Vergil in Averno: Book Two of the Vergil Magus Series

by Avram Davidson

  All knew, ah! that sack of gaunt Calimicho’s! Many a thing they had seen go into it, but not one had they ever seen go out.

  By now even Thrax knew what had happened.

  By now the nameless runner had slacked his pace, the race was done, he allowed himself a glance at Vergil as he, the unnamed runner, cantered on at an angle before finally coming to a stop. The dust was red upon his oiled and sweaty limbs, odd blue-green was the eye with which he gave Vergil a single glance. Thrax began again — for he had for one second ceased, and gasped, and began again to scream. He flung himself upon the pitted floor a-front of Calimicho, his back heaving; repeatedly he raised his head and as he gibbered and drooled repeatedly he bowed it down again and banged it before Calimicho; soon, the gibbering became words: “Ruler, Augur, Satrap, Lord . . . my shadow . . . shadow . . . shadow …”

  “It is done!” said Calimicho. He did not address Thrax. To the other students he said It is done. He flung up an arm and made an odd gesture, flinging up and forward, outward, the fingers that had been clenched. The light bedimmed. “The fee is paid. The course is finished. Go, go. Do not tarry: go.”

  Thus it was. It was (thought Vergil) the entire cost and charge of six-and-sixty students — teaching and materials and lodging, food, and all, for more than twelve months and several: paid, paid in full with one single captive shadow!

  And still Thrax groveled and still he wept and begged. “Basil. Turan. Magus. Rex . . . my shadow . . . shadow . . . shadow …” He beat his head upon the floor and flung his head from side to side; his blood and snot and slaver sprayed the other students, all.

  Calimicho gave one faint grin. Then he yawned. Then there stepped forward another student, a Northish one, who had early boasted (once) that his father was an earl. “Warlock,” said he, “this is not just. It was not Thrax who ran up last. It was” — his glance met Vergil’s, eyes to eyes, the Northishman’s mouth closed, opened — ”another,” said he.

  Calimicho at leisure finished his yawn. Then he said, and, ah! how matter-of-factly, “It’s not a matter of who runs first or who runs last. It’s merely a matter of who gets caught.” He teetered a bit on his toes. Very quietly he said, “Begone. All.”

  As Vergil passed, in his turn, down along the long, long corridors, he thought much of Thrax, and, less, of Thrax’s shadow. Never more might Thrax dare venture out on any sunlit day, save at noon, when no man casts a shadow: that therefore fearsome, fearful hour of terror sacred to Great Pan. (As for those who said, “Great Pan is dead,” had they never witnessed panic?) Thrax must henceforth even fear a moonlit night, and an even moonless one if lamps and torches might betray him. Thrax might indeed skulk, hide, dart swiftly and in pain from one dark place to another, sidling along dim walls and into dimmer corners. He might. He might try. To what avail? The man without a shadow was like a man with leprosy, save he needed neither cloak nor bell. No.

  There was but one thing (Vergil realized) that Thrax could really do. He could stop on at the Second Secret School, and do the bidding of its principals. In all things. In all He might there and thus at least hope someday to get his shadow back. Or to get, perhaps . . . what dread perhaps! . . . another’s. And as to what might perhaps be done with Thrax’s shadow —

  And Thrax’s blood and snot and slaver not yet dry —

  At this point in Vergil’s thoughts he found that he had reached the beadle’s lodge. There was a vat of water, hot, and a towel. The beadle gazed at him, gazed away, as bored as he had seen him ne’er before and ne’er would see him more; and cared full not. Said the beadle, “Wash.”

  • • •

  Tact was wasted in Averno.

  With a sweep of his arm Vergil dashed clear of everything the table nearest to him. There was more than one grunt of “uh!” But not one single one of “nuh!” And the Magnate Borsa gave another one of his enormous eructations, but as no words followed, it indicated, probably, slight surprise rather than even slight irritation. Vergil next appropriated from an adjacent table a bottle, one of the few glass vessels in the room; long-necked, round-bellied, new enough to be not even slightly iridescent; and he set it down so that a beam of sunlight passed through it, to be reflected, in refraction, on the opposite wall: a small circle. Not enough. Not by far enough.

  Beams of sunlight were not so abundant there in crag-girt Averno as elsewhere on and near the Parthenopean Coast; Vergil, with an odd, quick gesture, gathered together what there were of them. The rest of the room grew darker. (“Uh! . . . Uh! . . . Uh!”) Into the glass vessel he poured water . . . more . . . a little bit more . . . he wished it could have been from some special spring but there was not time for any of that. “Hold up the map marked Alpha,” he said, and snapped his fingers. It was not, perhaps, so very remarkable that the slave could read the leading letter of the Greek characters; what was rather remarkable was that he held the map up, not next to his body, that is, not in front of it, as he could hardly have been blamed for doing: he held it up, but away, to his right side, one arm quite above it and the other quite beneath it. This man knows what I mean to do! thought Vergil. But he had little time for the thought.

  The small, dim, irregular circle of light on the wall now became larger, brighter, more regular, and rectangular. This produced from the magnates merely a few listless grunts . . . from one, a quite audible yawn.

