There were no guards posted at the foot of the castle steps, which might indeed have been built by the gigantic four-armed Cyclopes in the Age of Dreams, so wide and deep and tall (and so irregular) was each vast shelf of stones. Vergil toiled his way upward, pausing from time to time to rest — and to examine the view. He had never before seen it from this particular angle or series of angles: Vesuvio and its almost invisible fume of smoke, Mount Somma hard by, the Deer Park beyond, the blue waters of the Bay, the Great Harbor (its clamor now barely a distant hum), parts of the city and its near and distant suburbs. Now and then as the steps curved and turned — its blocks and those of the walls to either side so irregular and often protruding that it seemed only the weight of the others piled on top kept them from slipping out of place and hurtling down like so many thunderstones — now and then the view was cut off as the steps sank or the walls rose; then, when he had for a moment forgotten everything but the task of mounting the stairs and placing his feet so that they did not slip in the deep hollows worn by endless ages of use and passage, an entire new panorama would flash open before his eyes again.
There was no guard at the top of the step, either; indeed, he had not at first realized that he was at the top, so gradually did the steps become shallower, so irregular did the footing yet remain. He did not at first notice the man in the scarlet cloak, either.
It was the legs he noticed first.
They stood upon a block of stone set by itself in the middle of a courtyard, by their look strong and healthy legs; and yet they trembled. Planted firmly on the stone, feet unmoving, tremors of nerve and muscle ran through them without ceasing. Vergil raised his eyes.
The man was dressed in the embroidered and pleated linen garment that was the traditional habit of the Tartismen, and over it he wore a short cloak, dyed in scarlet. All this Vergil saw in a second, and in another second he had said, “Sir, I seek the Captain-lord”; but before he had finished saying it his voice had almost faltered, having seen the man’s face.
This man is blind, this man is deaf, he is looking out to sea for a ship that will never come — so ran his rapid, startled, and successive thoughts. Then: He has taken a vow to stand here, thus, for a certain length of time, and will stand here thus though the Heavens may fall . . . and the man turned his gaze on Vergil. . . . This man is mad. He would kill me, if he could. The eyes were like dark green stones lain long under water, full of something duller than rage and sicker than pain. The lips were tremulous with a voiceless mutter and a drop of sweat — though the day was not at all hot — ran down his brow from his hairline to his nose.
In a low voice, Vergil said, “Sir, my pardon for disturbing you.” And he passed on. Rounding a corner, he came upon two other men — both wearing Tartis clothes, but neither in a scarlet cloak — emerging from a door into the interior of the castle; and to them he repeated that he was looking for the Captain-lord.
Both showed surprise, as much at his presence as at his request. One of them nodded, the other looked over his shoulder as they continued on their way, and he followed them. They spoke together in what he assumed was their own language. Down a ramp the three of them went, into a roofless chamber, turned at a right angle and went down another ramp, crossed through a balcony overlooking a hall as high as his house in which other voices echoed thinly, came by and by to what appeared to be an office or an antechamber. The Tartismen gestured to Vergil to sit — and vanished through a narrow door that closed behind them. Vergil sat.
This was the first part of the castle he had seen that was furnished, and its furnishings were scanty and curious. There was a saddle rug, or blanket, of Parthian weave spread on a wooden trestle with carved ends, a desk on which lay a codex in an extreme state of disrepair, a silver dish with a stale piece of bread and a fish bone, and a leather screen. Feeling the muscles in his legs begin to ache from the climb, Vergil sighed. From behind the screen something stirred.
“I didn’t know anyone was here,” a voice said, and the screen was pushed aside. The light from the embrasure fell full into Vergil’s eyes and he squinted, shielding his eyes with his hand.
“I am waiting to see the Captain-lord,” he said.
“Ah . . . please, then, come and wait here. It is more comfortable.” There was a long bench by the window niche. His eyes adjusting now, Vergil examined his host. The man’s voice hinted of Punic or Syrian origins, his clothes were of good Neapolitan make. His manner, though tense, was controlled. He might have been of any age. His eyes were pale, pale blue-green. His complexion . . .
