Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

“No, no,” he said, now in a softer voice, “really. You had that damnable trip to Cyprus, followed by that damnable work of the speculum. True, you are now looking better, but you do not look well yet. It is madness to embark on another journey.” His arguments were long, vigorous, logical. They did not avail. Finally Vergil broke in upon them, looking up from his open volume of the Cosmographia of Claudius Ptolemaeus on his library table. “I say that one of the things which compels me to do it is love. You deride this and say that it is lust. May I now remind you of your own words? ‘Love is for animals. Only human beings can appreciate lust.’” Clemens, caught short, snorted, pawed at the air.

Recovering himself, he sidestepped the pitfall and asked what the other things compelling Vergil might be. He listened gravely, now and then sorting his beard, and finally said, “It is a long way to go, Lybya, because of what you think you saw in an astrological calculation.”

“She is in Lybya. That is where she is. I know that we thought we saw her at Cornelia’s villa, perhaps we were mistaken, but the point is really only where she was, primus, when I drew up the horary chart, and where she was, secundus, when she was sighted in the speculum. Assuming that it was indeed she whom we saw at the villa that time, there is nothing which could have prevented her going subsequently to Lybya. Or, being taken, subsequently, to Lybya. Her mother’s motives I do not know and I don’t wish to involve myself at present in trying to know them. But I shall and must know them before I’m finished. At any rate, the chart, which was correct enough in so many other ways, clearly revealed Lybya — ”

Clemens closed the gigantic leather-bound codex with a clap. “‘Clearly revealed Lybya’!” he mocked. “Aside from Egypt, Mauretania, and Ethiopea, most of Africa is Lybya! And you intend to search this infinity of desert just because of what might be no more than a random configuration?”

Vergil straightened up and stretched on his toes. He was wearing one of his cloaks of sunset blue edged in gold embroidered work. In his mind he could see a certain rustic farm he knew well of old: the beehives, the spaniel-eared sheep, the furrows yielding to the plowman’s pressing tool; in the oak and beechy woods beyond, the tusky boar besought by hunters. Too, he could see a certain village in the Calabrian hills, known to him in later times, the spare lean houses perching like eagles upon their crag, the rushing streams — incredibly cool, wondrously clear — the quiet pools where lurked the cautious fish, the sweet-smelling woods and flowery glades. How much he would love to visit either place, sink gratefully into the quiet, and float there forever… or at least until all his weariness and turmoil was laved and washed away. But it would have been at this time a wrong turning in the road. His labors on the mirror had restored to him his complete psyche, but this left him, after all, no more than he had been before. All the great questions remained unanswered, their problems unresolved. He had, so to speak, been forced to look into the sun; now, wherever else he was free to look, the image of a great, dark disc hung over and obscured his vision. And this vision must be made clear.

And also: “Permit me,” he said, quietly, “to know at my age the difference between casual attraction and that deeper feeling which is both rare and valuable. I must go… to Lybya. Chasing the stars.”

Told of the appeal to the sortes via old Dame Allegra (“ On the sea, my lord, walk without water if you would find her .…”), Clemens admitted, as though he grudged it, that this was likely enough a possible reference to the sandy waves of Lybya Deserta. “I have also heard of a Lybya Petra,” he added, “but of a Lybya Felix? Never. So, a pretty face, the stars, the babble of a withered madwoman. What other auspicous omens impel you?”

Vergil walked off into the darkness of his library’s farther end. “Come and see,” his voice invited. As Clemens, muttering and grunting, advanced with caution, a square of light opened in the obscurity — a map on oiled parchment with lamplight thrown upon it from behind. Vergil had again his white wand in his hand and now used it as if it were a teacher’s pointer. They had, in the newly opened surface of the major speculum, seen Laura pacing down a vasty flight of steps of unmistakable provenance. No hand of man or men had ever cut those great stony slabs and wrested them into place. The craftsmanship thereof was as unmistakable as the leopards’ claws or the fleecy hair of the wise Ethiopeans.

“They were the work of the four-armed Cyclopes.” Clemens said, “Granted. What then?”

“What then, did the Cyclopes erect so many castellations as to baffle us forever? It isn’t so. Perhaps forging the thunderbolts of Jove occupied so much of their time, or wooing the beautiful females of the former age — Glaucus, for example — that the time they had for building was limited. But a record has, after all, come down to us. All of those they set up in central Sicily, their first home, have been torn down with immense labor by the tyrants of that island, to prevent their providing strongholds for rebels.” The wand touched the map, now here, now there; the points touched glowed briefly. “The castle of Mycenae, I’ve been lately informed, is a heap of rubble. The one occupied by the Tartismen here in Naples, we have searched, and found — as I would have expected — nothing. That in Carthage, as it later became, was with the rest of that great city destroyed by great Scipio and its very site sown with salt.” One by one the locations of each Cyclopean fortress became a tiny spot of blue-white light, like a wandering star, then vanished.

What was left? There was one other castle that the hideous Cyclopes made, each man glaring with his single huge eye, toiling and straining with his four arms. “It is not marked for sure upon my map. All that I know of it is that it lies somewhere in Thither Lybya. And it is there, Clemens, that I must go. Captain An-Thon Ebbed-Saphir will be my guide again, for he knows where it is.

Clemens sighed, sagged into a chair, waggled his huge mane. At length he said that he would not argue. “At any rate, I suppose you may rely upon the Red Man as you did before,” he conceded. Vergil was silent here. The Red Man had made it quite clear that, for reasons of his own, which he would not discuss — let alone disclose — he would guide Vergil to within sight of the Cyclopean castle… but no farther.

Whatever it was they had seen, without being able to see it in any way clearly at the edge of the mirror, whatever was with Laura, ugly and dreadful, Vergil would have to confront it alone.

The desert of Lybya stretched on all around them, dry and glaring, red and orange and yellow and white. The sands undulated like billows. Already the coast lay far behind them, and its curious capital, where reigned Mahound, the god-king, a strong and ugly man; and Baphomet, the god-queen, his equally strong and even uglier wife. Behind them lay farmlands and fields and, at length, even the hills of scrub and thorn where only the scrannel goats found nourishment, and they only because they could climb the niggard trees like cats and browse upon the tiny buds and leaves.

It could not be said that Vergil and the Red Man followed a road, It was barely even a trail… a faintly glistening streak was all it was, like a mark upon the flesh of a woman who has begun to put on weight. The camels snaked their long necks and gazed about with almost insufferable haughtiness and now and then lifted their meager tails and refreshed the sand with their strawy dung. Three oases lay behind them, with their green pools guarded by the date palm trees, and three more lay still ahead of them. Ebbed-Saphir squatted aboard the lead camel, gazing out over the sands as though from the poop of his ship, his reddened face muffled to the eyes, with a blue cloth, against sand and sun.