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

by Avram Davidson

  Although it was so hot that the flies, being too tired even to fly, hung limply in clusters from cobwebs whose webbers were too hot to pursue them, the Proconsul was wearing the same woolen tabard and trews which he was sure to have worn at any occasion back in Yellow Rome where the formalities did not require a toga. He was sweating heavily, too. He was a rather heavy man, too, despite the tradition that all Patricians were imperially slim. Yet he rose to his feet quickly enough when the Viceroy entered the pale-blue-plastered room — perhaps — perhaps? certainly not because he recognized in the Viceroy his superior (a mere Member of the Equestrian Order, a mere knight? as his superior? pah …) and certainly not because the Viceroy was saying “I greet Your Upperness, that whom no one has a nicer or more discriminating palate when it comes to date-wine, and the Excise is rather perplexed if the five tuns which have just come in are to be classed as Highest Duty, or —”

  “Date-wine? Sickly sweety stuff, fit to buy as treats for whores; Excise! not my department of course … but sometimes the Highest Duty stuff is after all not half-bad, and one wouldn’t want the Fisc to be cheated …”

  His words died away into a mumble as he followed the exciseman with quill, ink-pottle, and roll of papyrus. The Viceroy dropped his official politeness as though it had been a rather sweaty towel, and he at the edge of the pool in the Cooling-Room at the bath.

  “Of course I have been listening,” he said, and waited just a moment as Vergil automatically looked round for any tell-tale hole-in-the-wall; then, remembering to mind his manners, looked only at an imaginary spot between the Viceroy’s eyes: not that he expected any fascination to be exercized, his spirit paralyzed and subdued like the coney’s quailing before the serpent’s weaving head and fascinating eye — never had he known any Roman official who had this art — but it was well to keep in practice.

  “Of course I have been listening,” said the Viceroy, “not only at the wall just now, and a damned fool I’d be if I didn’t: much do I learn that way —”

  “Including Your Lordship’s learning the case endings for the neuter gender as well as the declension of two invaluable if irregular verbs. One supposes that a man could learn Latin that way, if one did not already know it and had a lifetime to listen.”

  Kept his face quite straight. Officials often enjoyed a joke about other officials, but sometimes thought they were being leered at; in which event they might not enjoy it.

  “You are pleased to play with me, Mage, and to enjoy yourself and almost to laugh. But I have also been listening down at the moles and jetties and my people have been listening for me: and you will not enjoy hearing what I have heard; come in, you!”

  And the You who came in was a man whom Vergil had seen before on his first, brief stay in Tingitayne, although this time he was without the company of his twain serjeants-at-mace; his name …? his name was …

  “Festus!” he exclaimed. Festus … the skipper of the “justice-boat”? Should he mention what he had seen of the fugitives the man had then asked about, seen of them that awesome night of the oliphaunts in “the Region called Huldah?” No. He would not. He would only —

  “Have you located the right hand of the Colossus of Rhodes yet, Festus?”

  The skipper, as was traditional, scratched his head. “A marvel that you remember my name, me ser. Ah, what? Well, no, but we’ve a report as to they say it’s been located in Neapoly, but changed unto marble … Ah! I perceives as me ser has heard this heself!”

  “But … the great Marble Hand has been in Naples as long as I can remember.”*

  “And the right hand o’ th’ Colossus of Rhodes has been missing, long as I can —”

  The Viceroy cleared his throat, and Festus instantly fell silent and stood to attention. “Those memories can wait upon some other occasion. To settle and set aside: You were marooned in Lotophagea?” Vergil nodded. “Marooning, except for reasons the most extreme, has been forbidden by The Law of the Sea since the Rescript of the Divinely Favored Julius I. I shall make complaint on your behalf, Ser Doctor Vergil, to the Admiralty Court; as to next —”

  Vergil, aware that perhaps he should remain silent, could not help hazard the suggestion that it might be best be made by himself, in person. “Best it might be, but you shan’t have time. As to next —”

  Though vastly astonnied, Vergil said nothing; fixed his attention on the opposite wall, where, who knows how long ago, some plaisterer, not content with having applied the plaister with his own bare hands, as witness the not totally unpleasing swirls which a common harling or screeding-tool would not supply, had briefly placed his hand flat upon the wet surface: and Vergil observed that the man’s index finger lacked the first joint; this quick glance had sufficed to keep his face quite blank; and, as really he did not wish his mind staying blank as well, switched his attention from the wall to the Viceroy’s face. Which was not alone stern, but aseemed a good bit haggard.

