Vergil in Averno: Book Two of the Vergil Magus Series

by Avram Davidson

  “No.”

  The answer gave, evidently, great satisfaction. “Then we need him not! For what? Not! Away with him, and off with his — ” The last word was not heard, perhaps was not uttered; Armin with a great shout tore off his outer robe (it was crimson, and woven with a pattern of stars and flowers in gold and white and in an off-white), which fell at once into the thick mire and stench of the market ground, and Armin leapt forward, and snapping his fingers and prancing high, he advanced before the king and took a hand of the woman dancing with the king and took the hand of the king and they danced, and they all danced and the tambours beat. The sistrum chittered and the reed flute shrilled and the tambours beat. And the tambours beat.

  But Vergil very slowly withdrew. He had tried to think of other things, and, in much measure, he had. Consider the powers of the winds. What were winds but airs in motions, might not the very airs be harnessed? What was sailing, else? Molded? Might one not make a mill empowered by air? Might one not make a bridge of air? A wall? He cast his thoughts abroad into the fetid nightlike sounds; echo answered: might. Vergil very slowly withdrew and clum a flight of stairs and went along an upper colonnade away. This (these, for they proceeded quite a ways) system of walkways was not deserted, late though was the hour, but all who were there were leaning over the balustrade and looking, singing, shouting, clapping with their hands a distinctive rhythm; no one noticed one who walked slowly along and away.

  In his room. “This is madness. To assume a royal title without Imperial permission, this is treason. Cadmus is mad, this is no thing new; but now half the city seems mad as well.”

  “Yes.”

  Vergil turned; he saw Armin stepping through the low window that he had just now opened for a last breath of (what locally passed for) air — he saw the same man who had not a half a sandglass ago gone leaping out to dance insanely. Armin looked nothing as he said one syllable, that yes, then he grinned, and it was neither a madman’s grin nor was it nothing. Vergil could not really bring himself to grin, nor even smile, but somewhat he relaxed. And, almost, he smiled.

  “Well, my guest, how may I serve?”

  His guest muttered, “I should have sate upon the sill, and not . . . How serve? With water to wash my filthy feet. You need not — I hasten — think I mean you to wash them yourself, neither ought you, really, to call a servant, for they are surely by now all a-dancing in the mule market; may I take your consent for me to pour myself water? — this time I shall sit upon the sill!” He stooped, ladled, poured. His face puckered. “Hercules! Me Here, how it stinks! No mud and no stench like the mud of our mule market . . . and then . . . I do presume, but . . . and then I should be grateful for something to toss over my tunicle, for my garment I did not truly care to retrieve.”

  Vergil tossed him a robe of local cut (a gift, one among many), and Armin caught it and threw it on. “Why did you dance there, then?” asked Vergil.

  The two men gazed calmly at each other. They were of an age, about, and of a weight, about; save that Vergil was thick in the chest and slender in the legs and narrow in the loins. The other’s form was more of a symmetry, more equal in proportions. Outside in the colonnade a cresset flared, then dwindled. No one was there to replace it, but a few lamps burned in the room, and the room was not much dimmer now than in the daylight once the shutters were closed, for no thin-pared panels of horn, none of lucent shell nor of oiled cloth pierced their solid panels. Vergil: “Why?”

  Armin scarce shrugged one shoulder, scarce twisted one side of his mouth. “Because it amused me. Ah, me Here! How it amused me! That is why I, too, hallooed loud Long Live King Cadmus! when they set the crown upon his curls. Nor did he disappoint me, that one. He has put bright tappeties — ‘tapestries,’ you call them — hanging on our black walls, and flung bright garlands round the necks of our black horses. And — you saw, you heard! — there in the open place where the black mules spilled their black piss and passed their black dung, he danced! Me Here, me Hercules! how he danced! What will you tell them when you go to Rome?”

  The swift transition did not catch Vergil unprepared. He stroked his short beard, and, as it, too, was black, he wondered (passing-swift and wry the thought!) how it would look offset with flowers. “I? I do not go to Rome,” he said.

  Armin looked at him, head a-cant, eye a-slant. “Ah? No? But, you know, you know . . . Rome may come to you,” said he.

