The Phoenix and the Mirror

by Avram Davidson

  Ernas shrugged, picked up the oar on which he had been working. “At this time there are no Kings for you to see. Ottil King is off somewhere, harrying the coasts of Little Asia. Osmet King is in Axand-i-Rume — how do you call it? Al-Axandria — dickering for more tribute. So, no Kings, no pass, no safe-conduct. Go.” His arm was half raised to point the way of their departure, when some recollection of his official role seemed honestly to settle down upon the man. Slowly and ponderously he dropped his arm, ponderously and slowly he said, “If I can in any way, as Delegate of the Sea-Huns, assist the bearers of letters of state from the August House, of course I will do so.” But his eye was on the oar.

  Promptly, Vergil said, “You can. A pass to your King.”

  Angrily: “Haven’t I told you? There are no Kings about!”

  “There is one King about, as I assume from your not having told us he was away.”

  Genuine amazement spread over the man’s face, he frowned a second, puzzled. Then his face dissolved into a mass of moving muscles and he cried, “Bayla King?” And he burst out laughing into their faces.

  • • •

  Afterward he had said, amusement still breaking his voice, “So — you have heard of our famous monarch, eh? In all your great cities — Rume, Axand-i-Rume, Byzant-i-Rume, and Jerus-i-Rume — resounds, eh? the fame of Bayla King? Be so. I will give you your safe-conduct. May it be of much profit to the August House.”

  And so he had . . . two of them, in fact. A white horsetail to tie to the Red Man’s mast, and a man of his own household to shout particulars to any Hunnish vessel which approached to find out what a Punic vessel did in those waters with the heralds’ emblem at its mast. This man had the weazened, ageless look of all his folk, and refused (with a look too contemptuous to be scornful) to go below decks at any time. He passed the voyage squatting on the quarter-deck wrapped in a half-hairless old wolfskin. No one knew what he drank, if at all; for food he had in a leathern pouch with him some dark lumps of dried dolphin’s flesh — a diet which horrified the Red Man’s crew. “The dolphin,” they said to Vergil, “is the friend of man, and what man eats his friend? The Huns are no men at all,” they argued, “but daemons, and this proves it.”

  The shore camp of the Sea-Huns on the island of Marissus lay in a state of semi-somnolence. The guide indicated, with a grunt and a gesture, where they were to moor. It was deep water there, the broken crater of some drowned mountain, and the figurehead of their ship cast its shadow on the rough shingle of the beach, over the weed-slimed stones and the broken gray pillars of long past days. The hawser was passed through the eye of a stone post, the guide leaped ashore, a small crowd of pot-bellied children and old women gathered; and no further attention was paid to them. On the whole they thought it best to follow their former voyage mate.

  Tents were pitched seemingly at hazard along the shore and into the pine and cypress woods, but there were few of them in comparison to the ships. Some of these had been beached for so long and were so unfit for sea that doors had been hacked in them and grass grew on their slanting decks. Here and there a man of fighting age sat, knees up, against a hulk or doorpost, honing a spearhead or a grappling hook or engaged in some other passtime work. But always, they noticed, he bore a wound which prevented his being out with the fighting fleets. There were few old men. Hunmen tended not to live until very old, preferring to perish in battle. But there were old women, and the old women were hideous. Withered, toothless, half-hairless, half-naked, their dried old dugs flapping as they nosed, bent over, about the camp, filthy and shrill, they epitomized the other side of the life of a race which despised what little they dimly understood of such concepts as love or grace or beauty.

  Here and there captives of some other nation paused in the work of fetching wood or water and gazed dumbly at the visitors from the half-forgotten world which had not thought them worth the price of redemption; then went again about their labors. A stench of night-soil and stale urine and rotten fish, of ill-cured hides, dried sweat, old dogs, unwashed clothes, sour mares’ milk, and other elements defying analysis hung over the camp. The Sea-Huns were said to bathe but once a year . . . and on that day, it was told, the fish in all the circumjacent seas died in great multitudes.

  Vergil felt he could believe it.

  Like sea-wrack long after some great storm, the decayed fruits of their pillage and plunder lay strewn about the camp. Gilded furniture crouched broken and peeling, bolts of fine dyed linen served as casual close-stools, unstoppered jugs of vintage wine sat turning into vinegar, against a torn codex illuminated in glowing colors a scabby dog lifted its leg . . . so it went.

