The Phoenix and the Mirror

by Avram Davidson

  Now, if the only use of such Caucasian beeswax was to be employed as “lost wax” in casting virgin mirrors, it might have remained forever among the mountaineers — except when some rare, infinitely rare, artisan chose to engage upon the work of such a speculum. But it happened that wax of Caucasus had other employment as well . . . for example, in making a supporting medium for the fashioning of those silvern cups which in an instant turn black when any poisoned drink is poured into them . . . or for waxing the ends of threads (the better to pass them through a needle’s eye without fraying) used to sew cerements intended to preserve bodies from corruption . . . and sundry, and costly other uses.

  There was, accordingly, a certain trade in it, and this trade in Naples was in the hands of one Onofrio, an apothecary, whose combination ware- and counting-house seemed more like some strange and odorous cave than any place of business. “We have it,” he told Vergil, winking and nodding. “We haven’t much of it, of course. Our wife was saying to us not a week ago, ‘Onofrio, put Caucasus on the list, it’s running low.’ So we did, we’re sending out work, there’ll be a bit more by and by. A year. Or two. Or three. Eh?” another wink. And, “How much? Hmm. Mmm. A lump the size of a man’s head. Don’t know its present weight, been scraping at it here and there and now and then as the need arises. Why? How much d’ye need, Dr. Vergil? What? All of it? Impossible. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible. Can’t be entirely without, no, we can’t.”

  In this he was certainly sincere. When, however, it was represented to him that part of it could be recovered and returned, it suddenly became no more priceless — but its price was considerable — and not to be calculated in gold alone. There were certain things which Onofrio wanted to know and which Vergil could tell; and certain things which Onofrio wanted done . . . and which Vergil . . . only Vergil . . . could do. Fortunately, the apothecary, though desirous, was not covetous. He drove a hard bargain, but he did not insist on payment in advance; the precise degree and amount of payment would, it was mutually agreed, depend on the amount of wax returned. Vergil followed him past towering cabinets containing ambergris, musks, storax, balsams, jujubes, attars, essences and elixirs, azoth, ointments, theriacs and talequales, unicorn, ostrich shell, toads and toadstools, bats’ blood and bats, vipers in treacle and vipers’ blood and dried vipers, fewmets of griffins, mummy and mandgagora and mercury; scents and stenches and smells and odors; to where the essential wax was stored, locked up in an iron cage guarded by a dog who had not seen the sun, poor creature, since he was whelped.

  The wax was dark, darker than common beeswax, almost black, but of no common blackness; shot through with tints of amber and red, did the light strike it a certain way. It was of a rich and overpowering odor, spicy and strong, and it felt unctuous and potent to the finger.

  “We must have as much of it back as can be saved, Dr. Vergil,” the muskmonger said. “We can’t spare a scruple of it to feed the fires wastefully, no, not a drachm. Those other items we’ve spoke of to you, we value them, we’d gladly pay for them in gold or goods or any way . . . we’re prepared to pay in wax, yes, if we must . . . but” — he ran his old, sere finger, like one of his own medicinal roots, over the great lump of Caucasus wax, lovingly and regretfully — “but, we beg of you nonetheless, Doctor, don’t waste it. Not any of it.”

  • • •

  The wax was melted slowly over a fire of fennel (and no small task to gather and dry enough fennel: fire to feed fire, tongs to make tongs, cycle upon cycle, wheels within wheels) and strained; washed with water, and again strained; purified and strained; refined and strained; ever with a cloth of an increasing fineness — these cloths, by direction of Master Workman Perrin, saved to be boiled to retrieve the residual wax. Vergil himself had neither thought nor patience for this — and the process repeated over and over and over. Slowly. Slowly. Slowly.

  And the other tasks proceeded. Slowly, slowly, slowly.

  Finally the wax was pure enough, pale enough, fine enough.

  Page after page of parchment, and ink from entire schools of squid and forests of hawthorn trees and oaks, were employed in the ever-continuing work of casting the horoscopes. The question of the Moon’s nodes was a particularly important one, the points at which the Moon’s orbits cross the ecliptic, the north node being known as the caput draconis, or Dragon’s Head, and the south one called the cauda draconis, or Dragon’s Tail. Caput was fortunate, cauda was misfortunate.

