Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

The Tyrean lifted the stick with which he drove his camel, and he pointed. “I have kept my word,” he said.

Sand had choked the castle’s moat and either time or lesser enemies had pushed down its battlements and turrets. Certain rude lineaments still persisted, becoming clearer as Vergil advanced. The curtain wall was still largely in place and, rather than go around and seek a proper gate which might prove to be no longer there, he entered through a wide breach in the curtain. There had been a garden in that place once — in a sense, there still was: bone-white trees cast slant, thin shadows over bone-brittle shrubs around a bone-dry pool. A fine white sandy dust lay over everything, and on its surface, small and delicate, Vergil saw the print of a naked foot.

While he mused and pondered, somewhere on the dry, thin air, a single note sounded, clear and pure. After it came another, and another, then a rill, a cascade of them, and formed into a tune of a music unknown and strangely beautiful to him. He followed it as if it were the sound of a rill of coolest water to quench his long unsated thirst.

Through a broken arch he paced the sound of music, and down a huge and winding flight of deep-set steps, dark and grateful after the weeks of naked sunlight, and so, in the lower courtyard below, there at last she was.

Lovely Laura, dulcimer in one hand, quill in the other, kneeling and resting her coils of red-brown hair against the seamy sides of the castle’s keeper, the huge and ancient four-armed Old One himself.

Whose eye was open upon the instant of Vergil’s stepping through the inward-bending frame of the doorless doorway. Whose eye was huge and blazing-gold and shot about the white with tiny lines of red. Whose eye was set in the center of his broad and low and furrowed forehead. For eye other than this, he had none, nor had he space nor had he place for any other.

No one had the right to call him a monster, Vergil presently affirmed. The Cyclops’ voice was deep and rich and slow and smooth, his words were civil and quite without threat or guile. A mind cultivated and distinctive lay behind that single glowing eye. He spoke of his loneliness without much self-pity, and even recited a few lines of his own verse-making. Laura, plainly, liked him, had no fear at all of him. But he was old, old, preternaturally old, the last of his race, and lonely.

“Man, you’ve come a long way, and if you are too new upon my vision to be my friend, I need not, at least, be your enemy,” he said. “But I will not give her up. Do you love her?”

“Yes,” said Vergil.

Cyclops nodded his massy head, flowing with snow-white curls. “I love her too,” said Cyclops. “You have a world teeming with friends and fellows and kin, Man. I have none of such. Your duty and your pains, you’ll think, have given you a claim upon her. Listen — have I not already rescued her from the Troglodytes when all her so-called guards were killed? I have. And I do not believe that they were truly her guards at all. I think they were manstealers, taking her to be the bride of that one whose pyring place is hard nearby. Oh — have I not watched often in anguish as some beautiful Man female was sacrificed to that one? And do I not hate that one? I do. What is your claim, Man Vergil, to mine?”

And Vergil said, softly, and not without respect, “Old One, my claim is not my claim alone. Laura has a mother and a brother and a great hope among the lands of Men. Some Man will someday be her swain. You, Old One, never can.”

“I know it, I know it. I am wiser than my brother Polyphemus, whose bootless wooing of a female not of our kind drove him near mad. I do not think of Laura so. I would keep her with me, and I will keep her with me, as a lovely bird who might have perished on the burning sands, but found refuge here with me instead. Her mother has had her long enough. Her mother has a son, her brother has a mother — and, likely enough, wives and cubs. I have none of these. I have only Laura. I do not remember when last I had anyone, and I will not give her up.”

Laura herself remained silent, turning her gaze slowly from one to the other, saying nothing, showing nothing but a faint and passive smile; though now and then she touched a chord upon her dulcimer. Vergil argued as earnestly and persuasively as ever he remembered doing. But the Old One only said, “I will not give her up.”

He said, “I was here when all you see was green and fair. I saw the Titans sporting like whales in great pools where now is nought but sand. The Titans, where are they? I saw the prides of sphynxes come to whelp in the caves along the river. The sphynxes, where are they? and where the river? The earth has grown old, like a garment, and I alone am left, and I am lonely in a way that no Man can know or has ever known loneliness. Do not speak to me of kings and queens and of princesses, Man. I will not give her up.”

Plainly, he would not. Vergil continued to talk, but his mind was now less on his words than on his thoughts, and his thoughts were on how he might overcome the Old One. It might be that his thoughts were read, or it might have been a caution of so long a standing as to have become habitual; however it was, the Old One had fixed him with his great golden eye, his huge and puissant eye, and gradually Vergil became aware that the gaze of this single eye was holding him. He was not paralyzed, no, but while the great eye gazed at him and bathed him in its golden light, he could not loose the string of his bag of tricks.

And yet, thought fathering the deed, as he bethought him of the metaphorical bag and purse and pouch, his fingers toyed with the actual pouch hanging from his belt, and his fingers let slip its cord and his fingers delved therein. He could not have, even had he desired, got therefrom a knife (if knife had been there) nor lifted it against the Cyclops. What he got, without hindrance, holding it unperceived, was so simple a thing as a coin. It had been fresh-minted not long before he left, and, in being new to him, he had put it aside from spending it at once, as people do, preferring instead to pass the old and worn, familiar coins while they lasted. So this one bright coin remained. He tossed it away.

The flash and glitter of it automatically drew the Cyclops’ single eye away for a second — long enough for Vergil, released from the eye’s power, swiftly to stoop and swiftly scoop a handful of dust and toss it into that eye, that single, great, and golden eye.

Cyclops shouted. Laura cried out. Vergil turned and swept her up. He took her voice and his own voice, and cast them to the side. As he ran, with her in his arms, ran to the left, he heard his voice and hers coming from and dwindling down to the right. And the blundering, roaring Old One rushed with all four arms outstretched, now stooping and testing the ground, now striking his great and horny palms against the walls, down the wrong corridor, down, down, and away, following the fleeing voices; following the lying, traitor voices.

“Cyclops, farewell,” she cried, faintly. “I did like you, Old Cyclops. I like you much — farewell!”

And: “Forgive me, Cyclops,” Vergil heard his voice in the distance say, “but I have done thee less damage than the Grecian did thy brother Polyphemus — farewell — farewell — farewell.”

Eventually, but before his tears had washed his eye clean, the Old One learned, too late, of their escape. From afar they heard a great cry of wordless grief, of aeons of loneliness.

THE RED MAN was seated, slumped, upon the ground when they reached him at last. The journey had evidently wearied him much, more than it had Vergil. Not until his blurred eyes focused on Laura did a flicker of interest show in them, and he slowly rose to his feet and prepared to mount. Vergil would have liked to take some of the scant food remaining in their packs, for, though he had drunk sweet water in a silver cup at the Cyclops’ castle, he had not then thought to ask for anything to eat. But it was best to wait. Let them get well away. Only…