Vergil in Averno vm-2

by Avram Davidson

  However, not for long. Vaguely he was ware of his young fellow-aspirant tossing him over his shoulder and carrying him. . the prickle of straw. . he made to get up. . he fell back….

  “One of you has failed the first test.” The beadle’s voice.

  “Silly kid. Couldn’t take it, huh, Ser Beadle.” The Apulian’s.

  “And the second test too. Where is your gear and baggage, boy?”

  “At the door. Where do I bring it?”

  “Wherever you like. Back the way you came. Or any other way as pleases you. But not in. Out. Now. So, go.” Soft the voice. But firm.

  A pause. Eyes clearer now, Vergil saw his fellow stare bepuzzled, then grow angry as well. “Say, Ser Beadle. What you mean? He was the coward. I stuck brave. Didn’t I? So — ”

  With, it seemed, no more than one finger, the beadle turned the boy around. “When you reach the exit gate you will find a caravan about to start. Say to its master, ‘There is a beast reserved for me,’ and he will point it out. Your charge and victuals are paid at no cost to you. And when you reach the port, there you will hear the drummers announcing the departure of a ship for Africa. Its voyage purpose is to find, capture, and bring back wild beasts for the arena. You need not join, though I expect you will. Do not tarry. Go.” The finger prodded, the Apulian moved. He moved unwillingly, still he questioned.

  “You say ‘one of us failed the first and second test’ — how come it’s me?”

  By this time they had passed from Vergil’s sight, he lying on the straw, sick with shame. The beadle’s voice drifted back.

  “The first lesson is to know fear. The second lesson is to feel humility. It may be that you will learn them both. Not, I believe, very soonly. Meanwhile my finger grows weary, so I adjure: Begone.”

  When the beadle returned, Vergil was on his knees, watching the vapor arising from a tub of water that had certainly not been there a moment before. Said the beadle, “Wash.”

  Gladly would the young Vergil have drowned in it; “I have soiled myself.”

  Something not even faintly like compassion, something faintly like impatience, tinged the beadle’s voice. “Another good reason, then, to wash. Wash.” And, when Vergil had done so, he was shown a certain door, one of several. “Go through that one. That one. Mark it well. It won’t be pointed out again. Now. . go …”

  That young aspirant also had a question, but he asked it as he went.

  “What of my baggage?”

  “It will follow,” said the beadle.

  And so it did; whenever the lad’s feet lingered, lagging along that long corridor, longer than any he had ever walked before, he could hear it following; once he looked behind. Only once.

  But as to how it had been made to follow, this was not the third lesson. It was not even the thirty-third.

  It was twelve months and several before he saw the beadle once again.

  The Apulian boy, though whenever (seldom) Vergil went to the arena he looked for him, he never saw more.

  • • •

  Armin had come to visit Vergil again. He seemed tired, had little to say as they sat by the slatted window-shutters, though Vergil tried to play the casually cheerful host. “Hecatombs,” the host repeated, taking up the note on which, more or less, the meeting with the magnates had closed. “Hecatombs can only help, for, after all — ” He paused to pour drink. “This is called beer,” he said. “Curious. It is much drunk in Egypt, so far south and east of here; and it is much drunk past the Alps, so far north of here. But it is not drunk much here. Is it that our grapes are better? Our barley not as good? What is that dreadful noise?”

  They peered through the slats. Some throng had turned a corner. “It is nothing,” Armin said, dispiritedly. “A coiner. A false-coiner.” Below, a man was being dragged along behind a cart to which he was bound. At every fourth step, the local beadle gave his whip a flourish and lashed the malefactor across his naked back. Someone, perhaps a friend, had stepped forward and thrust a piece of wood between the condemned man’s teeth. It could only have been a last gesture of friendship, pity would not be encountered at such a scene. For one single stroke more the counterfeiter bit deep into the wood to muffle his own cry. But the effort was not to be made more. The gag dropped at the next stroke of the whip, the lashed flesh bled, the criminal shrieked. He did not wish to be brave. The Spartan virtues did not flourish here. And at every shriek the mob howled, mocked, imitated, flung stones, pelted with mud. Why not? He had made false coin; had any one of them found such a one in his purse or till, he must need either have borne the loss himself, or else risked the same fate, for the penalty for passing was the same as that of forging. The grim procession passed slowly out of sight and, somewhat later, out of sound. Fairly soon enough the forger would be burned beside the same dung heap where his ashes would be scattered. Burned to death, the sentence was uttered.

