Avram Davidson: The Phoenix and the Mirror

Clemens had gone home, shaking his massy head and muttering, but had promised to return the next day to discuss the making of a major speculum. Vergil, alone, found study impossible. And so, he reflected, here he was, instead, discussing cats with an ancient madwoman. It was a diversion of a sort, and required less effort than most. And her withered womanhood could not taunt his missing manhood.

“How fortunate for Kingdom,” he said. “But you will miss him, Dame Allegra.”

She crooned, wordlessly, while her cats scrabbled on the roof and clawed the walls of her hovel of a hut. So she lived, so she desired to live.

“My lady fears for the fire,” she said, breaking off her keening.

The door of the Sun and Wagon burst open with a splash of yellow light and a stink of sour wine and the noise of teamsters and drovers and tavern wenches and tapsters; then it swung shut again, and in the faint echo Vergil asked, “What lady?”

Somehow he knew the answer without knowing how he knew it.

“It’s the Empire that’s wanted, my lord,” the madwoman mumbled, scuffling about for another handful of fish tripes to fling to her horde of pets. The bitter, nasty smell of their staling and spraying brought the basil leave to his nose again, but not before he was reminded of creatures more noisome — and more dangerous — than a pack of cats.

“Cornelia,” he said, half aloud… though his conscious thoughts had been elsewhere… Cornelia… musk and roses… but for the present and indefinite future, more dangerous than any, more dangerous than all. If I must search the dark halls of Hell, then let Hell itself be harrowed.…

“Cornelia,” he repeated.

“The Empire is what’s wanted. Leo! Myra! Nettlecomb! Orpheus! Hither to me, my conies. Dame Allegra will feed ye. She’s not for the fire, nay…”

The old woman’s voice died away. Was it the Samaritans who claimed that after the destruction of their temple by Pompey the gift of prophecy had passed to children, fools, and madmen? There was no use calling to this one, now. In her hut, on her sack of straw, warm and verminous and covered with cats as with a blanket, Dame Allegra had bid the day good-bye. It was time, Vergil considered, that he do the same.

Below and later, in his bedchamber, he considered his own day, and some of the questions it posed. Why did the manticores, who shunned light, collect lamps? How long would he have to postpone his attempt at their habitations? Would it not have been better had he never gone there? What did the proconsul hope to find in Egypt — rest? Plunder? Wisdom? How did Allegra know that he had been with the Queen of Carsus? What was “the fire?” How long would it take to make the speculum? How long would Cornelia wait? How could he still love her? How could he not?

He cleared his mind of all these questions by constructing in it a diagram of great potency and then concentrating on the center of this, in which lay absolute nothingness. Gradually, slowly at first, then more rapidly, the diagram faded away and simultaneously something else took shape in the center before the gaze of his inner eyes.

A door.

He saw himself get up, walk forward, open and step through it. He saw it close, saw it fade and vanish. Once again there was nothingness.

The humming was that of bees. He could not see them any more than he could see Mount Hymettus. He could smell the sweet scent of the violets growing on its slope, though, the rich carpet of flowers nourishing the bees. Illiriodorus sat upon his stool, and he at the old man’s feet, happy in knowing that the old philosopher was alive; vaguely troubled at recalling he had dreamed he was long dead. “A handful of wheat will do, my son,” Illiriodorus was saying. The other students weren’t present; whether they were in the Agora or where they were, Vergil neither knew nor cared.

“A handful of wheat, the flight of a flock of birds, the liver of a victim, an oracle or a prophecy. The truth exists and the truth can be known. It exists in everything and you exist in everything and therefore it exists in you.”

“Yes,” said Vergil.

“Since the truth exists in you, as well as existing outside of you, it is only necessary to bring it — somehow — out from inside, up from below, down from above. For this the focus is necessary, the precipitator. A speculum of virgin bronze will do as well. In this particular instance, perhaps it will do better than those others I mentioned.”

“Yes,” said Vergil. There was a small table by the sage’s side, and on the table was a bowl of honey, the fragrant and delicious honey of Mount Hymettus. Leisurely, he reached his hand toward it.

“No,” said Illiriodorus, warding off Vergil’s hand with his own. The bowl fell, falling slowly, striking the floor with the noise of a bell. Illiriodorus smiled, raised his hand in farewell. The sound of the bell echoed infinitely and echoed forever.

There was a painted room and in it lay a figure with waving hair and full lips, a figure that was human-like, but as a great doll might be human-like. This figure, which was neither man nor woman, made an agonized face and turned the face away from him. But he was in front of it, facing it; he was always facing it. The creature groaned, closed its eyes, opened them a moment later — hopefully, fearfully.

“Still there,” it said. “Still there,” moaned the epicene voice.

He said nothing.

The room was brightly, almost garishly, painted, as it might have been by a somewhat talented child, with the figures of people whose faces — eyes round as circles rimmed all about with long lashes; red spheres for cheeks; double cupid’s-bow mouths — whose faces were turned full frontward but whose bodies stood sideways underneath trees almost their own size and alongside flowers even taller; with the pictures of striped and dotted birds, blue dogs, red cats, green marmosets… an almost insane panorama which, still, arrested rather than repelled.

“I have had this dream before,” whimpered the figure on the bed, sexless as a doll. “I know I have, and I have caused it to be written down and I have referred it to the Wise Men and the Chaldeans and I have consulted learned Jews and even the Women Who Serve ‘Ditissa… no one has given me a good interpretation, not one.” It looked at him, consumed with woe and self-pity and a measure of genuine foreboding and horror.

It wept a little and it sniveled.

He said nothing.

“I would give you what you desire, if I knew what it was. You smell of Rome to me, and of all known things I fear of the Romans. They burn and they slay and they carry off captives. Go away!” it screamed. “I will not have this dream! Go away! Go…”

He was in a chamber hewn out of solid rock. A candelabrum of three lamps supplied thin light. The room was not large, and it was crowded. Matrons wrapped about the head with gauzy veils were there, and those whose dirt and ragged nakedness proclaimed them to be slaves of the lowest sort. A patrician was there, next to him an apprentice boy, next to him a girl in a rustic robe. Vergil seemed to be up toward the front; others, whom he could not see, pressed close around him.

Up at the very front was a table bearing vessels, some of common use, others whose function and design were unknown to him. To one side stood an old man with a long gray beard, his countenance thin so that the bones showed.

“Yet a little while, my children,” he said, “and all this shall pass away. Why do they persecute us, indeed? And why do they harry us? Have we swords? Do we plot rebellion? Are we bandits or brigands, pirates or thieves, to be treated thus? Ah, no, my children. We are weak, we are few, we are humble, we are peaceable. We are here to worship our Lord and Savior Daniel Christ, who gave His flesh to be eaten by lions and His blood to be licked by them, in order that we might be saved and have everlasting life.”