  The guide mounted the steps of a ruined temple and vanished. The Phoenician and his patron followed. The roof was totally gone, and in the interior was the largest tent either of them had ever seen. An avenue of horsetails, dyed red, dyed purple, black, and gray, led up to it. Through an opening in the top which let in a stream of sunlight, the two visitors, their eyes adjusting, observed the guide prostrating himself, rising before he was fully down, going through the motions of gathering dust and casting it on his head without ever actually doing so, advancing a few steps, repeating the process. And all the while he mumbled and muttered, yawning as if ineffably bored; and presently, raising his voice a trifle impatiently, but never ceasing his chant, he squatted on the great, and gorgeous, and filthy Bactrian carpet with which the pavilion was floored. He held his arm out horizontally as if to bar their further progress.

  They halted, peered, squinted. Before them on a pallet of greasy sheepskins, clad in a doublet of filthy samite, mouth open to show a set (incomplete) of brown stumps which had once been teeth, a man lay snoring. They realized, after a moment, from the golden circlet topping the pole from which hung the last horsetail, and from the muted but still patently purple color of the doublet, that they were in the real presence of Bayla, King of the Huns.

  Shabby as it was, the Presence was not altogether without its train of state or some notions of hospitality. Three scarred and limping men of his nation arose from the shadows at his bark (or snarl) when he awoke to find the strangers standing before his bed; these warriors-in-waiting, as it were, had been sharing the afternoon siesta with their King, and now added their own yips and yelps. Slaves and other members of the court came, though they did not come soon, and by the time Bayla King had cleared his nose and throat and laved his eyes in a little water and performed the other brute details of his scant and nasty toilet, something resembling a reception or audience had begun to be in progress.

  Vergil and Ebbed-Saphir sat on sheepskins piled ten deep and covered with robes of fur-lined silk (doubtless once the property of some plundered Scythian magate). Wine had been brought, and splendid goblets, which did not match, fresh water, kymyss, ships biscuit, and pastries of colored sugar-flour which had once been soft. In one corner a woman sat cross-legged and sang something through her nose as she banged discordantly upon a timbrel, the while suckling a great child in her lap.

  The warriors-in-waiting approached, introduced themselves, held out their hands. Baron Murdas had but one eye, Baron Bruda lacked most of his left arm, and Baron Gabron leaned heavily upon his spear to compensate for the severed Achilles tendon of his right foot: all three of them growled, “Give. Give. Give.”

  The bag of purple silk embroidered with the Imperial monogram and containing the letters of state was produced. Gabron seized it, gave it to Bruda, who handed it to Murdas, who opened it and dropped the documents in Bayla’s lap. The latter stroked them with his grimy fingers, held them upside down, flipped through them as if looking for filthy pictures, then allowed them to slide from his hands. In a hoarse voice, which seemed faintly disappointed, he said, “Emperor books, very beauty, very sweet. Great honor. Rume, Hun, big friend. Drink, eat. Meat, fish, soon. What name you got?”

  His Thallasic Majesty Bayla, son of Bayla, son of Ottil, son of Ernas, of the Sea-Huns King, Great King, King of Kings, co-lord of the Seas and the
Isles, was a flabby, pudgy little man with tiny and rufous eyes, a scant and drooping mustache. The left side of his face had been much worried by a knife, but not recently.

  The Phoenician introduced himself (“Punic man good sailor, but all time peddle, peddle,” said the King, mildly amused. “No peddle here. Hun not need buy, just take.”) and his patron. Scarcely was he done when Barons Murdas, Bruda, and Gabron commenced again with their hands outstretched to growl, “Give. Give. Give.” The guests produced their presents for the monarch. The Red Man gave a long knife, in the Sharkskin scabbard of which were fitted a small knife and a whetstone; Vergil’s gift was a pair of garters done of golden thread and adorned with Baroque black pearls.

  Having donned the garters as bracelets or armills, and having picked his teeth awhile, meditatively, with the smaller knife, Bayla scrambled to his feet, beckoned them to follow. His warriors-in-waiting promptly sank down to resume their rest, and the woman (she was, they learned later, Sept-Mother of the Fox Sept and the hereditary Court Singer, and had incidentally — very incidentally — presented Bayla with his youngest child) the woman instantly ceased banging and shrilling, and adjusted her left dug to the babe’s slippery mouth.

