, “is a marvel. Why have I never heard of them?”

  “Why be so sure that you have never heard of them?”

  Of a sudden Vergil felt a shock as they lay in his palm or was it in his mind? he ne’er knew. “What, ser? Messer Sparga! Can it be that one is the ring called Senex, which makes young men old? and that this other is the ring called Juvens which makes old men young?”

  The occamyst slightly oppressed his lips, edges so fine and sharp that might they have been carven by a crisping-tool. “A marvel it would be indeed, were a young man to wish to be old! To wisdom, a hard road!”

  Vergil, with a slight gesture and a questioning look, requested that he might have water from the nearby jug; Sparga did not allow him leave by speech or motion, but he poured him water with his own hand. The jug was very curiously wrought, with sylvan scenes drawn upon it, such as a spring emptying into a rocky pool overhung with trees. The water was as cool and fresh as though it had just now run purling from such a source indeed. “Thank you. — perhaps old in wisdom is the proper meaning of it. Eh?”

  “And is the other geste to become young in wisdom? Eh, indeed.” To this Vergil had no answer. “Unless,” Sparga, “that herewith Natura hath prepared an almighty jest of the other sort: that the rings be tried on unwittingly, a gamble very great, and the outcome not surely known; be not tempted, ser. Swiftly I forfend such temptation!” In an instant Sparga had taken up the two rings and twisted them with a motion for which deft was insufficient, lo! one ring was fixed curled inside the other. And … hold: “Curled inside the other?” there was something almost shockingly odd about the angle there … “Pentalepto of Scythia,” Vergil said, slowly (and the chymist soft said Ahhh), “accounted how he slipped, one day as he was walking the walk of the mazes and calculating his steps as he stepped, miscalculated, and slipped sideways and downways, as the Magna Homero has it, ananta katanta paranta, upalong, sidealong, downalong; and so fell he into that otherworld and universe in which even the geometry is clean different. There were the dragons feeding Anthony in the fattening pen. Anthony cried to him for help, but Pentalepto suffered so much as he stood there sickened by the strangest strangeness of it all in the harsh prismatic light, that it was with an almighty effort he broke back amongst us. And as for Anthony —”

  Vergil threw a sharp glance at Sparga, who merely took out from anywhere a small box carved in great detail showing the lyngworme coiled about the legs of Frotho Dragonslayer the suitor of that Thora (so the Northish annals told), and he with his sword couched high and ready to slash down; there was no egg present; and from the box the Sparga plucked a patch of some gloriously yellow sheepfell, and wrapped the twined twain rings up in it, and, opening his guest’s clenched fingers, slipped the tiny pacquet inside onto his palm. “This and these be thine,” he said. “These and this be thine.” It was, the guest Vergil felt, perhaps almost a formula as from a rescript. Of one thing and alone one thing was Vergil sure. To make a great matter of this great matter would be a mistake: “Thank you, Master Sparga,” said Vergil.

  “Sadly do I note that the day wanes shorter and that you will never tarry, nor I press you never so much.”

  And as he was saying this, he was moving along, Vergil perforce moving that pace ahead of him, and almost it seemed that guest was escorting host to the hole of the door; so deftly did Sparga give the congée. And the posts by the sides and the lintel up above were carven in strange carvings of designs, and one was that of an incoiling coiling without end, and the other was a continual wreath of flowers of whose petals were other flowers made, and so on so. “When next we meet, Ser Juvens,” Sparga (Sparga illa) said, “you are to riddle Ser Senex the riddle of this riddling,” and as he was so saying he was closing him the door. Vergil went alone to the inn with his head full of many thoughts. Always he kept with him in his pouchet or poke that scrap-piece of the (he was sure, quite sure) the Golden Fleece which contained the twain two rings so strangely flexed together. The sun was going down, down over Verona, as it was downgoing everywhere in that Zone of the Climates, but he saw it as it were going down upon the great Voe of Naples in an immense crowd of clouds of rosy-colored flame. And within it was a cloud of gold. To the Southwest lay the Isle of Inarime or Isehia and to the Southwest the Isle of Goats, or Capria. And within his heart lay much wonder at the wonders endless of the world.

