The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  But he could look for it, on or off the main-traveled roads. There was lots of time.

  Yellow Rome; or, Vergil and the Vestal Virgin

  INTRODUCTION BY DARRELL SCHWEITZER

  “Yellow Rome,” at first merely a pervasive image, suggesting the sunbaked brick, the searing sky, the soap-shy vulgus with their stained tunics, a condemned convict uncontrollably urinating; but in the hands of Avram Davidson it becomes something else, a resonant incantation. Yellow Rome! Teeming, filthy, and magnificent, where even a magus might lose himself.

  In the hands of Avram Davidson, everything becomes something else. The Yellow Rome of Emperor Julius I is not that of history. Julius Caesar wasn’t an emperor, for one thing. Every citizen most certainly did not carry knives as described here. In fact, the Julian law forbade them to. (This law coming to the attention of most readers—and most Romans—when repealed some four centuries later, as the center could not hold, mere anarchy was loosed upon the world, and the government told the provincials, “We cannot protect you. Go ahead and carry knives. Good luck!”)

  What we have here is ancient Rome seen through the filter of medieval remembrance, the setting of two exemplary Davidson novels, The Phoenix and the Mirror and Vergil in Averno, based on the curious legend that Vergil, the author of the Aeneid, was also a sorcerer. Davidson, the most playfully erudite of fantasy writers, brought the exploits of Vergil Magus irresistibly to life.

  “Yellow Rome” is the opening chapter of the unpublished third Vergil Magus novel, The Scarlet Fig. It is Avram at his atmospheric and arcane best. Read it for the pleasure of Avram’s presence and Avram’s unique voice.

  YELLOW ROME; OR, VERGIL AND THE VESTAL VIRGIN

  IN ROME—YELLOW ROME! Yellow Rome!—a man was being led to public execution. Aristocrats might be quietly done-in in dungeons; this was no aristocrat. Some common thug, a street-robber by night, or a house-breaker; thick and shambling, ill-made and ill-looking, he had killed a cobbler’s apprentice for a stiver—the smallest coin. The lictor went first, carrying the bundle of rods which might be used to flog the criminal (but wouldn’t) wrapped around the single-edged axe which might be used to cut off his head (but wouldn’t). It was a symbol only, and the lictor looked bored and disdainful. Then, arms bound behind him at the elbows, legs hobbled with ropes, the felon followed between two files of soldiers. Grasping him fast by a noose round his neck came the common hangman: one might have had them change clothes and places and scarcely told them apart.

  “Well, ‘one Vergil, a natural of Rome, and no mere denizen,’ do they have anything to do with this in Naples… I say nothing of the Bail of Brundisy…?” The wauling in my ear was Quint’s, to be heard above the clamor of the throng. There was in his voice some light and affectionate taunt that I had not been born in the City itself but in a fœderate town in the Italies’ south, well within the Empery, but nearer to where I now lived by the great Voe of Naples than to Yellow Rome itself. The so-well-paved Appian Way went straight and strait between Yellow Rome and Brundisy, but there branched off a branch of it for Naples. A young mage, not yet very well-established in his profession (or in public fame) did well to travel now and then to the Imperial capital, and gently press the thought that there was one (myself) useful to be friend of a friend (Quint) with a friend (the rich Etruscan) to the Court Imperial, to the Oliphaunt Throne…not to be lightly named: whosoever sate upon it.

  I pressed my bearded lips to Quint’s smooth ear-hole, said loud and sharp, that we had throngs and thugs, all right: but neither one was anything to this particular display.

  The throng howled, as the throng always would.

  “Chin up, cock! Brave it out!”

  “They’ll stretch that short neck!”

  “Hang the hangman! A louse for the hangman!”

  “You’ll scrag no more widdies nor prentices!”

  “Up tails all!”

  “Die! For a lousy stiver? Die!”

  The wretch’s face changed expression, but it changed slowly: now he had the sly look of a pig who had broken into a pea-patch, now he was pleased at the attention, now he scowled as some thick and gross insult struck home, now he looked desperately from side to side; always the hangy forced him on, as close to him as the butcher to the ox. All this passed before me and before Quint, and we stood and looked on; I was his guest, and he was the guest of Someone Important in Yellow Rome. Even a wizard, even if he did not want wealth, was willing to draw near to wealth, if he were young and new and scarcely known. And near to power, even if that sort of power he did not much want. Soon enough this procession would pass by, and then we would cross, cross safely on foot, for in Rome (and in Rome alone) no wheeled vehicle might pass through the streets in the day time.