  But before that time the man would already be dead.

  Stern and meritorious law.

  Host and guest sipped beer in silence.

  Vergil did not resume his comments on hecatombs, but his thoughts continued. A hundred magnates (at the most, a hundred) and their wives and households could hardly eat a hundred oxen, even after the prescribed parts of the sacrifices had been burned upon the altars; victims offered in such profusion would inevitably yield up festive meats for slaves, and slaves seldom got to eat flesh-meat. Usually they must count themselves lucky when they had wheaten bread to eat, instead of spelt; often enough their diet must have been heavy in spoiled spelt, at that.

  “I confess I miss the views of the Bay,” Vergil said, by and by. “The Isle of Goats. . and others. The gardens. . I confess I have a passion for islands, gardens, trees — I see you wonder at that.”

  Armin said, “Not in particular, no. Merely I wonder that anyone should have a passion for anything.”

  Vergil raised his eyebrows. “But that dance you danced. . surely, a passion?”

  Armin shook his head. “Ah no. Merely a sudden lust.” Equally sudden now, his tired eyes changed. “You wonder. Such excitement for a madman. But you can’t know how different his madness and gaiety is from the madness which is daily life in Averno.” His gesture took in the scene that had just passed. “Day after day: heat, fire, sound, stench, coarseness, cruelty, picking pennies with one’s teeth from dung heaps; no gardens, not a tree, not a blade of grass — the fumes would kill them off — all but those painted, and painted badly, on some walls. . and them the stinking airs, the sweet breezes soon discolor, and mostly no one bothers to paint them fresh.

  “Life in Averno — a contradiction in terms! This is a hell, death is our daily fare, we moil in the muck for money, and try to forget it by gorging instead of seemly dining, and sousing instead of decent drinking! One speaks with respect, with awe, of the Senate and the People of Rome, but never, ever, of the Magnates and the People of Averno! Ha, ‘the people of Averno’ —!” And suddenly, he wept, and his weeping spilled over on his cheeks.

  Vergil murmured, moved, “Ah, ‘the tearfulness of things …’ ”

  Armin, checking his tears with his sleeve, asked, “What?”

  “Oh, only a phrase from somewhere. I forget. No — I don’t. From the Oracles of Maro.”

  With a laugh still half a sob, Armin said, “You have seen their wives, the magnates’ — is that not tearful enough?”

  Victory over pride? Victory over arrogance. The Nine Muses the matrons of Averno, as he had seen them, certainly were not. Need they have been? He thought for some tactful comment, but even as he sought, he found one question had now formed itself: “Only one, I did notice, spun. The classical duty of a Roman matron.” Vergil did not look at his visitor, he poured him drink, wondered about his own work here, and how he would next get on with it. His visitor spoke.

  Spoke in a tone that indicated he wished his emotions, immediately past, to be not spoken of. “Ah, that was Rano’s wife. The Matron Poppaea. Of her some stories are told.”


  Vergil said merely, flatly, “Ah.”

  “Some stories are told that Rano for a while maintained her in another city, some say Potuoli, some say Naples, others say it was in a villa in the country. Some say he had reason to doubt her fidelity. It is said that he had no other reason to doubt except his own ugliness, however. It is said otherwise. And also, it is said, that, as he sent her there to live, so he brought her here to die….”

  “Many things, in short, ‘it is said.’ ”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “Putuoli made me, Averno unmade me. He who — ”

  “It has not unmade her. Anyway, not yet. What? ‘Potuoli — ’? Another citation from those Oracles? I don’t know them well.”

