“This,” he said, speaking somewhat slowly, “is what is called a map….” A grunt or two, or three. Then again silence.
“This is what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops, if …” His voice trailed off; from the audience had come a “nuh!” part-puzzled, part emphatic. The might had made no impression; in truth, what was displayed on the wall, the light magnified, reflected, refracted, expanded and projected along the long neck of the glass bottle and its stopper and passed through the transparent charts onto the whitened wall-space, was not “what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops.” Not without the automatic exercise of an imagination already enriched by a knowledge of, and experience with, maps or charts. Absorbed in the tasks of, first, preparing the diagrams, and, secondly, now, illuminating them upon the wall surface, Vergil had neglected, had forgotten, that neither such knowledge nor such experience was common enough to be taken for granted. Should he now try to explain? Begin to try to explain?
Almost without considering, he said, “Hippocrates, who reminds us that waters, airs, and places have their special powers, also reminds us, in his Aphorisms, that ‘Life is short, and art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and — ’ ”
But many mutters, much mumbling, and a general restiveness all informed him that quotations from learned sources, however apposite, were not what were now required. There was not time, and so he had perforce to use an easier way.
Slowly, but not so slowly as to lose the audience’s attention, the lines and marks and spots, circles, squares, triangles, grids began to change. . blur. . melt. . shift. . take shape. . shapes….
“There is on the wall a picture!” someone suddenly cried, high-voiced.
The magnates, as with one sudden motion, moved forward, stirred, gave a shuddering, muttering sigh. And one of them, and well did Vergil know which one of them, said, “See! He is a wizard!” It was not that there was, now, suddenly, a picture on the wall where a moment ago there had not been one; not this, alone. It was not that it was, now really was “what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops”; not this, alone. It was not even that the smokes rose and the fires flared (as those in common pictures did not); not this, alone. It was something else and more, something for which they, the great magnates of Averno, the city Very Rich, not in conception nor vocabulary very rich at all, had no word, for they had no conception of it: It was that the picture, with its moving smokes and flaring fires, was not drawn — if in fact they thought of it as being “drawn” — in the two dimensions of length and breadth alone. They were looking at something that had depth as well. It was as though someone or something had suddenly transported them in one body to the top of one hill, and showed them what might be seen, lying there below. As though they, feeling chairs and couches beneath them, were somehow somewhere else in a dark night. . and, looking down, saw the familiar city, Very Rich, which they so much controlled, there beneath them in what passed in Averno for brightest day.
Some of them groaned, as though, being aboard a storm-shaken ship, they felt not so much the oft-jested-of nausea but that grim seasick vertigo that may so painfully affect every atom of the body. One kept asking, in a tone both sharp and high, “What? What? What?” Others moaned. And one sole magnate, Vergil did not bother trying to discover which one (neither, it seemed, did any other one), without one spoken sound, fell with a massively heavy thud to the floor.
But the servant, the slave, he who held the map that was marked Alpha, scarcely moved a sinew.
“… and somewhat to the right of the upper left corner,” Vergil said, feeling rather like a docent in an art school, “is what was called the Old Works….”
This had an immediate and calming effect upon the magnates; a picture, suddenly visible upon a blank wall, parts of which moved, and in three dimensions, was something for which unfamiliar was a weak description. But — the Old Works? — they had all heard of the Old Works, this was something with which minds could grapple. “Torto! Torto! He was there — Torto, he been there, when they was working the Old Works! Not so, Torto Magnate?”
And a voice, still deep, but with a trace of quaver, said, as though coming awake with a start, “Uh! Yuh! The Old Works …” And indeed, somewhat to the right of the upper left corner, a part of the picture now sprang into detail. It was disproportionate to the picture as a whole, but no one minded that, perspective was not one of the arts of Averno (scarcely was it one of the arts anywhere else, largely it had yet to be moved from the mage’s elaboratory to the artist’s studio and surface). And in this new and moving image one saw men at work, toiling, sweating, mixing the ore with the charcoal on the open-hearth bloomery in one place, raking the molten mass in another; elsewhere the smith holding the crude ingot with his tongs and turning it, white-hot, as the striker smote it with his hammer, not pausing to brush off the sparks that flared briefly in the thickets of their shaggy breasts…. All this. And more.
