The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series

by Avram Davidson

  It was a while before he made a resolve …

  The boys had broken into talk.

  “Numa — they say? You know? Numa? they say his cave? —” “He, Numa, you know, the warlock? they say — old Numa! Can give you a good luckstone, and —”

  “— his cave — Numa’s cave? it be, they say, the gate to Hell!”

  “My grandsir? you know, my grandsir? Numa, he be a man-sibyl, Numa? my grandsir say so, and —”

  No one waited to hear more about his grandsire, they crowded each other, they pushed on the other, raised their voices to compete. “Numa? Hey, say, Numa? You know, bridges between men and the gods? Numa, he —”

  And, “He give my old gaffer, once, a potion again the fevers, and he never took no money off him: Numa …”

  It happened, as it often will, that all voices went silent at one same time: “Zeus prime,” it was the custom to say, and so one said it; there was not time for even a second one to say it, into the slight silence slid the Bruno: “Numa? He haven’t got no more power,” he said this in a taunting, mocking tone, with no concern for the primacy of Zeus (or Jove, as others say). “He haven’t got nothing — he’ve grown too old!” Whereupon several shifted their opinions, for all the world like citizens in some public assembly, quick to echo the loudest voice. But Mariu said no word at all.

  A man might be too old to plow, and yet know the best day to start the plowing.

  It was a while before he made a resolve to see Old Numa in his house-and-cave.

  And a while longer before actually he went to see him.

  The creature glared at him.

  Why was he, Mariu, here? What was he, Mariu, here to find? How was he to do it? Some stray memory, stray but yet purposeful, entered his mind … of a milestone set by a path in a hollow, in a small wasteland of thicket and thistle and rubble and rock … perhaps memorable only because it was otherwise so unmemorable? No. If he wanted the best view of the bay, to contemplate the galleys crawling over the seas … sometimes they did not crawl but with oars put up and sails full of wind they skimmed along the main … from Greece … to Greece, or farther … much, much farther … perhaps as far as ancient Carthage, much loved by Juno, stained with purple and heavy with gold … perhaps (not merely unlikely, but almost impossible … still … still … that which was almost impossible was possible) perhaps, via the canal which joined the sweet fresh waters of the Nile to the salt waves of the Arabian Recess and past the Gate of Tears and thence into the vast fetches of the Erythraean Ocean and the Indoo Sea and entire way to the Golden Chersonese and its far-distant City of Lions and thus to many-fabled Cipangu (risks, hazards, horrids, stinking shallows, shoals, and depths without bottom) — Merely to contemplate: one had to walk even that mile, at least that mile, and to encounter that milepost. And then to pass it.

  And, now, Numa was that milepost.

  The boy stepped forward.

  The creature glared at him swiftly thrust out a palm as black as an apeling’s. Its hung-agape mouth had a long spittle on the dropping-forward lower lip, this lip it folded back over some browned and crooked numbs of teeth, and in a harsh voice of curious tone, “Money,” it said. “Wisdom and wonder is not to be had for nought.”

  Not, without thought, for think on the words he did, but as quick as any reflex, he handed over the peeled oaken wand, as some tale or other round about the chestnut-scented nightfire had indicated that he should (chestnuts in the fire, chestnut-wood with its ruddy heart … or was it carob? memory of, earlier, chestnut flowers scenting all the world). Scorn, and hateful scorn upon the creatures’ face. “Where is the wee white bit of silver for my master?” the harsh, high voice demanded, “What, no’ even a copper piece, such as the hostler-thrall may have at stables? Why cam ye here, saucy boy, saunce coin?”

  Another voice now the boy heard, from the murkiest region of the room behind the door; at hearing this (to him) wordless grumble, Mariu at once understood that it was a voice of power, and that the grumble was not directed to him. The creature must have realized it, too, for it flinched, withdrew into itself a bit, yet gan a-whining for all that. “A peeled oaken-switch, lord warlock, shall I seeth it for thy supper? Or roast it by the coals like a fatling-kid?” Still its sarcasm, yes, hate, was strong and live, like the strong, thrang odor of some loathesome beast (and it lacked not that, either, the boy thought). He made a half-step back.

  The other voice spoke again. “Belike we’ll lay it along thy humps and haunches, Caca, mayhap twill be this rotten head of thine we’ll seeth in pot, Caca, or thy runny rump, dern scabs and all. What! Caca, still stand thee there? Boy! Push it aside, come over the threshold, enter, enter, pleased to be coming in.”