  “No. Another source. Not cited; rather, paraphrased. So — ”

  But Armin would not wait on So. He got up. “Master Vergil, as I was one of the means of bringing you here, I hope that neither you nor I will regret it. I am not always clear in speech; forgive me. Neither am I always clear in mind. May I bid you civilly good night? And feel as free as ever to call on you again? Whenever …”

  “Whenever. Yes. Certainly. I share that hope. Are there lights still?”

  Armin, brushing his face again with his sleeve, brushing his scant beard, murmured that there were lights enough. A formal word or two more, and he had gone.

  At once upon the man’s departure, Vergil’s boy appeared, rather as though he had but been waiting. Master looked at him, looked him over quickly. Well fed enough, well clad and well clean enough he seemed. Well content he did not seem. “Iohan. Time enough to bid you, too, good night. I’ll have some hard work for you, soon enough. Therefore don’t wear yourself down with trivial things in the meanwhile. Avoid provocation, fights, and all the like.”

  The lad’s look seemed troubled, but not markedly so; he expressed his assent, made an attempt to begin an accounting for some small sum allotted him for some small purpose, was waved aside in this until another time, made his brief respectful bow; then, too, was gone.

  That night the king could not sleep? E’en king, e’en queen…. But this night would Master, Adept, Astrologue, and all the rest of all of it, sleep. He could have done it by arcane means with full ease enough; suddenly he did not wish to. He took a small flask from his kit, subjected its stopple to a few sundry twists that an observer would have found too complex to follow. . and would have been meant to. . dropped scarce a scruple, by no means a dram, into the remnants of his cup of drink; downed it in two drafts; swift he sought his bed; let the lamp smolder to a dull-red smoky coal. The room contracted, the bed enlengthened, he felt his body change, expand, felt his spirit leave it but leave it by but a span of a hand; and hover there, content. He felt content, he did not feel asleep; he knew that he slept, he heard the cocks crow, bade them be still, knew there were no cocks in Averno, dwindled, faded, ebbed.

  Felt himself at rest. At rest.

  Something beat. His pulse? The anvils, hammers, fulling-mallets and the ceaseless pulse of here? Not any matter.

  Sleep.

  He slept.

  The Matron Poppaea Rano was sapling-thin, and she sat with wool and distaff and spun and spun, and — as Vergil had observed before — she spun rather badly. It was certainly not the coarse wool commonly worked in Averno, and he wondered why she alone should be working expensive fleece and yarn when she worked it so ill. But it was a subject for wonder, the whole thing: First a message had been brought to him inviting him to call once more at the house of Magnate Rano; next, another message had directed him to go instead to the magnate’s warehouse. And whilst he was in the broad street and inquiring more precisely the way, crying, “Ser! Ser! Master!” there came running Iohan.

  “He’ve changed his mind again, Master,” said the boy. “Wants you to go to his house, after all. I’m not sure, do he mean to join you there, or what, and this old besom, she won’t say aught to me.”

  The old woman was indeed as lean and rugged as a rustic broom, and she said no more to master than she had to man, merely she indicated by an inclination of her head the direction intended; then she walked off. Vergil gave a half-rueful shrug, told Iohan to get him back to their inn in case yet another change of plan on the part of Rano might be forthcoming; then he followed after the old she. Who did not indeed lead him to the main rooms via the kitchen, but she gave some shrill call as she — as they — came in, and, before they had gone more than the length of another anteroom (the ill-fitting tiles, their mortar not replaced for. . for who could say how long, going click-click beneath their feet), a squat and ugly servant of no particular sex brought her a bag of what was soon revealed to be beans, and a few pans; this house-thrall then returned. . wherever. And the “old besom” by and by simply sat herself down, squatting on her withered haunches, and began to sift through the dried beans, handful by half-a-handful, separating pebbles and clumpets of earth, a task he had times past seen the women of his own family doing so often — and, more than merely sometimes, he had helped, he felt he could here and now fall to and do it once again. And do it quite as well.

  However.