Vergil had never seen the Old Works, abandoned long before he was born. But Torto had seen it, old Magnate Torto; and it was from his memories (clear as cloudless day as to this past, though doubtless not so clear as to the events of even yesterday) alone that the scene took and kept form, shape, mingled with the light, upon the wall. As sudden as appeared, this, sudden, vanished. Torto had forgotten. Or wished no longer to remember.
If Torto had found it a strain, Vergil found it not much less of one: controlling the sunlight, concentrating it, projecting it, causing an image in three dimensions to appear — and maintaining that appearance. “Magnates,” he said, “pray pay close attention to what I am now going to tell you, for you are paying me to tell it to you….” He had them, there. In Averno, one did not pay for nothing; if one paid for something, one made use of it. As the farmer, appraising the old crone ewe, teeth so gone she can scarce eat grass, considers if he may still get one more lamb from her before she is given over to that butcher’s knife unto which every sheep is born, so in Averno every slave who labored (and every slave labored, one way or another) was closely appraised as age took toll and wearing wastage claimed its tax: Was the thrall’s labor worth another year’s victualing? For if not, out with him, out upon him, he might live by free labor — if he could — he might beg in the streets, though who, in Averno, save perhaps the occasional foreigner, would give alms?. . He might slump his way to the city gate and wait turn and chance to guide for a penny. . he might well not bother, but merely crawl and thraw his way to the common bone-pit. Thus and so reminded that they had, in effect, commissioned Master Vergil to delve and to devise answers, the magnates prepared to attend closely and to pay heed. True: They had paid him nothing yet (save for the few courtesy coins and the courtesy few robes), but, true, it was assumed that they were going to do so.
They paid, now, close heed to what he was about to tell them. Therefore.
“I will shortly change the picture back into what is called a map. On this, sirs, symbols take the place of pictures. . or, we may say, sometimes: Very small pictures take the place of very large ones; else there would not be room. For example of a symbol, on each piggett of iron forged in this very rich city is stamped the letter A, and A is in this case a symbol for Averno….” Still on its side the long-necked glass vessel, it struck him now how this vessel might be used in occamy, or alchemy, as some called it, but he did not even try to remember by what name the ampulla might be called in that other discipline. It lay, still, on its side, still a-point toward the wall, light issuing from its stoppered mouth and (it seemed) some vapors playing round about that — like, almost, steam, or fume. In a small second’s pause he became aware, again, of the incessant thump-thum-thump of the thousand forges; in a second more he had forgotten it again. He explained to the magnates how a small trident symbolized fire upon his map: One by one the fires blazing in the picture faded and were replaced by symbols of flame. He told them how a triangle symbolized a forge: See then the forges fade off the wall and the triangles take their places. Dye-vats? Before their eyes the vats changed and ebbed and for each vat a small circle appeared. The sheds which sheltered, the warehouses which stored, the houses great and hovels small one by one were dissolved and replaced by symbols; sometimes the symbol was “a very small picture.” Streets became thick lines and alleys mere thin ones; all round about the crenellated “wall” were ringed the outlined humps that were the craggy mountains. He pointed out the thin double-lines that represented the canal from the Portus Julius, and he emphasized the difference between the small tridents that were fires which could be, when expedient, stifled by dropping a wet hide upon them, and the larger tridents that blazoned fires too large for putting out….
“It is as though, Magnates, there are channels beneath the surface of your ground as there are channels beneath the surface of your skin, and some, if they bleed, will soon stop and some may be, as it were, tied off, and some are too deep to be tied….”
