Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

Neither child knew anything of any secret compact made before their own births. It was said that such had been made between a woman and a phoenix — in part for love; in part for passion; and in part in return for the promise of a throne. This compact was for long a source of hope and strength and joy — and then the note fell due before it was expected to, and it had to be paid. Or — did it?

“Suppose the woman who was the promised bride of the Phoenix was a woman of extraordinary powers. She would thus be able to set up wards and guards… but even so, always, always, there was the fear and terror that they might slip down. More, this woman would be in constant agony for her daughter, lest the Phoenix claim the child in place of the parent. Do you see?

“What should she do? What could she do? Let us hypothesize, assuming that this woman be you, madam. What could she do? Why, she could have her daughter, Laura, come with her from Carsus, disguised as Phyllis, the servant, Leaving Phyllis, enchanted into believing that she was Laura, to come along later. This might be done in hopes of the Phoenix’ doing what he did in fact do — have the wrong girl kidnapped. In this way both the loved-hated lover and the hated-loved servant would be gotten rid of together on that far-off pyre, where no mystic union would occur at all, perhaps, but only a painful death by fire. There was no way of knowing that the Troglodytes would waylay the Phoenix’ hired kidnappers or that Old Cyclops would rescue Phyllis or that the Phoenix would fear to face him and take her.

“But when the Phoenix, guised as a mere Phoenician, appeared in Naples, it was obvious that something had gone wrong. He came, he went, the uncertainty must have been agonizing. If my hypothesis be correct, madam, then your anxiety, your intense desire to fashion the major speculum, was not for fear that the false Laura had come to harm, but that she had not… That is my hypothesis.”

Cornelia said only, “It is false.”

Vergil shook his head. “I fear me, it is true. I myself first observed the true Laura my first day here at the villa, posing as a servant. It was the fact that she was holding unfinished embroidery copying the design on your ring which caught in my mind. The design, as I later observed, was mate to the Red Man’s ring — a phoenix sejant upon a pyre. And on a subsequent visit here Clemens had seen her too, and recognized her from the miniature in Doge Tauro’s possession.”

For a moment her head drooped, face went gaunt and utterly without hope. Then her head went up once more, and now hope was in her face. “And if I do admit it,” she asked, “will you protect me?”

He felt in the muscles of neck and shoulders the weight of heavy burdens, “You have admitted it,” he said. “And I have protected you.”

Even now her eagerness and relief were mixed with fear. “But will you continue to protect me?” she demanded. “It’s not my life alone I fear to lose, for what is the pleasure of this life here compared to that of life hereafter in the Islands of the Blest? I would do anything for him, anything but lose myself inside himself, anything but vanish behind his own overpowering person. For that — don’t you see? — that is the real source, I didn’t know it before but now I do, that is the real source of the Phoenix’s immortality and strength: he assumes his woman, he consumes his woman, he becomes He plus She, but the She vanishes utterly as soul and person, and only the He -soul and -person is reborn. The She has given… and then she is quite gone.”

“I know.”

Fear diminished but did not vanish. If he knew this, then he knew what it was she feared, what the deadly danger really was. And she repeated, “Will you protect me? Will you? Forever? Forever?” Her eyes sought his. A look came over her face, which became tender and almost haunting in its affection. “You will, then. I know.” Her voice sank, she gestured him near. “And I know why, And I know what reward you really want. You shall have it. Forever.”

She reached for his hand. “Come, then,” she said.

But the hand he took was not hers. “I have gone with you once, my Lady,” he said. “And we both know to what result.”

Affection was replaced by stupefaction. “But then… unless… I could never be sure… how could I believe… You prefer her to me? To me Protect me? You? ”

Her face became like that of another person, twisted into a horrible mask; her hands like talons clawed the air. She cursed. She cursed in the formal, liturgical imprecations of Latin, Etruscan, and Greek. She shrieked things which (by Laura’s wincing) could only be maledeictions in the tongue of Carsus. And then, like a veteran fishwife, she flung at him the foulest phrases in the Neapolitan dialect, cursing him with her words, her spittle, her very gestures: her finger made horns, she showed him the fig — the girl, she screamed, was a bastard and a bastard’s child-ill-hap and nothing else were the two of them to Cornelia and to Cornelia’s mother — mirror images, the one of the other.

“Why did I spare her life? I should have drowned her like a mongrel pup at birth! I saved her for this — for this — only for this! Why should she live and I die? I was promised at least five hundred years of life. Should I not even live out my normal span, and this whore’s daughter survive me? No! No! No! ”

Her rage grew more and more uncontrollable and unthinking, surpassing anything that Vergil had ever seen. “But I will destroy her yet!” she shrieked, foam forming on the corners of her lips, her hair torn by furious hands from its careful folds and now seeming to writhe like a gorgon’s, the ointments and paints so carefully applied to her face running and smearing from the tears and sweats of rage, her voice thin and high and trembling. All was ugliness and desperation. “I will destroy her yet! And you! And you! Wizard! Conjurer! Necromant! Mountebank! Bawd and punk and pimp! I will destroy you, too!”

Vile, vile, violent and vivid were the threats which now poured from her pale and cracked lips, she paused to draw a shuddering breath. He said, “My quest is won. At every level, you have disdained me… despised me… repulsed me… I leave you now forever. Phyllis, come.” He turned and, holding the shaking girl by the arm, strode quickly away.

He had not stepped a score of steps when a fearful scream behind spun him around. Cornelia stood where he had left her, but now the Red Man stood beside her, and then the Red Man wrapped his arms around her, and next the flames enwrapped them both. So unthinking was her rage that she had let slip all her watches, wards, and barriers; so that with this, and Vergil’s equally unwitting removal of the ban pronounced before the Lybyan pyre, the Phoenix, from across the leagues and leagues of land and sea, had claimed his bride at last.

It had been useless for Vergil to try to counter those furious flames. He might as well have attempted to quench Vesuvio, or to prevent the blaze which follows the conjunction of the terebolim, those male and female fire-stones. Yet, strange, it seemed the Phoenix had been right: likely that single scream was one of fear alone, for Cornelia had seemed to feel no pain; indeed, while the fire endured and made its great, deep sighing sound, her face grew calm, her body relaxed almost contentedly into her lover’s fiery embrace, her eyes closed upon the world: wrapped and rapt in flames, the both, she all submission, he all triumph. For a while their individual lineaments could be traced within the ashes, then these fused in a way which no merely human eye could fathom, then — very quickly — something lay there which for lack of better or more descriptive word might have been thought of as a great and glowing egg; this cracked in fiery heaps and something stirred and writhed as might a worm…