  After merely a moment, a manservant appeared, one whom Vergil had seen before; this one gave him the sort of ridiculous bow of the sort seen in pantomimes and street-plays, the spare-two-groats-for-the-bath-boss sort. At first the visitor felt he was being mocked, almost at once he thought that perhaps the man had never in his life seen any real sort of bow performed; this was, this was Averno. And so, the lumpkin having straightened up and made an equally absurd gesture, Vergil, following it, entered the room where the woman sat and spun.

  She rose as he entered, then, the spindle dropping, she lurched to catch it, caught it, gazed down at it a moment as though not sure what it was. Then she sat down again. After a moment she said, “Poppaea. I am called Poppaea. Did you know? Poppaea Rano.” (“Matron,” he said, with a bow she did not see.) “Rano sent to tell me you were coming.” Her voice was clear and had no particular accent; neither did it seem to have any particular weight of meaning.

  After a moment, as she stayed still, clumsily working her wool, and did not ask him to seat himself, he looked about, and seeing, at a respectable distance, to be sure a bad chair — but still, a chair — he seated himself. Another slow-passing moment. There seemed nothing wrong with her slender fingers, there were no marks of shackles on her wrists, merely this was an art which she had not. “Will Magnate Rano be returning presently?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said simply, and with the slightest air of surprise that he might think she should. Well, here there would be no discussion of readings from Homer; Sappho had woven her violets in vain as far as any analysis of her or anyone else’s poems was concerned. It was up to him to close the gate against silence, if the gate was to be closed at all. And so, with an inward sigh, he asked, by and by, “Do you have children, Matron?” At once he felt his words as a scalding draft in his mouth, but he could not call them back again.

  “Children die young here,” she said. “Not many children are born here.” Her fingers flexed the supple thread, the thread broke and she gathered the fiber again. “I have had two children here. . well, they were born here and they died here. The air was too thick for the older, I think, she had trouble breathing it. And the second had a disease. . what do they call it? Anthrax? It is worse with some. At least mine did not fall into a pool of boiling water or stumble into a fire-hole.” She gave him no chance to change the conversation, nor even to think of how it might be changed; the clear voice, devoid of passion, it seemed, and even concern, went on. The gate had been closed against silence. “When he died, my second one, I recollected and felt I understood that story, oh, I don’t recall where it is from, of a place where people weep when a child is born and they rejoice when it dies. But until then I thought, how horrible. Of course I didn’t really rejoice. ‘Sleep well, now,’ is what I said. And since then Rano says he asks nothing more of me, only to spin. ‘A woman must spin,’ he says.
Rano says.”

  She repeated this as her fingers gathered and the spindle whirled.

  “I don’t do it well, but one must do something, and — ” She broke off.

  She sighed a very small sigh. A thin sigh, he thought it might be called — appropriately: she was so thin herself. “We are rich here, we magnates and matrons, and so we may afford amusements. But we don’t spend money on them, really, we women here. Brosa. Do you know what her amusement is? She abuses her servants. Really.” Not likely, Vergil thought, that Poppaea could abuse the grim figure whose dirty toes were just within his sight, as she rattled her dried beans from pan to pan. And an odd duenna she was…. “Well, to be less delicate, she tortures them. Oh, not too heavily, no. They are always able to go back to work afterward. I know what Me-lanchthus’s matron does, she does her hair, she has wax-pictures of different hairstyles, and she copies them and does her hair and she looks in her mirrors and then she undoes and then she does it all over again. Grobi, she keeps the accounts; fancy me keeping Rano’s accounts! Do you know who does? You don’t. You will. And Haddadius’s woman, what’s-her-name, takes care of her children. Ask her if she has children.” Again he felt that scalding draft in his mouth, but she was not trying to punish him, the glancing look she cast at him at once after saying this was merely quizzical. “She has quite a lot of them, and she dresses and feeds them and talks with them and plays games…. Actually, of course, no. She has no real children. They are of course all mommets, dolls. Mommets are dolls and poppets are dolls, too; isn’t that curious?”