From time to time Vergil said Beta, he said Gamma; he asked a once or twice for Alpha again, he said Delta. In every case the correct map was produced at once and held at the correct angle. Had (Vergil thought) he been expecting this particular session, at which he had arrived early merely because his mare had wanted exercise; had he been prepared, he would have provided a sort of frame which he had had in mind: a trifle to arrange, to hold the maps and charts, even to turn them, like the so-called walking tripods that moved around the symposia of the Consuls of Philosophy, dispensing wine and water as they moved. Being mostly intent upon, for one, explaining the details of the transparencies, and, for another, on the work of concentrating the light; he gave not much further thought to the silent servitor who held the maps and charts, no more than he did to the sun itself, the sole primal source of the light; “… and thus, Magnates, I have shown you what most of you already indeed know far better than I, how over the course of the past few decades there has been both a shifting of the active fire-holes all round about, as well as a general waning of the full force of fire….”
He said Omega. He could not remember how long he had been speaking. “This final diagram, Magnates, shows that, however much the areas in which the fires spring from the earth have changed and shifted, there is nevertheless what I shall term an overlap: In longer words, there is one area, limited in comparison with the others, in which the fires have never, ever, during the periods which — ”
“The father-fire!”
Who had burst forth with this interruption? — cried out three words, and struck the table three times as though hammering an ingot on a forge? Vergil did not know, thought best to get on “… in which the fires have never, ever, during the periods which my studies cover, either shifted, changed, or waned. In this one area — which a magnate has just suggested may be called that of the Father Fire — ” But he had already lost the attention of his audience.
Were these ponderous grandees a-drunk again? — So suddenly? Why were they rolling from side to side, facing first one fellow, then another? Whence this sudden upburst of babblement? What reason for the intensely odd faces he now saw them pull? A tiny bell sounded; none attended. It grew louder, sweeter, was joined by another, by another; here and there an iron-forger or a wool-puller brushed absently or even (with some slight aware vexation) pulled at his own thick and shaggy ear: vain. The bells grew louder, they sounded from every corner of the room, and yet, still, they sounded sweet. Perhaps after all they were not bells but rare exotic birds. Perhaps after all they were not birds, birds notoriously did not live long in Averno; if a capon lived long enough to become fat enough for the spit or the pot, that was the long of it. But be they what they were, ringing and singing, eventually they overcame the sound of the magnates bellowing — a bellowing in which Vergil was able only to make out some references to the father-fire, to hecatombs, hec-a-tombs, and some few other words which, rather like the common converse of Cadmus, might be intelligible as single words but made no sensible connection to communication.
Not, at least, to Vergil.
And so at length the magnates became silent.
And so did the ringing and the singing.
“I would point out, Magnates,” Vergil went on, calmly as before, and as though these singular tintinnabulations had never occurred and as though he had had no part in them; “I would point out that the area of the overlap, that area of, if you wish, the Father Fire, is not large enough to contain all the present manufacturies of your city. But I would also wish to point out that there is one thing, which, although you know it well, perhaps do not well appreciate. And those are the malodorous breaths which escape from the clefts of your rocks, there, deep in your valley. It is well known to you, I have seen, that these stinking airs are sometimes inflammable. And I have been drawing up a scheme, one which is indeed not yet finished, whereby these bad vapors may be put to good uses. Each crack and cleft and pit from which they issue may be covered with a sort of iron helmet, and the fumes conveyed thence through pipes, much as the aqueducts for which our Empire is famous conduct water through pipes to public fountains and even sometimes to private homes. I am certain, Magnates, that it is possible for the hot waters which bubble up here and there around us to be thus conveyed as well. It should certainly be possible, Magnates, by such methods to have a source of fire at any point desired, for one need only touch a burning brand or a glowing coal to the end of the pipe from which those airs would issue — and furthermore I have the means of making devices which will extinguish such fires when desired and without the use of wet hides or anything so cumbersome — thus it would never again be necessary, that immense labor of moving forges and bloomeries, workshops and dye-shops, boiling-vats and all the rest of it, for — ”
Again the babble, the tumult, the tumultuous talk broke out; this time he made no attempt to interrupt or draw away attention from their discordant discourse to his own (he thought) well-ordered address. He merely waited. He might as well not have been there. Presently he said, in that Greek whose roughness had been first smoothed in Athens and then polished at Cumae, “Put the maps down, then.” The words must have been heard over and through the rumble-rumble-mumble, for the chart marked Omega vanished from the wall, and only there remained within the bordering of Attic fretwork a spread-out light, which, no longer even slightly dimmed by having passed through membrane, gauze, and thin-scraped parchment or that odd new papyrus from behind the far Pamir, shone just that much more brightly as perhaps to quicken at least one pair of eyes, and at least one magnate’s thoughts, for from the mass of murmuring magnates there now sounded a voice that Vergil had heard before, and saying words that Vergil had also before heard.
