Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

In its very horror, in its monstrous denial of nature, in its utter irrevocability lay much of its appeal. Men and women alike, to be sure shrank from the thought, but still they came to watch, to wonder, to worship. The thought that all this was for nothing was too much for the average mind to grasp. So great and terrible a sacrifice must surely signify something, something great, something marvelous. And so, meanwhile, the cult and mythos grew and grew and grew. ‘Ditissa was still worshiped, and from her clergy little hope or adherence could be expected, they being women, all. Therefore the greed and guile of Sylvian was perforce turned in another direction.

He had never known what it was to be a man, his discarding of the flesh which makes men had been done before the first hair grew upon his flesh. His body had never developed, nor his mind, in the fashion of a man’s. His desires therefore remained in many ways those of a child — but magnified and amplified and aggrandized by adulthood and the increased power of distorted maturity. It was not altogether strange, then, that it was not ‘Ditissa and her women who aroused his envy and his hatred. The desire to increase his power, to place the cult of which he was the head on a higher footing, fell instead in enmity and implacable malevolence upon the figure of the sacred king — a man — and the figures of his servants the semisacred hermaphrodies who were his servants — and who were both man and woman in the same person, unlike Sylvian, who was neither.

“He is undoubtedly one of the heads of the great dragon which is called Harlot, Babylon, and Beast,” said Angustus the Ephesian, waggling his beard, his eyes now shining with a joyous hatred. “Rome makes one head, Hun makes two heads, two and one maketh three, sacred by the eschatological numeration. Sylvian is one head, Paphos is two…” He counted on his fingers and he smacked his lips.

“Your pardon, sage,” said Vergil, with infinite civility. “I do not willingly interrupt your sacred mensurations, but I should like to know what connection you imply between the Royal and Sacred Paphiote Court and the shrine of Wolf-Zeus.”

Angustus looked at him with astonishment. “Why, is it not clear? Sylvian wishes to crush the King and to destroy his influence. He also desires to entreat the assistance of the abominable older gods — they be but daemons — in assisting him with some privy matter that I know not, any more than I know yours. Who then do you think it is that is to perform the abominable rite of offering his own son as sacrifice and sacrificial meal? Who then is then to be translated from the world of men and changed therefor into a wolf?

“It is himself the King of Paphos. It is he.”

The moon had risen, a great yellow moon, riding the clouds over the yellow marble of the villa; the moon had set and the great stars burned and melted in the velvet blackness of the sky. The dog had barked in his hutch, the babe wailed in his bedlet, the ox had lowered in his stall. The ass had yet to bray in his yard or the cock crow on his roost, otherwise the audible watches of the night had been told as the Heavens wheeled around the earth.

Vergil had slowed his breath and lessened the beatings of his heart. For hours he remained immovable… but not altogether motionless… Vergil was being a shadow in a doorway… and, as the moon moved, so the shadow moved… slowly… slowly… slowly. One could no more observe the actual motion in motion than that of the hand on the dial of an hour horlogue. It was long, long before he restored breath and heartbeat to their normal rates of speed. Then he waited for his body to restore itself to its wonted tone. Having thus passed the hours in something close to stasis, he felt no fatigue. Some distance more or less directly opposite him the guard lounged and yawned at his post, leaning now and again upon his halberd.

Behind the guard at yet another distance burned a torch, smokily.

Underneath Vergil’s long cloak, spun and woven and cut and sewn in Herborean Cymmeria and there dyed into that nameless color which is darker than black, was the device called a pembert, of which only Vergil himself and one other had the art. It consisted in a tiny lens-lamp and a tinier mirror set upon gymbals and a swivel. The parts responded to the slightest touch and tremor of a finger.

The lamp, a minute version of those globes of light which — never needing oil nor wick — illuminated the House of the Brazen Head, now answered to the finger’s touch. A shutter slid away. A beam of light emerged, passed though a lens, was greatly magnified. At the same instant the tiny mirror, shifting on its movements, sped into place at a calculated angle. The man in the shadows made a practiced movement with his throat. His lips did not move. The guard looked up sharply… looked straight into the eye of the lamp. Vergil’s throat moved again… his finger, too. The tiny eye of light vanished. The guard shook his head, puzzled.

But the shadows had moved forward.

Once again the voice which was less than a voice and other than a voice came from Vergil’s throat. His finger shifted slightly on the pembert. The light appeared again, was not reflected in the tiny mirror, moved… right… left… up… down… around, slowly, slowly, around.

And the guard’s eyes followed It… right… left… up… down… around, slowly, slowly, around.

He watched the moving light, his face slack, and did not seem to see at all the shadow slowly moving forward. The light presently vanished, the shadow moved past him, the torch guttered in its socket; the guard remained unmoving, staring. Staring. Staring.

Vergil expected to find obstacles, impediments, and delays standing between him and an audience with Sylvian; he was surprised to be told that no audience at all could be granted. There was no attempt at procrastination masked by oblique consent, no honeyed words urging postponement — the information was stated flatly, devoid of visible malice, but firmly:

“Lord, Sylvian sees no citizens of Rome.”

Basilianos was of no help. And when Vergil, with some half-formed notion of going by sea to another Cypriote port and trying to accomplish his purpose there, began to speak out his thoughts to Ebbed-Saphir, he found the Red Man, from some unknown cause, too tense and preoccupied to listen.

There seemed no other way open than the dark and mystic way he was now pursuing, although of course to him it was based not on mysticism at all, but plain philosophy and science.

Through the grounds, first, then the corridors of the Chief Priest’s great villa he proceeded, leaving behind him a train of bemused guards in a state between wakefulness and sleep, partaking somewhat of each, but in its entirety neither; and came at last to his destination.

There was a painted room, brightly, almost garishly painted, as it might have been by a somewhat talented child, with the figures of people whose faces — eyes round as circles rimmed all about with long lashes, red spheres for cheeks, double cupid’s-bow mouths — were turned full frontward but whose bodies stood sideways underneath trees almost their own size and alongside flowers even taller; with the pictures of striped and dotted birds, blue dogs, red cats, green marmosets… an almost insane panorama which yet arrested rather than repelled.

In the midst of the painted room was a vast bed and in it lay a figure with waved hair and full lips, a figure which was human-like, but as a great doll might be human-like. This figure, which was neither man nor woman, made an agonized face and turned the face away from him. But when the creature groaned and opened its eyes a moment later — hopefully, fearfully — Vergil was there again in front of it.