The Phoenix and the Mirror

by Avram Davidson

  And so on and on. What needed neither faith nor dissent to believe was that for years, from time to time, the peace and quiet of the opulent Island had been rent apart by the Cybelean theopomps — pouring down some startled street like a maddened torrent, the image of their goddess surrounded by screaming and ecstatic religious, tambour, horn and shaking systrum; and, drawing to them each fascinated eye, the galli — the priests! the priests! painted faces and thick falsetto voices, prancing, dancing, jiggling and jigging, ranting, chanting, gesturing, cavorting, prophesying and giving tongue in the unknown speech of the sacred madness: the priests of Cybele.

  The gelded galli, the eunuch priests.

  All this was quite enough in itself, but there was more. For these castrati did not hesitate by every conceivable (any by many almost inconceivable) means to inflame others with their own mania. It was chiefly of the women that they sought and received alms, but their main appeals were ever directed to men and to boys. And seldom had it failed that at least once in each hysterical, ecstatic session some deluded youth would be caught up out of himself and, yielding to the frenzied cries of “Cast off the flesh! Cast off the flesh!” would seize the sacred knife and geld himself . . . forever and forever after by this hideous consecration a priest of Great Cybele.

  In its very horror, in its monstrous denial of nature, in its utter irrevocability lay much of its appeal. Men and women alike, to be sure shrank from the thought, but still they came to watch, to wonder, to worship. The thought that all this was for nothing was too much for the average mind to grasp. So great and terrible a sacrifice must surely signify something, something great, something marvelous. And so, meanwhile, the cult and mythos grew and grew and grew. ‘Ditissa was still worshiped, and from her clergy little hope or adherence could be expected, they being women, all. Therefore the greed and guile of Sylvian was perforce turned in another direction.

  He had never known what it was to be a man, his discarding of the flesh which makes men had been done before the first hair grew upon his flesh. His body had never developed, nor his mind, in the fashion of a man’s. His desires therefore remained in many ways those of a child — but magnified and amplified and aggrandized by adulthood and the increased power of distorted maturity. It was not altogether strange, then, that it was not ‘Ditissa and her women who aroused his envy and his hatred. The desire to increase his power, to place the cult of which he was the head on a higher footing, fell instead in enmity and implacable malevolence upon the figure of the sacred king — a man — and the figures of his servants the semisacred hermaphrodies who were his servants — and who were both man and woman in the same person, unlike Sylvian, who was neither.

  “He is undoubtedly one of the heads of the great dragon which is called Harlot, Babylon, and Beast,” said Angustus the Ephesian, waggling his beard, his eyes now shining with a joyous hatred. “Rome makes one head, Hun makes two heads, two and one maketh three, sacred by the eschatological numeration. Sylvian is one head, Paphos is two . . .” He counted on his fingers and he smacked his lips.

  “Your pardon, sage,” said Vergil, with infinite civility. “I do not willingly interrupt your sacred mensurations, but I should like to know what connection you imply between the Royal and Sacred Paphiote Court and the shrine of Wolf-Zeus.”

  Angustus looked at him with astonishment. “Why, is it not clear? Sylvian wishes to crush the King and to destroy his influence. He also desires to entreat the assistance of the abominable older gods — they be but daemons — in assisting him with some privy matter that I know not, any more than I know yours. Who then do you think it is that is to perform the abominable rite of offering his own son as sacrifice and sacrificial meal? Who then is then to be translated from the world of men and changed therefor into a wolf?

  “It is himself the King of Paphos. It is he.”

  • • •

  The moon had risen, a great yellow moon, riding the clouds over the yellow marble of the villa; the moon had set and the great stars burned and melted in the velvet blackness of the sky. The dog had barked in his hutch, the babe wailed in his bedlet, the ox had lowered in his stall. The ass had yet to bray in his yard or the cock crow on his roost, otherwise the audible watches of the night had been told as the Heavens wheeled around the earth.