  The sun seemed brighter. Back of the tent, following the King’s gestures, they came upon an enclosure in which something was chained to a pillar.

  “Vergil Shaman,” the King said, “I give you good word. Take care. Not be like bad shaman. Louse’s bastard!” he shrieked, suddenly, his scarred face going red with rage. “Eater of swine’s turds!”

  The thing in chains raised its head and then its body. It was the oldest, mangiest, shabbiest bear Vergil had ever seen. It grimaced and blinked and champed its almost toothless jaws and made little, feeble noises, then covered its face with its paws as Bayla, in a hysteria of fury, pelted it with sticks and stones. At that moment it seemed like a very old man clad in a very old bearskin, and despite the hot sun Vergil once again felt the cold sick touch of uncommon fear.

  “Tildas Shaman? This?” The words were jerked from his mouth.

  “Tildas Shaman yes! Tildas whoreson! Hangman Tildas! Tildas pox!”

  Here it was, the bear which the whole Sea-Hun nation believed had once been a man. “Why do you hate him so?” he asked.

  “Why?” the voice of the King rose to a squeal. “Why? Why hate? Why?” His mouth spittled and his filthy small hands clenched and unclenched in fury. Rage deprived him, almost, of his little Latin, and it was a while before he could make clear his meaning. Which was, seemingly, to the effect that Tildas the Shaman, by failing to assume his human and articulate form — and thus being unable to convey from the Old King’s ghost and the ghosts of the puissant Sept-Mothers a message favorable to the pre-eminence of Bayla — had allowed Bayla’s brothers Ottil and Osmet to usurp the royal power and reduce Bayla to his present impotent position.

  “King!” he howled, beating his pigeon breast. “Bayla, King, too! Ottil, King, and Osmet, King, but Bayla — Bayla, King, too!”

  And so he was — King of the stinking shore camp, King of the old women and the potbellied children, King of invalids and cripples; of rubbish, flies, and scabby dogs — King. Bayla King.

  • • •

  There had been a sacred well used by the Greeks before the Sea-Huns had come crawling up over the horizon and squatted on the island like thick clots of locusts. The sides had fallen in through neglect, and moss was grown upon the rocks. Here, in the green and the cool, alone and unbothered, too solitary to be chafed by the comparison of what he was to what he might have been, Bayla sat and talked (calmer, now, after his outburst) to his visitors.

  Would he give them a safe-conduct to Cyprus?

  He would if he could — but he did not dare. His brothers — (“May they both have boils, piles, scurvy, saddle, galls, seasickness and black pox!”) — his brothers would be furious. No . . . no . . . he did not dare.

  A pity, Vergil observed. They had been looking forward to seeing the famous Cyprian city of Paphos. Bayla, at this, pricked up his dirty little ears. Paphos, eh. Where the great Temple of Aphrodite was, eh. Paphos — so they were going there. Ah-mmmm. Paphos.

  “Yes, King Bayla. To Paphos, where the Great Temple of Aphrodite is — and the seven hundreds of beautiful priestesses — or is it seventeen hundreds? — all skilled in the divine arts of love and ready to make each devoutly amorous pilgrim a lover by proxy of the great goddess herself. It would be a meritorious deed to worship the goddess, would it not?”

  “Worship goddess, eh. Mmm-ah . . .”

  Vergil’s eye met that of An-Thon; the latter at once declared how proud he would be to carry King Bayla to Paphos on pilgrimage. The little monarch refreshed his drooping lips with his tongue. His mind was working, at a slow and ponderous, but highly visible, rate. “. . . worship goddess . . .”

  A scowl crept, draggingly, over his face. “Ottil,” he growled, “mmm . . . Osmet. Rrr . . .”

  On the point of asking, rhetorically, he hoped, why the other co-Kings should object to such a pious journey, Vergil abruptly changed his plans. “Unless, of course, King Bayla is not allowed to leave the camp without permission. . . . If he is a prisoner, in effect, of his brothers — ”

  So quickly did the regius tertius leap to his feet, so furiously raise one fist, so swiftly reach for his knife, that the Magus had no time to say more than, “I die for truth!”

