The Phoenix and the Mirror

by Avram Davidson

  Vergil stood up abruptly, dropped the toga-long piece of linen and walked over to his dressing table. Into a basin of water he poured out of habit a very few drops of a preparation of balm, nard, and seed of quince; bathed his hands in it. He paused in the act of drying and said, “What was that word? Anti . . .”

  “Antimony. The supposed metal softer than lead.” He yawned, picked up a lyre, touched the chords with a tortoise-shell plectrum. “But I am tired of philosophy. . . . Shall I play you something from my Elegy on the Death of Socrates? Oh, very well!”

  He put down the lyre. “I will say what I know you want me to say. I came also because I was somewhat concerned about you. And now tell me — what does Cornelia want of you?”

  Vergil paused, immobile. Then he tucked his long shirt into his tights and adjusted the codpiece. He fastened his tunic and sat down to pull on the soft, form-fitting, calf-length boots. “Not very much,” he said. “She wants me to make a major speculum.”

  The alchemist pursed his lips and cocked his head. “I see . . . nothing simple, such as going to the Mountains of the Moon to gather moonstones, or bringing one or two of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides for her supper. No mere piece of easily obtained trivia such as a unicorn’s horn, or the Peacock in the Vase of Hermes. Oh, no — the Dowager Queen of Carsus only wants a virgin speculum, such as Mary of Egypt herself made but one of in her entire life. By Nox and by Numa! Why?”

  “She has a daughter on the Great High Road, coming here from Carsus, and is concerned for the girl’s safety . . . wants to know where she is . . . The girl is late.”

  Clemens rolled up his eyes and blew out his lips. “Oh, for some of that essence of wine, distilled five times in my alembic! Only therein, more spirit than solid, could I find refuge from this woman’s incredible . . . incredible . . . I lack the word. What next? Will she burn Naples to warm the soles of her feet? Oh well. A filly, a fool. And I daresay you told her as much.”

  The magus held up his hand. In the silence of the room there was only the ringing in their ears to hear, at first. Then there was a soft, steady hissing sound. And then the tiny drip . . . drip . . . drip of falling water. Vergil pointed his hand to the right. Clemens followed the gesture. There stood a statue of Niobe, surrounded by several of her children. As they watched a single drop of water welled up slowly in one of Niobe’s eyes, then in the other. First one tear and then a second welled, swelled, strained at the meniscus, broke, and fell into the pool at her feet.

  As the last ripple died away the pool became agitated. Bubbles arose and broke at the surface . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . five . . . seven of them. The pool emptied. And one of the children sank from sight into the pedestal.

  It seemed that they could hear a faint cry, as if from grief.

  Vergil’s hand moved slowly in the air, pointed to the left. A tall column, enchased with figures emblematic of the hours, stood where his finger indicated. A mask of Boreas was set into the top; above and facing it, one of Zephyr. And, as they gazed, a puff of steam emerged from the mouth of the face below, grew into a spume. A metal ball shot up in the steam, struck the face above and rang out like the silvery note of a small gong, and did so again and again and — “What is all this miming and mumming?” Clemens demanded, staring. “Either the water clock is faster than the steam horlogue, or the other way around. Easy enough to determine which is correct when the sun’s at high meridian. Why the posturing and posing?”

  Vergil’s countenance remained grave and set, his hand with its outstretched finger stayed still; then once again described its arc and came to rest pointing at Clemens. The alchemist made rude noises, originating around that eye said to lie behind his navel; tutted and tittered, then grew uneasy, fidgeting in his chair of Mauretanian leather; finally started convulsively and twisted to look behind him.

  Where there was nothing.

  Vergil burst out into a laugh of pure good humor which ended almost at once. Sheepishly, his friend settled back again, smiling. Then his laugh followed Vergil’s, he not noticing how abruptly the latter’s humor had ceased.

  “Come, now,” the magus said, a twisted smile trembling slightly on his lips. “Am I not, with you and with one other, all that remains of wisdom in this brute and bawdy age when decadence and barbarism contend for bay leaves, staff, fasces, crown and curile stool?”

