The Phoenix and the Mirror

by Avram Davidson

  Vergil walked off into the darkness of his library’s farther end. “Come and see,” his voice invited. As Clemens, muttering and grunting, advanced with caution, a square of light opened in the obscurity — a map on oiled parchment with lamplight thrown upon it from behind. Vergil had again his white wand in his hand and now used it as if it were a teacher’s pointer. They had, in the newly opened surface of the major speculum, seen Laura pacing down a vasty flight of steps of unmistakable provenance. No hand of man or men had ever cut those great stony slabs and wrested them into place. The craftsmanship thereof was as unmistakable as the leopards’ claws or the fleecy hair of the wise Ethiopeans.

  “They were the work of the four-armed Cyclopes.” Clemens said, “Granted. What then?”

  “What then, did the Cyclopes erect so many castellations as to baffle us forever? It isn’t so. Perhaps forging the thunderbolts of Jove occupied so much of their time, or wooing the beautiful females of the former age — Glaucus, for example — that the time they had for building was limited. But a record has, after all, come down to us. All of those they set up in central Sicily, their first home, have been torn down with immense labor by the tyrants of that island, to prevent their providing strongholds for rebels.” The wand touched the map, now here, now there; the points touched glowed briefly. “The castle of Mycenae, I’ve been lately informed, is a heap of rubble. The one occupied by the Tartismen here in Naples, we have searched, and found — as I would have expected — nothing. That in Carthage, as it later became, was with the rest of that great city destroyed by great Scipio and its very site sown with salt.” One by one the locations of each Cyclopean fortress became a tiny spot of blue-white light, like a wandering star, then vanished.

  What was left? There was one other castle that the hideous Cyclopes made, each man glaring with his single huge eye, toiling and straining with his four arms. “It is not marked for sure upon my map. All that I know of it is that it lies somewhere in Thither Lybya. And it is there, Clemens, that I must go. Captain An-Thon Ebbed-Saphir will be my guide again, for he knows where it is.

  Clemens sighed, sagged into a chair, waggled his huge mane. At length he said that he would not argue. “At any rate, I suppose you may rely upon the Red Man as you did before,” he conceded. Vergil was silent here. The Red Man had made it quite clear that, for reasons of his own, which he would not discuss — let alone disclose — he would guide Vergil to within sight of the Cyclopean castle . . . but no farther.

  Whatever it was they had seen, without being able to see it in any way clearly at the edge of the mirror, whatever was with Laura, ugly and dreadful, Vergil would have to confront it alone.

  • • •

  The desert of Lybya stretched on all around them, dry and glaring, red and orange and yellow and white. The sands undulated like billows. Already the coast lay far behind them, and its curious capital, where reigned Mahound, the god-king, a strong and ugly man; and Baphomet, the god-queen, his equally strong and even uglier wife. Behind them lay farmlands and fields and, at length, even the hills of scrub and thorn where only the scrannel goats found nourishment, and they only because they could climb the niggard trees like cats and browse upon the tiny buds and leaves.

  It could not be said that Vergil and the Red Man followed a road, It was barely even a trail . . . a faintly glistening streak was all it was, like a mark upon the flesh of a woman who has begun to put on weight. The camels snaked their long necks and gazed about with almost insufferable haughtiness and now and then lifted their meager tails and refreshed the sand with their strawy dung. Three oases lay behind them, with their green pools guarded by the date palm trees, and three more lay still ahead of them. Ebbed-Saphir squatted aboard the lead camel, gazing out over the sands as though from the poop of his ship, his reddened face muffled to the eyes, with a blue cloth, against sand and sun.

  The rocking gait of the camel was not unlike the way of a ship, but a ship at least offered room to walk about on or to lie down. Vergil rode as long as he could stand it, then he walked until the sand became too hot to bear, then he donned the blue burnoose again and remounted. Now and then a rock stood out above the sands like a twisted chimney, polished by ages of sand until it glistened.

