Avram Davidson - The Scarlet Fig - Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series

“This side, Brindisy be,” said a boy’s father (perhaps they were going to market with one calf or one colt, a shoat or a young sheep, say, a ewe-tep or a shearling: never more, back then). “And we be Brindisy-folk. Brindisy be foederate with Rome, Mariu. — Here we turn, so; beast, sooo , beast, sooo! We turn, here , and we remain on the soil of our city-state,” (for so he called it, though in truth its statehood was gone, subsumed in that foederate status); “We have the right to go further, Son, and to return, as the wicked again whom that inscription declares have not. But we don’t do so. Not today. And that way lead to Neapoly, which it were a kingdom once, now declined into a dukery or dogery, with its own doge; oh, a rare and rich city, too! Sooo! Keep the creature on the road-path, Mariu; if any man’s beast-creature strays and eats in our field, or, it may be, tilth, be sure we ‘pound it till his owner pay — I see of no ‘scriptin that this field’s owner be doing different — no one puts up a notice, All Beasts May Graze Here! — No! Switch ‘un, Mariu! Haul ‘un by the snout!”

And small Marius would be vigorously obedient, then, for he knew that the switch might fall on shanks not the hairy ones, did a small boy not be observant and obedient. One would not wish to tell one’s father how boys sometimes played forgetfully or furtively or fearfully round about the obelisk with its almost-round meteor-stone on top; or, how, sometimes turning half-aside and hoicking up tunicals to relieve themselves, boys might play rude games. This coarse play of theirs, they barely realizing that young boys are but young men not grown, was only once the subject of comment by any older person. That fellow Bruno, thin as the broth from thrice-boiled bones, had chosen to make his necessity his sport: scarce had he seen how far he spurted, when he (and they all) observed an elder woman pass nearbye: she wore the matron’s saffron veil upon her head and loose-tied beneath her chin; likely the wife of some citizen, but not, since she went afoot, of any rich citizen. The Bruno pretended for a second that he would spray her, too. She did not pause, but she, as she turned away, spoke only the brief words one said to those with neither pride nor shame. “You have no face,” she said. “ You have no face.”

He answered with a hoot; next, mistaking a mere look from another boy for a scornful one, gave him a shove, a painful dig with an elbow. And said, therewith, something very ugly.

Outrage, he, “Mariu,” felt first, then a hate like heat, then a something like convulsion. A confusion and a trembling in the air. Shouts. Fears. Tears. Fleeing and tripping. Terror. Clamor. Alien sound.

Later, peace restored, the lads recounted what they now decided had, after all, really happened. “Then Mariu say to his wee black doggy, ‘Seek ‘eem! Seek!’ And wee doggy goed ‘ reuch! reuch!’ and Bruno he piddle and he leap afar off! Har ho! Where’d he go, wee blacky dog, Mariu, man?”

“Mariu” made some sufficient mumble, and none pressed him for more; for he knew, and perhaps they knew, too, that there had been no black dog.

Of something which had happened to him in his earlier childhood, he had no clear picture, and had never tried to make clear the one he had: as though an actor would not interrupt his role to turn aside and look off-stage. He himself had come on stage, so to speak, that winter day with a falling of large soft snowflakes when the old shepherd, coming upon him in the hills behind Brindusy, had exclaimed ( now he could hear him: even now ), “Eh! Child! Whence comest thou, and whither doest thou go? naked, cold, and all alone …” Had he the child been lost from the house of his father, sturdy old Publius Vergilius Mago? merely lost? soon returned? had he been earlier stolen, later escaped, and then and thus found? Or had he been a child adopted into that family, his true origin as unknown and perhaps unknowable as though he were the Peacock in the Vase of Hermes?

Then, too, in earlier, very early memory, lying on the fleece or, rather, the sheep-fell, which was his only bed, in first dim-light before his aunt grumbled the fire brighter and himself onto his feet to do his chores and stints; even a taste of the boiled spelt or millet-mush yet hours away; before that, lying more-or-less awake in the grey dimness hearkening to the dame snore (different sounds she had made at different hours when his father’s usual bed-place alongside of him was empty for a while), always in that uncanny time he was aware of uncanny things: for one, his eyes wobbled round about and round and for long whiles he could not focus them; for another, one testicle would crawl up into a cave, tiny cave in his own tiny small body, and, in its own time later, come ambling out and sidle down again; the third play-thought-time-untold-of-thing, he would peep at the poker and make it roll from one corner of the fireside to another. Or shift the broom. Or —

No other boys ever said they knew of these things not, but they said nothing of knowing them at all, though they spoke often enough of another early morning thing of which he also knew. So he kept himself quiet. By and by his eyes became stronger and his stones stayed down and it must have been about then that he ceased to push his breath the secret way he knew and to shift broom and poker. And forgot it all. Came the incident of the wrath of Bruno, he had neither thought nor sought, the old familiar pressure came by its own; barely he knew how to suck back what he had forced. And it is dangerous , he thought. I must be taking care.

It was a while before he made a resolve …

The boys had broken into talk.

“Numa — they say? You know? Numa ? they say his cave? — ” “He, Numa, you know, the warlock? they say — old Numa! Can give you a good luckstone, and —”

“— his cave — Numa’s cave? it be, they say, the gate to Hell!”

“My grandsir? you know, my grandsir? Numa, he be a man-sibyl, Numa? my grandsir say so, and —”

No one waited to hear more about his grandsire, they crowded each other, they pushed on the other, raised their voices to compete. “Numa? Hey, say, Numa? You know, bridges between men and the gods? Numa, he —”

And, “He give my old gaffer, once, a potion again the fevers, and he never took no money off him: Numa …”

It happened, as it often will, that all voices went silent at one same time: “Zeus prime,” it was the custom to say, and so one said it; there was not time for even a second one to say it, into the slight silence slid the Bruno: “Numa? He haven’t got no more power,” he said this in a taunting, mocking tone, with no concern for the primacy of Zeus (or Jove, as others say). “ He haven’t got nothing — he’ve grown too old! ” Whereupon several shifted their opinions, for all the world like citizens in some public assembly, quick to echo the loudest voice. But Mariu said no word at all.