  He said nothing as he went.

  Vergil was not used to the house-high waves of the Great Green Sea of Atlantis (what sensible man ever was?) … and no ordinary house of a man’s height plus half of a man’s height, but of those towering tenements called islands … might not waves so high sweep clear over actual islands? With such thoughts one ought not to entertain oneself in such rough weather on such rough sea; the Romans had a saying, Only Greeks and fools go much to sea. Odd that to the Romans, Greece was the epitome of sea-faring, while the Greeks themselves said Ship-shape as a Punicman: what said the Punes? perhaps they praised the ships of Tartis. Although the Carthagans, still rough-mannered colonials compared to the mellow Punic folk of Tyre and Sidon, the Carthagans were not at all likely to praise any place but Carthage … though, as any schoolboy knew, Carthage had been destroyed.

  Destroyed, too: Vergil’s hope that he might in unvexed security return from Tingitayne.

  Groping his hand into his budget for a clean cloth to wipe his mouth, he encountered a small bouguin, what was it but that Periplus of the Coasts of Mauretayne which Nephew-to-Sergius had given him to boot in Corsica. Seldom could Vergil resist the seduction of a new book and however old chronologically or corporally this one was, twas new to him: he read in it till the seas seemed monstrous rough, then slipped it back away. Every atom in his body seemed now at war with every other atom, he covered his body from the spume and spray and fell into a dull state in which he half-dreamed he was in the bough of a tree, the while drinking an infusion of sage and ginger for his stomach: there seemed a conversation going on between two men whose voices he could not then identify, familiar though they seemed. Ginger is cheap this season, one was saying; ginger is cheap, a pound of ginger now costs no more than a sheep. Cheerful and jocular was his voice. And another, graver and somedel pettish: Why should any wise man sicken or die who has sage growing in his garden-herbs?

  Vergil dozed, slumbered, awoke, tossed as the ship, tossed, slumbered, awoke, and finally fell into a state in which wakefulness and doze and daze and sleep and fretful confusion were all alike mixed. All jests about sea-sickness fell into the abyss. He was wounded with a mortal wound and the first sickening shock thereof continued, shocking and sickening, without abatement. Whither did the vessel go? This was no offshore sea, rolling merely restlessly between Negroponte and the Grecian main, or between Italy and Corsica, or off the lands of the Ligurians. Something was deeply different and deeply wrong: this sea had neither bottom nor shores! He strove to leav
e his body and go soaring aloft to spy out where they might be and then inform and guide the sea-men of the ship; but the waves, the winds, the spume and spray, beat him back, beat him back, beat him down: and thus he continued and abode long a while.

  He awoke into a different world. To his starboard spread a quiet sea; quiet but not at all sluggish like the waters of the Putrid Sea adjacent to the Paleus Maeotis and whose size — their sizes — remained a mystery: a light wind stirred the waters as it stirred his hair.

  The noises of the ship — the creaking of the planks and timbers, the rattling of the ropes, the luffing of the sails — all still continued, but not loudly nor frantically. To his larboard stretched the land: now tawny, now green, trees dotted the coast and hills, and along the edge of it were white and yellow sands. The sunlight there was different: the sunlight, fractured, shattered, was reflected from a million shattered crystals (themselves not seen); the sunlight was reflected by the facets of a spadai æon of atoms; and these reflections sparkled without dazzling: unstinted … untainted … and untorn. The captain, Plauto, greeted him, in rather an abstract manner.

  “What shore?” asked Vergil. “What coast of people?”

