Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

The thing in chains raised its head and then its body. It was the oldest, mangiest, shabbiest bear Vergil had ever seen. It grimaced and blinked and champed its almost toothless jaws and made little, feeble noises, then covered its face with its paws as Bayla, in a hysteria of fury, pelted it with sticks and stones. At that moment it seemed like a very old man clad in a very old bearskin, and despite the hot sun Vergil once again felt the cold sick touch of uncommon fear.

“Tildas Shaman? This?” The words were jerked from his mouth.

“Tildas Shaman yes! Tildas whoreson! Hangman Tildas! Tildas pox!”

Here it was, the bear which the whole Sea-Hun nation believed had once been a man. “Why do you hate him so?” he asked.

“Why?” the voice of the King rose to a squeal. “Why? Why hate? Why?” His mouth spittled and his filthy small hands clenched and unclenched in fury. Rage deprived him, almost, of his little Latin, and it was a while before he could make clear his meaning. Which was, seemingly, to the effect that Tildas the Shaman, by failing to assume his human and articulate form — and thus being unable to convey from the Old King’s ghost and the ghosts of the puissant Sept-Mothers a message favorable to the pre-eminence of Bayla — had allowed Bayla’s brothers Ottil and Osmet to usurp the royal power and reduce Bayla to his present impotent position.

“King!” he howled, beating his pigeon breast. “Bayla, King, too! Ottil, King, and Osmet, King, but Bayla — Bayla, King, too!”

And so he was — King of the stinking shore camp, King of the old women and the potbellied children, King of invalids and cripples; of rubbish, flies, and scabby dogs — King. Bayla King.

There had been a sacred well used by the Greeks before the Sea-Huns had come crawling up over the horizon and squatted on the island like thick clots of locusts. The sides had fallen in through neglect, and moss was grown upon the rocks. Here, in the green and the cool, alone and unbothered, too solitary to be chafed by the comparison of what he was to what he might have been, Bayla sat and talked (calmer, now, after his outburst) to his visitors.

Would he give them a safe-conduct to Cyprus?

He would if he could — but he did not dare. His brothers — (“May they both have boils, piles, scurvy, saddle, galls, seasickness and black pox!”) — his brothers would be furious. No… no… he did not dare.

A pity, Vergil observed. They had been looking forward to seeing the famous Cyprian city of Paphos. Bayla, at this, pricked up his dirty little ears. Paphos, eh. Where the great Temple of Aphrodite was, eh. Paphos — so they were going there. Ah-mmmm. Paphos.

“Yes, King Bayla. To Paphos, where the Great Temple of Aphrodite is — and the seven hundreds of beautiful priestesses — or is it seventeen hundreds? — all skilled in the divine arts of love and ready to make each devoutly amorous pilgrim a lover by proxy of the great goddess herself. It would be a meritorious deed to worship the goddess, would it not?”

“Worship goddess, eh. Mmm-ah…”

Vergil’s eye met that of An-Thon; the latter at once declared how proud he would be to carry King Bayla to Paphos on pilgrimage. The little monarch refreshed his drooping lips with his tongue. His mind was working, at a slow and ponderous, but highly visible, rate. “. . . worship goddess…”

A scowl crept, draggingly, over his face. “Ottil,” he growled, “mmm… Osmet. Rrr…”

On the point of asking, rhetorically, he hoped, why the other co-Kings should object to such a pious journey, Vergil abruptly changed his plans. “Unless, of course, King Bayla is not allowed to leave the camp without permission.… If he is a prisoner, in effect, of his brothers — ”

So quickly did the regius tertius leap to his feet, so furiously raise one fist, so swiftly reach for his knife, that the Magus had no time to say more than, “I die for truth!”

Out flew the knife. “Up, up!” cried Bayla. “Vergil Shaman, Ebbed Captain, up! To ship, to ship — now! We go Cyprus.” Rage a bit abated, determination not one whit, a corner of his mouth lifted the ruined side of his face in something which was not quite a smile and less than a leer. “Paphos ho!” cried Bayla the King. “Worship! We worship goddess!”

He drove them before him, as a dog drives sheep.

The three battle-battered barons were so dumfoundered by the decision that they had not a word to say to their excited liege-lord. The situation, however, obviously required that they say something to someone; and they turned, therefore, upon the two visitors, hands outstretched again, palms up, fingers slightly curled in:

“Give, give, give.”

It was no time to hold off giving. They gave Vergil’s writing case, Ebbed-Saphir’s pocket astrolabe, they gave belt buckles and buskin clasps, knives, purses, amulets, combs, caps, cloaks. Vergil later commented that he had given everything but his virtue.

Supplies were swiftly laden aboard by the crew, and the horse’s skull with black ribband through the nostrils fastened to the bowsprit — no Hun would ever presume putting to sea sans this potent talisman. They found the sea as slack and windless as a pool in the bottom of a cave, but the oarsmen rowed with their hearts and their bended backs, and scarcely let up the driving pace till the stench of the Huns’ camp lay far behind with the smudge on the horizon that was Isle Melissos.

Free of the decaying influence of his court, such a court it was! — Bayla seemed another man. He proved himself a good sailor and even a brave though clumsy fighter, helping them through a gale off Farther Greece by his prompt seizure and careful handling of the tiller when the duty helmsman lost his grip and went tumbling arse over ale mug, and was the life and soul of the crippling and beating-off of a Sard freebooter south of the Cyclades. Time and time again Hunnish vessels approached, wet and pitchy-black sides gleaming with malice, sails the rusty color of old blood; but the royal standard of the white horsetail surmounted by crown, plus Bayla’s stumpy figure on the quarter-deck, got the ship through every time.

But when the winds failed, Bayla could do nothing. Indeed, he went to sleep.

“Of course we can row, we can always row,” the Red Man said, more than a trifle impatiently. “But my men are not slaves, to be used up, cast aside, and replaced. Hence, the amount of sea that we can cover by rowing quickly is limited. And there is the question of time. Always there is the question of time.”

It seemed almost as though he had taken Vergil’s problems for his own.

“If it is the question of being back in Naples to pick up a charter,” Vergil said, stroking his short and pointed beard, “I can only assure you again that, should you miss your customary cargoes by a late return, you will not be the loser by it.”

But the Red Man denied that time, though it must always be paid for, could always be paid for in money. “And, sometimes, Ser Vergil, it has no price that we would willingly pay. Can you not raise the wind?” he demanded, abruptly.

No price that we would willingly pay. So well had his hired captain summed up his, Vergil’s, own feelings. Caught up full, for a moment, in the never-for-long subdued anguish caused by the missing portion of his psyche, by the betrayal of the woman he loved most among women, he shook his head. Then, quickly regaining control, said, “The influences are not favorable. But — ”

Swiftly, An-Thon: “ But then there is… something else? Then, do it, man. Do it!”

It was dim, down there in the cedar-scented cabin. From within a great chest of ebonwood Vergil lifted out a smaller one made of the puissant horn-beam tree, and out of this he took one of several caskets cleverly worked from tortoise shell. He placed it on the cabin table.