  It came not to push; the strange thrawn doorkeeper drew aside, and, sending the boy one last evil look, gat it gone — presumably to the cave which common talk agreed lay behind the heavy dark curtain at the rear of the house proper. But — as to the warlock’s voice! — for the warlock himself he could see nought of, save some large shape amidst the shadow and the smoke — to be sure the voice had begun with all the power of a king — and then of sudden, turned sweet. So that long later he was reminded of the famous play upon words which turned Ptolemaios, the name of Ægypt’s king, who had sent an hundred thousand only slightly suspected subjects to toil in his silver mines; turned Ptolemaios into Apo Melitos: Made-of-Honey. Aye, but they were subtle folk, there in Grecian Ægypt — and, aye! they had need to be. Haply it had amused them there, moiling by torchlight at the black ore — but, well! Claude was Ptolemy now, a philosopher for a king, a cosmographer, and … well … one must hope — no abuser of power. And as the boy was pleased to be coming in (and pleased he may have been, but he was not delighted), the warlock spoke again in his made-of-honey voice, “When the novice approaches the adyt, all clothing and other possessions should be cast off, charm, chest-cloth, ring and ringlet; there should be no retained objects.” To be sure the boy had heard a muckle tales of sacred washings, immersions, lustrations, ablutions, and so his fingers began working at fibula, belt, knot, and pouch — scarcely knowing where to begin, his fingers roved and roamed; but something stirred within him which demanded precedence, a mighty great caveat was growing, and a strong and cool caution alongside of it: they pushed his fingers away and they made smooth his face and voice.

  “I am not to do this now, my lord bridge-builder.”

  A gust of air made the smoke billow up, but it made it billow in such a manner as to clear away the reek and fume where the warlock sate. Of nothing was the boy so much reminded as of the sight he had seen once in the market on a festal-day, an artist had for sale a pair of tablets made with colors of heated wax on slabs of wood. “This shows Mount Somma as she was before, as tall and strong as Mount Vesuviu. And this other shows she as she be now.” In the figure of the warlock Mariu instantly felt he could discern the shape and features of a fine, great man; but concealed, as it were collapsed, inside the slumped and sunken figure sitting in the chimney-corner chair-seat, clutching his requisite sword in ane great twisted, spotted fist; and to be sure, to be sure, a wolfskin kirtel hung loosely slung about him, and it still smelled so, one might think it freshly cut, or not so freshly staled upon: or was that but the lingering scent of the thrall Caca?

  “Wolfskin,” but what did wolves smell like, really? A something which he later on came to think of as common sense, told the boy that, smell like what they may, live wolves and cured wolves’ hides (well-cured or ill —) were not likely to be found together. This thought was like a streak of cool in the midst of a feeling perhaps not really hot, and yet why did his heart swell so? and why did his breath labor?

  This place was no flowerbed of spices. And —

  What bleary eyes the old man had! It was not sure that he blinked now for a show of seeing you, or —

  At once, the invitation to shed garb and gear now having been declined, at once the old wizard’s manner changed; his very tone, too. Gone was the royal We, and gone
, also the made-of-honey voice. “Marius, hail,” Numa mumbled, in an eldritch toothless voice, as though lost in the palate.

  “They do call you, ‘Marius,’ and not ‘Vergil’?”

  Automatic formality, “Vergilius Marius Mago,” almost he’d said “Maro,” why?, “of the —”

  A cracked and dirty, very dirty palm confronted him flat up and out. “I know your gens, I know your tribe. Your agnomen I know, and I know your cognomen, too. Your great-grandmother, she had six toes upon either foot, and such is the reason for the family secret, why she would never never let thy great-grandser see her barefeeted. And I know where your blacksmith uncle had the scar of the burn by which he gat his smity-art, where none accidence could cause a burn to be. Your dam smiled upon me once, twas on the Gules of August, when the ewes do oester, Canabras was Consul then, and I gave her a small and rufous stone —”

  “I have it yet in my pouch, as a luck-piece, a ward-piece, but I didn’t know it came from her … or from you, Messer Numa …”