“My name is An-thon Ebbed-Saphir, but they call me the Red Man. It’s easy to see why. I’m a Phoenician. Our skins seem to take the sun, to retain it, but we do not tan. ‘Phoenician,’ of course, means just that — the Red People. But you know all this, of course.” He waved his hand a trifle wearily. His voice died away. He took his place at full length upon the bench. After a moment he said, “The Captain-lord. I have never seen him, myself.” Giving over the effort of speech, he invited Vergil, with gestures, to admire the view. He did not look up or speak when a Tartisman with a woolly beard came bustling in and motioned Vergil with both arms and an expression of great importance to come along. Vergil tarried a moment.
In a low voice he said, quickly to the Red Man, Ebbed-Saphir, “Who is the one in the scarlet cloak?”
A flicker of something disturbed the raptness of the Phoenician’s gaze. “Don’t ask, do not interfere,” he said. And his look returned to the prospect of the suburban villas stretching along the Bay for miles.
“Well?” cried Woolly Beard. “Well? Captain-lord? Why?”
And then he screamed — a scream of utterly unbelieving agony, such as tears unbidden and unchecked from a laboring woman by whom a child struggles to be born.
Scarlet ran before Vergil’s eyes. Woolly Beard lay doubling on the floor. The Phoenician was not to be seen. The man who had been standing outside on the block of stone went rushing through the inner door, his cloak streaming and whipping. His voice cried terrible, inarticulate things. His short sword ran blood. And Vergil ran behind him.
The course he ran was a nightmare course down the endless Cyclopean corridors, echoing with the frenzied cries of the man ahead — a man who, every now and then, would turn and lunge at him. The face was no longer more than faintly human. Vergil fell and hit his head a sickening crack against the stones. The man in the scarlet cloak turned around and ran again. The cloak caught upon the protruding socket of a burnt-out torch, ripped, hung there. Vergil snatched it as he ran past, holding it in one hand as he groped desperately with the other, got hold of the writing case in his belt.
Suddenly they were in a suite of furnished chambers. A door burst open and a man stood there, frozen before he could show either astonishment or terror. The madman howled, leaped forward. Vergil leaped after him, bent, whipped forward the cloak with the writing case knotted into one end of it; stopped short, jerked back.
Tripped, felled by his own cloak, the attacker lay before him on the floor, motionless for an instant, which Vergil dared not let pass unused. He jumped, coming down with his knees and all his weight upon the place just below the ribs, turning his toes so he could move back on the balls of his feet; and pinioned the madman by the elbows.
Now men poured forth, it seemed, from everywhere. They beat the manslayer to the floor again, and one of them raised the sword.
“Good is the strong wine,” the Captain-lord said, in his guttural voice, “and I have had put in it a medicine or two. But it is to be drunk, not held in the cup.”
Vergil drank. The wine was of a vintage strange to him, and tasted of herbs. It was somewhat bitter and despite himself he shuddered. Then, as if with the shudder, all the weakness left him. “Why did he want to do it?” he asked.
The Captain-lord took in a hiss of breath, held it, shrugged. “To explain it, fully, would take long — and then there would be explanations of the explanations. I will speak shortly. There was a matter
of a woman, a punishment, a consent I could not give.” Seated, he looked immense. Huge head, huge chest, broad shoulders. His legs were short, though, and he limped. The thought came to Vergil that in this, as much as anything, might lie the reason for the man’s inaccessibility, his never appearing before the gaze of strangers. His hair was white; his face, seamed.
“Once there were guards all around,” he continued, “to protect from a danger. I, thinking there was none, removed them. And so — look — danger . . . and from within. Tell me, now, with truth, who you are and why you came.”
The room was elaborately, richly furnished, but everything seemed a little old, a little shabby; a little dirty, too.
“Speculum majorum, I have never heard of a one. Magic. I have no concern in it. Queens, Carsus, copper — all things strange to me.” The Captain-lord shook his massy head. He raised his eyebrows, his great chest filled with air. “But — tin? Ho! Tin! Yes! With this I have a concern. The Captain-lord does not sell you tin, but he can give all you want. So . . . Vergil. Doctor. Magus. How much tin is enough?”
