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

Zenos was a fine ensample of the old black ship, it did indeed have purp le cheeks with its masts and spars made red with minium; the white sails and the red, black, and purple went very well together. That is, all this had once been so. But many years carrying sacks of wheat and barley and giant jars of oil and eel and tunny and olives in brine, many years of buffeting by the angered seas and wind and salt, had stripped Zenos of every trace of color; even her once-white sails were dirty and dulled. She no longer released the scent of fresh-sawed oak and pine and cedar, she stank of bilges and of all the rotting off-shake and sullage and spillage of many cargoes. Vergil settled his portmantle next to the pack of rations which the porter had carried aboard at his direction. There were to be sure ships which victualed their passengers, but not Zenos , and not for this voyage. He did not need to fumble to reassure himself of his gold, he felt it securely settled where he had set it: here a little and there a little, so it would not be obvious and neither would it unbalance him. And besides his supply of food and the portmantle with changes of clothing he carried a few sundry other articles in his old doe-skin budget. Claudia! I flee into exile for thee!

So said his heart. Aloud, his voice said, “Set it down there. Here is your agreed fee. And here is one coin more.”

Aboard ship: night, the stars and the sound of spray.

The sudden thought, he had found, was like a flash of lightning, and might be compared with the practical consideration, which was like the small dull light of the oil-lamp or the stinking rush-light soaked in suet, lard or tallow and sold at four to the copperkin (in the language of accompt the smallest coin was called the obol and in flash usage this was the stiver: never, though, did it quite lose its old, old name of copperkin, little copper thought it contained anymore … old speech died eventually, but it died hard). The flash of lightning lit up the nighttime sky in greater detail than the noonday sun, a man might note a dragon on the distant horizon in a flash of lightning: in an instant it was gone, see descend again nox niger, the black night. Such a consideration as, Gather thy clothes for the washer-woman was a dim light indeed, and by its glow no one would like to write a poem; but unless one wanted to be deemed a stinkard….

The thought flashed cross his mind, Petition the Emperor To what end? Suppose he asked a reward for saving the Vestal from a fall … if it were granted, then he was safe…. Si licitem , was the way the Emperor concluded his replies to those petitions he was pleased to approve; if licit ; if it were not licit, too bad: of course the Imperial Prerogative (which automatically made all things licit) was something else. The Emperor could slide sideways from granting a reward by a pious hope that the immortal gods might requite the petitioner: still, did not this legitimize, post facto, the petitioner’s act? Who dared say Nay? Hope flared in Vergil’s heart. And in another moment, realizing that the petitioner must give a full description of himself, including where he was to be found, he had a picture of himself waiting, waiting … waiting … all very well if you tilled a farm and had petitioned to be free of mill-tax. But did he wish to be bound to any place, any one place? And suppose the marmosets (as they were called, the little fellows who — despite whatever high-flown titles — attended to the Emperor’s niggling small affairs for him) suppose the marmosets , perhaps in accord with the Archiflamen, decided that it was not licet? Did Vergil really want to call attention to himself and his deed? let everyone know where he might be found, should it come to that, by the lictor with his bundle of rods bound around a single-headed axe? He had no reason to think that he had actually been identified, though to be sure the Vestal herself had surely noticed him ( noticed! had the same flame of fire run up her arms and down through her heart and into her privy female parts? she was a sacred and a holy woman: but she was a woman !) and even in the dreams which he and Quint had dreamed, she was not shy of declaring that notice —

The flash of lightning died away quite, leaving him in darkness. He had had a madcap notion, but it was gone, he would certainly send no message to the Palace Imperial; the Vestal would stay in Rome, she would certainly not go to Corsica, and if she had a great desire to drink of its sweet waters and to taste of its fragrant acorn meal, why! they might be brought to her; she would stay in Yellow Rome to feed the sacred fire, and had assuredly no desire to attend her own public funeral while she was still alive. And he? He would certainly never come near to Yellow Rome again for a very long time. A very long time.

“This one here, to thy left — shall we cut his heart and take his purse and cast him privily to the monsters of the deep?” — what was this?

He realized instantly that this was the pair of foreign men, his fellow-passengers, who were they, he’d asked the bosun; Corsicans? And the man had answered, carelessly, “Carthagans,” and turned to his ropes. Vergil had spent enough time in Sidon to ken well the Punic speech, was not Tyre (“Toor,” they called it there, from its towering rocky citadel) the next city on the Punic coast of the Levant, and had it not in Africa founded Carthage? Instantly, too, he realized this was a trick: did he cry for the captain the Punes would loudly scorn him for not kenning a familiar-enough shipboard-type of jest or jape: neither was this either jest or jape. He stretched, yawned, slipped off his shoes and explored the skin between one set of toes with the toes of the other foot. “Scorn him,” almost by second nature they did already scorn him; their first encounter on the ship he had greeted them. They paid him no more mind than if a hen had farted. Big men, vastly bearded, there was a suffused rosiness in their skin but it was not a European rosiness. Wild, fantastic, handsome men. Arrogant, too. What did they here? Corsica had been a Punic fief once, indeed, but that was long ago. Odd. What did they here?

“Doesn’t understand,” murmured one; almost at the same time the other grunted, “The dolt wots nothing.” It had been a trick, done to test if he could ken their speech. At once they switched to Latin.

That is, one of them did. With an almost theatrical gesture and a sort of sub-theatrical voice, he quoted the proverb, “‘Like burning Elba in the dark of night.’” The forges of Elba were famous to the point of commonplace. Vergil said to himself, Like Elba, yes: in the dark of night, a light to guide by; ashore, in daytime, it would probably bewilder, with its guideless mazeways between the toiling, moiling forges — the Labyrinths of Elba, they were called. Olive-shaded Elba, shades of the days there before the Age of Iron; say, also, olive-haunted Elba; and where was oft-seen the pallid cheek-bones of the Frank, come to buy well-worked forged iron for the battle-hammer and the spiked battle-flail called “morning-star.”

But aloud Vergil merely said, “Some little sight.”

The Pune who had not spoken to him growled in his native tongue, “Ruman dog, die costive!” And at once the other remarked, in a tone of one already tired of the talk, “My brother does not know Latin well,” and turned aside. What was the point of this charade or masquerade? why had they not simply kept aside to themselves? A moment’s thought told him that the answer lay in the brisk wet wind: in this corner of the ship one was more sheltered; though this might cease in an instant, did the wind or ship change course — outwardly, he merely gave a sleepy grunt, and stretched some more, pulling his mauntle over him.