Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

The shore camp of the Sea-Huns on the island of Marissus lay in a state of semi-somnolence. The guide indicated, with a grunt and a gesture, where they were to moor. It was deep water there, the broken crater of some drowned mountain, and the figurehead of their ship cast its shadow on the rough shingle of the beach, over the weed-slimed stones and the broken gray pillars of long past days. The hawser was passed through the eye of a stone post, the guide leaped ashore, a small crowd of pot-bellied children and old women gathered; and no further attention was paid to them. On the whole they thought it best to follow their former voyage mate.

Tents were pitched seemingly at hazard along the shore and into the pine and cypress woods, but there were few of them in comparison to the ships. Some of these had been beached for so long and were so unfit for sea that doors had been hacked in them and grass grew on their slanting decks. Here and there a man of fighting age sat, knees up, against a hulk or doorpost, honing a spearhead or a grappling hook or engaged in some other passtime work. But always, they noticed, he bore a wound which prevented his being out with the fighting fleets. There were few old men. Hunmen tended not to live until very old, preferring to perish in battle. But there were old women, and the old women were hideous. Withered, toothless, half-hairless, half-naked, their dried old dugs flapping as they nosed, bent over, about the camp, filthy and shrill, they epitomized the other side of the life of a race which despised what little they dimly understood of such concepts as love or grace or beauty.

Here and there captives of some other nation paused in the work of fetching wood or water and gazed dumbly at the visitors from the half-forgotten world which had not thought them worth the price of redemption; then went again about their labors. A stench of night-soil and stale urine and rotten fish, of ill-cured hides, dried sweat, old dogs, unwashed clothes, sour mares’ milk, and other elements defying analysis hung over the camp. The Sea-Huns were said to bathe but once a year… and on that day, it was told, the fish in all the circumjacent seas died in great multitudes.

Vergil felt he could believe it.

Like sea-wrack long after some great storm, the decayed fruits of their pillage and plunder lay strewn about the camp. Gilded furniture crouched broken and peeling, bolts of fine dyed linen served as casual close-stools, unstoppered jugs of vintage wine sat turning into vinegar, against a torn codex illuminated in glowing colors a scabby dog lifted its leg… so it went.

The guide mounted the steps of a ruined temple and vanished. The Phoenician and his patron followed. The roof was totally gone, and in the interior was the largest tent either of them had ever seen. An avenue of horsetails, dyed red, dyed purple, black, and gray, led up to it. Through an opening in the top which let in a stream of sunlight, the two visitors, their eyes adjusting, observed the guide prostrating himself, rising before he was fully down, going through the motions of gathering dust and casting it on his head without ever actually doing so, advancing a few steps, repeating the process. And all the while he mumbled and muttered, yawning as if ineffably bored; and presently, raising his voice a trifle impatiently, but never ceasing his chant, he squatted on the great, and gorgeous, and filthy Bactrian carpet with which the pavilion was floored. He held his arm out horizontally as if to bar their further progress.

They halted, peered, squinted. Before them on a pallet of greasy sheepskins, clad in a doublet of filthy samite, mouth open to show a set (incomplete) of brown stumps which had once been teeth, a man lay snoring. They realized, after a moment, from the golden circlet topping the pole from which hung the last horsetail, and from the muted but still patently purple color of the doublet, that they were in the real presence of Bayla, King of the Huns.

Shabby as it was, the Presence was not altogether without its train of state or some notions of hospitality. Three scarred and limping men of his nation arose from the shadows at his bark (or snarl) when he awoke to find the strangers standing before his bed; these warriors-in-waiting, as it were, had been sharing the afternoon siesta with their King, and now added their own yips and yelps. Slaves and other members of the court came, though they did not come soon, and by the time Bayla King had cleared his nose and throat and laved his eyes in a little water and performed the other brute details of his scant and nasty toilet, something resembling a reception or audience had begun to be in progress.

Vergil and Ebbed-Saphir sat on sheepskins piled ten deep and covered with robes of fur-lined silk (doubtless once the property of some plundered Scythian magate). Wine had been brought, and splendid goblets, which did not match, fresh water, kymyss, ships biscuit, and pastries of colored sugar-flour which had once been soft. In one corner a woman sat cross-legged and sang something through her nose as she banged discordantly upon a timbrel, the while suckling a great child in her lap.

The warriors-in-waiting approached, introduced themselves, held out their hands. Baron Murdas had but one eye, Baron Bruda lacked most of his left arm, and Baron Gabron leaned heavily upon his spear to compensate for the severed Achilles tendon of his right foot: all three of them growled, “Give. Give. Give.”

The bag of purple silk embroidered with the Imperial monogram and containing the letters of state was produced. Gabron seized it, gave it to Bruda, who handed it to Murdas, who opened it and dropped the documents in Bayla’s lap. The latter stroked them with his grimy fingers, held them upside down, flipped through them as if looking for filthy pictures, then allowed them to slide from his hands. In a hoarse voice, which seemed faintly disappointed, he said, “Emperor books, very beauty, very sweet. Great honor. Rume, Hun, big friend. Drink, eat. Meat, fish, soon. What name you got?”

His Thallasic Majesty Bayla, son of Bayla, son of Ottil, son of Ernas, of the Sea-Huns King, Great King, King of Kings, co-lord of the Seas and the Isles, was a flabby, pudgy little man with tiny and rufous eyes, a scant and drooping mustache. The left side of his face had been much worried by a knife, but not recently.

The Phoenician introduced himself (“Punic man good sailor, but all time peddle, peddle,” said the King, mildly amused. “No peddle here. Hun not need buy, just take.”) and his patron. Scarcely was he done when Barons Murdas, Bruda, and Gabron commenced again with their hands outstretched to growl, “Give. Give. Give.” The guests produced their presents for the monarch. The Red Man gave a long knife, in the Sharkskin scabbard of which were fitted a small knife and a whetstone; Vergil’s gift was a pair of garters done of golden thread and adorned with Baroque black pearls.

Having donned the garters as bracelets or armills, and having picked his teeth awhile, meditatively, with the smaller knife, Bayla scrambled to his feet, beckoned them to follow. His warriors-in-waiting promptly sank down to resume their rest, and the woman (she was, they learned later, Sept-Mother of the Fox Sept and the hereditary Court Singer, and had incidentally — very incidentally — presented Bayla with his youngest child) the woman instantly ceased banging and shrilling, and adjusted her left dug to the babe’s slippery mouth.

The sun seemed brighter. Back of the tent, following the King’s gestures, they came upon an enclosure in which something was chained to a pillar.

“Vergil Shaman,” the King said, “I give you good word. Take care. Not be like bad shaman. Louse’s bastard! ” he shrieked, suddenly, his scarred face going red with rage. “Eater of swine’s turds!”