  “Would it not be better if we pitched a tent and rested during the day, and then traveled by night?” Vergil had asked. But the Tyrean merely made a curt gesture and shrugged, silent. At night the stars blazed hugely in the blue-black velvet sky, each encircled by its own ring, and sometimes the rings intersected. Each night they drew a circle of their own around the campsite, and removed all stones found inside. One night one stone was overlooked and not discovered until Vergil, lowering his eyes from the stars, observed two tiny glowing circles moving slowly toward them through the darkness. His sudden gesture drew the attention on the instant of the Red Man, who advanced with ember and cudgel. The tiny lights blinked, retreated. A hissing was heard. Ebbed-Saphir blew upon the ember, tossed it, leapt, plied his club. There was the sound of stick hitting something soft and nasty, then it struck upon something hard.

  The Red Man returned, tossed the something, with a grunt, at Vergil’s feet; then kindled a torch and went searching. It was one of the hideous and deadly petromorphs, which came alive at night, loving to crunch the glowing coals of fires, but not disdaining to bite with their venomous jaws anything else which they encountered and which gives out warmth. Stony and chill was their bite, and stony and chill their victim soon became.

  But there were deadlier things in that desert than the petromorphs.

  There is nothing, perhaps, more disturbing than to see things one cannot hear and simultaneously to hear things one cannot see. The fourth Oasis, and its bibulous chieftain, Abèn-Aboubou, now lay well behind them, for all he had urged them to stay — unlike the other chieftains at the other oases, who, though charging gold and silver for water, food, and wood, seemingly begrudged every hour the strangers remained. At first, “It is shadows, it is a strain of the eyes, it is the warping of the air by the heat” Vergil told himself: tiny things flicking and flickering around the corners and edges of his vision. He turned his head, they were gone. Then commenced and followed odd little noises, hissings and mummings and clickings and patterings. But when he drew his camel to a halt, they, too, were gone.

  He had grown used to them, blamed them all upon the heat of the sun, looked forward to the night, the rest, the encircled, blazing stars. And then it was, no sooner than Ebbed-Saphir held his hand up and out and urged his grumbling camel to its knees; then, in the blue-red-purple dusk, it happened. Vergil gave a shout of alarm and fear and loathing as the host of figures seemed to swarm, all but silently, up from the sandy earth itself. Tiny, they were, and filthy-ragged, and hairy, and hideous to look upon, with snottled faces and pores like pockmarks; up they swarmed, up from all around, knives in their paws of hands.

  The Red Man shouted strange words in a strange language. “Tala’ hon, tala’ hon!” — then, “Hither! Come hither! Come hither to me!” Vergil ran, driving the alarmed camels before him — indeed, they might have bolted and been lost, had not at that moment the finger of Ebbed-Saphir, in an instantly well-remembered gesture, swept about in a circle . . . and, in a circle, all about them, up sprang a ring of fire.

  Now, in alarm and terror, the silence of the hideous Troglodytes was broken. They shrieked, tumbled backward. The few who found themselves inside the circle turned to look — The Red Man produced two swords and tossed one to Vergil. Up rose the encircling fire, too high for any Troglodyte to hurdle. The fiery hoop expanded, driving those beyond it back and ever back. There was no time to watch the fire, no time to watch the Red Man. Vergil, who had caught the thrown sword, unsheathed it and fell to defending himself against the three tiny imps who now rushed upon him with pattering, splay, and filthy feet. They darted around him, knives held in such a wise, stooping, low, that he knew at once their intention. From behind, to sever his Achilles tendon; from in front to pierce his arte
ry at the groin — this was their aim. But those who depend on stealth and surprise as the chiefmost weapons are never at their best in an open fight. One, he laid apart his skull; the second failed to dodge a heavy stroke though much he tried, and, staring amazed at his severed hand, ceased to take part in the combat; the third continued to evade him as the rat evades the dog in the pit. They moved about and eyed each other, weapons poised. Then came Ebbed-Saphir, who had by now slain his two Troglodytes, and he and Vergil advanced upon the survivor. It would have been his death, then, had he not come upon one of his kind’s hidey-holes, and, with a bray of triumph, vanished down it, where they could not follow.

  And now once again the Red Man indicated with his finger, and a writhing, undulating serpent of fire sprang into being and slid down into the scape-hole. A dreadful screech of fear and pain grated upon their ears; then it was gone.