  Clemens considered, a short moment. “‘One other . . .’ Appolonus of Tyana, that would be. . . . True, sir. True. Then . . .”

  “Then allow me my tiny joke. If I dared take my position seriously the whole day long, I would go mad . . . or agree to make Cornelia her speculum.”

  The other got lazily to his feet, half-heartedly tugged at his robe to straighten it. “What did she say when you refused?”

  Said Vergil, “I didn’t refuse.”

  • • •

  “Ingots . . . I mean, without even any regard to the question of making the speculum — which is a labor only somewhat less slight than making an aqueduct — there is the question of getting the materials. Very well . . . ingots of tin, to start with. To start our discussion with, that is. Of course you can’t start the work of the speculum with ingots.”

  Book after book lay open on the long library table at which they were seated, one on each side. Clemens held his finger in the codex of the Manual of Mary of Egypt, in which the woman, the greatest alchemist of the period, had put down the observations of a long life devoted not merely to theorizing but to actual research and work. Alongside were commentaries made by her scholars. Vergil gazed into the scroll that contained the fifth book of the learned Syrian, Theopompus BinHaddad, On the Affinities and the Sympathies, a treatise devoted to the philosophy of the psyche and its multiple counterparts. His chin rested in one hand so that his index finger pushed up his lower lip.

  No, one could not start the work of the speculum with ingots. Not a major speculum. The entire foundation of the work lay in the principle of creating a virgin article; the ordinary, or minor, speculum was merely a bronze mirror, fitted with a cover that opened on hinges, rather like a large locket. There were rumors, legends, that somewhere there existed — or had at one time existed — mirrors made, somehow, of glass. But in no work on the subject did anyone claim to have seen a mirror of this sort, let alone give directions for making one.

  But directions of the artificing of the sort which they now sought, though not copious, were explicit enough. Mary recorded having fashioned one for the Imperial Advocate in Alexandria. The anonymous genius who was known only as the Craftsman of Cos described how he had made no fewer than three, of which two had been successful. There were further accounts in the Chalcheoticon of Theodorus and in the Text-Book of Rufo.

  “We might conjecture a theory,” said Vergil — breaking his silence and announcing his descent from the clouds of thought by a slight humming sound — “to this effect. The atoms which comprise the viewing surface of a speculum are not merely passive, reflecting without receiving. To assume that is to assume that a look is completely intangible, and this we cannot assume, for we have all seen a person obliged to turn around because he has become somehow aware that he is being looked at.”

  Clemens judiciously, said, “Granted.”

  “If any surface,” Vergil continued, formulating his thoughts aloud, in an academic drone which numbed his emotions but left part of his mind untouched, “received an impression which was tangible, some imprint of this impression had to be left upon the surface. Hence,” he said, “a speculum which has been in use, however briefly, has become as it were clouded, however imperceptibly, with the accumulated impressions it has received. Nor will it suffice simply to fashion a new speculum. It is essential that the very atoms of the metals involved have received as little disturbance as possible. The ordinary craftsman works with scraps of old bronze. A somewhat superior craftsman uses bronze which has not been worked before — as bronze.”

  But bronze itself was not a pure metal, it was a fusion of coppe
r and tin. The smith who made bronze made it out of ingots of tin and — usually — ingots of copper; although copper was sometimes available in sheets formed in the shape of an oxhide. The smith, therefore, could not forge a virgin bronze because he was not working up virgin tin and virgin copper. Only the pure ores themselves, which had never been shaped by the hand of man, could be used to form the virgin bronze for a virgin speculum. And then . . .

  “You annoy me with your tedious recapitulation of details known to every apprentice, let alone an adept,” Clemens interrupted testily. “Somewhere on your shelves are works on the music of the Upper Orient, by masters who arranged the compositions played at the courts of the kings Chandraguptas and Asokas — you know that I would dearly love to see them. But every time I come here — every time that I am not myself engaged in other research, that is — you distract my attention, you occupy me with matters not to my tastes, and so the time goes, and it is always later than you think. Enough.” He rose to go.