  In that case, in a sudden silence, what hooves were those, and what wheels? Quint, I saw, that Roman of Romans, knew at once: and would tell me soon enough…if I did not ask. The mob broke into noise again, its inalienable right, and though it was still shouting, it seemed to be shouting the same something, though not all at the same time. Half the yammering throng faced the nice little wagonette and its nice little mule, and the woman, half-veiled, who was in it. Her small slave-girl holding the sea-silk sunshade or ombello was beginning to be inattentive a bit and a bit the sunshade slipped.

  And half the vulgus faced the procession and shouted and gestured, pointing, pointing—

  The lictor had strode on, eyes down; and in fact by then he had gotten ahead of the procession and seemed rather to have forgotten it: lictors, too, have their secret private thoughts.

  The soldiery slogged along in its fixed rhythms, paying no attention at all to the thing its ranks confined; probably thinking of the evening’s rations: bread, salt, garlic, parsley, wine, perhaps a bit of dried meat or a bit of dried fish—tunny harpooned in the bloody trapping pens, for instance—and the anticipated meal with its, perhaps, treat, meant far more to them than any execution of a sentence of death (death, to an old soldier, was more boring than exciting).

  The hangman, whose attention was so suddenly besought by many cries and movements, pressed on. I noticed that the hangman pressed on.

  What Quint, with his pale thin face and dark thin hair, noticed, was not known to me.

  Who made up the mob rabbling and howling? The meanest class of citizenry, whose leather badges with S P Q R stamped in gilt served to prove citizenship, made up the largest part. They had no money to buy anything and no mind to read anything, so a procession to the gibbet was an absolute gift for them.

  Men, too, from all the peoples of the Empery were there: Franks with long hair and Celts with short and Ægyptians with none; pale Berbars from the Solitudes of Syrtica and of As’hara, sand as high as mountains and hills of solid stone pierced with holes where the Troglodytes live; dark Numidians who had seen the Sphynges flying in their thousands to drink of the waters at the sources of the Nile—of all other waters drink they not, of the Waters of Ægypt drink they not—and Gauls with their bearded chops, the wailing of whose dead fills the islands and the highlands of the misty great green darkling Sea of Atlantis between shore to shore of whose vasty waters might no bird fly; and Æthiops with emeraulds in their ears. Many indeed could I see (though not so many) were aliens from outside the Empery, and even the Œconomium.

  I was indifferent at seeing or smelling the so-called Foul or Infamous Crafts such as the knackers and the carriers of dogs’-dung for the tanneries, for I still had the muck of the farmyards and the fernbrooks on my legs and feet, and the odor of dead beasts and dung-heaps was fresher to my nose-holes than those of ambergrise and nard.

  And here and there, as so often of late (and some said, more and more often, and they darkly mumbled their gums about laws graven on the Twelve Iron Tablets about the artificial production of monsters and other omens…no one of course was ever able to find such laws) here and there through the mass went wandering a satyr or a centaur of, say, the size of a goat-kid. There were no weanling Lapiths to be
seen, however; and who would know one, had there been? memory of one Cluco, a night-soil-man little wittier than a wittold, in my home-hamlet in the Bail of Brundisy, who used to stop anyone too purblind to avoid him, and confide, “My granddam, now, she seen a Laypith, she seen ‘un with a horn in the muddle o’ his forrid: which be the reason, she bein’ six months gorn wi’ child, that I has six finger on my left ’and.” What the logical, or even illogical connection between the two things were, no one was ever able to conjecture; certainly all local priests denied that ever there had been stories—“myths,” you might call them—of monoceroid Lapiths; and neither was anyone, lay or cleric, able to credit Cluco’s being able to invent such a story. But, however invented, tell it he did, decade after decade, to whoever could not trot faster than he could, and who—usually—was glad or let us say willing enough to avoid the presence of Cluco, polydactylous or not (for rhododactylos I assure you he wasn’t, and neither was he rosy-scented) with the dole of a very small coin or a not-quite-so-small chunk of bread: at which see Cluco become unseen; this may or may not have been more profitable than the night-soil business, but was certainly much easier.

