Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

Vergil stood there, motionless. The Phoenix beckoned. Slowly the fiery circle round Laura advanced toward its maker, and she perforce advanced with it. The sun’s great orb touched its lower rim to the horizon. The air grew dark and blue and chill. The wind riffled the flames.

The Phoenix said, “Come”

He extended his finger. He said, “I was able to attend at the pyre of my fellow in Cyprus. None will attend me here. But that matters not. I need no epithalamium.” Vergil, staring through the leaping flames which enclosed him like pickets and palisadoes, watched as Laura, fire-encircled, advanced numbly toward the Phoenix, who held out his hand. And she took it. Together they approached the pyre.

The Phoenix turned. “Farewell, Wizard,” he said.

But now it was Vergil’s finger which moved, moved in a motion contrary to that of the Phoenix, moved widdershins. And the fire blazing hot around him flickered… sank… sank… became a mere faint glowing circle on the ground. He stepped over it. Dumbly, the Phoenix stared.

“Phoenix of Phoenicia, I, too, have been in Phoenicia. Student of the secrets of fire as well as you. But I studied them in Sidon and not in Tyre. ” A sound, half growl and half groan, came from the other’s throat. Tyre, burned to rock and ashes; Sidon, still enduring.

Vergil advanced. The Phoenix turned to face him. Vergil said, “My powers are the opposite of yours, and are not always deemed as useful. I am one of the few. Yet what think you quenched the blaze in my house in the Street of the Horse-Jewelers? Do you not know — you of all must know — that they err who say that the Salamandar starts fires? He starts no fires, he puts the fires out! It is this power of his which enables him to walk through the flames and the embers unharmed… consuming, but not consumed.

“Go, Phoenix, confront your proper pledged bride in Naples, and claim her, if you can and will. But this woman here is not she, and her you must release — ”

He staggered back. The night had exploded in flames in front of him. The rocks were fonts of fire. He flung out his hands. For a space about him there was an opacity, a blackness, and this spread. The fires hissed, fell back as though in pain. The rocks spat like griddle pans. A steamy vapor was seen in the air, and an unseasonal dew distilled upon the ground. Lightnings flashed and writhed, were quenched by rains. Fiery serpents large as pythons rushed upon him, met wet, black mists; the twain intertwined as if engaged in some dreadful, loveless copulation. The mists hissed, vaporized, grew thin. A cry of rage and triumph came from the Phoenix, he hurled out his fires, he blazed himself like a fire, he waved his glowing arms.

The mists thickened, became clouds, clouds and thick darkness, the air grew wet and thick and hot as a bath heated by a hypocaust. The nimbus-circled stars were obscured. The dark and steamy atmosphere was shot through with flames — white flames, blue flames, red and orange and yellow and green glames — but gradually there were less of them.

And finally there were none at all.

Vergil shivered, his flesh chill and trembling in the cold wind. Strange how the scent of the spicy wood, warmed by the fire, now came fresh and strong. Outlined against the pyre, slumped and shrunken, was the enemy.

“Phoenix,” said Vergil, “mount.”

The Phoenix raised his head and drew in a breath and held it. He brightened, he blazed up, he glowed like a fanned ember. It was his last effort. Then, totally, suddenly, the light went out of him. Dull, dull and defeated, he seemed to hang there.

“Phoenix,” said Virgil, “mount.”

It was painful, almost, to watch how he more crawled than walked up the carven stairs of the great pyre, how he dragged himself to one of the two furnitures there, half throne, half nuptial couch.

Round and round about the pyre Vergil drew with his wand a great circle, and blazoned it with rays. “Now, Phoenix, hear my bane,” he directed.

“Within the circle of this sun

Shall no fire burn

Nor water run

Until my quest be won.”

The cold moon rose and the strange rocks melted into its shadows. Atop his cold pyre, the Phoenix stared, immobilized, motionless as a statue.

The camels for once, seemed less than haughty.

He dared not risk a return by the same route. There was danger that the hideous and treacherous Troglodytes might take them unawares. There were the petromorphs, stone things which came alive, reversing the process whereby living things became stone. Drink and baffled greed might well have turned the chieftain Abèn-Aboubou into a confronting instead of a stealthy enemy. And any other route to the coast he did not know and dared even less to hazard.

“We must turn south and east.” he said to Laura, having explained this to her. “Unless perhaps you have thought of something else?”

She laughed, and wound her fingers in a long coil of hair which had come undone. “I’m not used to being asked my thoughts,” she said. “I shall have to bend my mind… bear down upon it…” She frowned her unaccustomed concentration. “Northward lies the Middle Sea? Is that right? and westward… ? The Western Ocean. That seems fair enough. But what lies south and east, Ser Vergil?”

He sketched a quick map for her upon the moonlit dust. South lay the mountains clove in two by the thick, black waters of the River Nigir, upon which was said to lie the great rich city of Tambuctone. Beyond river and mountains was the land of the Garamantes and Ethiopea Interior, the Equinox, the region called Agisymba, and the Terra Incognita whose extent and terminus not even legend had touched upon. A southeasterly course would traverse Proper Ethiopea, Nilus, the rivers Astapus and Astaboras, and so to the Sinus Barbaricus and the Erythrean Sea.

“South is more or less an unknown quantity, and southeast would consume an infinity of time. I think then, that we should descend sufficiently south to leave the hills, and then head east — hoping that, if we are fortunate, we may meet another caravan intending for Upper Egypt. There…”

She apologized for yawning. “You see I am like a servant girl of no manners, despite having been benefited by Queen Cornelia, daughter of the Doge and granddaughter of the Emperor. I was never outside the Carsus until all this began to happen. It’s been all very terrible, and I’m very glad it’s all happened. Shall we go to sleep now?”

Toward the end of the next day, in approaching the end of the foothills, they were fortunate in finding a spring of water welling up from a cleft in the rocks into a shallow pool. It could not have been called an oasis, for evaporation evidently prevented the moisture from ever spilling over onto the adjacent ground, and the ground around it was so rocky that only a single and small pocket of soil had survived the restless buffetings of the winds.

They drank their fill and let the camels drink and filled the leathern water bottles. Then they mixed with water the handful or so of parched ground grain, which was all their food, and ate the only faintly salted paste slowly. “It is utterly tasteless,” she commented, licking her fingers. “Horrible stuff… I wish there were more.” She patted her pockets and examined their contents in her lap. There was a tiny handkerchief, a coney’s foot amulet (“There’s no meat on it, I’m afraid!”), some loose beads, and something brown and crumpled and smelling faintly sweet.

She smiled. “The core of my last apple,” she said. “The gardener at Carsus gave it to me when I left and I said that I would keep it to remember forever… but by and by I got hungry, so I ate it. Those are only beads, they have no value,” she added, as Vergil picked them through with his finger. One seemed to catch his eye.