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

by Avram Davidson

  I pardon that man! what? what?

  “I pardon that man,” someone was saying next to him, and it was no dream, no dream alone, nor was it either a waking dream: Caniacus was riding alongside of him, and — “I pardon that man,” was saying — “had one man slain my Mother and ravished my sister, and had he later, my rage and my desire to flay him slowly still unachieved, still, had he had to come and live here … here … in this one such place … yet: I pardon that man.”

  More than half dazed, the immense fatigue and pain accumulating during this journey having subdued his mind, and that aching sleep or drowse into which he had fallen, still bemusing it, Vergil looked up, but the face of Caniacus was masked as usual so he turned his head and looked whither Caniacus was looking. A vast red eroded rock lay before them, how long had he sat lolling and dozing in his saddle-seat? many cracks and caves were in that hill of solid yet eroded stone: they had come up from that sunken place, that declivity, and a high and wide red rock half as large as some small city, as though its virons had been walled and yet its walls thrown down, as though it were a castello of wide extent slumping from age and from immemorial decay, this lay before him now to see: no dream.

  And from the cracks and flaws and fissure and ravines, from the caves and from the holes, down from the shelves and cliphts, streamed slowly a muckle many men; each, as he walked slowly … limped … crawled … hobbled … hopped … climbed … each slowly unwinding from round his head and face a concealing head-cloth: how slow, how reluctant, how without (it seemed) will to object, but yielding to the necessity of their condition, like so many men before the block or platform for auction in a slave market, in some mart of slaves, those who submitted to whatever fate had made them property were stripping off their clothes, surrendering a last pretense to privacy and private status and private will: that the prospective buyers, even the pretensive and pretending public, might see their nakedness, their shame, their once proud forms reduced to something not entirely human … not entirely at all did these strip and expose themselves, only they revealed their faces.

  Merely from this heap, this red and eroded rock a habitation, the habitants descended and exposed their red, eroded faces: pitted, cracked, falling and fallen down the features of what must be their faces, for what else could they be? Hoarse his voice and strained with effort to control its trembling, Vergil whispered, “My body and my god! Caniacus! what men are these? what place is this?”

  And the Masked Man who needed never unmask and never (never but once) did reveal his own unblemished face, he, Caniacus made answer: “You who saved my life: save it never not from such a destiny and fate as this. These are the men who in order to save their own brother-twins from the preordination that one of each pair must accept leprosy else must each and both contract it: these are the brothers who chose to accept in order to save everyone of them his twin, they have come here to endure their lives as lepers, and their brothers of the salvation send them clothes and victuals and all needed needful things, and sometimes things unneedful; it is we the caravans and cafflemen who bring all such to them. This is called The Rough Place …”

  It was not until the next day that he was able to follow Benninaly up a winding flight of steps, each step deeply worn in the center from passing feet and some sort of laithly line a-pressed upon the wall nighest each step, worn place in the step and uncleany line upon the wall of the great rough rock where the habitants pressed with their hands (or what was left of them) to steady them as they clumb and clambered, doubtless often pausing to gasp a breath: the vatic voice it seemed to murmur aside his ear-holes something of what dread hands and what dread feet. Benninaly he had seen lately often times carrying packs and bails and articles padded and wrapped in sacking; it must have been hither, out of sight from the shelf of solid rock and shifting scree, that Benninaly had continued to hump them up, stooping forward but stopping not. And now he had gestured Vergil to follow him on one last such trip, and Vergil followed after him. He did not, his feet being shod, disdain to step into the hollows of the steps, but sooner he should have fallen to his death with raw head and bloodied bones than clutch support from the wallside where appeared unctuous line and smear.

  At length Benninaly brought him to a large cave not yet occupied, in fact never occupied but prepared for occupancy, with rugs upon the rock floor and tappetties of broider-work upon the rock walls, and furniture-backs of embossed leather: all of the quality as used by the well-to-do. Even, in niches and on shelves, there were books as well, and images of animals. The main several rooms were built about and ventilated by an air-shaft fashioned by largening a natural and deep fissure. Even there was a kitchen with its own air “pipe”: and behind them all, rooms of larder. The caffile had brought stores of dried foodstuffs, with oil and wine and charcoal… “It seems a good place to live,” Vergil said, reluctantly, “— if one must live here, that is. If this is life.”

  “Ah, the vanity and uselessness!” cried Benninaly, laying aside his silence as a garment for the nonce not needed. “And besides,” in a lower and unemotional tone, “they soon enough tires of it and ventually they finds an old and greasy hole to slink into and be snug enough … usually.” And added that somewhere in this rocky warren was the dwelling place of one who had been a paramount prince, said still to keep a kind of court and was waited on by some whose kin-family had all died out and no one to send them victuals or ought, or not enough. “But he never show himself … at anyway, never to us. There!” He finished setting up a bronze stand holding many lamps. “Tis fit for — for him who’ll come here. By the caffila in ane year’s time, I ‘xpect … if not before. When his woe can be no more concealed. Eh? Nay. No wives allowed here, unless they be also leprous stricken by such a fate as strikes without the twinly curse, absit omen.” Spet a thrice time, beckoned, left. Vergil followed after.

