And this prospect pleased him even less.
Much, much less.
“A horse? For sure a horse,” said Fulgence the liveryman. “For how long, a horse, the master?”
Vergil considered. “Surely not more than a fortnight.” He hoped.
The liveryman’s face, all expectation at his answer, whatever his answer might be, now changed. Brows flew up, eyes bulged, mouth flew open, hands flew out. “Ah, then the master will not want …” He paused, he licked his lips. Again scanned his customer, decided that perhaps after all he would not try to impress by a guess. “So. Is it that the master may want a nice bright filly for ambling up and down the streets? Or maybe the master wants something. . for show, not. . not a filly; a good sturdy mare, mayhap? or a gelding? For, maybe, the mud and dirt, the roads to trudge, the farms to see?”
“I am going to Averno.”
One more slow lick the liveryman gave his lips, the while he looked from side to side as though for witnesses to this incredible statement; but witnesses there were at the moment none, for the swipes and hostlers were gathered round a handsome stallion in a corner of the yard. The man took a breath. He held it. Let it out. Looked about once more. Shrugged. Gazed up as though the god-actor, descending from the hoist-machine in the amphitheater, would yet come down to save him. But — as he himself might have put it — a god from the machine there was not.
“Well, what is it, Fulgence, man, what is it?” Vergil was becoming impatient at this play.
“What is it? What it is? Heh-hem! Is going to Averno, says the master, says, and wants to know” — here control began to slip and voice to rise — ”Jove, Apollo, and Poseidon! ‘What is it?’ asks he! Is this: For one, for Averno, not a horse would be, but a mule. Is this, for another, so here are no mules, none. Mules, here, are not. Childs of whoring mares are mules, and in my stable have, I wouldn’t.” Several of the children of the whoring mares lifted their heads in adjoining stalls just then, displaying their characteristic ears, as though astonished to hear the morals of their mothers impugned and indeed their own very presence denied. Vergil grinned. The liveryman cursed. “The mules (some hangman stable boy brought in against my willing) — the mules I curse.” He broke off to explain and to excuse, and stooped as though for a stone to sling at them, a search somewhat handicapped by the fact that his hands, being both clenched into the position called the fig, with each thumb thrust between the next two adjacent fingers — a gesture sovereign and remedial against the evil eye in general, as well as specific spells and cantrips — his hands thus arranged were hardly capable of picking up stones to cast at mules, existent or otherwise. And at this moment when he was realizing this himself, and his dismay at the position becoming fast impossible to conceal, and the position itself already impossible to conceal — at this moment, concealed in yet another stall nearby, an ass began to bray: perhaps an epithalamion. The liveryman danced up and down in a hysterical ecstasy of helplessness and rage.
Vergil began to laugh, his head thrown back so far that his tar-black beard jutted straight out. “Bawd, pimp, and punk!” the man screamed, cursing the still-invisible though hardly inaudible jackass, kicking dust and dung toward its stall. “May devils ride your rod and may it dwindle! May your stones — ”
In a voice still weak from laughter, Vergil urged him to desist. “ — for suppose your curse came true?” he asked. “What of the jack’s stud-fees, man?”
A look of absolute horror expelled all other emotions from the face of Fulgence. “Twenty ducats cost me the beast, and me, I curse his rod!” He smote his forehead with the flat of his hand. “On me let it befall, on me, on me, and not on thee….” It was his voice that dwindled as he considered what he had just said, and his face seemed to writhe in a whirlpool of contradictory feeling, as the last bray ebbed off into silence. Very, very weakly, he said, “For Averno to go, a deposit the most immense it would be essential. A deposit — ”
The stallion gave a scream of pain, the liveryman at once forgot deposits, jackasses, mules, customer, and all; and in an instant was there with the stallion and its agony. “What!” he exclaimed. “Still he didn’t pass? Two days, what, and still no — The louse?” he cried, looking wildly and fiercely at the group of men and boys, some stroking and speaking to it, one holding it at the head, others standing carefully away from the great hooves. The beast was a bay, huge, and a beauty, and it quivered in pain.
Vergil asked, “He has a stricture?” Mostly they gaped at him, but one, the senior hostler by his looks and manner, nodded.