“All right to go now, Wizard,” it said.
With this videlicet he had gone. The vessel through which, via its long neck, the sun rays had played, indeed he did not take; it was not his; but he had once again placed his hands round about the stoppered part and with his mouth up close had murmured words: The stopple came cleanly and clean out, a moment it dazzled (as perhaps it had dazzled long ago from amidst the golden fleece), then it was back again in his pouch. The blank wall now went dimmer, though — not yet — dim. None else noticed. Once again the silent servitor was by his side, showed him down the stone stairs and was showing him through the courtyard — the “garden” one could scarcely call it, no plants grew therein. “What is your name, then? You have done me well, up there. Whose man, are you, then? …” Meanwhile he reached into his purse for a coin.
Now for the first time he heard the fellow’s voice; soft it was, as — however unusual for this roughshod hole in hell — as befit a house-servitor’s. . for surely one would find it hard to picture him shoveling slag or beating bronze, even. . perhaps, (though he hoped not), plucking the clumps of stinking wool from the blue-putrefying sheep-fells before they were dipped to pickle in the tan-tubs; and the voice said (softly), “Master Mage, it is Magnate Torto’s freedman, Aymon Blandus [“Blandus, we must talk — ”], and here, ser master, is ser master’s horse.” Saying this, he so gently guided the hand in which Vergil held the coin over to the mucky palm of the hobgoblin doorkeeper that, almost, Vergil could have believed it had been his own intent to reward the latter, instead. The troll bowed and scraped, rolling his eyes, seemed undisposed to linger, and, bowing some more, backed and was gone, hiding behind the already opened gate. Up came Vergil’s boy, holding the mare.
“Have they taken care of you well, Iohan?”
“Yes, ser. Gave me some good thick wine and thick victuals, too. And offered me the kitchenmaid, but she was so stinking damnable dirty that almost I heaved the grub up; still, I says to meself, ser, ‘Food is food and I ben’t no dog to gobble up me own vomit.’ Therefore.”
Vergil nodded at this sound philosophy, was nuzzled by the mare, absently stroked her muzzle; began to turn his head, saying the while, “Now, Blandus, we must …” His words faded away.
As had Blandus.
Iohan joined palms and stooped for Vergil’s mounting, neither yielding nor grunting as his master went up into the saddle. In Thrace, it was said (Who had said it? Thrax. O Apollo! Thrax!), the horses were trained to kneel, as he had seen the camels kneel, afar off in Sevilla, for ease of riders’ mounting. But. . But enough of “but.” Out they stepped. “Uncommon dark it be, master, even for this dim-pit, o’ the time o’day,” the boy observed.
And indeed it was. Even after leaving the extremely frustrating termination of the session behind, still Vergil felt strained; now and suddenly he knew why. He looked up. Brighter was the window of the great Magnates’ chamber than anywhere else in sight. He relaxed, dismissed control. Flung outward the fingers of his upraised arm.
“There!” exclaimed Iohan. “Speak of Phoebus, he may soon appear!”