  • • •

  But though long later men were to speak both of what they called, fearfully and darkly, The Death of Rome (some said, one man; some said, three men; none could agree on the names of any), and to speak, brightly and cheerfully (some men, at any rate) of what they called The Salvation of Rome, describing this as a series of mirrors in or through which the Emperor might see, and in good time, the advance of any army of rebels or of alien invaders — that morning, that is, the morning next, Vergil for one saw in no mirror any sign or signs of Rome advancing toward him.

  So he looked into his tablets to see what names the secretary of Haddadius had at his master’s whisper engraved therein.

  The first name on the list was that of M. Cnaeus Grobi, and at that magnate’s gate the door was not even opened for Vergil at all, merely a slat slid back to disclose a peephole behind it (Grobi, it seemed, was even less trusting than the nephew of the blind jeweler!), and through this an eye looked at him. Vergil stated his purpose, the eye did not blink and the door did not move; he showed his tablets with their inscribed list, the eye moved a bit, and then the eye went away. Dignity be damned! Thus thinking, Vergil applied his own eye to the peephole’s other side: naught he saw but some screen or buffer standing or hanging back a way . . . not much farther back, he thought, than to allow a man to stand between it and the gate. No more he saw; did he hear more? . . . more than the usual clamor from the nasty street at the lane’s end? He heard something like a growl from deep within what might be the chest of a rather large dog. Sign, Cave canem, there was none; who came upon the canine came without having been forewarned, such warning being evidently here at least regarded as an indulgence not the least necessary. But, by and by, Vergil, having withdrawn his eye (he had applied it very briefly), by and by there came the sound of slow and heavy steps, and the sound of slow and heavy breathing. … I should like, at least for a moment, to listen closely to those lungs (thought Vergil) and to inform their owner what said Hippocrates and what said Galen and what said such a one and such a one: and to advise him … and then an eye again looked out at him through the chink in the door.

  It was not the same eye.

  The heavy breathing continued a moment, the slat slid shut, the heavy footsteps departed. Vergil waited and he paced, and he paced and he waited; but there was no further response from behind the heavy dark door (it seemed, though, that perhaps the dog behind its wall paced him on his side step for step), and presently he went away. Those lungs shall not long continue to labor breathing this thick, foul air, he thought. But he thought this without malice, and without particular pleasure. And he thought, too, that if this was the way one was treated in The Very Rich City, he might another time prefer to hazard his chances in silted-up Parva Porta, so proverbial for poverty; where, it was said, pigeon soup was made by boiling pigeon feathers, and the very dogs were so weak that they had to lean against the trees to bark.

  Trees! He saw none here at all.

  The doors, however, of the house of Lars Melanchthus opened wide enough, and wide they must needs open if Lars Melanchthus himself had to pass through, for Lars Melanchthus was a wide man indeed. “Ho, you are a wizard!” said he. “You are a wizard. You are a wizard?”

  “Yes, Magnate.” Clearly this was no time to ask if they should first define their terms. Nor, for that matter, had Socrates had to define the bowl of hemlock.

  “Ho,” said Lars Melanchthus. He gazed at Vergil with large and reddened eyes. The eyes seemed respectful. But they also seemed to hold a look of what might be called shrewdness. Particularly by Lars
Melanchthus. Who now looked round about his table, then picked up one of those jointed figures of a skeleton, made of ebony and ivory, which were usually passed around the banquet-board after the finger bowl as a memento of man’s mortality. First he picked it up, then he set it down, well away from the reach of Vergil’s hands. “So, Wizard. Make it dance. Make it dance, Wizard, so.”

  Was it for this — ?

  Vergil made it dance. He made it caper, tread on its toes, he made it fling its arms up, and he made it dance the classic dance of Attic grace. Magnate Melanchthus was delighted, clapped his huge hands, summoned sundry members of his household, gestured them to look at the jiggling anatomy, and joined in their amusement. And when, after a while, the dance of death slowed and the skeleton sank down and lay at full length in repose, the magnate announced his own conclusion. “Yes,” he said. “You are a wizard. Oh yes! Yes.”

  The wizard bowed. In what audience of what school of enchantment the magnate had discovered this singular, though simple, test of wizardhood, Vergil would have liked to ask, but he forbore. Melanchthus snapped his fingers, gestured. The magnate’s butler approached and handed Vergil a new robe and a single coin. A silver ducat. “Those are for you,” said Lars Melanchthus. “For you, for you. So. Thank you.”

  “On the contrary, Magnate, it is really for me to thank you.”