“Yes, master, he — ”
“The louse? The louse?” shouted Fulgence the liveryman.
“ — he hasn’t passed no water for anyway two days. Maybe two ‘n’ a half. The boss he sends out for to get a louse, you know, master — ”
“Ah. Yes, I know.” He knew, Vergil knew, the homely if uncomely remedy: If a louse was placed in the fundament of a horse afflicted with stricture, the crawling of the tiny parasite should produce a shudder that would relax the tautened or tightened orifice.
“ — but we couldn’t get no louse, boss,” a young stable boy grumbled. “Some days beggars be so thick, and everywhere you looks, a scratchin’ of theyselves, till you wants to leap away. Therefore. Dunno where they’m gotten to, today, we see only one, is all, old No Nose, but he — ”
But Fulgence would be butted no buts. “A handful of coppers, I give! Even, I told you, what do they want of me, the filthy, gold? Silver, a silver piece, even. Two hundred ducats cost Hermus, a price for a king! Oh, the gods! Jove, Apollo, Poseidon!” This mixture of the Roman and the Grecian was too common locally even to be noticed by those locally denizened. The great stallion Hermus. . and in truth he did seem a fine beast and perhaps fit for a king and perhaps too fine a beast for a livery stable; some story that one would never, likely, hear, lay behind his presence there. . the bay, Hermus, gave a moan. His master put his hands to his own head. The horse’s health was surely more worth than one piece of gold, but he could not bring himself to pay it; nor was it pure parsimony, either. “They would sneer me forever, upon may I spit; ‘Ha, ho, who, Fulgence! Who for a louse a gold piece did give!’ Hermus. Piss for me!” And no doubt they would, too.
Vergil meanwhile had himself replaced the man by the horse’s head, stroked its neck, stroked its belly, once, twice, thrice, murmured, “Hermus, Hermus, turbid with gold …” And stepped one pace back.
Had a demigod been then and there begotten, as upon Danae the daughter of the Argive king through Jove’s assuming the rather unexpected form of a golden rain to circumvent the locks upon the bronzen tower, there would have been no greater commotion.
Most of the credit at first, however, went to the horse.
But only at first.
And after a while the liveryman Fulgence bethought him of his other business; grateful he must have been, his words of thanks could not have been entirely insincere, but like many another person in many another (and some might think, more exalted) station in life, he was somewhat chary, somewhat leery, of showing overmuch gratitude: and he looked at his customer with a somewhat slanting glance, no longer straight into the face. Gratitude, appreciation, these were all very fine things: but business was, after all, business. Fear of his appreciation and gratitude costing him something was evident; so was his fear of losing the customer’s custom. A nice balance. . and a mixed one. . rather, coming down to specific examples, rather like a mule. “A mule, a mule,” he murmured, waving his hands as though to wave away any reminder that he had ever denied he had a mule, let alone mules, in his place. “The best of mules the master shall to have, a gentle mouth how it has, a back so kindly, the how clever on by craggy roads its feet! As for the deposit …” Here he stopped suddenly. “Averno,” he whimpered, whispered. “Who goes to Averno, does they always come back? De-posit …”
The senior hostler said, low, respectful, but how charged with significance his words, “Hermus be’s the deposit, what me thin
k.”
Fulgence hissed. Fulgence writhed. Slantingly he looked at Vergil. Appeal, greed, fear were in his look. Vergil, saying nothing, showing nothing in his face, merely looked straight on ahead. As it, however, happened, it was the great stallion Hermus who stood right straight ahead where Vergil was looking.
And so Vergil therefore looked straight at Hermus.
Fulgence gave one single short hoot of fear. Then he wilted. “It must be no mule,” he said, after several long and audible swallows. He gestured to his senior hostler, the gesture — toward some more distant stall — meant nothing to Vergil, but it evidently meant something to the senior hostler. And, it was clear, to the junior ones as well. Relief showed, and even respect. The older man bowed to Vergil, bowed to his own master, went off, nodding his head as he went. Another gesture, and Hermus was led away and into his own stable. Back came the senior, leading another horse, a roan, led it to the place where Vergil’s eyes still looked.
“This one be a good one, sir,” he said.