  The gum-welling eyes, reddled yellow and washed-pale and almost infant blue, played upon him, half-shut. ‘Aye, I have had great wealth, affording great gifts. And have had great costs. Yet maychance I be not so poor as I seem so to thee, Vergil. Maychance I need make no show of wealth. Or that I keep it by me in a secret place for a secret purport. What brings ye here to me, my wean? If ought else than that ye’ve learned you’ve some’at ‘ithin you that other lads have not. Shall I rid you of it? Take but that part-peeled oaken-switch — Oh? I shall not? Well, well, place that switch (wand, some call it) in the corner here, a-tween my sword,” grunting a bit he stood the sheathed sword on the floor; “a-tween my sword and my stave. Now see you against where now you stand, yet another part-peeled stick — a willow. Move yand wand to me; it was cut in the catkin-drooping grove of Persephone, strewing its pollen like gold, hard upon the misty bank of River Ocean, in whose baths the Bear hath no share — and so it may be made, may be made, I say, a sovereign ward against the bruin — move it, now! Thus. Aye. It moves. It ought not, ought it? Thou hast touched it not with either hand nor foot. Ah, thou rascal wean! Nevertheless, it does move.”

  Numa sat back a moment, breathing somewhat harder than before. Then he sat again forward.

  “So, now ye have moved it to thy home-garth, without anyone a-sees it move, save my servant, which had come forth again, I needed it, the thrall, y’see, for some’at and such and so. Ye planted the withe well, and when it had greened thrice three times, ye’d cut an other such switch from it, and ye brought it here with thee, plus three small sorbus-fruits from the garden in the Castle of the Crown, same as is be-called Castle of the Hawk. Those things ye had done —”

  Numa was saying all this with such absolute and matter-of-fact certainty as almost to take the boy’s breath away. “Sir,” said the boy, “No, sir, no I have not.”

  The witchman smiled, and a vulpine smile it was, too; and like a very shabby old he-fox he seemed, too. “My wean,” he began — and very little did Vergil feel like that one’s wean, and very little did he wish to be such, either —“My wean, those of us who speak with vatic voice, sibyls and such-like, ye see, ‘prophets,’ as the Ebrews call ‘em, we sometimes describe as of the past or present that which, really, we descry in the future. D’ye see.”

  In whatever space or place there was which lay behind the heavy crusted hanging cloth (and greatly dirty it was, too) thrall Caca had been muttering, muttering, and by the sodden sound and echo, stirred a something with a long stick in a large pot. A moment’s silence, the curtain moved sluggishly and the thrall stood within the room once more. Numa made moist his lips. “Thou has, Vergiliu, in a secret place about thee, a puny piece of silver. Give it to the thing. Go.”

  The ancient epicene horror, Caca, all rags and stench and hate, now crept forward, its hand hunched out. The boy dropped the coin. Numa sank back into his chair, eyes closed. The fug inside was dimlight as by a sour and reeking fire. He was outside again, he stumbled a bit at the sunken threshold. Overhead gleamed the glittering stars.

  Overhead gleamed the glittering stars; actually, directly overhead the stars were as yet faint and few and pale, full and bright they shone at or near the farther horizon. From the nearer horizon enough light glowed from the setted sun so as to keep, for the moment, most things clear enough. He was glad of that, and did not tarry, but made haste to get onto a main-travelled path. Words of what he had heard repeated themselves in his ears. “I can show you, Marius, a way and ways, Marius! to tell South from North and West from East, without regard to the position of the sun. And I can show you, Marius, Mariu, Vergiliu, boy: Vergil! I can show how to devise maps! arts which only twenty men and several have in all the whole world, Vergil!” and he ambled and rambled on and about the knowledges and powers he could impart, until Marius (he did think, now he thought about it, that best of all his name he liked Vergil) wondered, then, why if Numa knew all this, he chose to live, or suffered himself to live, like, almost, a beast in a lair.

  He had yet to learn that great powers did not necessarily mean great prosperity.

  And he wondered as well, right then and there, how came he to recall having heard those words, when well he knew, once he thought about it, that he had never actually heard them? … from Numa … or from anybody else. Was this, then, in some manner of illustration the vatic voice?

  For, surely, now and before, it spoke of things he did not merely desire, it spoke of things, once glimpsed, which he lusted for to know. A direction-finding art! And how to make — not alone, for any doge might have one for money, not alone to have maps — but to know how to make maps! Compared to this, what was that some subtle something inside of him which could move willow-wands, cause pokers to roll, and could simulate the Power of the Dog? It was less … much less …

  Later, of course, he realized that one thing had nothing to do with the other; rather, that one thing had much to do with the other: but that one thing did not occlude the other.

