Robert Silverberg - With Caesar in the Underworld

“Truly, the Styx?” Menandros asked, with a credulity Faustus had not expected of him.

“We call it that,” said bar-Heap. “Because it is the river of our Underworld, you see. But the true one is somewhere in your own eastern realm, I think. Here—we must turn—”

A jagged, irregularly oval aperture in the passageway wall proved to be the entrance to the great hall that served as the sorcerers’ marketplace. Originally, so they said, it had been intended as a storage vault for the Imperial chariots, to keep them from being seized by invading barbarians. When such precautions had turned out to be unnecessary, the big room had been taken over by a swarm of sorcerers, who divided it by rows of pumice-clad arches into a collection of small low-walled chambers. An octagonal light-well, high overhead in the very center of the roof of the hall, allowed pale streams of sunlight to filter down from the street above, but most of the marketplace’s illumination came from the smoky braziers in front of each stall. These, whether by some enchantment or mere technical skill, all burned with gaudy many-hued flames, and dancing strands of violet and pale crimson and cobalt blue and brilliant emerald mingled with the more usual reds and yellows of a charcoal fire.

The roar of commerce rose up on every side. Each of the sorcerers’ stalls had its barker, crying the merits of his master’s wares. Scarcely had the ambassador Menandros entered the room than one of these, a fat, sweaty-faced man wearing a brocaded robe of Syrian style, spied him as a likely mark, beckoning him inward with both arms while calling out, “Eh, there, you dear little fellow: what about a love spell today, an excellent inflamer, the finest of its kind?”

Menandros indicated interest. The barker said, “Come, then, let me show you this splendid wizardry! It attracts men to women, women to men, and makes virgins rush out of their homes to find lovers!” He reached behind him, snatched up a rolled parchment scroll, and waved it in front of Menandros’s nose. “Here, friend, here! You take a pure papyrus and write on it, with the blood of an ass, the magical words contained on this. Then you put in a hair of the woman you desire, or a snip of her clothing, or a bit of her bedsheet—acquire it however you may. And then you smear the papyrus with a bit of vinegar gum, and stick it to the wall of her house, and you will marvel! But watch that you are not struck yourself, or you may find yourself bound by the chains of love to some passing drover, or to his donkey, perhaps, or even worse! Three sesterces! Three!”

“If infallible love is to be had so cheaply,” Maximilianus said to the man, “why is it that languishing lovers hurl themselves into the river every day of the week?”

“And also why is it that the whorehouses are kept so busy,” added Faustus, “when for three brass coins anyone can have the woman of his dreams?”

“Or the man,” said Menandros. “For this charm will work both ways, so he tells us.”

“Or on a donkey,” put in Danielus bar-Heap, and they laughed and passed onward.

Nearby, a spell of invisibility was for sale, at a price of two silver denarii. “It is the simplest thing,” insisted the barker, a small lean man tight as a coiled spring, whose swarthy sharp-chinned face was marked by the scars of some ancient knife fight. “Take a night-owl’s eye and a ball of the dung of the beetles of Aegyptus and the oil of an unripe olive and grind them all together until smooth, and smear your whole body with it, and then go to the nearest shrine of the lord Apollo by dawn’s first light and utter the prayer that this parchment will give you. And you will be invisible to all eyes until sunset and can go unnoticed among the ladies at their baths, or slip into the palace of the Emperor and help yourself to delicacies from his table, or fill your purse with gold from the moneychangers’ tables. Two silver denarii, only!”

“Quite reasonable, for a day’s invisibility,” Menandros said. “I’ll have it, for my master’s delight.” And reached for his purse; but the Caesar, catching him by the wrist, warned him never to accept the quoted first price in a place like this. Menandros shrugged, as though to point out that the price asked was only a trifle, after all. But to the Caesar Maximilianus there was an issue of principle here. He invoked the aid of bar-Heap, who quickly bargained the fee down to four copper dupondii, and, since Menandros did not have coins as small as that in his purse, it was Faustus who handed over the price.

“You have done well,” the barker said, giving the Greek his bit of parchment. Menandros, turning away, opened it. “The letters are Greek,” he said.

Maximilianus nodded. “Yes. Most of this trash is set out in Greek. It is the language of magic, here.”

“The letters are Greek,” said Menandros, “but not the words. Listen.” And he read out in a rolling resonant tone: “‘BORKE PHOIOUR IO ZIZIA APARXEOUCH THYTHE LAILAM AAAAAA IIII OOOO IEO IEO IEO.’” Then he looked up from the scroll. “And there are three more lines, of much the same sort. What do you make of that, my friends?”

“I think it is well that you didn’t read any more of it,” said Faustus, “or you might have disappeared right before our noses.”

“Not without employing the beetle dung and the owl’s eye and the rest,” bar-Heap observed. “Nor is that dawn’s first light coming down that shaft, even if you would pretend that this is Apollo’s temple.”

“‘IO IO O PHRIXRIZO EOA,’” Menandros read, and giggled in pleasure, and rolled the scroll and put it in his purse.

It did not appear likely to Faustus that the Greek was a believer in this nonsense, as his earlier eagerness to visit this marketplace had led him to suspect. Yet he was an enthusiastic buyer. Doubtless he was merely looking for quaint souvenirs to bring back to his Emperor in Constantinopolis—entertaining examples of modern-day Roman gullibility. For Menandros must surely have noticed by this time an important truth about this room, which was that nearly all the sorcerers and their salesmen were citizens of the Eastern half of the Empire, which had a reputation for magic going back to the distant days of the Pharaohs and the kings of Babylon, while the customers—and there were plenty of them—all were Romans of the West. Surely spells of this sort would be widely available in the other Empire. This stuff would be nothing new to Easterners. It was an oily place, the Eastern Empire. All the mercantile skills had been invented there. The East’s roots went deep down into antiquity, into a time long before Roma itself ever was, and one needed to keep a wary eye out in any dealings with its citizens.

So Menandros was just trying to collect evidence of Roman silliness, yes. Using bar-Heap to beat the prices down for him, he went from booth to booth, gathering up the merchandise. He acquired instructions for fashioning a ring of power that would permit one to get whatever one asks from anybody, or to calm the anger of masters and kings. He bought a charm to induce wakefulness, and another to bring on sleep. He got a lengthy scroll that offered a whole catalog of mighty mysteries, and gleefully read from it to them: “‘You will see the doors thrown open, and seven virgins coming from deep within, dressed in linen garments, and with the faces of asps. They are called the Fates of Heaven and wield golden wands. When you see them, greet them in this manner—’” He found a spell that necromancers could use to keep skulls from speaking out of turn while their owners were using them in the casting of spells; he found one that would summon the Headless One who had created earth and heaven, the mighty Osoronnophris, and conjure Him to expel demons from a sufferer’s body; he found one that would bring back lost or stolen property; he went back to the first booth and bought the infallible love potion, for a fraction of the original asking price; and, finally, picked up one that would cause one’s fellow drinkers at a drinking party to think that they had grown the snouts of apes.