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

One day in the Principality of Poyle (some called it Apulia) an older man had taken him upon a certain mountain and pointed out to him far-off lines, faint to be sure, and only to be seen when the light was at the proper angle. “Them be the rows where the Oldern People cultivetted their crop, young scholard,” said he.

“The lines of their plowing?”

And the older man had repeated, “… plowing …” in a certain tone a bit sardonic; then said he, “The yearth be like a woman, for once man have had she, she be never the same again no more.” Adding, after a moment, that he wasn’t sure that “the Oldern People” had had plows. And afterwards, the slow trip down, he had told Vergil to take abundance of thistle for a sign that men had once builded there. And he showed him the fairly rare plant called virginsbreath as sign that men had never builded there, nor so much as delved the ground with digging-tool. And a few things more had he told him about plants and about stones — addlewort, a sure cure for scattered wits, and bloodstone, which would stanch a bleeding wound; and of trees never to be strick by lightning, and weather-signs and things safe to do and things not safe to do, and how to do them and how to do them not. And when, as regards times and seasons and hours. Almost, Vergil had expected to hear him mutter, that Lord Saturn was e’er a malign stellation.

But he did not.

There was, however, save for that sole and faintly suggestive line, no sign that man had ever digged, delved, or builded here; or that even it had ever been a place of verdant virgin loveliness.

By and by, pace never slowing, never quickening, they came to a great grey rock a-sticking up above the desert floor like the standing-stone to mark a grant’s grave: a Titan or a Cyclops, perhaps: and here the line turned left. Here the line turned left, but, save for the gant grey rock behind them now and the was it a low mountain rather nearer or a high mountain yet very far away? — save for these two extrusions from the surface of this world of stone, there was no other difference that Vergil could see. A huge large lump of rock as limp and yellow as a pudding was twin to the one he had seen yesterday, and the heap of rock the size of a house like some great coagulated mass of mulberry juice was twin to the one he had seen the day before yesterday. — was it the day before yesterday? or the day before that? He was no longer sure … of that, of anything else … then the way began to sink slowly into some vast declivity, and the great grey rock behind and the hill (was it a hill ?) before them in the distance shimmering with heat alike went out of sight. Vergil adjusted the length of blue and white checked cloth so that it enclosed most of his face, and slumped yet once more into his saddle. Tingitayne slumbering in the sun, Volu-whatever it was, the thick forests of Corsica, even teeming Naples and the once ever-present in his mind and eagerly longed for elaboratory, Yellow Rome straddling the yellow Tiber, the Land of the Lotus-eaters, and even, even “the Region called Huldah” and the battle on the sea, all seemed to subside into a formless and not so much dull as dulled confusion like some dream in which he was dim aware yet uninvolved; of two things alone was he as well aware as if he were wide awake: one was the clear blue eyes of the Vestal Virgin and the lightening stroke touch of her as he held briefly, so briefly — her arm; and the other was of Huldah herself as he looked down into her face and heard her voice, I shall build for you a fire (as though she had not already availed for him a fire from which he got a joyful heat).

I pardon that man! what? what?

“I pardon that man,” someone was saying next to him, and it was no dream, no dream alone, nor was it either a waking dream: Caniacus was riding alongside of him, and — “I pardon that man,” was saying — “had one man slain my Mother and ravished my sister, and had he later, my rage and my desire to flay him slowly still unachieved, still, had he had to come and live here … here … in this one such place … yet: I pardon that man.”

More than half dazed, the immense fatigue and pain accumulating during this journey having subdued his mind, and that aching sleep or drowse into which he had fallen, still bemusing it, Vergil looked up, but the face of Caniacus was masked as usual so he turned his head and looked whither Caniacus was looking. A vast red eroded rock lay before them, how long had he sat lolling and dozing in his saddle-seat? many cracks and caves were in that hill of solid yet eroded stone: they had come up from that sunken place, that declivity, and a high and wide red rock half as large as some small city, as though its virons had been walled and yet its walls thrown down, as though it were a castello of wide extent slumping from age and from immemorial decay, this lay before him now to see: no dream.

And from the cracks and flaws and fissure and ravines, from the caves and from the holes, down from the shelves and cliphts, streamed slowly a muckle many men; each, as he walked slowly … limped … crawled … hobbled … hopped … climbed … each slowly unwinding from round his head and face a concealing head-cloth: how slow, how reluctant, how without (it seemed) will to object, but yielding to the necessity of their condition, like so many men before the block or platform for auction in a slave market, in some mart of slaves, those who submitted to whatever fate had made them property were stripping off their clothes, surrendering a last pretense to privacy and private status and private will: that the prospective buyers, even the pretensive and pretending public, might see their nakedness, their shame, their once proud forms reduced to something not entirely human … not entirely at all did these strip and expose themselves, only they revealed their faces.

Merely from this heap, this red and eroded rock a habitation, the habitants descended and exposed their red, eroded faces: pitted, cracked, falling and fallen down the features of what must be their faces, for what else could they be ? Hoarse his voice and strained with effort to control its trembling, Vergil whispered, “My body and my god! Caniacus! what men are these? what place is this?”

And the Masked Man who needed never unmask and never (never but once) did reveal his own unblemished face, he, Caniacus made answer: “You who saved my life: save it never not from such a destiny and fate as this. These are the men who in order to save their own brother-twins from the preordination that one of each pair must accept leprosy else must each and both contract it: these are the brothers who chose to accept in order to save everyone of them his twin, they have come here to endure their lives as lepers, and their brothers of the salvation send them clothes and victuals and all needed needful things, and sometimes things unneedful; it is we the caravans and cafflemen who bring all such to them. This is called The Rough Place …”

It was not until the next day that he was able to follow Benninaly up a winding flight of steps, each step deeply worn in the center from passing feet and some sort of laithly line a-pressed upon the wall nighest each step, worn place in the step and uncleany line upon the wall of the great rough rock where the habitants pressed with their hands (or what was left of them) to steady them as they clumb and clambered, doubtless often pausing to gasp a breath: the vatic voice it seemed to murmur aside his ear-holes something of what dread hands and what dread feet. Benninaly he had seen lately often times carrying packs and bails and articles padded and wrapped in sacking; it must have been hither, out of sight from the shelf of solid rock and shifting scree, that Benninaly had continued to hump them up, stooping forward but stopping not. And now he had gestured Vergil to follow him on one last such trip, and Vergil followed after him. He did not, his feet being shod, disdain to step into the hollows of the steps, but sooner he should have fallen to his death with raw head and bloodied bones than clutch support from the wallside where appeared unctuous line and smear.