  Several generations back, someone’s cousin had been married to someone’s brother-in-law, and not even then a first cousin. But although, even then, Vergil’s family had not been related to this other family, it had been thus connected. A very faint sense of this connection had shed upon a certain woman, Emma by name, the last of an earlier generation, a semblance of being some sort of twice-great-aunt. When he was small, he had thought My Emma, as he had also thought of another old woman as My Grandma; for all he knew, every small boy had an emma, too. Sometimes, not often, his own aunt, his own mother’s sister, who had taken the place of his own mother in the household; sometimes, not often, she had said, his aunt, “Take this to your Emma” … a festal cake, it might have been, a stuffed tripe, a new-enough kerchief, itself replaced by one bought more newly yet (the elder Marius had been a great one for kerchiefs, buying them for his sister-in-law whenever he’d gotten a coin more than he’d reckoned as his bottom price for a beast sold at market. Once only had he bought her a small bauble of glass and brass, immediately she had asked, “What about marriage, then?” and Father had withdrawn to muck out the byre, not returning for several hours; and after that he had confined his purchases to kerchiefs), a honeycomb in a dish deep enough to contain the drippings, a small flask of oil … such-like things.

  Emma lived within what was a half an hour’s walk for a small boy; it was of course less than that now, yet he went there less often. Emma’s daughters lived in another village now, Emma’s son had died, and Emma’s daughter-in-law, Euphronia: a woman of no sweetness of temper, had married again, and her husband was her match. And old Emma lived on, and lived with them, the gods save us from such a fate as that! Aunt had paid them a visit, had not felt she’d been made to feel welcomed; her next small gift, carried by the boy “Mariu,” had been disparaged by the now-chief woman of old Emma’s house, and been deprecated as precisely that: small. As “Mariu” had, in all child innocence, reported.

  After that, the aunt sent things seld
om, and Emma (her humble gifts: two eggs, say, still warm in some straw in a tiny basket she’d made herself) sent things no more at all. Nor, evidently, was allowed to.

  This man had brought with him to the marriage a son of his own first wedding. And this was the boy Bruno, who had soon enough taken upon himself to exemplify all the grudges of that house.

  From time to time one would see the three of them doing butcher’s business out of a wheelbarrow in which a slaughtered pig had been taken from the shambles; they raised swine, took each, live, as far as the abattoir (where it had by law to be killed so the tax could be collected), then wheeled it, dead, just past the official limits of the town, where they sold it, cut by cut. By thus avoiding setting up a booth or stall within the lines of the population, they saved a certain amount of money. They were rough people and sold their rough-cut pork to other rough people — either those rough by nature or rendered perhaps rougher by poverty, which seldom smoothes the manners.

  Thus, they cried, “Fresh pork for sale!” and hacked, awkwardly (perhaps cutting up even a skinny swine in a wheelbarrow was not the easiest of work: but they paid no public market fee; ah! they paid no fee!), and slashed, awkwardly. And … so the boy, not yet much called Vergil, thought … had they been but a bit more brazen, to be sure they would have cried, “Hog’s liver! Fair fresh hog’s meat! A penny for half a snout, and a halfpenny for the tail,” from the very base of the obelisk itself. Once or twice he saw them slow the barrow as they came to the monument, they seemed almost to hesitate — but they did not dare.

  By and by the boy, Marius, had summed up some few certain things: Did he walk with his own father, a man rather taller than the average, and did they encounter Bruno, he scowled, that one. But he passed them by, or he let them pass him by. And that was all. For then. Did Marius encounter him, of a sudden, face to face, or with his, Marius’s friends, he got no more from the Bruno than a lowering look. One had learned that it was useless to smile at him … unless one had use for a sneer, which was all that one got in return. But, more than once — indeed, almost often — if Marius were walking by himself, all alone, a stone or a short piece of wood or a small chunk of a broken-brick or such-like rubble, would sail past his head: at once, did he turn quickly around, who was there, arms still and looking somewhere else? Bruno. Was who. Of course one could walk quickly towards him, one could even run towards him. And he would run away, laughing his unlovely laugh.