  “There you have it!” Vergil cried, despairingly, throwing down a pen. “I should draw the entire nativity of the princess — cast it myself — not depend on the one Cornelia supplies — when was she carried off? Was her ruler of life conjoined with cauda? Should we wait six months for Venus to go around the zodiac to be conjoined with caput as an auspicious moment for the dragon to spew her forth?” Seizing the pen, he hastily sketched a diagram, only to have it arouse a host of speculations, many of them far from apropos, such as the resemblance and semblance of the dragon with caput at cauda to the Midgard Serpent and the Worm Ourobouros and Great Leviathan and the River Oceanos engirdling all the world. “The chart of the Eight Houses,” he murmured. “Saturn-adverse-Venus . . . disappointment almost certain . . . What is astrology but the study of cycles in time? Are our planets truly globes of light? Or are they, for our purposes, our present, particular purposes — are they instincts whose interrelationships is that which causes destiny?

  “Let me erect the horary chart again,” he said, more calmly this time. He had lost weight, color, tone, in all this great work and worry.

  He took fresh parchment, pen, ink. The shapes took on form. Here was the First House, showing the questioner; here, the opposite, the Seventh House, showing the problem or the (unknown) person causing it. Supposing Cornelia to be asking the question, this would have her represented by the First House, and Laura by the Fifth; thus Laura’s problem was represented by the plane in the Eleventh House, which was opposite her own . . . “Let me see, let me see,” he muttered, bending close. “Jupiter is royalty, rules Sagittarius, so the chart for the moment is with Sagittarius rising . . . Sun in Sagittarius, First House denotes Queen . . . Sun rules rulers . . . sign of Leo, First House could be Leo, then the Fifth House would be Scorpio — Venus beseiged! Surely! Venus ruling love and beauty — the Princess Laura Now — interception of the sign, thus is with Taurus on its cusp, Venus ruling Taurus. And so the Seventh House, containing the problem and its causer, thus would be Gemini on cusp, or Mercury ruled. Saturn — no, no, Saturn will not do, will not go where I want him . . . Venus conjuncts Mercury in the Eleventh House . . . the Eleventh Cusp is Scorpio . . . what is Scorpio? So, sign of magic, profundity, intensity, eagle, serpent, and phoenix . . .” He repeated his words, drawn by a sudden conviction of a connection both present and invisible. What was it?

  Eagle? The Empire? The Imperial House? Prometheus bound on Mount Caucasus? Serpent? This opened the way, surely, for whole torrents of possibilities: wisdom, witchcraft, copper and bronze, the cycle of Venus through the zodiac from Dragon Tail to Dragon Head, cycles, circles, rings, rings . . . He paused, pressed his hands to his aching head. There was a ring there, somewhere. But it would not come up where he could see it. Eagle, serpent, phoenix . . . Scorpio — sign of regeneration — the Eleventh Cusp, Venus conjuncts Mercury in the Eleventh House. The princess and the causer of the problem. Mercury, ruler of the Seventh Cusp on the horary chart. Seventh House rules enemies and world conditions. Afflicting. Bad aspects . . .

  No, no. It was still impossible. The chart would not work out. Too much was lacking, too much contradictory. It was best to waste no more time on it, and on other things.

  Still . . . it was certainly very curious. “The sign of regeneration . . . Eagle, serpent, phoenix . . .”

  • • •

  They purified the copper further with three ranges of bellows working at the forge by night and day, night after night and day after day, and poured it finally into ingot molds. Before it was cooled and
while it was still red-hot, they held it with tongs upon the anvil and struck it with the largest hammer. It cracked. They melted it once again, repeating the long process, drew it forth again, struck it again. This time it did not crack.

  Vergil bared his arm, Clemens bound it. Clemens bared his arm. Vergil bound it. Iohan, Tynus, Perrin, and all those engaged in the work did the same. The veins swelled. The lancet passed between the mage and his friend. The blood spurted forth was caught in the vessel. Each gave, none withheld. And then the vessel was full, and then they plunged the glowing ingots into it, and thus they cooled them and completed the work of the smelting.

