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

“Naturally.”

“So for a while I did nothing. But my eyes kept bothering me. I’d heard good things of a Greek physician, Tlepolemos. He blamed it on an excess of a humor, and gave me an ointment of dill roots soaked in water. It smelled lovely, but made me belch quite a lot, and, really, my eyes were no better. But I remembered that Tlepolemos had warned me against another Greek, his name was Scamander, and Tlepolemos said that Scamander was the man who’d poisoned Socrates. So I went to him — Scamander, not Socrates, of course.”

“Of course.”

Quint took a sip of his wine. “So I asked Scamander if he’d really poisoned Socrates, and he said No, that was another Greek, named —”

“Tlepolemos?”

“However did you know? Well. You needn’t tell me. You mages have your ways. And then Scamander gave me a very keen look , and he said he could see that, as the result of an excess of a humor, my eyes were badly inflamed. Naturally, I was —”

“Impressed. Naturally.”

Quint went on, “Well, Scamander explained that lots of doctors made up their ointments with suet or lard, which was far too thick. Whereas, he used veal-fat, more delicate. Made sense, I thought. And he gave me a preparation of anise root pounded up well with saffron and wine in veal-fat. It smelled so nice that my cook thought it must be a new sauce for the barley; I must say, it wasn’t bad. But of course I had to send for some more, and I warned the cook to stay away from it, or I’d have him scourged. And I used the stuff until I quite ran out.”

“And your eyes?”

Quint helped himself to a snail farced with ground gammon. “Oh, it made them rather worse; I felt that from the start. Why did I go on taking it? Why, because it smelled so nice.”

Vergil sighed. He rather thought that he had heard enough about Quint, evidently a mere slave to his sense of smell. But clearly Quint did not think so. “Well, I mentioned all this to the dowager, Hypatia. And she said, ‘Oh, you poor man! I know just the thing! Black-flower boiled with iris juice! And I know just the apothecary to see for it — he gets his herbs fresh from the country —’ which is a thing you hardly ever hear of, you know,” he said, as an aside, to Vergil. Who said that he knew.

“All those bundles of herbs lying around. Like my granny’s kitchen when she was going to make salame-sausage,” Quint said. “Your average apothecary’s shop, I mean. She used only the best garlic, regardless of price. Eudoxius of Sessa.”

Vergil was quite sure that Eudoxius of Sessa was not the name of Quint’s granny, however good her garlic, but Quint had mentioned the name as though he expected Vergil to know it. Vergil had never heard of him. And said so. “What, never heard of Eudoxius of Sessa? The man to whom all the old senators used to go and see when they had trouble with swollen veins?” And seeing that Vergil did not understand, Quint, with a grin and a quick graphic gesture, made clear exactly which veins were meant; and Vergil understood that the old senators’ trouble was that they “had trouble” because the veins would not get swollen — a not infrequent problem of old men, whether of senatorial rank or not. “His herbs were fresh, all right, place was like a greengrocer’s; man had agents who’d stay in the country districts, mountains, woods, buying stuff early in the morning from all the canny herb-women who’d been gathering it; they’d send it on to Rome, post-haste, by horseback, in great baskets which the riders had strict orders to sprinkle regularly with cool water in order to keep them fresh. He also kept a good line in otto of rose. How his place smelled!” — But Vergil felt that they had heard quite enough of Eudoxius of Sessa, and about his herbs, and, in fact, about Quint’s eyes and all the nostrums with which he’d doctored them; tactfully, he led the conversation into other channels. And presently they parted.

But that was how he and Quint first met, and from this first meeting grew their friendship. Whenever Vergil visited Yellow Rome, he made a point of meeting Quint.

Sore eyes and ointments, smells and all.

The Nine Roses of Rome consisted of the Six Vestal Virgins, the Empress, a woman of the people selected by lot, and a ninth, who was never publicly identified, but was popularly believed to be The Sybil. The only one who received pay was the woman of the people, who was entitled to every lamb struck by lightning; this happened more often than one might think. What the Nine Roses did was even more of a mystery, as no man was allowed to be present, not the Archiflamen, not the Emperor; not even a eunuch: not a castrate priest of Cybele, not even a natural-born eunuch; not even Cumus, who was allowed to help bathe the Empress and to be present at the Women’s Mysteries, dressed as a woman; and whose gifts included that of making fire by striking his dexter hand against his opposite thigh. Several sacred lamps were thus lit at intervals, but not the sacred fire of Vesta: and, indeed a certain ancient family was charged with the task of keeping guard over Cumus at intervals (which they did with much grace by dining him among the patricians), just to make sure that Cumus did not at those times assume the likeness of a woman and somehow pass as one of the Roses, he was supposed to have at various times been both a priest and a priestess, python and pythonissa, at Delphos. But enough, for now, of Cumus. Popular and current belief no longer held that the Roses recited rhymes to ward off the Gauls, but there was always a whisper that only the Roses kept at bay The Death of Rome. As one Vestal had always to tend the fire, a question inevitable: who, then, was actuually the Ninth? Common sense made very doubtful the truth of the suggestion that one of the group had the power to divide herself in to, pro hac vice. The year that Hugo was the co-consul, “and kept the King’s sword,” a certain Stilicho, merely for suggesting when in wine that there was always a secret seventh Vestal to replace whichever of the regular Six had to go piss, was sent, and in chains, to that city on the far southern frontier of Lybya on route to the Guaramantes and their dogs, where the houses are made of slabs of salt — rose- colored salt, one hears — and then, tooo, onehears that it took only a month for his skin to slough off, instead of the usual year. (The skin, stuffed with fragrant gentian flowers and with yellow oxalis, is on view or not on view somewhere in the warren of the Palatine, where unlicensed cults are compelled to worship, lest their gods be wroth with Rome; and as for Stilicho himself, does he indeed receive worship by the ophioloters in the darkness, who can say?) The Nine Roses of Rome.

The magnate Latulus, who had at one time owned half of Sicily, rich in grain, and was thus said to have his finger-marks on every loaf of bread baked in Rome, had determined to buy the Empire … or, at least, the Crown Imperial — as he might buy another field of wheat. He visited all the Kings — every single King — made immense presents and promised more if he were elected to the next vacancy: no one refused. Averroës was Emperor then. Averroës would ride spirited horses. On one public occasion publicly changed his mount for an even more spirited one on the breath of the moment: at the first prick of the spurs it not only threw him but trampled on him — “If it had been one of the Thracian stallions trained by King Diomedes to deal with unwanted guests” (a problem with which not only kings are vexed), “they would have eaten him as well!” said Quint to Vergil, rubbing his ever-sore eyes: but Quint’s eyes, like the horses of Diomedes, were besides the point, the point was that the Emperor was dead (“he has bought his own death,” the Levantines in Rome said), that there was not, as there sometimes — seldom — was, an emperor-designate, no one could charge or should even suspect conspiracy (well, “no one,” there was, as there always is, some antique ninny-dizzard: he muttered that the priests of Poseidon Horse-breaker, offended by some neglected sacrifice, et sic cetera; sure it was that Poseidon/Neptune was no greatly popular deity with the ever-sea-sick-prone Romans: several passers-by threw used orange-rinds at the antique ninny-dizzard and several others threw used sponges at him, not used at the Baths but used by patrons of the public cloaca to wipe themselves: vox populi, vox dei, and the antiquity withdrew himself in ungainly haste, presumably to mutter in some less public space); and Latulus was elected Emperor by the electoral kings.