Avram Davidson: The Phoenix and the Mirror

Clemens drew in his breath. His vast figure seemed to swell. He cast his eyes around the book-crowded room as though looking for the words just mentioned. His face grew red, and he rested his clenched fist upon a curious globe whose surface was covered with a painted map according to the theories of that Aristarchus who taught that the world was round.

“Listen,” he said. “You have had these books as long as I have known you. We have long been friends. You knew of my desire for them. What is this Cornelia to you, that now and only now you offer me this gift to gain my help? Did she threaten you? And with what threat? Did she bribe you, cozen you, slip the gold and ivory key to her chamber into the palm of your hand? The time and the toil it will take to gratify her whim — if it can be gratified at all! — why… ”

His voice died away, growled in his chest.

Vergil’s face twitched, and he pushed away the scrolls. “Time and toil… I worked two years for the Soldan of Babylone, that wise and great man,” he said, “casting two hundred and twenty-one nativities in order to find one man whose elevation alone could prevent rebellion and bloodshed, after which I devised a system of gates and sluices for the Soldan’s canals whereby one province could be saved from flood and two others from drought. At the end of those two years he took me by the hand and led me through his treasury, gold and silver and ivory and emeralds and purple, he led me in by the nearer door and let me out by the farther one. And then he said to me, ‘It is not enough.’ And he gave me as my wages those two books of the music of the Eastern Kings.…

“Do you think he did not value them, or value my time and my toil? Do you imagine that I do not value them, merely because I do not understand them? When it is time for the chick to crack the shell, no heralds are needed to blow trumpets. Time and toil.… On my way back from Babylone I traveled through Dacia and stayed one night at the same rude inn with the magnate Lupescus, who farms the revenues from the Imperial mines in that rich land. I heard him tell of the tedious and wasteful process which they used in having slaves pick over the buckets of rubble brought up from the earth. Then and there, remembering what I had done for the Soldan, I sketched for Lupescus with a piece of charcoal on a piece of board a plan whereby the same work could be done with sluices of water — cheaper, quicker, better.

“He gave me into my own hands a thousand ducats of gold, and horses to carry them, and every year he sends me a thousand more. It is useful to have, but I do not particularly value it, for I know he does not either — he must make by that process alone easily a hundred thousand a year — and besides, I earned it in a few minutes.… From time to time I ask myself, Did I really toil two years’ time for the Soldan of Baby lone, or for Lupescus? And, if for Lupescus, was it not rather for five hundred of his slaves whom my discovery freed from labor which drew blood from their fingers when they worked fast and blood from their backs when they did not?”

Clemens cleared his throat. He pursued his lips. “You’ve become quite a philosopher,” he said at last. “Well, well. Very well. You shall have my help and we shall see what chick hatches from this egg. And now, Master Vergil, allow me to point out to you that there are two requirements which must be fulfilled before anything at all can be done toward making a major speculum — and both requirements are impossible of fulfillment!”

He lifted one wing of his moustache with his stylus and leered on that one side. Then, replacing the stylus in the writing case fastened to his belt, he held up two huge and hairy fingers. He pressed down one. “You cannot get ore of tin.” He pressed down the other. “You cannot get ore of copper,” he said.

With a slight sigh Vergil leaned across and pulled the casque down over the globe on the table. He got up and stretched, his shadow gesturing grotesquely in the now dimmer light. “I know we cannot,” he said, yawning. “Nevertheless, we will.”

WESTWARD INTO the the sea the last rose strokes of sunset painted the sky. Smoke of wood and charcoal drifted up to Vergil leaning over the parapet on his roof. Fish and squid, lentil and turnip, bread and oil and garlic, and a little meat — Naples was having its supper before retiring for the night; though few in Naples would have all of these for supper. A few horses still thumped their way down the street below, and a single heavy cart rumbled. Horses and cart were probably heading for the great stable at the foot of the hill. Women spoke in tired voices, filling their amphoras at the Fountain of Cleo. A baby cried somewhere, the sounds of its wailing thin upon the cool air. The lights of tiny oil lamps flickered like fireflies, and here and there the mouth of a brazier glowed, redly and briefly, as someone fanned the embers or blew upon them through a wooden tube. From the Bay came the faint thump-thump of a galley bailiff beating out the rhythm for the rowers as the ship put into port.

“Abana! Bacchus! Camellia! Dido! Ernest! Fortunata! Gammelgrendel! Halcyon!… Halcyon?”

The voice called nearby. Someone clapped hands, summoning. “Halcyon? Ah… my pretty! Come along, come along.… India! Jacynto! Leo! Leo! Leo… ?”

The old madwoman was crying her cats home. Vergil walked to the side of the parapet, plucking a sprig of basil from one of the flower pots and bruising it between his fingers. He held the fragrant leaf to his nose and leaned over.

“Dame Allegra, where is Kingdom?” he asked. She fed her covey of cats on the innards of fish and whatever other offals she could gather up, poking about the streets and wharves and alleys in her stained and tattered gown. Sometimes a choicer scrap of victual fell her way, from someone who pitied her or — more likely — feared her for the Evil Eye; this she ate herself. Not because she was better or more deserving than the cats, she would explain. Because her taste had been corrupted and theirs was still natural.

“Kingdom?” Her voice came clearer now, as though she had lifted her head and was peering up through the darkness. “Kingdom, my lord, hath gone back to Egypt. Often did he tell me he would, an the season were aright for’t. To fare upon the sea, my lord, in these crank craft — nay, it were not befitting my handsome goddikin — in one of these common and stinking galleys? Nay, sir. But yestere’en, when the moon were all o’ gold, saith he to me, Cat Kingdom saith — Allegra, nursling mine, th’ imperial galleon goeth a-post tomorrow to Alexandria with my lord the proconsul aboard of her. And I’m half of a mind, sith, to gang along of him.”

And so, while the deep blue deepened into purple and thence to black, she crooned her madwoman’s tale of how Kingdom (a lean and rangy tom with scarred flanks) had been welcomed aboard as befit his demidivinity, provided with silver dishes and golden drinking bowls, and had sailed for home, promising to speak good words for her to Sphinx and to sacred Bull Apis and to all the hieratic hawks and crocodiles.… The truth of the matter, Vergil reflected, was that he — Cat Kingdom — had probably been knocked on the head by some starveling slum-dweller and was even now stewing with an illicit onion and a clove of stolen garlic and a borrowed bay leaf. Naples was known to relish a dish of “roof rabbit” when the chance and an empty belly occurred together.

Of course, it was not altogether impossible that some pious Egyptian actually had picked up the cat and taken it back to be cuddled and cosseted and reverenced in a village by the Nile for the rest of its life; and to be embalmed and entombed and worshiped after it died. What was fact and what was fancy? With old Allegra, it was often hard to know — and not with her alone.