  When I mention the size of a goat-kid I refer to the centaurs, for the satyrs were man-sized (as I could have told anyone), and very near each creature was someone (invariably a shill) mentioning confidentially the name of the thaumaturge who’d made it, in some such words as, “That ’un’s the work of that same Septimus as keeps his crib atween Apollo’s Court and the Steps of Woe.”—why would anyone want a confected satyr or centaur? perhaps one of those newly-rich who kept a baby elephant in his atrium might want one, and for the same reason: show.

  Thieves were there, in the vulgus; as they could not steal the golden spikes from the ridge-poles of the temples and the other public buildings, they cut the thongs of purses with their knives so much sharper than razors; sellers of snacks were there, for many a man had neither cook nor kitchen to dress a meal of victuals, and if he turned aside into a cheap eating-place he might miss something: but whether a rabbleman stewed hog-palates in vinegar or cut the thongs of purses or did, as was the right of citizens, nothing at all, something there had now changed and perhaps everything had changed. But the hangman wished to behave as though nothing had happened. The lictor, whose attention was now besought by many cries and movements, strode on, eyes down, and in fact by now he had gotten ahead of the procession. The hangman pressed on. A bit the woman’s sunshade slipped and a bit the veil, revealing to me a face of such extraordinary loveliness and purity that my breath was stopped.

  The word coming up from the populus now was pardon: the hangman would not stop for it; why should he? He received the deadman’s clothes as a perquisite: even if they were rags (and they were not always rags) they had their value and their price as ingredients of the Black Rite; he got to receive everything which was, or at the time of prisonment had been, on the body of the dead-man-to-be; and he also received his fee for making the liveman’s body dead by pushing it off the ladder at the gibbet and at once leaping onto his shoulders and jumping up and down on them—thus assuring that the caitiff’s neck must break if it had not already been broken by the drop. Of these benefits the hangman would receive none at all in case of pardon, so why should he stop for it? and lastly, it would deprive him of all the pleasure of the death scene: the hangman, howl the mob as it would, would not stop. And who might stop him?

  (The lictor, fasces bundled into his arms, was by now rather far ahead, stooped, aloof, deep in thought: of what, who could say? Perhaps that time there was, ere Roma’s woes began…perhaps not.)

  Who else? Himself, the August Caesar? Where was he? not here. From what other place, then, did the musty multitude seem to think that help might arise? The woman in the wagonette commenced to rise, in a slow and flowing motion like a hieratical dancer: though, perhaps actually not: only…somehow…it seemed so. The brute would not see her. I caught her eye, and again, that ambiguous impression, that impression deep yet perhaps false. Had I caught her eye at all? Erect, like a statue of the golden age, she seemed.

  The lictor, perhaps grown somewhat aware of the hideous shriek and hum from that mass of men—here and there some women: not trulls alone: vendors of fragrant citrons, of pickled samphire for relish, of sieves and baskets in many sizes, fishwives going down to the river to renew supplies of mullet and sardines and dogfish with double-lobed livers; others—the lictor at once saw all. Quint, keenly enjoying everything, was telling me nothing; scarcely he raised a thin and hairy hand to brush the ever-deliquescent ointment from his bleary eyes—his physicians were generally agreed ’twas from an excess of some humor, but they never yet agreed on which humor, though there were not many, but prescribed this salve or that; they might as well, I thought, have told him to graze grass like an ox…whoever saw a blear-eyed ox? And, “Ow!” shouted the throng, and “Yow!” shouted the throng. “Pardon! Pardon!” it howled. And ever and again, “Uptails, all!” and “A louse for the hangman!”

  The hangman may or may not have gotten a louse (close-pressed in that stinking swarm, it would have been no surprise if he had) but what he very quickly got was the lictor at his side; and the lictor said to him, more in astonishment than anger, “Where are you going, turd of a toad? Don’t you see the highborn Virgin lady? Stop!—Or I’ll let the populus have you, and may they eat your liver!”