  One day more unlading, then they mounted each man his animal and left that rusty hell.

  The congregants had made but not much sound, the travel-company being there, but as the caffila turned long-around to go, there rose from behind them at the foot of the Rough Place, thin at first and scarce to be told from the scree and cry of some haunting bird, then louder and more deep, such a sound and wail of despair and lamentace as he had never heard at any funeral nor any place of pestilence or death judicial. Perhaps some dim thought from his brief day as an advocate at law came now into his mind, that it was the sentence of death which was executed — the man himself was killed.

  And it was to this place, life-in-death or death-in-life, that one day must come one nephew of Bodmi the cooper.

  One … depending on which loved the other more … or, if not such love?

  Both.

  Lamentace.

  XIV

  The Soldier in the Desert

  For a long while the horror of the Rough Place stayed with them all, and all were silent, from Benninaly the capitane of the caravan to the mangiest camels which might have been excused for braying out of mere relief that their loads had been lightened, and that the men had not been obliged to tap the stinking water stored in the humps. The land of stone appeared as stoney as ever: but now and then and always just in time they came either to an oasis or a deep, deep well, whither men descended great depths, never the water being near the surface. It beseemed that all the waters of Afric had sunk beneath that stoney carapace: thank the god that evidently another such below the water kept it from sinking quite away into sands subterranean. By and by the taste of that frightful and accursed place ebbed off, it would be wrong to say that they became all cheerful; but one might say that although the weather remained fearful hot by day and frightful cold by night, merely they endured it with a calm endurance.

  Yet one day, Vergil, having fallen a bit behind and to aside, was all at once joined by Caniacus and two other of his masked confraternitude. Idly Vergil asked, in the old manner of Italic boatsmen as they raised another, “What thing?”

  Quite a thing indeed, th
ey indicated with a many gestures. But only Caniacus spoke, saying, “ ‘The Nephew of the Cockatrisk’, we call it.” And as to, what was it, and why did they call it so, why there followed only sundry shrugs. Also, more gesticulations. Something, it was clear, was presently to be a-seen; and a great wonder it was. By and by Vergil saw what appeared to be an odd-shaped stone, like so many odd-shaped stones in this stony land. As the Masked Men got them down from their beasts, why, so did he. They had begun to shovel at the sands with their hands, and to scoop it up and throw it aside; indeed, they had not quite finished their tasks when he came along, holding his horse’s bridle with his right hand as if he were any page or quire leading his knight’s destrier. And almost he thought he saw just that: a knight upon a destrier, covered with that eternal dust which covered all things, here. The image was one of the best things of the sort that he had ever seen: a statue of a mounted man-at-arms imperial, in exquisite detail: even the rings of the mail upon the man’s baldric seemed to have been chiseled with an eye to an expectation of an inspection far keener than Vergil’s. He asked the men just now clearing way the clinging crowding sands from the horses hooves, “How came that statue here?”

  Had it been done to mark a battle? A cairn of stones would have done as well, besides he had hearn never tale nor story of any great battle in the Terrapetra: and in any case would not the victor have sooner arranged for his own (or an Imperial) likeness to have been brought thither from some town where flourished the arts lapidary, or — likelier — arranged for the sculptor to have crossed the desert to carve the monument (he looked for inscription: none could he see: indeed, there was no base nor pedestal … unless they lay under the sands)… “How came that statue here?” asked Vergil.

  “Ah, that is the very Nephew of the Cockatrisk, you see. How came he here? Why as to that I do not know, but see you how once he encountered that deadly look, that evil eye” here the men all made apotropaic gestures; it being dry to spit “and in a twinkle it petterfied him into stone —”

  Just so; every statue found in desolate places and cities which no longer man inhabiteth, though once populous and green trees grown about, each such image was said by the Masked Men to have been once creatures quick with life, but turned to stone by the cockatrisk or the basilisk (their memories did not go as far back, evidently, to Medusa, her hair full of snakes … evidently some primitive ascription rich with awe, by perhaps the first of the peoples of the Sea Between the Lands ever to have seen the otherwise inexplicable tightly-coiled hair of “dusky Nemon’s swarthy race;” whom the later and wiser would call “the pious and fleecey-haired Æthiopians”). Well … then … “How long has he been here, then?”

  Sighs, hums, more shrugs, more gesticulations. “‘How long’? Ah … how long shine the stars by which we navigate this stony sea? … Ah … ‘How long?’ Why my sire he often y-spoke of’t to me, ensaying, ‘Turn to the right a half-turn as you hold your arm out straight to catch the shadow when the Seven Sisters rise, and thence past the Nephew of the Cockatrisk will bring you to sweet pastures inlands …’ Ah … ‘how long?’ Why my grandsire a-spoke of it before my infant ears, ‘how long,’…. And my grandsire hoary —” and this, Vergil had learned, meant the great-grandfather. To attempt to accompt years by such tales was a task most futile … and … eh …?

  “They do say, me ser sage, that if one touch this with a wand of wood from the saelic, hælic willow tree, such as grows by the Grave of Proserpini abaft the River Ocean, such a one shall have great portendance.”