  “Yes,” said the magnate. He nodded his acknowledgment, looked all around, gathered the nods of others. Then he said, “All right to go now, Wizard.”

  And the wizard went.

  Was it for this — ?

  • • •

  Someone had told him this: that, traditionally, and where circumstance permitted, in the sundry workplaces among the fire-fields of Averno, the day’s work began with the Big Slave, be he owner or the chief workman, tossing a red coal at, seemingly, nowhere in particular; there followed a sound like a gasp (so it was described in the account), followed by a jet of fire. The Big Slave had known whereat he tossed, and his red coal had found some fumarole whose foul breath was no merely foul breath, but inflammable air, called gas.

  It was not that Vergil would not have wished to see this happening (vaguely he recalled having heard that somewhere this was involved with a lump of incense: surely not here!), and see it happen he might yet: but not here, now, yet; the day’s work had long ago begun, and, by the sound, was in no way slackening. At the home (which he had next sought) of a listed magnate, they had without either civility or incivility sent him with some young house-thrall as guide through a long lane into the open area where, for the first time clear, he beheld the fire-fields being worked. He stood for a while merely looking, thinking, appraising, calculating. When he looked for his guide to ask a question, the guide was gone.

  Vergil shrugged. He would ask another one, then: this one coming up with an armful of iron rods.

  “Magnate Boso?” The man bobbed his polled, scarred head at an angle, said, “Two-bib”; passed along. The syllables, immediately, made no sense. Only sight made sense of them. There, following the angle of the canted head, at one of many forges: two men, one holding with tongs the white-hot bar, one the hammer. This last was naked save for his thick sandals and his leather apron; the other wore a leather apron behind, as well. The odor of body sweat and singed body hair was very strong. He who held the softened iron continually turned it, and continually said he, “Strike! . . . Strike! . . . Strike! …” With each command, down came the hammer: at each blow, the softened iron splayed wider; was, at the next blow —

  But he who held the iron in the tongs did not call for, by and by, a next blow; instead he did not even turn the bar: merely, he looked at it. Yet the striker, catching sight of Vergil, did not catch lack of command. Down his hammer came, too late he tried to stop himself; in the process was caught off balance, fell against the fire-hot forge, swerved back, screamed, managed to bring the hammer down to the ground and to lean upon it. There would be another scar, by and by. His breath sobbed. Yet it was not at his seared flesh that he looked. He looked at the smith.

  Who said, “Bugger. Punk. Son of a sow. The Big says, Strike, you strike. The Big don’t say Strike, you don’t strike. Sometime the iron got to rest, even just a little, from the taste of the fire. And sometime the fire got to rest, too, even just a little, from the taste of the iron. Sometime even the smith, Big or other, got to rest, even just a little. And sometime the striker, too. Pig’s pizzle. Whistle-brain. You want taste more fire? You want take rest with the iron up your — What you look?”

  For the striker, despite dismay, despite pain, despite even fear, had let his eyes wander to the source of his miscalculation. And the eyes of the smith, first, next his head, last his entire upper body, turned, and so for the first time he saw Vergil standing there. How level was his gaze, the smith’s. How cold (in all these heats) his look. How deep, yet deeply contained, the scorn. As if to ask, “How dared you come here? Who are you? I care not.” Vergil said no word. A sudden start, a movement swift, well-trained body (well trained for this) sensing a change in temperature which no else could sense, the smith swerved back to the forge, spat upon the bar up by the forge, drew from the very steam and vapor to which the spittle had in an instance turned, the knowledge which now made him cry, “Meherc! Miscarried monstrel! Too cold, now! Too cold!”

  Before the smith had finished words, Vergil had, so swift, opened his pouch and taken from it a short length of wood of the thickness (and somewhat the shape, for fully symmetrical it was not) of his index finger, and of perhaps twice that length (and still from every forge the heats and smokes arose, the air was thick and murk); he twisted it, let some small part drop back, and saying calmly, clearly, “Ash . . . Ash . . . Aysh . . . Aysh …” he leaned forward, his other hand closing his garments tighter to his body, and blew once, twice, thrice, toward the bar in the tongs. This had been ashen, next dull red, next it whitened, next it rippled with many colors, next —

  The smith’s hands tightened on the tongs, he gave them the slightest of turns. “Strike!”

  And the striker seized his hammer and with all full-measured strength he struck.