  Vergil raised his hand. “Stay a moment,” he said.

  Clemens paused, fretting and muttering, while his friend returned to his thoughts. Then Vergil smiled — a rather painful and weary smile.

  “Help me with this concern,” he said, “and you will be able to consult the works of the music masters of Chandraguptas and Asokas as often and as long as you like. I will give them to you.”

  Clemens drew in his breath. His vast figure seemed to swell. He cast his eyes around the book-crowded room as though looking for the words just mentioned. His face grew red, and he rested his clenched fist upon a curious globe whose surface was covered with a painted map according to the theories of that Aristarchus who taught that the world was round.

  “Listen,” he said. “You have had these books as long as I have known you. We have long been friends. You knew of my desire for them. What is this Cornelia to you, that now and only now you offer me this gift to gain my help? Did she threaten you? And with what threat? Did she bribe you, cozen you, slip the gold and ivory key to her chamber into the palm of your hand? The time and the toil it will take to gratify her whim — if it can be gratified at all! — why . . .”

  His voice died away, growled in his chest.

  Vergil’s face twitched, and he pushed away the scrolls. “Time and toil . . . I worked two years for the Soldan of Babylone, that wise and great man,” he said, “casting two hundred and twenty-one nativities in order to find one man whose elevation alone could prevent rebellion and bloodshed, after which I devised a system of gates and sluices for the Soldan’s canals whereby one province could be saved from flood and two others from drought. At the end of those two years he took me by the hand and led me through his treasury, gold and silver and ivory and emeralds and purple, he led me in by the nearer door and let me out by the farther one. And then he said to me, ‘It is not enough.’ And he gave me as my wages those two books of the music of the Eastern Kings. . . .

  “Do you think he did not value them, or value my time and my toil? Do you imagine that I do not value them, merely because I do not understand them? When it is time for the chick to crack the shell, no heralds are needed to blow trumpets. Time and toil. . . . On my way back from Babylone I traveled through Dacia and stayed one night at the same rude inn with the magnate Lupescus, who farms the revenues from the Imperial mines in that rich land. I heard him tell of the tedious and wasteful process which they used in having slaves pick over the buckets of rubble brought up from the earth. Then and there, remembering what I had done for the Soldan, I sketched for Lupescus with a piece of charcoal on a piece of board a plan whereby the same work could be done with sluices of water — cheaper, quicker, better.

  “He gave me into my own hands a thousand ducats of gold, and horses to carry them, and every year he sends me a thousand more. It is useful to have, but I do not particularly value it, for I know he does not either — he must make by that process alone easily a hundred thousand a year — and besides, I earned it in a few minutes. . . . From time to time I ask myself, Did I really toil two years’ time for the Soldan of Baby lone, or for Lupescus? And, if for Lupescus, was it not rather for five hundred of his slaves whom my discovery freed from labor which drew blood from their fingers when they worked fast and blood from their backs when they did not?”

  Clemens cleared his throat. He pursued his lips. “You’ve become quite a philosopher,” he said at last. “Well, well. Very well. You shall have my help and we shall see what chick hatches from this egg. And now, Master Vergil, allow me to point out to you that there are two requirements which must be fulfilled before anything at all can be done toward making a major speculum — and both requirements are impossible of fulfillment!”

  He lifted one wing of his moustache with his stylus and leered on that one side. Then, replacing the stylus in the writing case fastened to his belt, he held up two huge and hairy fingers. He pressed down one. “You cannot get ore of tin.” He pressed down the other. “You cannot get ore of copper,” he said.