Slowly, carefully, as simply as he could, Vergil explained that he required only as much tin as would fit into the palms of his hands . . . but that it must be virgin tin.
“I understand,” the old man said. “You explain to me most carefully. I will explain — I will try to explain to you, also carefully. Look. You are in your house. You want something, you send your slave to the market. You say, Go. Buy this. So? Simple. But what you want now, it is not simple. Goods come down to us slowly, from the north, from the west, from ward to ward. Virgin tin, it comes not here. It is cast into ingots so far away that I, even the Captain-lord, I do not know where. I can try to obtain. But I am only Captain-lord here. In another ward I am only another name. Far enough away to find virgin tin, I am not even only a name.
“Here I have power of life, power of death. Elsewhere, I have no power. My influence is strong at Rome, weak at Marsala. Ice — do you know ice, Doctor? Pass one piece from hand to hand. It melts. It melts away . . .”
More than ice and personal influence melts away, Vergil thought. The whole Tartis system seemed to be melting away, seemed to be in decay, a shadow of its past. And so seemed he himself.
But so long as even a shadow of it remained, he had to make use of it.
“I will try,” said the Captain-lord. “Why not? It is gratitude. Perhaps in three years time — virgin tin.”
Someone came and lit the lamps. No longer dim, the room seemed no longer shabby, old, worn. In the dancing shadow the old Captain-lord grew younger. A spark of light glittered on the boss of a round shield hanging on the wall by an auroch’s horn.
“Sir,” said Vergil, “three years time will not do. Three months may be even too long, too late.”
A faint, wry smile touched the old man’s lips. “Doctors of Magic and Science, even you are bound by time? And what, then, of me? Never mind. Bring here the horn.”
The lowing note sounded deeply. After a while a servant came. Torches were obtained, by their hissing flames they were lighted down the same vast, turning, Cyclopean steps; and into a courtyard filled with a strong, rank, sharp odor. A man with leather wristlets looked up from placing bits of meat in a bowl of water. He was obviously a falconer, thought Vergil. But where did the Tartismen hawk? And who had ever heard of their hawking? Furthermore, not all of the equipment to be seen was the familiar “hawks’ furniture” of falconry.
The two old men spoke together in their own language, then turned to enter a wooden outbuilding built against the castle’s wall, the Captain-lord beckoning his guest to follow. The place smelt like a mews and there were subdued bird noises from the cages and roosts.
“This is the Master of the Air,” said the Captain-lord. Vergil bowed. The Master grunted, looking far from honored, far from pleased; and when his commandant went on to say “He will arrange the sending,” the Master of the Air protested bitterly — so his tone and manner showed, though Vergil could understand no word. Still muttering, he reached into a cage and took out a bird the like of which Vergil had never seen before. It was gold in color and had a crest upon its head, and it bent forward and nibbled gently on the Master’s index finger with what seemed like affection. The man’s gaunt face softened, and he spoke to Vergil for the first time.
“She was sent me in an egg,” he said. “One of a clutch of two, under a broody hen. The other hatched not. I raised, I taught. For only great danger was she to be sent — ”
“The danger came today,” the Captain-lord interrupted. “And he, this Vergil Magus, saved from danger. He has earned the sending, I say, enough.”
The Master of the Air seemed almost about to weep. Touched, Vergil would have liked to decline whatever it was — he was still not sure — what the order touched on. But he remembered his own need, and his own pain. And he stayed silent.
With a final mutter, the Master of the Air tucked the golden bird under one arm and went off into the shadowy corners of the mews. He came back with a small falcon-eagle on each wristlet, glaring fiercely from their yellow eyes. The Captain-lord took the bird of gold in his hands, gently, and the bird looked up at him. He spoke to it, and it seemed to follow. He spoke again — stopped — spoke again. The same words seemed to occur each time. It was as if he were instructing the bird.
“Am I to understand,” the thought occurring suddenly to Vergil, “that this bird of gold will carry a message? You will teach it to speak the words — like a popinjay? And will it learn them quickly?”