  Across the darkling plains of sand the ever-widening circle of fire shed its ruddy rays. There was silence. Vergil said, “Indeed, you have studied fire very deeply, Captain.”

  Almost contemptuously: “‘Studied fire’? You may say so! I worship fire! I know its secrets, and the secrets of its secrets . . . Come! Tonight we will do as you begged, and travel. There are worse things to be feared here than the heat of the sun.”

  • • •

  The fifth oasis lay behind them. They had not tarried, nor had the chieftain urged them to, nor would they even if he had, remembering the bibulou Abèn-Aboubou, and not doubting that he had used the time to send out word alerting the murderous Troglodytes, lurking in their cool caverns below the heated sands. Likely he intended himself a share in the loot. And so Vergil was not surprised to find the remains — torn rags and gnawed bones cracked for marrow — of several men along the way.

  “They were not lucky enough to have you with them,” he commented, turning the things over with the toe of his shoe. The Tyrean only grunted, waiting impatiently to ride on. Suddenly Vergil exclaimed, fell upon his knees to look closer. “Surely,” he cried, astonished, “it was only from Naples that this striped yellow broadcloth came! And it could have been only in Naples that this shoulder knot was tied!” His fingers pawed and combed the sand, came up with a blackened bauble. In a low and troubled tone he said, “And none but a Neapolitan would wear this, particular charm against Evil Eye . . . I don’t like this. I’ve heard of none from Naples venturing into Lybya before us. Who could they have been? Who could they have been?”

  But An-Thon Ebbed-Saphir from the stork’s nest of his camel saddle cried only, “Ride! Ride! Ride! Ride on!”

  • • •

  The last oasis lay behind them, and none lay ahead; nothing lay ahead but more desert, and then the farfamed Mountains of the Moon, the Antropophagai, with tails, the dwarf-like Pygmies, and the distant, distant shores of the Erythrian Sea.

  “I go no farther,” said the Phoenician. The blue burnoose had slipped, showing his face, and it looked haggard.

  He had been of little service as companion on the journey, but he had not been hired as companion, after all . . . only as guide. “You engaged to bring me within sight of the castle,” Vergil pointed out. “And unless you do so, all has gone for nothing.”

  The Tyrean lifted the stick with which he drove his camel, and he pointed. “I have kept my word,” he said.

  Sand had choked the castle’s moat and either time or lesser enemies had pushed down its battlements and turrets. Certain rude lineaments still persisted, becoming clearer as Vergil advanced. The curtain wall was still largely in place and, rather than go around and seek a proper gate which might prove to be no longer there, he entered through a wide breach in the curtain. There had been a garden in that place once — in a sense, there still was: bone-white trees cast slant, thin shadows over bone-brittle shrubs around a bone-dry pool. A fine white sandy dust lay over everything, and on its surface, small and delicate, Vergil saw the print of a naked foot.

  While he mused and pondered, somewhere on the dry, thin air, a single note sounded, clear and pure. After it came another, and another, then a rill, a cascade of them, and formed into a tune of a music unknown and strangely beautiful to him. He followed it as if it were the sound of a rill of coolest water to quench his long unsated thirst.

  Through a broken arch he paced the sound of music, and down a huge and winding flight of deep-set steps, dark and grateful after the weeks of naked sunlight, and so, in the lower courtyard below, there at last she was.

  Lovely Laura, dulcimer in one hand, quill in the other, kneeling and resting her coils of red-brown hair against the seamy sides of the castle’s keeper, the huge and ancient four-armed Old One himself.

  Whose eye was open upon the instant of Vergil’s stepping through the inward-bending frame of the doorless doorway. Whose eye was huge and blazing-gold and shot about the white with tiny lines of red. Whose eye was set in the center of his broad and low and furrowed forehead. For eye other than this, he had none, nor had he space nor had he place for any other.

  • • •

  No one had the right to call him a monster, Vergil presently affirmed. The Cyclops’ voice was deep and rich and slow and smooth, his words were civil and quite without threat or guile. A mind cultivated and distinctive lay behind that single glowing eye. He spoke of his loneliness without much self-pity, and even recited a few lines of his own verse-making. Laura, plainly, liked him, had no fear at all of him. But he was old, old, preternaturally old, the last of his race, and lonely.