  It was that night that Vergil saw himself again “pass through the Door,” and part of his mind shrieked in silent terror at the sight, knowing it had not been his intention to do this . . . knowing too, the danger involved in this implied loss of control. But another part of his mind counseled calm and acceptance, and this implied that the loss of control was perhaps apparent only, and not actual.

  He was in Cornelia’s chamber. She sat at a writing desk, a branch of lamps beside her. She did not look up, but he could tell that she knew someone was there.

  “I must cast a proper nativity,” he said — and her entire body recognized his voice, and — strange, strange, exceedingly strange — this intelligence quite dispelled the fear in her. Taut tendons relaxed in her neck; she let out her breath with a sigh.

  “Of course,” she said, softly. “Of course.”

  “Write down the precise moment of her birth,” he directed, “and the exact or even approximate latitude, if you know it.” She wrote. “Now the nearest moment as you can recall it to the time you heard of her disappearance . . . Now get up and leave me quite alone.” He watched her gliding step as she went from the room, the drapery at the door rustling yet another moment, then lying still.

  He stared at the wax tablet and what was written thereon, committing it to memory. He wondered who it could have been that she had so much feared to find behind her. Then he seated himself and began to work. The natal chart took rapid shape beneath his fingers, he needed no ephemeris, all information welling up in his mind as he thought for it. He saw the type of danger likely to threaten in her life chart, and the direction from which it would come; even the probable time was there . . . yes . . . it fitted . . . the Progressions fitted . . . advancing the birth planets roughly one degree for one year on the principle of A Year Shall Be as a Day, events of the age of twenty were indicated by the thus-progressed planets twenty-one days after her birth, the first day not being counted as it equaled the birth year.

  “Sometime during this week” — his finger pointed as he calculated aloud — “and possibly on this day — she would be in grave danger from dark forces emanating from the north as shown by Saturn at her birth at the nadir of the chart, adversely affecting her Venus-at-birth by Progression when she reaches that age, but” — he scowled, calculated, smiled, became totally abstract — “her Venus-of-birth being trined by benefic Jupiter posited in the zodiacal sign Scorpio, help would come to her through a wise man, philosopher, mage . . .”

  Yes . . . it did fit . . . it was almost uncanny how it fitted. Scorpio, sign of regeneration, and, hence, naturally, of eagle, serpent, phoenix. Besides its other obvious possibilities, was not the eagle, with its uncanny keenness of vision, sighting its prey from leagues afar, a clear symbol of the magic mirror? And did the eagle not, when age had dimmed its eyes and heavied its wings, seek out the fountain of youth whose location was known only to its kind, soar over it until, “within the circle of the Sun,” a potent beam or ray from the as yet undiminished Source of Light burned away the dimness? And, thence, diving from on high, deep, deep into that fountain, new its youth for lustrums more. Then, lastly, if one could so speak of lastly, there was the falcon-eagle, which had at peril and to its great cost borne from distant, distant Tinland the purse of that essential ore. And how had Clemens managed to miss the exemplum of the serpent in his little philosophical address? — the serpent which annually casts off its skin as the ore casts off its dross, serpent seemingly almost at the point of death, dull, dazed, struggling; serpent, finally, alive and quick; renewed. Last of the three was phoenix, that rare among birds, unique for its life-span and life cycle, enduring for five hundred or a thousand years, then building its nest and making its “egg” fanning with its wings the fire which converts nest into pyre; fire consuming phoenix, fire hatching egg, out of the egg a worm, out of the worm the phoenix.

  Out of the fire, the phoenix.

