Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

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.”