  As had he not observed on their first meeting.

  “As to next, the talk around the water-butts along the fore shore is that you, Doctor Vergil, by some arts magical into which I shall make no enquiry, Festus informing me that he knows of a surety that you do have the doctorate, license being implied …” He had been speaking indeed very fluently, then slowed down, then stopped. Remained a bare second silent. Then resumed again: not indeed slowly, but slower.

  “The fact, I understand, is that certainly the ship pursuing you was greatly disabled, though, one hears, not foundered nor sunk. And I must suppose it to have been a ship of Carthage, whatever that may mean. Did you perceive aboard of it any person you know by sight or —”

  “The Pune whom I observed on a ship, the Zenos, passing between Naples and Lerica, and later ashore in Corsica; and yet again in your Lordship’s office. I knew him as Hemdibal; you told me he is also called Josaias.”

  “King of Carthage,” they finished, simultaneously.

  “Yes … Well, Ser, or rather Doctor, I have heard that this same man had evidently recognized you. And has sworn to pursue and to burn you or drown you, posting over every sea …”

  “Such a report, if true, has reached here very quickly —”

  With a weary gesture, the Viceroy said he sometimes thought the very birds brought words; and Vergil bethought him of the harpy-birds: had they witnessed the scene at sea? were they perhaps grateful to those who provided carrion? if indeed it was carrion-flesh they ate? or were they eager to provoke combat to the death between any groups of men? Fire burns, water drowns, Carthage hates Rome, Harpies are no friend to man …

  “The same rumors say he aswore vengeance on, what’s his name, Polycarpu, his ship and crew. Therefore. I have told Polycarpu to take his ship up the coast where there are a few shipwrights and their ways and have his barco repainted, taking not even time to scrape or caulk or make repairs, to fit himself for sea in haste, with new masts and new shrouds and new sails bent on, and to make his way west with all speed. I’ve also told all men with beards to shave them and all men who have no beards to let them grow. Mayhaps these deceipts will bring them safe to Sardland; and further my advice to them is to avoid the western seas for long and long. Until this matter and this menace be cleared up.”

  Here the man stopped and ordered by gesture that a tassy be filled for him out of a jug; he drank, he began again to speak.

  While it was, of course, treason for a subject to assume a royal or imperial title, still, lawyers might have pretty sport and long make delay over such matters as: was Josaias indeed effectively assuming the title of a kingdom which no longer existed? “I can see the advocates there, prancing and preening in Apollo’s Court; knowing that no Roman judges will now accept that there is such a res as a Kingdom of Carthage … Ah, my Herc and my Merc, it’s all futile! Is there still a Roman fleet, swift to punish violations of the Pax Romana? There must still be, where is it now? — all round about the Italian boot, keeping guard against enemies out of the east. Against a rabble of scum and barbarous dogs
in bumboats called Sea Huns! And what of the west, eh? what of the —”

  Nothing but the need to swallow the spittle which filled his mouth made the Viceroy stop a moment, and in the silence while the muscles worked in the man’s face and throat, quietly, Vergil asked, “My Lord Ser, regardless of legal status, where is Carthage now?”

  A helpless but eloquent gesture, such as the ruffian caitiff Junius had given at the funeral of one whose name differed from his own by a letter: murderer, assassin, blood fresh-washed from his hands; and then a cried, What title had Casar to the Empery? and for the matter of a title delivered Rome over to something worse than an Emperor: to war, to civil war, over to two-faced Janus, with red mouth straining and with teeth all bare … “It, or whatever place these Punic brutes use as base, it must be somewhere, must it not? Even pirates require a base, an armada however hostile can’t subsist on fish alone, can’t draw bread and oil and weaponry in with a net. Tartis …!”