  With a slight sigh Vergil leaned across and pulled the casque down over the globe on the table. He got up and stretched, his shadow gesturing grotesquely in the now dimmer light. “I know we cannot,” he said, yawning. “Nevertheless, we will.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  WESTWARD INTO the the sea the last rose strokes of sunset painted the sky. Smoke of wood and charcoal drifted up to Vergil leaning over the parapet on his roof. Fish and squid, lentil and turnip, bread and oil and garlic, and a little meat — Naples was having its supper before retiring for the night; though few in Naples would have all of these for supper. A few horses still thumped their way down the street below, and a single heavy cart rumbled. Horses and cart were probably heading for the great stable at the foot of the hill. Women spoke in tired voices, filling their amphoras at the Fountain of Cleo. A baby cried somewhere, the sounds of its wailing thin upon the cool air. The lights of tiny oil lamps flickered like fireflies, and here and there the mouth of a brazier glowed, redly and briefly, as someone fanned the embers or blew upon them through a wooden tube. From the Bay came the faint thump-thump of a galley bailiff beating out the rhythm for the rowers as the ship put into port.

  “Abana! Bacchus! Camellia! Dido! Ernest! Fortunata! Gammelgrendel! Halcyon! . . . Halcyon?”

  The voice called nearby. Someone clapped hands, summoning. “Halcyon? Ah . . . my pretty! Come along, come along. . . . India! Jacynto! Leo! Leo! Leo . . . ?”

  The old madwoman was crying her cats home. Vergil walked to the side of the parapet, plucking a sprig of basil from one of the flower pots and bruising it between his fingers. He held the fragrant leaf to his nose and leaned over.

  “Dame Allegra, where is Kingdom?” he asked. She fed her covey of cats on the innards of fish and whatever other offals she could gather up, poking about the streets and wharves and alleys in her stained and tattered gown. Sometimes a choicer scrap of victual fell her way, from someone who pitied her or — more likely — feared her for the Evil Eye; this she ate herself. Not because she was better or more deserving than the cats, she would explain. Because her taste had been corrupted and theirs was still natural.

  “Kingdom?” Her voice came clearer now, as though she had lifted her head and was peering up through the darkness. “Kingdom, my lord, hath gone back to Egypt. Often did he tell me he would, an the season were aright for’t. To fare upon the sea, my lord, in these crank craft — nay, it were not befitting my handsome goddikin — in one of these common and stinking galleys? Nay, sir. But yestere’en, when the moon were all o’ gold, saith he to me, Cat Kingdom saith — Allegra, nursling mine, th’ imperial galleon goeth a-post tomorrow to Alexandria with my lord the proconsul aboard of her. And I’m half of a mind, sith, to gang along of him.”

  And so, while the deep blue deepened into purple and thence to black, she crooned her madwoman’s tale of how Kingdom (a lean and rangy tom with scarred flanks) had been welcomed aboard as befit his demidivinity, provided with silver dishes and golden dri
nking bowls, and had sailed for home, promising to speak good words for her to Sphinx and to sacred Bull Apis and to all the hieratic hawks and crocodiles. . . . The truth of the matter, Vergil reflected, was that he — Cat Kingdom — had probably been knocked on the head by some starveling slum-dweller and was even now stewing with an illicit onion and a clove of stolen garlic and a borrowed bay leaf. Naples was known to relish a dish of “roof rabbit” when the chance and an empty belly occurred together.

  Of course, it was not altogether impossible that some pious Egyptian actually had picked up the cat and taken it back to be cuddled and cosseted and reverenced in a village by the Nile for the rest of its life; and to be embalmed and entombed and worshiped after it died. What was fact and what was fancy? With old Allegra, it was often hard to know — and not with her alone.

  Clemens had gone home, shaking his massy head and muttering, but had promised to return the next day to discuss the making of a major speculum. Vergil, alone, found study impossible. And so, he reflected, here he was, instead, discussing cats with an ancient madwoman. It was a diversion of a sort, and required less effort than most. And her withered womanhood could not taunt his missing manhood.

  “How fortunate for Kingdom,” he said. “But you will miss him, Dame Allegra.”

  She crooned, wordlessly, while her cats scrabbled on the roof and clawed the walls of her hovel of a hut. So she lived, so she desired to live.

  “My lady fears for the fire,” she said, breaking off her keening.

  The door of the Sun and Wagon burst open with a splash of yellow light and a stink of sour wine and the noise of teamsters and drovers and tavern wenches and tapsters; then it swung shut again, and in the faint echo Vergil asked, “What lady?”