  • • •

  Models for the double discs had been carved of ordinary wax, studied, corrected, approved; then copied in the wax of Caucasus for the final model, copied so carefully and with such exquisite, agonizing care as to make mere painstaking seem slovenly: stroke by stroke and flake by flake and quarter inch by quarter inch. The wax must not be too warm, the wax must not be too cold; it must not melt, it must not sag nor slip, it must not grow brittle and chip. And everything in this doing was done in accordance with the celestial confluences. A separate horoscope was cast even for so pragmatic a matter as placing the waxen sprues. Finally, omens having been taken on the thunder chart, the entire modelings, save for the tops of the prues, were coated with the specially prepared clay; allowed to dry . . . and dry . . . and dry . . . coated again . . . dried . . . coated a third time. When the hour auspicious and appropriate arrived, a fire was built, aspersed and censed with appropriate herbs, and the molds placed adjacent to it, over vessels of water to collect the precious wax, which, after it had melted and left its impression on the clay, was poured out through the sprue channels. Then, when a Sun Hour arrived, suitable for workings with fire, coinciding with a time acceptable to the chthonic Presences having jurisdictions over earth and things made with earth, Vergil and Clemens and adepts and workmen, chanting the strange, discordant Etruscan litany, reversed the molds and now placed them carefully in the fire with the sprue holes pointing downward. And in that position they remained until the clay was turned as red as Mars ruling molten things, as red as the fire itself . . . as red as the red robes of the sun . . . as red as the earth.

  On a Thursday, fortunate period of benefic Jupiter ruling prophecy and things at long distance and beyond the veil, the Street of the Horse-Jewelers was laid end to end ankle-deep in tanbark to muffle sounds and concussions. The molds had been heating with a low fire kept in, and this was now increased, and the crucibles got ready. The bellows were fixed, with two strong men to each one. All now had to go with speed and precision. Fresh coals were arranged in the furnace for the molds and the molds set on them, supported roundabout with hard stones such as could not break with the heat of the fire, lapidem super lapident, stone upon stone and with sufficient interstices until they were half a foot higher than the molds; and burning coals around them, and fresh coals over them to the top. They burned, they sank, were replenished, burned, sank; and again, till three times.

  Vergil lifted the cover to peer inside, but the heat drove him back. Clemens, more used to it, peered quickly within, and the heat crisped and singed his beard. “It is red-hot,” he said. Vergil hastened with deliberate steps to the crucible where the copper was waiting, and had it put inside and mixed with coals. At his gesture, the bellows began to work again, primo mediocriter, deinde magis ac magis. A green flame arose from the crucible. The copper had begun to melt. Immediately Vergil signaled for more coals to be added, ran to the mold furnace and oversaw the work of removing the stones and the fire and replacing it with earth. He ran back to the other fire, stirred the copper with a long charred stick.

  “Now!” he said. And he threw in the copper fibula Cornelia had given him.

  The tin was added, and carefully stirred and stirred until it, too, was all molten and all mixed, and meanwhile the crucible was with infinite care turned around from side to side in order to maintain an even temperature. Then it was removed from its own fire and carried to the molds, skimmed of coal and ash, and a
straining cloth placed over the opening in the mold of the first half. Vergil threw himself down on the floor as near to the mold as he could stand the heat, his ear to the ground.

  “Pour!” he said.

  They poured, slowly, slowly, and he listened. He gestured them to pause. He listened. All was well, nothing murmured, nothing grumbled, nothing groaned. He gestured, he listened, and they poured. At length Iohan said, “Master, it is done.” Vergil said nothing. They waited and they watched. It was quite some while before they realized that he was not still listening, and then, but silently and gently for the sake of the molten mass within, they lifted him from where he lay, insensible, and so they carried him to his upper chamber.

  But Clemens remained below and directed the casting of the second half.

  • • •

  Presently, when Vergil had recovered from his exhaustion of body and spirit, they broke open the well-cooled molds and removed the two parts of the speculum. He then had them boiled in a strong liquor of potash until all residual dirt was removed, and rinsed in hot water and dried. The discs were then annealed in fire until red-hot, the utmost care being taken that they were not made white-hot. Should any dirt or impurities have remained, they were now gone, and the metal made softer and fit for the burnisher — but it was not yet his time. The bronzes were cooled and then placed in a pickle of one part of oil of vitriol and three parts of water. “I prefer aquafortis,” Clemens said.

  “Ordinarily, so should I,” Vergil said. “But you wouldn’t use ‘new’ acid for this, and that which makes ‘old’ acid desirable, namely the presence of much metal in solution, obviously disqualifies it for our present purpose. The entire status of this bronze as virgin bronze would be annulled.”