  Vergil’s hand went to his pouch, came out with something that glittered and glimmered. It had come from a long way off, where, as sang Mimnermus,

  There dwells AEtes in the farthest

  east Upon the banks of Ocean Stream

  here the rays of the sun are stored

  In a golden chamber

  In that far-distant land whence the

  Sun doth rise …

  This he thrust into the neck of the glass bottle. It did not fit; he clasped his hands roundabout, brought his lips close, murmured a moment, then turned the container on its side; a tendency to roll he quickly checked by sliding slices of cabbage partly underneath it to right and left. Then, there on the wall (fortunately it was a wall that contained no painting, though evidently preparations for one had once begun, for there was a whitened area surrounded by a border of Attic fret) — there, on the wall, contained within the border, there appeared, quite bright, and quite distinct, something that produced from the audience not a single, single, sound, not even “uh!” For a long moment Vergil thought that they were overpowered by what they saw. In another instant he realized that they had no notion at all of what they were seeing, for they had never seen anything of its sort before, not in any form at all. Most people, for that matter, had not.

  “This,” he said, speaking somewhat slowly, “is what is called a map….” A grunt or two, or three. Then again silence.

  “This is what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops, if …” His voice trailed off; from the audience had come a “nuh!” part-puzzled, part emphatic. The might had made no impression; in truth, what was displayed on the wall, the light magnified, reflected, refracted, expanded and projected along the long neck of the glass bottle and its stopper and passed through the transparent charts onto the whitened wall-space, was not “what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops.” Not without the automatic exercise of an imagination already enriched by a knowledge of, and experience with, maps or charts. Absorbed in the tasks of, first, preparing the diagrams, and, secondly, now, illuminating them upon the wall surface, Vergil had neglected, had forgotten, that neither such knowledge nor such experience was common enough to be taken for granted. Should he now try to explain? Begin to try to explain?

  Almost without considering, he said, “Hippocrates, who reminds us that waters, airs, and places have their special powers, also reminds us, in his Aphorisms, that ‘Life is short, and art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and — ’ ”

 
But many mutters, much mumbling, and a general restiveness all informed him that quotations from learned sources, however apposite, were not what were now required. There was not time, and so he had perforce to use an easier way.

  Slowly, but not so slowly as to lose the audience’s attention, the lines and marks and spots, circles, squares, triangles, grids began to change . . . blur . . . melt . . . shift . . . take shape . . . shapes….

  “There is on the wall a picture!” someone suddenly cried, high-voiced.

  The magnates, as with one sudden motion, moved forward, stirred, gave a shuddering, muttering sigh. And one of them, and well did Vergil know which one of them, said, “See! He is a wizard!” It was not that there was, now, suddenly, a picture on the wall where a moment ago there had not been one; not this, alone. It was not that it was, now really was “what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops”; not this, alone. It was not even that the smokes rose and the fires flared (as those in common pictures did not); not this, alone. It was something else and more, something for which they, the great magnates of Averno, the city Very Rich, not in conception nor vocabulary very rich at all, had no word, for they had no conception of it: It was that the picture, with its moving smokes and flaring fires, was not drawn — if in fact they thought of it as being “drawn” — in the two dimensions of length and breadth alone. They were looking at something that had depth as well. It was as though someone or something had suddenly transported them in one body to the top of one hill, and showed them what might be seen, lying there below. As though they, feeling chairs and couches beneath them, were somehow somewhere else in a dark night . . . and, looking down, saw the familiar city, Very Rich, which they so much controlled, there beneath them in what passed in Averno for brightest day.

  Some of them groaned, as though, being aboard a storm-shaken ship, they felt not so much the oft-jested-of nausea but that grim seasick vertigo that may so painfully affect every atom of the body. One kept asking, in a tone both sharp and high, “What? What? What?” Others moaned. And one sole magnate, Vergil did not bother trying to discover which one (neither, it seemed, did any other one), without one spoken sound, fell with a massively heavy thud to the floor.

  But the servant, the slave, he who held the map that was marked Alpha, scarcely moved a sinew.

  “… and somewhat to the right of the upper left corner,” Vergil said, feeling rather like a docent in an art school, “is what was called the Old Works….”

  This had an immediate and calming effect upon the magnates; a picture, suddenly visible upon a blank wall, parts of which moved, and in three dimensions, was something for which unfamiliar was a weak description. But — the Old Works? — they had all heard of the Old Works, this was something with which minds could grapple. “Torto! Torto! He was there — Torto, he been there, when they was working the Old Works! Not so, Torto Magnate?”

  And a voice, still deep, but with a trace of quaver, said, as though coming awake with a start, “Uh! Yuh! The Old Works …” And indeed, somewhat to the right of the upper left corner, a part of the picture now sprang into detail. It was disproportionate to the picture as a whole, but no one minded that, perspective was not one of the arts of Averno (scarcely was it one of the arts anywhere else, largely it had yet to be moved from the mage’s elaboratory to the artist’s studio and surface). And in this new and moving image one saw men at work, toiling, sweating, mixing the ore with the charcoal on the open-hearth bloomery in one place, raking the molten mass in another; elsewhere the smith holding the crude ingot with his tongs and turning it, white-hot, as the striker smote it with his hammer, not pausing to brush off the sparks that flared briefly in the thickets of their shaggy breasts…. All this. And more.