  Great Portendance. Ho. So. “And have you tried it, any?”

  Of course he could not see their faces, but their eyes told him no, they had not, even before Caniacus asked, “And how should we wanderers of the desert and the stony land have gotten such a thing as wand of willow?” Awaiting no answer, at once (one could see the eyes widen, see, almost, the sudden thought, swift as the thunderquarrel but quite saunse blast), “Have you?” Title, civil pretence nought. Just: “Have you?”

  The answer of course, though Vergil spoke no word, could, by his motions, be but yes. There was more sand in that place than dust, in color ranged from ox-red to saffron-yellow and every shade in between; they felt no wind as Vergil took out his old soft doe-skin budget from the saddle bag, yet the sands began to move and slide: and from this slide and drift and movement came a sound, faint as whispers, the sound of a music. What it may have seemed to the Masked Men, he did not know; but something, it must have meant, for they covered their ears (their ears were of course covered in cloth: they pressed their hands over the already covered ears; they seemed distressed, they hissed: he heard them): to him it was the music of the wind in the willow-trees of that misty Grove Persephone. And forth he drew the three small sticks, each no longer than his hand, each concave at one end and convex at the other and he fitted them together, and he stood there with, in his hand, the willow-wand of the Order of Sages and Mages. And he touched the stone horse of the soldier all of stone.

  Perhaps it was not necessary to say the words, might the touch suffice, but he had begun to say them anyway: “Rex Rhabdon, from the glare of the basilisk and the venom of the cockatrisk, sweet messenger Mercury; King of the Canny Rod, deliver us …” A moment still the horse and his rider stood as motionless as they had motionless stood for ages. Then the horse whinnied, he moved his hooves a-slaunt upon the sands; some grains of them fell off …

  The music of the sands had stopped, the Masked Men took away their hands, the soldier upon the horse slightly moved the targe upon his arm, slightly shifted it as if so to gain a better grip; brought forth from his side the sword. And gave the full salute. And then, dust falling from lips:

  “Vergilius Marius Mago, Citizen of Rome?” (“Soldier: Yes.”)

  “Himself the August Caesar no longer desires that you come to August Rome forthwith or at all. Instead you are strictly inhibited to enter Yellow Rome or come within the Third Mile Post in any direction, for the balance of the term of this Indiction: and herein fail not to obey. Rome has spoken. The matter is ended.” Again he gave Vergil the full salute, kneed his horse, turned, and cantered forth at easy pace towards — as far as Vergil could see or calculate — absolutely nowhere at all.

  As far as Vergil knew. Perhaps the Masked Men knew … a something … for one by one they took up each a handful of sand, a moment held it, then cast it slightly in the direction of the man-at-arms.

  Who in one moment more went quite out of sight.

  From the sands a-covering the rocky surface underneath, there came, of course, no sound more.

  They rejoined the caffile, the Masked Men falling behind to whisper or gesture what they might. None other gave indication that they had seen anything — though seen they must have. Vergil, having taken apart the willow-wand and replaced it carefully, felt now some wonder that no one else seemed to wonder. Perhaps they had seen so many wonders … and it occurred to him, simply, they did not care. Eventually, to those who move across the land of stone in their yearly movements, not in carrying cargo but in search of pasture, they would certainly care when a long-time landmark had disappeared: but doubtless, one way or another, they would adjust. They had managed before that stony figure had appeared and, someday and somehow, they would manage again.

  How long had the soldier stood there, turned to stone? … ages … generations … How else could he have endured? In a way that he could not know, it was necessary that he had endured. But how could a man who in the regular course of things would long ago have died and turned to dust have received a message from someone not yet to be born, for another man not yet to be born? Vergil did not and could not know. He recalled, however, having heard of someone who long ago had said, History is but a cycle; as the cycles of years, so are the cycles of the times; and when I harp of burning Troy I do not know if I sing of things past or if I prophecy of things yet to come …

  He was now, so to speak, unsummoned to Yellow Rome? He was on the contrary, forbidden to approach thithe
r for … for how many years remained of the current Indiction, that fifteen-year term of appraisal and valuation of all lands taxable throughout the Empery? Forgotten: he would yet recall. It was said that Soldan Moyses, King of Thule, remembered everything which had ever happened since Deucalion’s Flood; sea-birds brought him tidings, it was said, which they had been told by other birds yet. A thing remarkable indeed, yet in no wise beyond belief; for one had observed, many times, and many times more, congregations of birds, of many sorts of birds, sitting on stones and rocks and twigs and trees, doing nought as far as one could see and hear save conversing to one another in great gabbles and babbles and in songs of sounds. What more likely than that they were exchanging news of tidings near and far? — and always, at the end of these conventicles, hear the birds chaunt … chaunt … something … and group by group, see fly away in all directions. Vergil was not Soldan Moyses, King of Thule, but in regard to which year of which Indiction this was — ah! it must be the First Indiction, for Lupus, that wolf, had not yet been the Elected Emperor for a term of fifteen years, the term of an Indiction, though his term of rule as an Emperor, of course, was the same as the term of the lepers’ term in that Rough Place: for life.