  Vergil leaned, the better to hear. Tartis from its ruined and ruinous city near Gades, next trade entrepot north of … of … of Gades! sands of time! yet another name for that pass between the seas: the Great Gates of Gades! … Tartis, that once-great league of kingly sea-traders, established not only before Rome and before Carthage and even before Tyre and Sidon and before the spread-out lands of Greece; Tartis was now like some great sea-orme, its head a-stricken off, yet its coils still twitched … some of them still had life, here and there a trading-post, there and here a castello. Tartis …

  “Tartis reports, in that antique and oblique way of Tartis, ceremony interminable; come reports, if one may call them so, that black ships, not our small Midland Sea barco-boats daubed black: but ships of burthen as large as any ships of war, flying, shamelessly, bold as brothel-bawds, some banner we here know is the old Punic banner …” The man paused as though summoning strength to staunch his own rhetoric; went on, more slowly, slowly, on. “One hears that of late these ships do great trade in many far-apart marts: buying wheat which they have some way of boiling and drying out so it neither rots nor rusts nor moulders: buying iron, buying steel, buying old copper, copper, tin, buying timber, tar, and flax, buying leather, buying hide.” He had given name to just about all materiel of war. “I hear of such trade, much, but see no such cargo coming past my Tingitayne, to pause and pay the export-tax. With what do they pay? Why, they pay with purple, and I hear that sometimes they pay with gold, and tales incredible I hear: such as, they pay with silk —

  “Silk. I believe it not. Nor do I believe other reports, that they pay with yet something else of value, which it seems folk be shy and coy to name … But of this, enough. So men say. As for you, if these ships be bold enough to enter our Roman sea and swear reprisal on you, it is time that you get gone. Right soon. Now. You are, it seems, wanted at Rome, the August House has want of you, it wants you hard, I wot not why. I do wot that Himself, that Wolf, will have my head if he gets you not. And since you cannot go by sea, by this sea of water, you must go by land, across the sea of stone, the stony land, the Terra Petra: and so even if that Pune or some Pune or other or any posse comitatus all of Punes; if then they swoop down and burn my Tingitayne, stinking sullen sulky Tingitayne, burn it like an hut in a cucumber field: at least word will be gat out that you have gone safe from here and so that wolf will not burn my own brothers’ lands and fields and houses, holding them at guilt by right of frankpledge. Horses are being saddled for you and guide, leave by the black lane at fall of night. These Berbar horsemen can guide themselves by faintest starshine so don’t bother and bootless stand, begging for delay. If you have prayers to pray, go quick to the temple in the courtyard. Dusk falls, it gins and commences to fall right swift, there is time to take neither a woman nor a bath: here is the double purse of gold. I shall offer for you, let us be hopeful. Tell them at home that the Viceroy Caspar at Tingitayne filled his orders full. Go.”

  * See Appendix IV, The Great Globe

  XIII

  The Terrapetra

  The black lane. Every walled city had its black lane, some going under the wall by tunnelled work of sappery. The black lane! used by such traveling on official business whose departure was not desired by public way in public sight to go … The Emperor wanted him? This was to be the first sign that the Emperor, Lupus, “that Wolf,” had ever heard of him. A sudden tremor: was it the matter of, How didst thou dare to touch the Virgin’s flesh? — No No: it could not be. Else they had either thrown him in fetter and gyve and … Well. If he had now to cross the Land of Stone; time to make a start was best at Night. Onward.

  The “black lane” was of course not black, it was of a variety of colors, depending on the colors of the brick or stone of which the backs of buildings were made, through which the lane … winding, winding … passed; and none of them were made of that black, deadly, deathly black stone of which had been builded (so he had heard: much care had he taken to go there never) the capital city of Cappadoce. The principal hue here was of the same tawny lion-color, really quite different from that of Yellow Rome, as were the fronts of most of the buildings of Tingitayne, Tingis, Tingitana: and now, even as the small group of horsemen cantered along, the colors in the setting sun changed the stones to rose, then to a deeper red, then began to take on a purple tone. One might only guess at the nature and function of those buildings: warehouses, whorehouses, temples, homes? Some had never had windows, in some the windows had been carefully blocked up either with brick or with stone, no attempts made to match the tints of the buildings themselves. That a lane should be winding, away from the formal center of the city, was no surprise; but in this winding lane were no shop-fronts, no crowds of buyers or sellers, no loungers or loafers, no odors of edibles, no smoke or smell of combustibles; here was not even one single toddling child, half-naked and half about to cry, such as one encountered so very, very often elsewhere in such a wynd. No one sat hunched, fanning a charcoal brazier on which the evening meal cooked; no one begged with various tales of beggary or even merely whined and held out a dirty palm or showed a possibly interesting sore or a perhaps intriguing deformity.

