Four for a Boy

Chapter Twenty

John appeared at Senator Opimius’ house next morning, prepared to continue with Lady Anna’s instruction. She surprised him by hurrying out of the servants’ entrance before he could rap on the door.

“John. There’s someone I want you to meet. We’ll go immediately.” She was shrouded in a heavy cloak.

“At this early hour, Lady Anna?”

“Who knows when we’ll have another chance? Now, you recall the man I mentioned yesterday, Avis? The inventor? I had intended for us to visit him then, but of course we were distracted by that poor, dead man on the docks. Avis is the person we’re going to see.”

When John queried her about the reason for the unexpected excursion, Anna grew mysterious. He finally had to remind himself that it was not a slave’s place to question orders given by his mistress, however flighty her apparent whim.

Anna did however expound on Avis’ eccentric living arrangements as she led the way north along a wide thoroughfare that opened into a plaza near the Prosphorion harbor. It was the time of morning when the stark cries of circling seabirds had not yet been overcome by the rush and roar of humanity.

A path, so narrow that it could not be called an alley, ran between two warehouses facing the plaza. It led to the dwelling of Avis.

The brick sides of the four-story, octagonal tower were blank for the first three levels. A row of enormous windows circled the final floor. When lamps were lit inside at night the conical-roofed structure resembled a lighthouse. Constantinople-born mariners, noting a more earthy resemblance, had given the tower an obscene nickname which Lady Anna thought best not to mention to her companion.

She repeated, instead, its less scurrilous name. “They call this Avis’ lantern,” she smiled. “It’s said that local sailors do not consider themselves truly home unless they can see its light from their ships.”

John observed that its owner must have an inexhaustible supply of lamp oil.

“I don’t know about that, but Avis is a night bird. He tends to work until dawn, so his lamps are lit almost as dependably as those of a real lighthouse.”

“Then surely he won’t be up this early?”

Lady Anna smiled. “I am hoping we’ll catch him before he retires for the day.”

From the base of the tower a staircase snaked up and around its sides to a platform perched in front of a door. The sound of birds singing and whistling reached their ears.

“A tower seems a strange place to keep an aviary,” John observed as they climbed the creaking, splintered, wooden stairs. An updraft of wind from the docks below the seawall carried his words away into the leaden sky.

“At first glance, perhaps.” Anna rapped at the door, which was opened almost immediately by the owner of the tower and provider of illumination to mariners.

“My dear lady! Such a pleasant surprise! How delightful! If you could just get inside quickly.” Avis waved a hand, gently shooing back a sparrow heading toward freedom.

John and Anna stepped quickly into a whitewashed room and Avis closed the door against the wind and smell of the sea.

“Who is your handsome friend. Lady Anna?” Avis asked. “A man with some taste and imagination, no doubt.”

Anna colored slightly and introduced the two men without alluding to John’s lowly rank.

John gave a small bow and murmured a polite greeting. The man seemed oddly familiar. Perhaps he had glimpsed him at the palace.

While Anna and Avis exchanged pleasantries John surveyed the room. One corner had been partitioned off, but otherwise its large expanse was filled with birds.

Birds flew around the high-ceilinged space, perched along the branches of trees growing in barrels and tubs, fed from piles of grain or fruit, their bright colors airborne jewels with one or two somber, dark-plumed birds making a gloomy contrast among them. John noted that while the fruit and grain available to the feathered residents was in copious supply, Avis’ tunic was threadbare.

The birds’ excited chattering sounded loud in a space which was bright despite the dark clouds outside since such light as entered the rows of windows around its perimeter was reflected and magnified by bone-white walls.

Anna and Avis finished their exchange. Anna strolled among the room’s swooping denizens, a delighted smile on her face, oblivious to the occasional splattering of white which joined similar droppings on the floor.

“Be careful,” Avis cautioned. “My servants will be up later to clean, but it can become rather slippery. Step into my study.”

Avis’ study was a tiny, walled-off space with an artificial ceiling. A many-paned window, large as that in a real lighthouse, presented a vertiginous view of the Golden Horn.

John’s gaze was drawn not to the view, but rather to a table on which a thin, marble slab held the bones of two large, fan-like wings. Laid out in an arrangement he imagined echoed their natural placement, the bones were obviously in the final stages of being reattached to each other with thin, bronze wires. Several scalpels and probes lay between the slab and a platter holding a similar sized wing. The rest of their former owner was nowhere to be seen.

Most of the remaining space on the table was taken up by piles of codices and sheets of parchment scribbled with diagrams and calculations, onto which birds had dropped their own comments. Several empty cages and a small wooden carving of a raven sat below one window, next to a pair of boots and a chest.