  Vergil had slowed his breath and lessened the beatings of his heart. For hours he remained immovable . . . but not altogether motionless . . . Vergil was being a shadow in a doorway . . . and, as the moon moved, so the shadow moved . . . slowly . . . slowly . . . slowly. One could no more observe the actual motion in motion than that of the hand on the dial of an hour horlogue. It was long, long before he restored breath and heartbeat to their normal rates of speed. Then he waited for his body to restore itself to its wonted tone. Having thus passed the hours in something close to stasis, he felt no fatigue. Some distance more or less directly opposite him the guard lounged and yawned at his post, leaning now and again upon his halberd.

  Behind the guard at yet another distance burned a torch, smokily.

  Underneath Vergil’s long cloak, spun and woven and cut and sewn in Herborean Cymmeria and there dyed into that nameless color which is darker than black, was the device called a pembert, of which only Vergil himself and one other had the art. It consisted in a tiny lens-lamp and a tinier mirror set upon gymbals and a swivel. The parts responded to the slightest touch and tremor of a finger.

  The lamp, a minute version of those globes of light which — never needing oil nor wick — illuminated the House of the Brazen Head, now answered to the finger’s touch. A shutter slid away. A beam of light emerged, passed though a lens, was greatly magnified. At the same instant the tiny mirror, shifting on its movements, sped into place at a calculated angle. The man in the shadows made a practiced movement with his throat. His lips did not move. The guard looked up sharply . . . looked straight into the eye of the lamp. Vergil’s throat moved again . . . his finger, too. The tiny eye of light vanished. The guard shook his head, puzzled.

  But the shadows had moved forward.

  Once again the voice which was less than a voice and other than a voice came from Vergil’s throat. His finger shifted slightly on the pembert. The light appeared again, was not reflected in the tiny mirror, moved . . . right . . . left . . . up . . . down . . . around, slowly, slowly, around.

  And the guard’s eyes followed It . . . right . . . left . . . up . . . down . . . around, slowly, slowly, around.

  He watched the moving light, his face slack, and did not seem to see at all the shadow slowly moving forward. The light presently vanished, the shadow moved past him, the torch guttered in its socket; the guard remained unmoving, staring. Staring. Staring.

  • • •

  Vergil expected to find obstacles, impediments, and delays standing between him and an audience with Sylvian; he was surprised to be told that no audience at all could be granted. There was no attempt at procrastination masked by oblique consent, no honeyed words urging postponement — the information was stated flatly, devoid of visible malice, but firmly:

  “Lord, Sylvian sees no citizens of Rome.”

  Basilianos was of no help. And when Vergil, with some half-formed notion of going by sea to another Cypriote port and trying to accomplish his purpose there, began to speak out his thoughts to Ebbed-Saphir, he found the Red Man, from some unknown cause, too tense and preoccupied to listen.

  There seemed no other way open than the dark and mystic way he was now pursuing, although of course to him it was based not on mysticism at all, but plain philosophy and science.

  Through the grounds, first, then the corridors of the Chief Priest’s great villa he proceeded, leaving behind him a train of bemused guards in a state between wakefulness and sleep, partaking somewhat of each, but in its entirety neither; and came at last to his destination.

  There was a painted room, brightly, almost garishly painted, as it might have been by a somewhat talented child, with the figures of people whose faces — ey
es round as circles rimmed all about with long lashes, red spheres for cheeks, double cupid’s-bow mouths — were turned full frontward but whose bodies stood sideways underneath trees almost their own size and alongside flowers even taller; with the pictures of striped and dotted birds, blue dogs, red cats, green marmosets . . . an almost insane panorama which yet arrested rather than repelled.

  In the midst of the painted room was a vast bed and in it lay a figure with waved hair and full lips, a figure which was human-like, but as a great doll might be human-like. This figure, which was neither man nor woman, made an agonized face and turned the face away from him. But when the creature groaned and opened its eyes a moment later — hopefully, fearfully — Vergil was there again in front of it.

  “Still there,” it said. “Still there,” moaned the epicene voice.

