Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

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.

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.

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 attackers — dirty fellows in patched jerkins — breathed noisily through open mouths. The stranger moved to Vergil’s side, made a sweeping and violent gesture. In an instant the circle was sucked into one flaming heap, which went roaring down upon the thugs, spreading out, fan-wise, as it did so. They fled, whooping in terror. Now the fire was a great serpent, undulating in pursuit, nipping at the heels of each of them. The shadows danced madly on the grimy bricks of the buildings. The fire moved more slowly, but the fleeing brutes did not slacken, nor look behind. And the fire sank down, drew in upon itself, its heat seeming to leave it, its color changing from yellow-orange-red to the blue-white of phosphorescence. At last there was but a spot, a speck, like the glow of a firefly. Vergil turned to see the Red Man beside him.