“I see you find my scientific efforts of some interest.” Avis sounded eager. “Do you know anything about our avian friends?”

John admitted that he did not.

“Except, perhaps, for enjoying a chicken for your evening meal now and then?” Avis chuckled. “Did you ever notice how remarkably tough their sinews can be? If only I could find something as strong.”

Anna laid her hand affectionately on the man’s arm. “How go your labors since I last visited? I see you have almost accomplished wiring the raven’s wing together.”

Their host nodded rapidly. “As you say. Once I have it entire again I think I shall be able to calculate how it bears such a large bird aloft. From there, who knows?” His voice trailed off wistfully.

Anna patted his arm reassuringly, but said nothing.

Avis insisted his unexpected visitors examine his drawings. They consisted mainly of minute renderings of wing articulations of various types of birds, doubtless drawn from life or, more accurately, from death. As sheet after sheet was displayed for their admiration and astonishment, John wondered if the man allowed his birds to die natural deaths, or if he hastened their ends as needed.

Avis opened the chest. “Here is something you haven’t seen, Anna.”

“How beautiful!” she exclaimed as he set a tiny, silver stork on his worktable.

“It belonged to my son.” Avis caressed the bird’s head tenderly. “It was a gift for his first birthday.”

The world of sadness in the man’s voice and eyes told John that the boy was gone from his father. Departed to seek his fortunes or gone forever? Anna’s murmured condolences provided the answer.

Wiping tears from his faded blue eyes, Avis returned the bird to the chest. He walked over to a corner where a rough linen cloth concealed some object nearly the height of a man. “The last time you visited me, I believe I mentioned I had made a working model. I haven’t tested it yet.” Avis’ voice wavered. “Although it is my intent to do so as soon as I have gone over all the calculations and measurements one more time.”

Avis waved away a raven that had just found its way into the study, and then pulled the cloth off to reveal what was unmistakably a set of artificial wings. They were crude compared to the bones he had been wiring together. Closer examination revealed that they were constructed of thin, wooden slats, their joints held together with twists of wire. Silk, stretched taut, covered the upper surface. On the undersides, at the length of an arm, were two loops.

Avis proceeded to describe the mechanics of his invention, his face beaming. John heard little of it. He suddenly remembered where he had seen Avis.

He was the man with whom he had collided while pursuing Victor into Viator’s warehouse.

***

“It’s a terribly sad story, John,” Anna said when she and John had left the tower. “Avis told me he once lived on the coast not far from the city. He was quite well-to-do then and owned more than one villa. That was many, many amphorae of lamp oil ago, as he put it.”

“He had a son, one now dead?” John inquired.

“Yes. This son was a scholar and very interested in the old mythologies. Harmless enough in itself, but unfortunately it seems that eventually he took the notion to fly.”

“Like Icarus?”

“Like Icarus,” Anna confirmed. “So he constructed some sort of device, perhaps with wax and feathers as is related in the ancient story, and jumped off the cliffs near his father’s estate. He paid for his attempt with his life. After that, his father took the name of Avis and has devoted most of his wealth and all of his time to studying birds and their method of flight. His quest has taken over four decades now.”

She sighed. “Avis persists, not because he wants to be the first man to soar into the sky, but rather because it was a passion with his son. By carrying on with the work he keeps his son’s memory alive and the boy close to him. Besides, he says, he would prefer to think the boy had not died in vain.”

They had come to a spot where a gap in the warehouses allowed a view across the Golden Horn. Anna leaned on the seawall and gazed toward the tiny buildings and trees visible on the far shore.

John stood beside her. “To give up one’s life to achieve what anyone can see is impossible seems a useless death, Lady Anna.”

“Is a thing impossible just because all the world insists it is?”

He observed that surely flying was the province of birds.

“You think we are not the equals of those gulls circling over the water?” She paused. “Beyond that, what would Avis be without his quest?” she went on. “Just another self-indulgent, wealthy man. One of the sort who spend their lives scrambling over one another for money or power, like quarreling dogs. And whichever wins out, what is accomplished? The victor is still just a dog.”

John made no reply.

Anna glanced up at him. “Is there any work of man which did not begin as nothing more than an idea? How can someone who dreams of flying be of lesser worth than one who has no dreams? I try to believe all things are possible.”

John looked away from her solemn gaze. Clearly Lady Anna had intended the visit to Avis to be instructional or inspirational. Just as clearly, a slave could not throw off his shackles any more easily than a free citizen could jump into the air and take flight. Anna’s inappropriate interest in him was a danger to both of them.

“Do you believe Avis will ever try out that contraption he showed us?” John finally asked.

“Yes, I do, John,” Anna replied softly. “When Avis is ready to go to join his son, then he will strap on his wings.”