  “Man, you’ve come a long way, and if you are too new upon my vision to be my friend, I need not, at least, be your enemy,” he said. “But I will not give her up. Do you love her?”

  “Yes,” said Vergil.

  Cyclops nodded his massy head, flowing with snow-white curls. “I love her too,” said Cyclops. “You have a world teeming with friends and fellows and kin, Man. I have none of such. Your duty and your pains, you’ll think, have given you a claim upon her. Listen — have I not already rescued her from the Troglodytes when all her so-called guards were killed? I have. And I do not believe that they were truly her guards at all. I think they were manstealers, taking her to be the bride of that one whose pyring place is hard nearby. Oh — have I not watched often in anguish as some beautiful Man female was sacrificed to that one? And do I not hate that one? I do. What is your claim, Man Vergil, to mine?”

  And Vergil said, softly, and not without respect, “Old One, my claim is not my claim alone. Laura has a mother and a brother and a great hope among the lands of Men. Some Man will someday be her swain. You, Old One, never can.”

  “I know it, I know it. I am wiser than my brother Polyphemus, whose bootless wooing of a female not of our kind drove him near mad. I do not think of Laura so. I would keep her with me, and I will keep her with me, as a lovely bird who might have perished on the burning sands, but found refuge here with me instead. Her mother has had her long enough. Her mother has a son, her brother has a mother — and, likely enough, wives and cubs. I have none of these. I have only Laura. I do not remember when last I had anyone, and I will not give her up.”

  Laura herself remained silent, turning her gaze slowly from one to the other, saying nothing, showing nothing but a faint and passive smile; though now and then she touched a chord upon her dulcimer. Vergil argued as earnestly and persuasively as ever he remembered doing. But the Old One only said, “I will not give her up.”

  He said, “I was here when all you see was green and fair. I saw the Titans sporting like whales in great pools where now is nought but sand. The Titans, where are they? I saw the prides of sphynxes come to whelp in the caves along the river. The sphynxes, where are they? and where the river? The earth has grown old, like a garment, and I alone am left, and I am lonely in a way that no Man can know or has ever known loneliness. Do not speak to me of kings and queens and of princesses, Man. I will not give her up.”

  Plainly, he would not. Vergil continued to talk, but his mind was now less on his words than on his
thoughts, and his thoughts were on how he might overcome the Old One. It might be that his thoughts were read, or it might have been a caution of so long a standing as to have become habitual; however it was, the Old One had fixed him with his great golden eye, his huge and puissant eye, and gradually Vergil became aware that the gaze of this single eye was holding him. He was not paralyzed, no, but while the great eye gazed at him and bathed him in its golden light, he could not loose the string of his bag of tricks.

  And yet, thought fathering the deed, as he bethought him of the metaphorical bag and purse and pouch, his fingers toyed with the actual pouch hanging from his belt, and his fingers let slip its cord and his fingers delved therein. He could not have, even had he desired, got therefrom a knife (if knife had been there) nor lifted it against the Cyclops. What he got, without hindrance, holding it unperceived, was so simple a thing as a coin. It had been fresh-minted not long before he left, and, in being new to him, he had put it aside from spending it at once, as people do, preferring instead to pass the old and worn, familiar coins while they lasted. So this one bright coin remained. He tossed it away.

  The flash and glitter of it automatically drew the Cyclops’ single eye away for a second — long enough for Vergil, released from the eye’s power, swiftly to stoop and swiftly scoop a handful of dust and toss it into that eye, that single, great, and golden eye.

  Cyclops shouted. Laura cried out. Vergil turned and swept her up. He took her voice and his own voice, and cast them to the side. As he ran, with her in his arms, ran to the left, he heard his voice and hers coming from and dwindling down to the right. And the blundering, roaring Old One rushed with all four arms outstretched, now stooping and testing the ground, now striking his great and horny palms against the walls, down the wrong corridor, down, down, and away, following the fleeing voices; following the lying, traitor voices.