  “Done,” said the smith. And drew the bar back once more.

  Then he turned, sweeping his arm across his brow, to Vergil, who, with a movement too calculated to be called haste, had replaced the hollow rod. The smith asked, “Fellow, where you learned fire?”

  “In Sidon, me ser.” Only after having said it did he bethink him he had answered in the tongue of Sidon. And from this place to that place …

  “You be the mage we — ?”

  “Yes, Magnate.”

  Boso cupped his huge hands around his huge mouth, shouted something. Waited. One would not have said that any voice could have carried over the noise and clamor of those forges; and this one needed not, for its burden was taken up and passed along. Very soon indeed a figure appeared through the murk and haze. “Go thither, Wise One,” said Boso, still in Sidonian. “To him, to him, to that one; he will prepare for you, and I shall come . . . I shall come …” He gazed around and all about his works, his words fallen, stopped. Almost Vergil felt that the man would have wished to have been at every single forge at once. The face returned to look at him. Quite gone that freezing, contained scorn of short moments before. “I shall come presently.” He strode away to another forge, where even then the smith had taken one short step backward and seemed, though slightly, to totter. The magnate seized from him the tongs and turned the iron . . . not much did he turn the iron, almost plastic in the smolder, but then he would know, as any master smith must know, just how much to turn it; and “Strike!” he cried.

  As Vergil followed the one figure designated to “prepare” for him, ever behind him he heard that voice, heard indeed other voices from and at all other forges: “Strike! . . . Strike! . . . Strike! …”

  And, after all, presently he did come, both “bibs” flapping. To Vergil he gestured an obeisance, omitted at their first meeting, one which the guest had
seen before, though not locally: Brosa stooped, but did not stoop low, he dropped his hand, but did not drop it far; he brought it up toward the top of his head, but he did not bring it up to the top of his head — and all this very fast. He had, in effect, bowed to the ground and gathered up its dust and strewn it upon his poll. In fact, of course, he had done nothing of the sort. And whilst doing (and not doing) all this, he growled something that was clearly intended to be a respectful greeting, though certainly not intended to be a prolix one.

  And the while he stole a glance at Vergil’s pouch.

  But of what he thought might be in it, and of what he knew was certainly in it, of this he said no word.

  Then he addressed himself to the meats upon the table. By and by, his mouth only partly filled, he said, “This a very rich city.”

  “Indeed, Magnate.”

  “It been richer.”

  “Indeed, Master?”

  “Could be richer, could richer be, than ever was. But how?”

  “Indeed. Magnate.”

  Magnate Boso poured into his goblet a draft of something thick and dark, poured on top of that something thin and light, swirled the goblet, once, twice, raised, and in an instant drained it, set it down. “Rich. Richer. Very rich. Riches.” Barely he paused, he looked at Vergil from beneath his hedge-thick eyebrows. “Interested?”

  The possibility of gaining, and gaining swift and soon, the means of supplying all he ever had desired to supply for that place, as yet set no place, which his dreams termed home, lit up Vergil’s mind. And in the light, like the brief and fitful shimmer of a sheet of heat-lighting, something else he saw there illuminated as well.

  At the Secret Sacred School, filing past Putto, the obscenely fat, who stood with a large and sagging sack in each swollen paw. Every student, by instruction (and one did not dally in obeying instruction; this was already the eighteenth lesson . . . or . . . it might prove to be; one did not always know . . . till after) and without looking, peering, peeping, groping, fumbling, was to place one hand into each sack and withdraw one, only one . . . whatever. The student ahead of Vergil was an Illyrian named Lustus, one with a clever way of seeming not the least clever, of lurching into one of his fellows, if not always (though often) to his own profit, then to the other’s loss, and similar tricks of which one could hardly or not decently complain. Lustus had taken hold of . . . whatever . . . with each hand; perhaps Lustus did not like the feel of what he had hold of by his left hand, clearly Vergil saw the wrist-tendons move, knew that Lustus was — Lustus, slightly, feigned a stagger, murmured apology — was letting go of . . . whatever . . . and taking hold of another. Lustus gave a short, sick, and sickening grunt. Lustus drew up his hand as though it was afire. Vergil could not clearly (thank the gods!) make out what it was that clung to the left hand of Lustus, it was too large for an insect and had too many limbs for an animal or reptile, and it writhed, writhed, and Lustus screamed, screamed —