  The Vestal, meanwhile, remained standing in her wagon all but motionless, the very image of aristocratic calm. Silence took a while. When things were almost silent, the felon seemed to emerge from his daze. One could almost read—no, one could read—the play of thoughts coursing over across his sword-slashed and much-confused face. Where was he? What was happening? Why had they stopped? Why was everything quiet? Answer: they were arrived and halted at the place of execution; any minute now he might have a small and ill-tasting coin thrust into his mouth and feel nothing beneath his feet, and a sharp brief pain in his neck. With a sound like the lowing of a yearling ox he spread his hobbled legs, and pissed.

  The swarm went wild with laughter. Only the lictor’s leather face, the Vestal’s marmoreal countenance, did not change, for all that her little maid, hand hiding mouth, seemed to whisper in her ear. At length silence was again achieved, and in that silence—though the punks and pogues still rolled their painted eyes and smirked at potential clients—the Vestal rose completely to attention, put out her white arm and hand and in a lovely ringing tone declared, “I pardon that man.” No one word more. And sat down. It had been a completely legal formula, sans emotion. “I divorce you; herewith your dowerfund.” “Slave, thou art henceforth free.” “Bear witness: I sell this horse-stud for six solids.” I pardon that man. No one word more. And sat down.

  The crowd went wild again. A soldier in a swift second slashed the bonds about the elbows; another slightly stooped and severed those around the ankles. For a second more the thug gaped. Then he started to run at a stumbling trot. Many hands caught at him: he fought against them. Many cries of, “Not yet, man!”

  “Not yet! Thank the holy lady! Go and kiss the Virgin’s foot! Thank her for your life!”

  But one might as well have spoken to a pig escaped from the shambles; loose, was he? Then he meant to stay loose. And this meant to flee. For a full minute (so I guessed) the absurd scene continued, the pardoned man butting furiously against the arms and bodies which would have had him first do his duty by giving thanks for that pardon; the crowd all of one mind now (the whores most of all: could it have been they fancied a slight upon that one quality which they universally lacked, and lacked, one might say, almost by definition?), the crowd’s sense of amour propre was seriously offended; while the lictor covered his grim face with his free hand and gazed through his spread and ringless fingers as though he could not believe his eyes—And then herself the Vestal: something which might have been a mere flicker of rueful amusement passed over her fine face and was in an instant gone (more than Caesar’s wife must a Vestal Virgin be a
bove suspicion, she must be above suspicion of vulgar emotion). She raised her hand at an angle to her wrist, slightly pushed it away from her; the other hand fluttered the colored leathers on the mule’s neck. The crowd released the fool felon and laughed to hear his running feet; at once made way for the Vestal’s wee carriage, and saluted her with the utmost respect. Did the little maid murmur something, something, anything, with well-practised and almost motionless lips? did the sea-silk sunshade dip for a second a fraction of an inch in a particular direction? this was not certain.

  Certain it was that a mule was not a horse, all horses were hysterical more or less, the most placid old cob was likely to behave like a northish bear-shirt if—if, whatever; this would differ from cob to cob—horse to horse. But mules were mysterious creatures, that this one was a small mule did not make its potential mystery any smaller; probably it had been bred for the service it now performed out of a pony-mare by one of the jack-donkeys of the northern lands, lighter in build and in size than the asses of the south, brought to Rome or its countryside for just this purpose. And in view of what was about to happen it was necessary to consider also the probable history of the street-bed. Quint might know just when the street had last been paved, I not. But in some short moment I envisioned the scene—a man engaged in ramming the gravel turning aside for a moment to go piss or to get a drink of water, another workman not waiting for his return or not even considering the matter of had the gravel been rammed sufficiently—and it had not—the second workman perhaps, then, mechanically setting down the pave-stone; the first workman returning and, likely even without so much as a shrug, picking up his implement and moving on a few feet to commence the work of ramming a bit further on. And then the passing of the years, the rains, many years of rains, the not-fully-packed gravel shifting, moving; then perhaps the fall of a heavier stone from an improperly-laded wagon passing by in the torchlight: the paving stone sustaining a crack not observed in the night, more years passing, the incessant traffic at last splitting the pave-stone. Somehow the inspectors had missed it…or, their reports ignored…the night-traffic cared nothing for any bad spot which their heavy wagons could lurch across…had, anyway, the drivers and teamsters, no time to spend on complaints: into the city by nightfall, incargo laded-off, out-cargo laded-on, out of the city by nightrise: so.