  Vergil said nothing. He had again been struck by shock, as, when with Angustus the Ephesian, the cloak curiously fallen over the sights seen when he, Vergil, had “gone through the Door,” had suddenly been lifted, and full memory of that one scene returned. Now it had happened again. It seemed that as he approached in reality the things observed in the visions of the night, recollection of them left him in order that free will might be reconciled with predestination; in order that his choice of what he would do be not influenced by his prophetic knowledge of what must be done. He reached back, now, in memory, to strive to recall other details, for surely the work of preparation called “going through the Door” was intended to assist him: else of what use was it?

  Rome! It snapped into his mind, almost audibly. The key was Rome.

  “You have had this dream before,” he reminded the whimpering figure on the bed, sexless as a doll. “You know you have, and you caused it to be written down and you referred it to the Wise Men and the Chaldeans and you consulted learned Jews and even the women who serve ‘Ditissa. But no one has given you a good interpretation, not one.” It looked at him, consumed with woe and self-pity and a measure of genuine foreboding and horror. It wept a little and it sniveled.

  “But now, Sylvian, this time it is no ordinary dream.”

  He reached out and touched the soft hand. Sylvian jerked back as if burned. He screamed. He screamed.

  “No one can hear you, Sylvian. No one can come to help you. It is now that you must come to terms. And I will tell you why you now must, in one word, Sylvian. Rome!”

  The eunuch drew his breath in on a note of long, shuddering fear. His face became waxy and pinched. Vergil recalled to him the might of Rome, made the room echo with the strokes of the oars of the great armadas, with the rhythmic tramping of the feet of many legions. He thrust the forefinger of his right hand toward the bed screen, and instantly it reflected the shadows of a besieged city. On its crenallated walls the outlines of figures waved their arms in defiance, but nearer and nearer crept the great siege-engines, the armored towers, battering rams, catapults, lumbering on relentlessly, crashing and pounding. Then the darkness grew bright with flames, and billows of smoke veiled the scene.

  “Shall I tell you what follows, Sylvian? The capture, the degradation and the shame, the fetters, the darkness and the stinking wet at the bottom of the prison ship, the marching in chains through the mocking crowds of Rome, Sylvian! A prize figure in a Roman triumph, Sylvian? How soft the soles of your feet are, Sylvian! How hard and how harsh are the stony streets of Rome, Sylvian!”

  Inert, the recumbent figure rolled up its eyes and made little gasping moans like a woman in terror. Relentlessly, Vergil pressed on. “But that is not the end, Sylvian. Common captives, they merely sell into slavery. But the chiefs and the princes, the leaders of rebellion and defiance, Sylvian, them they strip before Caesar, Sylvian — and they flog them, Sylvian — and then they kill them, Sylvian.”

  “They fling them from precipices, they behead them, they crucify them, they give them to be torn by wild beasts in the arena, and sometimes . . . though perhaps not often . . . they dip them in tar and then they burn them, Sylvian.”

  The Chief Priest of Cybele flung his arms over his eyes as if to shut out the sights. “Why?” he cried. “Why? Why?”

  “Why? Only thus is mastery and empire maintained. It is not in the nature of any people that it should willingly endure being ruled by another people, whether it is ruled ill or ruled well.”

  Sylvian cried, “No.” He rose in his bed and came toward Vergil, crawling and lurching, protesting that this was not what he meant. Why should Rome wish him ill? It was true he feared Rome, this was why he feared Rome, but why should Rome hate him so, why intend him harm? He came, humping and groveling to the foot of the bed, and there he cowered, begged an answer.

  Vergil gave him a question.

  “Why have you bewitched the King of Paphos?”

  The eunuch sat bolt upright, his figure ungainly and unnaturally tall, his face askew, his mouth working.

  “Why?”

  Sylvian stammered that it was to destroy the King’s resistance.

  “He need not in any case resist,” Vergil said. “He shall have nothing to resist. Rome will not countenance the ceremony to which he is intended to submit. How could you presume to think it would? Or did you? What! Rome, city-empire of the Sons of the Wolf! Is Rome to endure an ally king’s consuming the flesh of his own child, slain by his own hand, and then to be changed into a wolf? No, by the wolf that suckled Romulus, the wolf that suckled Remus, it shall not be!”