  Plauto opened his mouth, closed it, shrugged. “Well, ser. It is the old story. We have been carried off our course by storm. We had intended to make for the Islands,” a slight emphasis here, “… our usual way … then to come back into the Mainland by a southwest route,” his arms and hands described a rough triangle — from the Mainland to the Islands (whichever islands they were), from the Islands to the Mainland — it was a large enough triangle, and, had it been completed, would have saved the ship from hugging quite a section of the coast. As for trading opportunities missed along that section, this, as it occurred to Vergil, must have occurred to Plauto as well. However. There was perhaps therewith those Islands which had so much made visiting them worth the while that Plauto had never ceased to do so, even though it meant that, season after season, venture after venture, never once in his life did he forbear to do so; recking nothing of the neglected possibilities of the mute commerce and the trading post, into which that curious marketing so oft developed.

  “… and to speak the truth —”

  “As is your invariable way of speaking,” Vergil said, gravely. He could hardly overlook this opportunity of sticking the long needle in, of reminding Plauto, now more-or-less his friend, of that trick and decept by which he had lured Vergil aboard his scummy bark in the first place; easily lying about his course and destination in order to get the stranger’s passage-fee. But Plauto, either expecting no sarcasm or accepting this description of himself — certainly the way in which he would wish to be seen — as accurate, Plauto nodded. “— to speak the truth, Ser Doctor, I don’t know this coast and shore at all. And though we shall soon need water …” Plauto did not continue the sentence. He did not need to; its implications were obvious. And — head for a green section, as likely to have water (else why and how was it green?), why … bless you … the water was as likely to flow underground as not. And Plauto and his men were not tap-roots.

  Vergil scanned the coast. Then he nodded. Gestured. “That blink of white? That will be the rock called The Skull. Just past it will be a small cove, and at the head of the cove a small trickle of water. Very small. And very slow. Not enough to fill the butts. But enough to give us a drink. All of us. And then …” He paused to intensify the effect. “And then … after half a day’s sail, we come to the region called Huldah.”

  Plauto’s face quickened. His face showed more nor one emotion. “Ah, ser! And here I thought that you were an entire stranger to these lands! The Skull! The region called Huldah! I have heard of them! My thanks, Ser Doctor! My thanks —” Here he seemed just a bit troubled, literally swept the look off his face with his hand, called out something to the crew. Vergil saw the helmsman’s arms and shoulders move. Presently the ship was seen to stand down the vast bay and proceed more closely along the shore.

  VI

  The Region Called Huldah

  We should sight it, then, after that headland there,” Plauto had said, meaning The Region Called Huldah. And Vergil had nodded.

  But when they rounded “that headland, there,” they did not sight it … or anything else. Whatever lay beyond was shrouded from them, from sea to sky, as if by a series of pleated white gauze screens and curtains, seemingly one behind another, such as often veiled the throne and person of some exotic Berbar queen in her native court. Vergil looked quizzically at Plauto. And that one rubbed the bridge of his sun-scorched nose, and then slowly shook his puzzled head. Said, “I don’t know what to make of this. Never seen anything exactly like it. Smoke? It don’t look like smoke. And neither can we smell it. Mist? It don’t look like mist, either. It’s not the weather for fog. Nor it’s not the time of year for haze … besides which, it’s not the color as haze would be. But one thing about it as I can tell you —”

  And Vergil waited, and then gave some slight questioning sound.

  “— I can tell you, my ser, that we are not going to try to hug a shore which we can’t see. Rocks, reefs, shoals, shallows … who can know what might lie there? Eh? Doctor? What do you say?”

  Vergil said that he thought he’d like to make a fire. “Right here where I now stand.” Plauto called something. As a crewman appeared with the thin skin of hammered-flat iron and the box of sand on which the few cook-fires were built (lest the direct heats of the fire should infect the wooden surface of the ship), Vergil busied himself with items from his old doe-skin budget. He accepted the few pieces of charcoal which the crewmen next offered him, and to this he added some black shards of his own; bringing samples which he had taken with him when in Naples: not that he had much needed them just then or expected to need them on this or any voyage, but merely that in his haste he had not taken them out of the pack again. Miraculously and somehow, a living coal had been saved afire throughout all the commotions of the storm; Vergil declined it with great politeness. Neither did he accept the offer of Plauto’s tinder-box, its scorched linen, and its flint and steel. Carefully he arranged the charcoal, as though might some grave bird engaged in nidification as the time of the laying of the eggs drew nigh. He bowed his head. The men, assuming he was engaged in prayer, grew silent. In his innermost mind he bethought himself once again in the Sunken School abaft the Fuel Market in Sidon.

