Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

“Where did this come from?” he asked. It was a nacreous off-white, faintly iridescent, with tiny flecks of blue through it.

She shrugged. “Why? I don’t know… oh, it was picked out of a river bed one dry summer. Has it a name, Ser Vergil?”

He inclined his head. The pebble seemed to weigh rather heavily in his hand. “A river bed. One of its tributaries has evidently an origin far north of Carsus, for this seems to be that stone which the Sarmations call ‘Timebinder’.… There is scarcely any telling what might be done with it, if it is real… but in our present situation we must make one certain experiment, and one only.

“May I break your bead?”

She made him a japing, low curtsy, dress spread out wide, somewhat disconcerting him. Immediately, she was all remorse, and begged his forgiveness. He murmured something, searched among the nearby rocks. He placed the blue bead upon one and, still murmuring, struck it with another. Twice more he struck, and at the third blow it severed into three parts without shattering.

“Now give me your apple core.” He took his wand and pierced the sod in the pocket of soil and dropped into the hole one single leaf of arbor vitae from the tiny packet he carried in his pouch, slightly widened the hole, dropped the apple core into it, tamped it down with the blunter end of the wand, replenished the hole with soil. Then he planted the three pieces of the timestone so as to form a triangle with the buried core in the center. Of what he did and of what happened next, she told him afterward she could never be clearly sure. She remembered, with perhaps somewhat greater clarity than one commonly remembers a dream, the sun and the stars and all four phases of the moon rising and setting and wheeling in retrograde and then back again, to and fro, but all this within what appeared to be a vast triangular embrasure in the Heavens distinct from the major portion of it. And, as she turned her astonished and bemused gaze from the Heavens to earth and back and again, she beheld a shoot break through the broken soil and become a twig. The twig grew apace into a sapling increased in girth and stature.

“Oh!” she cried, rapt, and clapped her hands. The dry and vacant air was filled with the scent of snowy apple blossoms, and then these, too, faded away like snowflakes. And presently the boughs of the noble tree sagged earthward like the breasts of a woman filled with milk, and the apples hung heavy upon the boughs.

They ate their fill of the food, which was also drink, and they let the beasts have their satiety as well. Then they filled the saddlebags and made sacks of their blankets and their cloaks, and filled them, too. And then, refreshed and supplied, they set off once more.

In Garamanteland the climate was so hot by day that water exposed to the sunlight boiled at noon, and by night so cold that the same water, if poured out into a shallow vessel, froze at midnight. The rigors of the climate were fortunately not matched by the severity of the people, who neither hinder travelers nor help them. The Garamantes are so shy and eremitical as to be willing to greet strangers only from a distance too great for voice to carry; often Vergil and Laura would see their strange, cloaked figures, arms upraised, outlined against the hill or sky. Always at their sides were their dogs, which the Garamantes love more than they love humankind; and this love is returned, for when the Numideans carried off captive the King of the Garamantes to hold for ransom, no less than two thousand of his own dogs followed his trail by scent and by stealth until they burst upon the sleeping camp to destroy the captors and release the king.

In Outer Nubia they were perplexed by what they at first took for the ghost of a woman who had died in trying to abort her child — doomed forever to seek the babe unborn, weeping and wailing, forever following, never seen, sobbing and calling out. But it did not respond to exorcism, and so Vergil realized that it was no human ghost after all, but that inhuman loathsome creature sometimes called Jaekal and sometimes Hyaena, which imitating the human voice like a perroquetta, or Indian jay, it often lures men and women to come in search of it; whereupon it leaps upon them from behind and laughs as it devours them.

At last, alternately burned by heat and numbed by cold, they met up with a caravan which led them into Meroë on Nilus, a river port famous for its trade in the hides, ordure, and tushes of cocodrilli. By one of those paradoxes in which Nature seems to delight, these stinking beasts pass perfumed dung exceeding the primest musk, much sought for in confecting ointments and scents; its teeth are in demand for treating pains and affections of the bones and joints, as well as being aphrodisiacal. In Nilus Meroë they obtained places on the downriver packet boat, and allowing only for two or three stops en route, would be in Alexandria as swiftly as the current flowed.

To eyes used to the mountains, hills, valleys, isles, and coastlands of Europe, the Nilus and its banks could not but seem somewhat samely and monotonous, but to Vergil the mere greenery was grateful after the fret and glare of the desert. And to her it all had a charm for being new. The bending trees all a-gaze at their reflections, the vasty hippopotami — once, even an oliphant appeared, and gnashed its enormous teeth at them — the incredibly rich fields full of heavy heads of grain, the ornately carved entrances to the caves yielding the precious and essential balm called mummy, and perhaps above all the huge pyramidical structures which were the treasure houses of King Pharaoh… treasures which continued to baffle the searching zeal of those who would find them.

He thought that she was entirely absorbed in these sights, and it was with surprise that he was roused from his own musings by her question, “Ser Vergil, why did you come to look for me?”

Some foolish compliments hesitated at his mouth. And yet, fatuous as it might have been for him to have said, Your red hair with its glints of brown, your brown eyes with their glints of red, your white skin with its tracery of blue veins, your delicately formed and coral-colored lips, the gracious arching of your brows and the sweet rise of your bosom — all, all seized hold of my eyes and heart, and beguiled me from the bitter reek of my elaboratory and the musty but beloved scent of my books.… Was it not the truth?

He stammered a bit, then told her instead that he desired to follow the matter of the mirror to its conclusion.

“And not leave it unfinished,” she summed up.

“Yes… and not leave it unfinished.”

She nodded, seemed to follow this well, be satisfied; then she grimaced. (“What… ?” he began.) “The Queen,” she said. (“Oh,” he said. “Yes. The Queen… Don’t worry.”) She looked at him and raised one brow. Then she smiled faintly. “I won’t, then,” she said.

HE HAD MADE no point either of informing Cornelia that he was going to Lybya or of keeping the information from her. He rather thought that she would have learned, though, but as he and the Red Man had taken their usual precautions against departing together, he rather thought that she would not have learned of that. Tullio he met in the villa’s hall of entrance as Vergil swept in, the girl behind him. The seneschal’s eyes and mouth opened wide at the sight, but a gesture and a glance from the Magus sufficed to close them. A further gesture and a further glance, and Tullio meekly led the way.

Cornelia was occupying herself with small rectangles of ivory, parchment-thin, on which curious designs and pictures were limned in color, evidently by a skilled miniaturist. Her face had a familiar look of faraway thought. She had laid a number of them out in several even rows, and the rest were in her hand. “Rota,” she murmured. “Rato. Arot. Otar. Ator. Taro — ” She looked up and saw him and the pack leaped from her hand and scattered and fell.