Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

There was no place wide enough to turn more than a single horse, not even in the broad place by the Fountain of Cleo, but the street retained enough width all the way through to drive into Kings Way. A lorimer named Appolonio had his business a half flight up from the Piazza of the Fountain; and on the street side of the same building, in the basement, was the wineshop officially entitled The Phoebus and Chariot, but generally called The Sun and Wagon. When Vergil as a younger man had passed through Naples from his native Brindisi, en route to study at the Academy of Illiriodorus in Athens, the three upper stories had been let each to single sublessors who filled the rooms with what tenants they liked — journeymen, whores, astrologers, waggoners, unsuccessful fences and even less successful thieves, poor travelers (such as students), menders of old clothes. So it had been in those days, so it still was; save that now, on the roof, in a hut of rubble and rushes, a madwoman dwelt quite alone save for fifteen or twenty cats.

Up the steps of the house adjacent came the same man (older now, beard still black as tar, dark of skin, gray-green of eye, and greyhound-thin) at sunset this day. Of all the houses on the street, by this one alone no one loitered, no one rested, no one begged, or ate supper out of a handkerchief or nuzzled a street wench or crouched fanning a charcoal brazier on which cheap victuals cooked for sale. No little boys paused to piddle or scrawl things on the temptingly smooth and clean pale yellow plaster of the walls. In a niche in the wall on the left-hand side, three steps from the bottom, was a brazen head; and, as the man in his slow and painful ascent trod upon the step level with it, the eyes opened, the mouth opened, the head turned, the mouth spoke.

“Who goes?” it demanded. “ Who goes? Who goes?”

“He who made you goes,” the man said. “And will enter.”

“Enter, master,” said the brazen head. The door at the top began to open.

“Guard me well,” said the man, not pausing (but a grimace twisted his face); “as ever.”

“Thus I hear and thus I tell and I will always guard you well.”

“As ever,” the brazen head replied. The heavy voice seemed to echo somewhere: ever… ever… ever … The eyes rolled — right — left — up — down — the mouth muttered a moment more. The mouth closed. The eyes shut. For a pace or two, the man staggered.

The man walked slowly down the hall. “My bath,” he directed; adding, after a moment, “My dinner.” Bells sounded… once… twice… the soft chimes died away. He pressed his palm upon a door showing, in a relief, Tbbal-Cain working in metals and handing something to an awed Hephaestus. The door opened. Somewhere, water had begun to splash. The room was lit by a glowing globe of light upon a pilaster of marble of so dark a green as to be almost black — “dragon green,” the Phrygians called it.

He moved to the first of the other pilasters which ringed around the room and lifted a helm of black enameled work which fell back on golden hinges, disclosing another glowing globe. A voice from one side; “I found that too many lights were diffusing the reflections of my inward eye, the one which lies behind my navel, so I covered them.”

After a second, the voice said, in a tone of mild surprise, “Greeting, Vergil.”

“Greeting, Clemens,” Vergil said, continuing his slow round until every light shone unhampered. He made an effort. “I know that very sensitive eye which lies behind your navel. It is not light per se which inflames it, but light which shines through the goblets in which you have captured the fifth essence of wine… before imprisoning it, for greater safety, also behind your navel.” He sighed, stepped out of his clothes and into his bath.

The alchemist shrugged, scratched his vast and tangled beard, made rude and visceral noises. “The quint’ essentia of wine, taken judiciously by a man of superior physique and intelligence, such as myself, can only aid reflection. I must show you some notes pertinent to this point in the commentary which I’m making on the works of Galen. Also — fascinating! — my invaluable discoveries anent his prescription of flute-playing as a cure for the gout — the Mixo-Lydian mode, tonally…”

Vergil continued to bathe, all absence of his usual zest in this seeming to escape the alchemist, who, having demolished to his own satisfaction all recent galenical research (particularly that of the Arab Algibronius), suddenly bethought himself of something else; smote the conical felt cap atop his mass of curly hair.

“Vergil! Have you ever heard of a metal with a melting point lower than lead?”

Vergil, pausing briefly in his ablutions, said, “No.”

“Oh…” Clemens seemed disappointed. He said, “Then it must be an exceptionally pure form of lead, sophically treated to remove the dross. I’ve seen only a few beads of it, but it melts in the heat of a lamp wick, and if a drop falls on the skin it doesn’t burn… remarkable.…”

He fell into deep thought. Vergil emerged from his bath, wrapped himself in a huge square of soft white linen, and (quickly suppressing a shudder) crossed over to a table and seated himself. The top rolled back, the inside rose slowly, lifting a covered tray. Vergil made a start at eating, but his hands began suddenly to tremble and he clenched them upon a quaff of strong, sweet, black beer, and bent his head to sip from it.

Clemens gazed at him for a while, a slight frown passing over his face. “I take it, then, that you met the manticores… and escaped from them.”

“No thanks to you.” Yes, he had escaped them… the brief and bitter thought came to him, Perhaps it would have been better if he had not! He muttered again, “No thanks to you…”

Clemens thrust out his lower lip. “You wanted information about the manticores. I gave you the best information available, namely, that they are best left alone. Anything else would only embroil you more deeply, more dangerously.”

Vergil pondered. The time was passing as if this were any ordinary night succeeding any ordinary day. Yet, what else was there to do? Reveal all to Clemens, entreat his immediate aid? He shrank, with all his nature, from the former; the latter could be, for many reasons, productive of nothing. He recalled his own words to Cornelia; You do not know the problems involved… it might well take a year … And, echoing louder and louder in his mind: I have not the year to spare!

A year. A Year! — And yet, God knows, if the year were to have been spent with her — !

“Well, never mind for now,” he said. “Someday you’ll want something from me. I’ll go back down below and get what I know is there. It has to be there. And I have to have it, for the Great Science. But I’ll wait, if I have to.” And he did have to! “Meanwhile, Clemens, here’s a conundrum for you.”

“Who is it that has a villa in the suburbs, speaks our tongue like a Neapolitan, dresses like a foreigner — but with a strip of purple on the border of the robe?”

Again, Clemens snorted. “Is that your idea of a conundrum? Cornelia, of course, the daughter of the old Doge, Amadeo. She married Vindelician of Carsus — good-looking boy, not very much else, who was making the rounds of the minor courts, playing the exiled claimant and all that.

“Doge Amadeo didn’t think much of him, but Cornelia did, so they were married and the old man gave him a villa in the suburbs, plus a few Oscan and Umbrian villages to lord it over. Then the actual King of Carsus died of a hunting accident — ‘accident,’ huh! — and his twin sons soon had a nice little civil war going for the succession. Mind if I just taste one of these squabs? You don’t seem to care for them.”