  The eunuch babbled of Zeus-Leucayon, but was cut short. From beneath Vergil’s cloak came the bag of purple silk embroidered with the Imperial monogram; from this he produced the documents of vellum and parchment, lettered in glossy black, vermilion, and purple; here with seals affixed to the page, and there, with seals dangling upon ribbons tied through slits — each page embossed with the Great Imperial Seal of the Eagle and the Wolf.

  “These Sylvian, are my letters of state. Do you see these syllables? Himself, the August Caesar. Read these documents if you like, but, read them or not, defy them at your absolute peril. In the name of Rome, Sylvian, and by the power which Rome conveys through me and through these letters, I now place the Royal and Priestly House of Paphos under my protection.

  “And that protection, Sylvian, is the protection of Rome.”

  The hermaphrodies bowed down and kissed his knees and feet. How much they knew, how they had learned, Vergil did not know, but it was clear that they knew something which was enough. How much the King himself knew was even more debatable. But obviously he knew that a dreadful thing had threatened, that it threatened no more, and that in some way the foreign wizard was responsible.

  “My head is not very clear,” he said, dazed yet, but thoroughly happy. “But my faithfuls” — he gestured to the clustering hermaphrodies — “tell me that copper ore is needed for your white wizardry. What this may be, I do not know, but I have ordered one hundred tumbrils to be put at your diposal, Lord Vergil.”

  “Sir, my infinite thanks, but not even one hundred palms are needed. Sufficient ore to fill an ordinary bowl will be quite enough.”

  The King pondered a moment. Then, with the sometimes wisdom even of fools, he remarked, “But if you take more, lord, then you will not be put to the trouble of coming for it if you should need it another time.”

  Vergil blinked. So vexed had he been with the matter of this one major mirror, it had not occurred to him that it might be possible for him ever again to wish to make one under less troublous circumstances. It was, to be sure, not likely. But it was not impossible. He thanked the King for his generous thought, and agreed to accept as much as could be carried by a fast mule without slowing its pace. A pace, as it soon turned out, which was not long in delaying the ore from almost present appearance, from its storage place nearby. Now that circumstances had so quickly, abruptly changed, Vergil found everyone willing to discuss the mining, grading, transporting, and working of copper in all its aspects. Unless he exercised great control, it was clear, nothing would prevent them from telling
him much more about copper than he cared to know.

  He dined in the King’s atrium on boned quail wrapped in grape leaves and the tender tripes of young beef dressed with nuts and herbs and young onions. Spiced wine was mixed with cool spring water and poured onto roasted figs, the mixture heated again in a closed vessel and poured into goblets of gold engraved with antique scenes. The conversation of the King was neither deep nor wide, but it had the interest of the curious; also it was a pleasure to observe his almost incredulous good feeling, the joy of his relief. And now and then he called a child of his to the table and fed him with his own hands of the choicest morsels.

  It was while host was making polite discourse of local scenery, in particular of certain grovy hills on the road to Larnaca, that a thought which had been rolling about in Vergil’s mind came to the surface. “There is a hill, sir,” he said, “not on the road to Larnaca, but on the road to Chirinea, at the foot of which there is a thriple arch. Can you tell me anything about it?”

  The reply was brief, politely disinterested, provoking. “The phoenix sometimes honors it,” said the High King of Cyprus. But it was then that the copper arrived, in chests of carven olivewood, and there was no time for further discourse.

  Messengers had already been sent for Bayla, and he was there, enjoying the rare pleasure of a hot bath, in the Golden House, comely serving maids rubbing the soles of his feet with perfumed pumice stone as he grunted delightedly. He had evidently worshiped the goddess to his heart’s content, and put forth no objection to an immediate return. Now the company lacked only its third member, and word was brought that An-Thon was not at his ship in Paphos port. Where was he? Certainly not still at that hill concerning which Vergil had asked of the King — that hill, marked at its roadside base by the thriple arch, on which Vergil (going to Sylvian’s villa) had observed the previous night a great fire, and heard a cry of ecstasy; that hill from near where he might have seen the Red Man coming on his own return . . . but so far was the distance and figure, so dim the now dying fire, that he could not be sure. And perhaps never would be.