His voice placed a slight emphasis on good. The liveryman perhaps did not like the implication, his lips moved, then he shrugged, then he looked at his purse hanging at his belt over his slight paunch. He swallowed again. “I leave to the master his choice. Should he choose this Prima, he choose a good mare, no filly, no maiden-mare all so skittish, but he choose a matron-mare: steady, secure, strong, she. If she would have a sometime a little humor, just a little and no more would it be, to go a little right, or a little left to go, or to over her shoulder to look, well.” He shrugged again. “The master is no cruel and he would allow and it would all right be.”
“This one be a good one, sir.”
Vergil now allowed, first his eyes, then his hands, to move over the mare. All seemed true. She gave her head a slight toss. She seemed already to have accepted him. He seemed already to have accepted her. Already, in this short moment, they seemed familiar with each other. Vergil gave a long, slow nod. And once again he saw and heard the liveryman swallow. The only slightly protuberant eyes besought him somewhat more. Vergil waited.
“I leave to the master his generous, he would compassion have. Like a nobleman, he would wish the payings for two weeks in advance to pay.” Vergil thought this, from his own acquaintance with nobility, perhaps the very last thing a nobleman would wish; but he let the thought pass by, and, the purse being now open in Fulgence’s slightly trembling hands, he put money in it.
And Fulgence bowed. And Fulgence said no more.
Vergil and the mare were a ways down the street when he realized that there were three of them. The youngest stable boy had helped put on the horse-furniture, and then withdrew; now here he was again. “Thank you, boy, I shan’t need you,” Vergil said, sifting out a small coin.
“Ah, master, but I shall need you,” the stable boy said firmly. “He’ve kicked me out, old popeyes have, for that I didn’t bring him back no louse.” Likelier (thought master), likelier Fulgence, having still some small matter in the debit column, had paid it by this small act of anger — and better than to have kicked a horse. Or. . but. . “I suppose he’d liked me to fetch it back in me armpit or me crouch. And I shan’t get no other job in no other stable, sir, for they’ve got as it be a guild, and without the old boss gives his leave no new boss durst take you on. Leastly such a young chap as me. Therefore.”
He said no further word, but marched sturdily along by the side of the mare. Nor did Vergil.
If the lad had not already learned that they were going to Averno, soon he would.
The famous sunshine of the great Bay was absent the morning of their departure, veiled in a sour drizzle of rain and smoke. The boy Iohan sniffed, and liked it not, despite the felt capes provided for them both. “The gods might have waited a bit,” he said. “For we shall soon enough have much such weather, where we go. As master knows, I’m sure.” He was a moment silent, then added, in a flat voice, “Very rich.”
Vergil understood. It was said that the city of Averno had two unofficial mottoes; one was Money Never Stinks, a mere pleasantry (for Averno, a mere pleasantry); but the other, Thou Shalt Want Ere I Shall Want, gave pause for much thought. And there was also the matter of its official municipal appellation. The descriptives of cities were customarily twofold, with both adjectives preceded by the word very; there were exceptions, of course, and Rome, of course, had none. . needed none. . and Avignon, the co-capital, was termed the Imperial and Pleasant There might perhaps be a distinction between “pleasant” and “very pleasant,” but none between “imperial” and “very imperial.” Amalfi was the Very Free and Very Faithful, perhaps a contradiction in terms; and Sevilla was termed Very Ancient and Very Wise.
And so on. And so on.
But Averno was, very simply, Very Rick.
Which nobody would deny.
For a moment the mare, Prima, paused at the crest of the surrounding hills. The mare turned her head to look at the Bay of Naples, then it rolled an eye and looked at Vergil: and the look in that eye reminded him at once so strongly of the Matron Gunsedilla that he had to check himself — there on the sun-warmed summit — from murmuring, “Yes, madam. It was very well done, madam.” The mare rolled the eye back, hunched a bit, plodded on. Vergil smiled. They had told him that the mare had her little humors.