“No. It cannot speak.”
“Then . . .”
“It will carry your message as my message. And where it puts down, there it will write the Word.”
Write!
And the Captain-lord did not believe in magic!
“Enough, then. It has learned. The two others go with it for guardians. Master of the Air, let it be done.”
The Master of the Air caressed the birds, all three, lovingly, gently. He whispered in their ears, he kissed the fierce heads of the falcon-eagles. Then he loosed their leathern jesses. They fluttered their wings. The bird of gold was tossed up. The torchlight glittered on her golden pinions. She circled once. Twice. A third time. The falconets shot up like crossbow bolts. The three vanished into the night. One soft gray feather came floating down and landed at Vergil’s feet. From far, very far and above, a faint scream sounded on the night wind, and the torches smoked and flared.
CHAPTER FIVE
DECLINING WITH THANKS the offer of a torchman to light him home, Vergil took his leave of Tartis Castle. Scarcely noting the strong, familiar smells of the Main Port, he let his mind run freely. . . . What a journey lay before the bird of gold and its pair of protectors! Seas and storms, crags and forests — how far? No one knew. Over farmland and marshland and woodland and barren moors, beyond the distant border marches of the Empire, past the remote boundaries of the Great Economium itself . . . perhaps all the way to Ultima Thule, farthest land of rock and freezing seas. Who knew where Tinland was?
They would see sights, as they veered and circled, that no man ever saw: the sun rising from the sea beneath them, like a disc of burnished brass; beneath them, too, the icy alps; the Great Forest, stretching farther than the knowledge of man; and, at length, after many days and many perils, the storm-buffeted air and water of the cold, gray Northern Sea, where the shape shifters turned seal instead of wolf.
A blind beggar, alerted by the approaching footsteps, began his singsong chant, broke off in mid-note as he heard the coin clatter in his bowl, mumbled a thanks. Gobbets of meat sizzled and smoked, beans bubbled, spiced wine simmered in an open-front cookshop lit chiefly by its own cheerful fires. Porters and dockers squatted on the step, dipping chunks of bread into their suppers, reminding Vergil that he had not yet had his. A woman with a painted face and no bosom to her dress leaned over a lamp-lit window sill and called an invitation. A ragged child and a scabby dog slept belly to belly in an alley.
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sp; Presently the busier part of the port, busy even at night, began to give way to the warehouse district, busy only in the daytime. He walked through pools of black shadow. The lights were dim and few. Up ahead, past the archway where the street began to climb the hill, came the noise of a brawl. Vergil turned aside to avoid a heap of sand and gravel, which the builders had left when they stopped work for the day, and found himself in the middle of the fight.
Clubs thudded against each other, shouts of warning, obscenities. Men circling for position, crouching and darting. A broken jug lay in a splatter of cheap, sour wine — perhaps a result of the brawl, perhaps its cause. Vergil began to pass by, staggered as one of the men — there may have been five or six of them — fell heavily against him. A protest would be wasted breath. He caught his balance and had started on his way again when the man who had fallen against him whirled around and came after him. Shouting. Cudgel raised.
It was no time for explanations. His long knife was in his belt. He drew it. “Keep off,” he warned. And began to move away.
The gesture did not bring him unopposed right of passage. The men dropped their private quarrels, began to close up, to move in toward him. “Drew a knife on us,” one muttered, with the sullen rage of the bully who feels wronged when resisted. Another stopped, swung at an angle, his hand whipping up and out. Sensing rather than seeing the stone, Vergil ducked. It was the wrong thing to do.
He thought the arc of light he saw appear on the paving was from the sharp, sickening pain of the blow. In an instant, as the men stopped short, staring down, he knew it was not. The curving line expanded like a slow ripple, licked up into a circle of fire. His flesh prickled, he sensed a pressure which he did not feel. His knife hand still out-thrust, the blade pointing up, he turned his head. There was a man behind him whose hand also was thrust out, but it held no knife. The index finger indicated, almost negligently, the circle of fire. The finger rose. The level of the fire rose.
The Phoenix and the Mirror Page 5