  Out flew the knife. “Up, up!” cried Bayla. “Vergil Shaman, Ebbed Captain, up! To ship, to ship — now! We go Cyprus.” Rage a bit abated, determination not one whit, a corner of his mouth lifted the ruined side of his face in something which was not quite a smile and less than a leer. “Paphos ho!” cried Bayla the King. “Worship! We worship goddess!”

  He drove them before him, as a dog drives sheep.

  • • •

  The three battle-battered barons were so dumfoundered by the decision that they had not a word to say to their excited liege-lord. The situation, however, obviously required that they say something to someone; and they turned, therefore, upon the two visitors, hands outstretched again, palms up, fingers slightly curled in:

  “Give, give, give.”

  It was no time to hold off giving. They gave Vergil’s writing case, Ebbed-Saphir’s pocket astrolabe, they gave belt buckles and buskin clasps, knives, purses, amulets, combs, caps, cloaks. Vergil later commented that he had given everything but his virtue.

  Supplies were swiftly laden aboard by the crew, and the horse’s skull with black ribband through the nostrils fastened to the bowsprit — no Hun would ever presume putting to sea sans this potent talisman. They found the sea as slack and windless as a pool in the bottom of a cave, but the oarsmen rowed with their hearts and their bended backs, and scarcely let up the driving pace till the stench of the Huns’ camp lay far behind with the smudge on the horizon that was Isle Melissos.

  Free of the decaying influence of his court, such a court it was! — Bayla seemed another man. He proved himself a good sailor and even a brave though clumsy fighter, helping them through a gale off Farther Greece by his prompt seizure and careful handling of the tiller when the duty helmsman lost his grip and went tumbling arse over ale mug, and was the life and soul of the crippling and beating-off of a Sard freebooter south of the Cyclades. Time and time again Hunnish vessels approached, wet and pitchy-black sides gleaming with malice, sails the rusty color of old blood; but the royal standard of the white horsetail surmounted by crown, plus Bayla’s stumpy figure on the quarter-deck, got the ship through every time.

  But when the winds failed, Bayla could do nothing. Indeed, he went to sleep.

  • • •

  “Of course we can row, we can always row,” the Red Man said, more than a trifle impatiently. “But my men are not slaves, to be used up, cast aside, and replaced. Hence, the amount of sea that we can cover by rowing quickly is limited. And there is the question of time. Always there is the question of time.”

  It seemed almost as th
ough he had taken Vergil’s problems for his own.

  “If it is the question of being back in Naples to pick up a charter,” Vergil said, stroking his short and pointed beard, “I can only assure you again that, should you miss your customary cargoes by a late return, you will not be the loser by it.”

  But the Red Man denied that time, though it must always be paid for, could always be paid for in money. “And, sometimes, Ser Vergil, it has no price that we would willingly pay. Can you not raise the wind?” he demanded, abruptly.

  No price that we would willingly pay. So well had his hired captain summed up his, Vergil’s, own feelings. Caught up full, for a moment, in the never-for-long subdued anguish caused by the missing portion of his psyche, by the betrayal of the woman he loved most among women, he shook his head. Then, quickly regaining control, said, “The influences are not favorable. But — ”

  Swiftly, An-Thon: “But then there is . . . something else? Then, do it, man. Do it!”

  It was dim, down there in the cedar-scented cabin. From within a great chest of ebonwood Vergil lifted out a smaller one made of the puissant horn-beam tree, and out of this he took one of several caskets cleverly worked from tortoise shell. He placed it on the cabin table.

  “This may not be pleasant,” he warned. The Red Man made an impatient, scorning sound in his chest, watched Vergil as with long fingers he carefully unwrapped layer and layer of costly vine-wool brought from Hither India; soft and white as newly fallen snow; and uncovered something sere and forked and brown, and tied up hand and foot in a series of scarlet, silken knots.

  Marveling, the Red Man said that he had never from his younger days till now seen any such a thing as a knot so utterly strange as (he indicated without touching) this, and this, and this, and this. “And I am a sailor,” he said, “and thought that by now all knots were known to me.” His voice grew lower. “These are of another order altogether, I see. Are they the ones that bind the winds? No! You have here a . . .” His voice ceased entirely. He watched.