Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“The spook box,” he said.

Everybody has read of someone’s jaw dropping. Hers now dropped.

After a moment it was back in place.

“‘Well, I’ve heard the expression, too. But I…we…never knew what it meant,” he said. “What does It—?”

She had somewhat recovered. He saw her swallow. But she did not ask for a glass of water, or even if she might sit down. She was game . “Well, it was an old family story. I mean, old . It was a…‘now you see it and now you don’t’ sort of thing. Every now and then it would turn up. By the time it would take for someone to go and tell about it, by the time someone would come back, it was…well… gone . As though it had some kind of a hex on it.”

Theo said, “Maybe he had cheated the pow-whaw man on a bale of furs, or something. Or maybe his father had. They didn’t get rich buying dear and selling cheap, that’s for sure. Well . Guess we’ll never know.”

She agreed that, probably, they never would. “But when I saw it and touched it myself, I knew that if there really had been a hex! on it, the hex was really off it now. Woman’s intuition; I really have to go.” And she really went.

Sometimes dreams come true . Among the (few) things which TDD had brought with him in his latest move was the old toolbox, its last remembered use being the dismantling of a hen-house: “It smells , is ‘why,’” said Mrs. Delafont James De Brooks, nee Puckelman. The box was far more well-built than the hen-house had been, and it must have taken him an hour to get it open, his heart beating, beating, beating. How many years? Over three hundred years. What did he have to show for it? A lifetime of unrealized hopes. And many sly tricks, most of which never worked. How was he going to handle the matter? Some of the gold coins he would sell in Boston. Some he would sell in New York. Some in Philadelphia. Some in Baltimore. No dumping. And then he would catch a plane. Where to, a plane? Jamaica… Barbados… Curacao…and… Ella…?

He never doubted for a minute what, exactly, was inside the box.

He was right.

Mrs. Thatcher was right, too.

The story of how the traveling-chest made of cedar-wood and black bull’s-hide got packed into a snug box and how it found its way into The Great Repository and what had happened to the poor Old Patriot Patroon and why it had lain abandoned for almost two centuries would never, certainly, now be known. And as for the rich De Brookses, screw the rich De Brookses. They had had their chance. Chances.

And maybe the pow-whaw man taught the Patriot Patroon the hex.

The chest was easier to break into than the heavy outer box had been. The black bull’s-hide crumbled easily. The cedar was sturdy, but the builders had not built it precisely snug, and the crowbar fitted between the gaps. Theo felt a slight difficulty in breathing; there was fortunately a bottle kept in case of emergencies; as he sipped, these words came into and ran through his mind: Seventy-five silver Pieces of Eight Royals, and the rest all in gold: gold escudos, golden guineas, golden louis, gold doubloons: every one of the rightful heritage of Theodore Delafont De Brooks.

And sometimes they don’t.

The treasure chest of the Patriot Patroon contained not a brass farthing nor a pewter shilling nor two copper pence, and certainly neither silver nor gold. Witnesses had seen that it had once been packed with metal money. But Wouter Cornelius De Brooks had not been called the Patriot patroon for nothing; it was not in word alone that he had supported the Continental Congress: he had trusted in its currency as well; and sometime during that mysteriously missing month he had exchanged every single piece of hard money for paper money, and the fruits of this exchange filled the chest. How unpatriotic, then, how cruel, on the part of whoever it was who had first used the phrase, Not worth a continental.

The Continental Congress had been gallant.

But it had not stuck around to pay.

The ancient, the august, the almost-noble house of De Brooks, for reasons which Theobald Delafont had never known and would never know, had smitten him, innocent as he was, more than one blow: and this one more and greatest blow, it had waited more than two hundred years to smite.

The greatest.

But the last. Had he, though, been entirely innocent? Had he not wasted his life on a dead claim to a dead name? Was there not, waiting in the chest, one message of great worth? Lay thy burden down , it seemed to say. It had to say something , didn’t it? He spent another while neatly dividing the old paper money into two equal portions, and in neatly wrapping and addressing them. One to Muskrat Sump. And one to Parkill Ridge. And in the upper left-hand corner of each he wrote, Wouter Cornelius De Brooks . It was morning by now, the post office would soon be open. And…then …? Mullet River was so small that he could not even find it on the map in the Atlas.

But he could look for it, on or off the main-traveled roads. There was lots of time.

“Yellow Rome,” at first merely a pervasive image, suggesting the sunbaked brick, the searing sky, the soap-shy vulgus with their stained tunics, a condemned convict uncontrollably urinating; but in the hands of Avram Davidson it becomes something else, a resonant incantation. Yellow Rome! Teeming, filthy, and magnificent, where even a magus might lose himself.

In the hands of Avram Davidson, everything becomes something else. The Yellow Rome of Emperor Julius I is not that of history. Julius Caesar wasn’t an emperor, for one thing. Every citizen most certainly did not carry knives as described here. In fact, the Julian law forbade them to. (This law coming to the attention of most readers — and most Romans — when repealed some four centuries later, as the center could not hold, mere anarchy was loosed upon the world, and the government told the provincials, “We cannot protect you. Go ahead and carry knives. Good luck!”)

What we have here is ancient Rome seen through the filter of medieval remembrance, the setting of two exemplary Davidson novels , The Phoenix and the Mirror and Vergil in Averno, based on the curious legend that Vergil, the author of the Aeneid, was also a sorcerer. Davidson, the most playfully erudite of fantasy writers, brought the exploits of Vergil Magus irresistibly to life.

“Yellow Rome” is the opening chapter of the unpublished third Vergil Magus novel, The Scarlet Fig. It is Avram at his atmospheric and arcane best. Read it for the pleasure of Avram’s presence and Avram’s unique voice.

IN ROME — YELLOW ROME! Yellow Rome! — a man was being led to public execution. Aristocrats might be quietly done-in in dungeons; this was no aristocrat. Some common thug, a street-robber by night, or a house-breaker; thick and shambling, ill-made and ill-looking, he had killed a cobbler’s apprentice for a stiver — the smallest coin. The lictor went first, carrying the bundle of rods which might be used to flog the criminal (but wouldn’t) wrapped around the single-edged axe which might be used to cut off his head (but wouldn’t). It was a symbol only, and the lictor looked bored and disdainful. Then, arms bound behind him at the elbows, legs hobbled with ropes, the felon followed between two files of soldiers. Grasping him fast by a noose round his neck came the common hangman: one might have had them change clothes and places and scarcely told them apart.