  The sound of the clopping of horse-hooves. Else —

  Silence.

  And in that silence there came thought a-visiting, a thought of a thing which he had somewhere read — and only some invisible and incorporeal recorder with no other task entrusted could know how much, how very much he himself had read, read, concerning which often had he heard and still he did betimes hear, He seems to read, and yet he neither reads aloud nor moves his mouth!

  Briefly the guides had been named to him: the Berbar guides Sylvestro and Amulo, and Caniacus who was one of the Masked Men and wore a dark blue-black domino, far larger than common (common, though, among the Masked Men), which covered what they called the tharg, that part of the face from the bridge of the nose to the chin: and had no name at all, this part of the body, among any other of the peoples of the world. Folk who wished them well said twas because they had an unseemly facial blemish running in their blood and did merely wish to cover it and do others no fright; folk who wished them ill declared them a criminous caste who desired to pass unknown amongst others and espy out what they might steal: and, when they came to steal, first off-stripped the mask, that they be not recognized nor open to identity. They themselves said only this, Thus did my Father and my Mother and their Sires and Dams, so thus do I. Well-known it was, not to venture to ask a twice.

  Well: and as Festus, Sylvestro, Amulo, and Caniacus cantered with him down this uncovered lane, this chasym through the city (from which arose but a smothered murmur like some half-distant throng of bees), so this thought visited Vergil: Swiftly darteth the mind of a man who hath travelled over far seas and lands and thinketh in wistfulness of heart ‘I wish that I were here, or there,’ and many are the wishes he wisheth. And yet he too is fated to lie down in blood and dust amongst the dead … well, and what was this but a perhaps more complex statement than this in the Theophrast on Plants, that
“Against death there grows no simple”?

  Often at evening lightfail there was a cooling-off of the air, but in this black lane perhap even at noon meridian it had not been full hot: and certes it grew no cooler even now: but the same stagnant warmth stayed on. And next for sure the lane was covered over, and Vergil, riding with Sylvestro and Amulo afore him and with Festus and Caniacus ahind him, was sure that now they were indeed riding through cavern or tunnel; he saw nothing looking up, recalled the old word that to a man imprisoned at the bottom of a dry well, heaven was but one ell wide: could not see even that ell. Could hear the echoes of the hooves clatter. Felt all at once a breeze of wind upon his face, still some wet from the sea: looked up and saw above him the glittering stars.

  One of the guides said something brief, the two others grunted, perhaps in agreement. Vergil had not known that they had voices. Many a court of kings and sub-kings, so to speak, favored the services of mutes: they could hear no secrets and, did they see of any, of them they could not tell.

  Festus, suddenly beside and not behind him, said, “Did you see, me Doctor sage, them twain tall slabs at th’end of lane before went under the ground?”

  “I did not take a notice.”

  “We who take this lane some often, it’s an old jest of our’n to call they ‘The Pillars of Hercules,’ ” and he made a chuckle but a thin one as if well aware that the jest was very thin, too. Vergil’s reply was an uninflected, “Ah,” there was still the faintest line of blue against one part of the world, with darkness above it and darkness below: then it turned fainter, and green; then it was gone. He let his horse keep canter and company with the others.

  But Festus, having made his introduction to the subject, now proceeded with it. “Them real Pillars, as you know of, Ser Lord …” (“Ah.”) “They say … tis said … One day shall come when a gigant shall put hands against them Herculean Columns, you know? and push, you know?… and bring down the sky … you know?”