The Matron Gunsedilla, who was she? she was a knight’s widow. She was also a witch. There were those who, having devoted more time to old wives’ tales than to wives, old or young, believed that every witch had a white chin-beard and dwelt in a clearing in the woods, crouching by midnight over a caldron on a fire. Gunsedilla was still on the brighter side of thirty, her middle age a bit more than a lustrum off, and she had no children; neither had she a beard, though to be sure there was a very slight dark down upon her upper lip, not enough to attract Spaniards, though. Her late husband had left her a mansion in the city, a villa in the suburbs, three latifundia in the country, olive orchards and an oil-press, as well as such other legacies as interests in several ships and some blocks of tenements. Her only appearance at a clearing in the woods would be to pick mushrooms on a picnic. She needed, of course, neither spin nor weave, nor wash wool and linen by the brook. In part she spent her time in pious devotions at home and at the temples, she brought soup and sop to the pauper sick, and broken victuals as well; and her readings from Homer were a feature of the town, her reader being a learned Greek with a mellifluous voice and a keen sense of grammar and rhythm. And what she did if she crouched at midnight was her own affair. As at midafternoon.
Still, time hung heavy on her hands, and, not wishing to fall into idle ways, she had some while since betaken herself to studies such as would stimulate her supple mind: first geometry, then geomancy; then, by a natural progression, sorcery — of, of course, the benevolent sort, the other sort being naturally illegal. She was of great help in recovering lost objects, she would be of no help at all in helping them in getting lost. Her command over the contents of Macer’s Concerning Those Made Impotent Through Sorcery was profound, though she would herself do nothing to cause anyone to become impotent through sorcery. As for her efforts in moon-constructs, gentle and sweet Selena must have smiled on them and her as she bent close to the lunar reflection in the burnished mazer and the dark-bottomed wooden pan; rustics who would not have known a burnished mazer had one bitten them in the buttocks would murmur at sight of the matron or even mention of her name, “Ah, the Madame Gunsedilla, she can draw down the moon from the heavens! Aye, haul it down from the starry skies!”
Now and then Vergil would not mind a short visit of an afternoon to discuss this work and that with her, and she was very far from minding, either; and now and then he would take a seat at the reading from Homer. Why only now and then in either matter? Why, that the matron was inclined to be just a bit, just the slightest bit, importunate; she did not exactly fish for compliments, rather did she slightly nudge for them; how well he knew the roll of those large eyes. . and how well he knew that, did he not at on
ce bow a bit and smile a bit and look impressed a bit and murmur, “Yes, madame. It was very well done, madame,” rather (he had once thought) like a butler approving the catering arrangements — why, then see that fine and mobile mouth with its slightly downy upper lip draw out and draw down in discontent, see that still-supple body give a rather unpleasant hunch of annoyance. A twitch. A shrug.
Life contained enough of toil, of pain, and folly, and he felt that these echoes or simulacra of such, however faint and petty, were hardly worth. . well, experiencing. Often.
All this had passed across his mind like the faintest of shadows, and whither he now turned his eyes he saw a deeper shadow yet.
Averno lay beneath them, so near that they could identify individual houses, yet so far by reason of the wandering way through the craggy hills that it might be near sundown before they arrived. And some such thought evidently being in the mind of Iohan, he muttered, “Smell thee in the dark …” and broke off to break off a piece of his bread and scatter a crumble, and mumble, “Hither for this offering, ye genius loci.” He who has cautioned us that art is long and life is brief has also reminded us that airs, waters, and places have powers of their own.
The genius loci did not at once visibly smile, and it would have been difficult to say how such a sign of favor would be manifest in that region, but at least at no time as they wound round and round and sometimes, briefly, up, but mostly always down — at any rate, at no time did any rock fall upon them, nor any lip nor barm of a tight trail give way beneath them. For a while yet there stayed some trace in their nostrils of what the poet Andersius has called “the sweet salt air;” scarcely were they aware of this when the wind went tepid and dull, and then a warm sullen slap of stale breeze in their faces gave notice of what was to come. . and, fortunately, it came slowly and in stages. The heat and stench were Averno’s curse, yes, but they were the inevitable results of Averno’s blessing, too, for the hot places of the earth, elsewhere buried deeply, were here very near the surface. Here waters bubbled boiling up with no fuel placed beneath them, and here mounds rose anvil-high and anvil-iron-red and hot-white-hot without the need for charcoal, wood, or bellows -
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