  Vergil had never seen the Old Works, abandoned long before he was born. But Torto had seen it, old Magnate Torto; and it was from his memories (clear as cloudless day as to this past, though doubtless not so clear as to the events of even yesterday) alone that the scene took and kept form, shape, mingled with the light, upon the wall. As sudden as appeared, this, sudden, vanished. Torto had forgotten. Or wished no longer to remember.

  If Torto had found it a strain, Vergil found it not much less of one: controlling the sunlight, concentrating it, projecting it, causing an image in three dimensions to appear — and maintaining that appearance. “Magnates,” he said, “pray pay close attention to what I am now going to tell you, for you are paying me to tell it to you….” He had them, there. In Averno, one did not pay for nothing; if one paid for something, one made use of it. As the farmer, appraising the old crone ewe, teeth so gone she can scarce eat grass, considers if he may still get one more lamb from her before she is given over to that butcher’s knife unto which every sheep is born, so in Averno every slave who labored (and every slave labored, one way or another) was closely appraised as age took toll and wearing wastage claimed its tax: Was the thrall’s labor worth another year’s victualing? For if not, out with him, out upon him, he might live by free labor — if he could — he might beg in the streets, though who, in Averno, save perhaps the occasional foreigner, would give alms? . . . He might slump his way to the city gate and wait turn and chance to guide for a penny . . . he might well not bother, but merely crawl and thraw his way to the common bone-pit. Thus and so reminded that they had, in effect, commissioned Master Vergil to delve and to devise answers, the magnates prepared to attend closely and to pay heed. True: They had paid him nothing yet (save for the few courtesy coins and the courtesy few robes), but, true, it was assumed that they were going to do so.

  They paid, now, close heed to what he was about to tell them. Therefore.

  “I will shortly change the picture back into what is called a map. On this, sirs, symbols take the place of pictures . . . or, we may say, sometimes: Very small pictures take the place of very large ones; else there would not be room. For example of a symbol, on each piggett of iron forged in this very rich city is stamped the letter A, and A is in this case a symbol for Averno….” Still on its side the long-necked glass vessel, it struck him now how this vessel might be used in occamy, or alchemy, as some called it, but he did not even try to remember by what name the ampulla might be called in that other discipline. It lay, still, on its side, still a-point toward the wall, light issuing from its stoppered mouth and (it seemed) some vapors playing round about that — like, almost, steam, or fume. In a small second’s pause he became aware, again, of the incessant thump-thum-thump of the thousand forges; in a second more he had forgotten it again. He explained to the magnates how a small trident symbolized fire upon his map: One by one the fires blazing in the picture faded and were replaced by symbols of flame. He told them how a triangle symbolized a forge: See then the forges fade off the wall and the triangles take their places. Dye-vats? Before their eyes the vats changed and ebbed and for each vat a small circle appeared. The sheds which sheltered, the warehouses which stored, the houses great and hovels small one by one were dissolved and replaced by symbols; sometimes the symbol was “a very small picture.” Streets became thick lines and alleys mere thin ones; all round about the crenellated “wall” were ringed the outlined humps that were the craggy mountains. He pointed out the thin double-lines that represented the canal from the Portus Julius, and he emphasized the difference between the small tridents that were fires which could be, when expedient, stifled by dropping a wet hide upon them, and the larger tridents that blazoned fires too large for putting out….

  “It is as though, Magnates, there are channels beneath the surface of your ground as there are channels beneath the surface of your skin, and some, if they bleed, will soon stop and some may be, as it were, tied off, and some are too deep to be tied….”

  From time to time Vergil said Beta, he said Gamma; he asked a once or twice for Alpha again, he said Delta. In every case the correct map was produced at once and held at the correct angle. Had (Vergil thought) he been expecting this particular session, at which he had arrived early merely because his
mare had wanted exercise; had he been prepared, he would have provided a sort of frame which he had had in mind: a trifle to arrange, to hold the maps and charts, even to turn them, like the so-called walking tripods that moved around the symposia of the Consuls of Philosophy, dispensing wine and water as they moved. Being mostly intent upon, for one, explaining the details of the transparencies, and, for another, on the work of concentrating the light; he gave not much further thought to the silent servitor who held the maps and charts, no more than he did to the sun itself, the sole primal source of the light; “… and thus, Magnates, I have shown you what most of you already indeed know far better than I, how over the course of the past few decades there has been both a shifting of the active fire-holes all round about, as well as a general waning of the full force of fire….”

  He said Omega. He could not remember how long he had been speaking. “This final diagram, Magnates, shows that, however much the areas in which the fires spring from the earth have changed and shifted, there is nevertheless what I shall term an overlap: In longer words, there is one area, limited in comparison with the others, in which the fires have never, ever, during the periods which — ”