The street was now not so dun and dim; from above, a sudden silence, then a sudden outcry. “Lights! Lamps! Torches!” Whatever they were up to, up there, they would have to be up to it in the dark for yet a small while. What were they up to, up there? Suddenly he felt too tired to care.
“The mare seems to require no further much attention,” said Vergil. “Just take her tackle off, wipe her just a bit with hay, and give her a little of grain. . and then. . and then. . if we have four groats between us, shall we go to the baths?”
Iohan said, “Therefore.”
In the warehouse of Rano.
Vergil had been in warehouses before: many and many. Some were really open courtyards roofed over with reed mats. Some were larger than the great vast halls of some palaces, and, some of those, far more secure. Some were like temples, some had been temples, and in some instances — not always the same — the resemblances had been magnified by the presence for sale of sacred images of marble people or shrines of silver. There were splendrous things in the warehouses of silk merchants, and to walk through them was like walking through gardens in which all the flowers of the world and many flowers of worlds other than this one were in bloom, in blossom, all. And flowering at one and the same time, gardens of delight to the eyes. . though to the eyes alone. Sundry times he had been led almost by the hand, at one actual time actually by both hands, someone holding his right hand and someone else his left, through warehouses of spiceries: No mere casual stroller could after all toss a bale of precious silk-weft over a shoulder or under an arm and hope to walk off with it; but it was not beyond a physical impossibility that someone might, particularly in such trading posts where things were stored in rooms like castlements and the thicky walls of which were made for defense and the windows mere slits for archers, it was not impossible in places by necessity dim-lighted for someone to reach out a hand here or steal forth a hand there and transfer a palmful of cardamoms into a pouch or slip mirobolans or cloves into a compartment of a tunic perhaps even prepared for such a purpose. In one such place he had been led through by either hand as though he’d been a child. The hands rested gently enough in his own, but there came a moment when, forgetful, he had begun to move a hand his own; instantly the other had drawn it back and down, ah so firmly! “My hosts, I would but take my pocket-cloth and touch my nose; ‘tis dusty here and I might sneeze….”
“Ah, dusty ‘tis in here, serreverence, and as you are our guest and guests are sacred, for the gods send guests, take no thought for the matter, and we shall do it for you.” And so, with the right hand of the custos on the right-hand side (for the left hand of this one held the right hand of Vergil), he had had his nose wiped for him….
… and had a strong persuasion that, had he need perform perhaps another and more urgent office, another’s hand or hands would do that for him as well….
It was odd how the flowering silk-weaves, so gorgeous to the sight, had conveyed nothing to the nose; whereas as in the bale-stores of all balms and spices, some open and some closed, though these rich-stored items were dull and dingy to the eyes — enough! what scents, what odors there came forth from them! And from the custos on his left a semicontinuous drone, as, “These be dried rose-peels, ‘petals’ they be called in common speech, and these be violets and sweet clover for weaving garlands for the Indoo-folk, and here is citron-skin and thander bales have cinnamon-rinds, as the Sarcens tell us is took from the nests of great birds which do build they nests of cinnamon-stalk, and this is zedoary of the best sort and its next is zedoary of the second sort and last is zedoary of the third sort as sells for mere silver, and in the aft row — ” And now for the first time the voice of this one ceased its automatic drone. “Drag him hence,” it said, “he swoons….”
Something odd and rough, and pungent beyond belief, was held before his face. They were outside. “Oft the visitors do swoon and faint,” said one, “for us, we be used to it. Does my serreverence be feeling some better now?” (Yet still they held his hands, yet still they held his hands! High the price of freedom. And high the price of spice.)
“Yes,” he’d said. And — ”But what is this you have here under my nose? Never such a commingling of scents have I — ”
And one looked wry and one looked solemn, and one then said, “It be a beard shorn from a goat in Spicy Araby, my ser. . snuff it up, serreverence, ‘twill clear the nase and clear the brains a-well….”
“A beard shorn from a —?” Astonishment as well as giddiness (was the weakness worse than the remedy?) held the question incomplete.