  And gradually a piece of charcoal reddened.

  He had no hollow tube, but, placing his head quite near, himself his own “blower of fire,” he let his warm breath play about the heap. And then all the charcoal was alight.

  Next he added a few leaves of sage, and some shaved root of zinziber, the “ginger” of his uneasy recent dream, and one drop only of Olor of Benjamin (benjoin, some called it). Atop this all he placed a sole feather of the swallow, which, released from the wicker cage never so far at sea, would always — wise bird! inerrably head for land, so that a keen-eyed master of a ship might follow o’er the white-waved seas, as the sweet singer of Anglia had put it. And then he fanned with the fan which Plauto had waiting; woven, it was of palm leaves: be there even so much as a single tree upon this hidden shore, likely it would be a palm. And like called, even silently, to like.

  The winds blew slowly as before, there was no gust, the sails did not crack, did not luff, neither did there appear (as it might be) an eagle of the mountains with a white goose in its talons as it (the eagle) cried aloud its defiance to the world and air: but steadily as they concentrated all their gaze, those upon the ship saw gradually the gauzy curtains as though one by one drawn back. And the exotic queen — did she stand there before them? Was this indeed “the Veil of Isis”?

  What stood there before them was a stretch of coast, like any stretch of coast. Nothing was different. In which case … why had all been so oddly veiled? … why veiled at all?

  But suppose something was a little different. A sea bird, wide of wing, wheeled near the ship, then — with a cry — for wh
om, in that empty sky, to hear? — wheeled away. “Master Plauto,” said Vergil, “hold up your hand, so,” he demonstrated; “and look through the spaces between your fingers. And there, at about the fifth finger, do you think … what? … there is a creek mouthing into the sea?”

  “I … do … think … so …” the master of the craft breathed, half intent only upon the accidents of the scene, and half in wonder of its incidents. Then he dropped all this as he might drop a garment, and uttered orders, curt and crisp. The helm turned. The oars were set into the tholes. The sail dropped down. The ship moved now upon its own motion. And Vergil, with a gesture, handed over the fire — just … now … a common fire … to the crewman in charge of such. And closed his old, soft, doe-skin budget. And strode up to the bow and looked.

  There she disembogues…. Since, perhaps, the day the waters of Deucalion’s Flood drained off the face of earth, this quiet little river had loosed its waters into the slaunting bay, itself of no great eye-catching quality, and so shy, that river’s nymph, that scarce she revealed herself at all: why, therefor, that shielding white veil? One would see. Perhaps. Limpid, and, seemingly, pure, the creek did not even hint of any nearby settlement of the sons and daughters of Deucalion: and perhaps there was none. Even the sounds of the oars striking the waters were small, birds sang and, some of them, white and crimson, rose-red-and-green, were revealed in flight. More and more and thicker and thicker the trees grew, till some of the branches on one side (Plauto, be sure, his keen eyes had not failed to note the currents stealing down to the left, and so he had gestured that the ship keep the right) lightly struck the spars. The river slowly swerved, slowly the ship swerved with it, till, stealing round one more curve, entered upon yet another bay, large enough (thought Vergil) for all the ships of Tartis, plus all those of Rome as well, to ride at anchor; or to execute — all! all! — maneouvres there. A sound of mixed astonishment and delight rose from their throats, to see this hidden treasure; for, evidently, though Plauto … and perhaps all of them … had heard … of the region called Huldah, evidently they had not heard — or none of them had much believed — of this great hidden bay therein. And at the opposite end lay the cultivated lands, the fields of grazing cattle, the orchards neatly set out, the planted gardens, and the settlement of houses.