The Phoenix and the Mirror

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE RED MAN was seated, slumped, upon the ground when they reached him at last. The journey had evidently wearied him much, more than it had Vergil. Not until his blurred eyes focused on Laura did a flicker of interest show in them, and he slowly rose to his feet and prepared to mount. Vergil would have liked to take some of the scant food remaining in their packs, for, though he had drunk sweet water in a silver cup at the Cyclops’ castle, he had not then thought to ask for anything to eat. But it was best to wait. Let them get well away. Only…

“This is not the way we came,” he called out to his guide.

The Red Man shook his head slightly. “Another route…” his words came, faintly over his shoulder.

“That’s wise. We will avoid the Troglodytes this time, I suppose?” But no answer came. He rode alongside of Laura, and spoke to her, but she had little to say. Her manner was as passive as ever. Indeed, she seemed so blank and docile that Vergil felt a pang of doubt concerning his feelings for her. Could she really be little more than a lovely doll? Had Cornelia’s state and beauty sapped and stunted her personality? Or was this merely a sort of protective shock?

Presently she was enough aroused to answer one or two of his questions — or, rather, to explain why it was she could not answer them. “I do not know why they took me from the Great High Road,” she said softly. “They said that Queen — that my mother had sent them, and they showed me a letter from her.”

“A forgery, doubtless. But it is very strange… to have brought you so far, when convenient hiding places were so much nearer. One wonders why, for what motive. Ransom?” But Laura did not know. She gazed out of her mild and lovely wine-dark eyes on the passing desert. From time to time Vergil suggested a halt, but the Red Man pressed on. Sometimes he shook his head, sometimes he gestured ahead with his driving stick; he never spoke. They had grown so gradually weary that it took some time for Vergil and Laura to realize that their present route had taken them quite definitely out of and away from the Sea of Sand. They were now, and had been for some time, in a region of stones, the land rising gradually on all sides.

They were discussing this, in weary wonder, when he observed that she had closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her temple. He drew his camel in close to hers and reached out to support her. “We must stop now,” he called out. “The princess is very faint.”

Without turning his head, the Red Man said, “We are almost there.”

“Almost there?” Vergil felt anger rising over fatigue. “Almost where? I tell you, we must stop at once!” But Ebbed-Saphir spoke only to the mounts, and they would not pause now for all of Vergil’s urgings. It was a slight shift in the wind which brought tidings of what their eyes soon enough beheld. A perfume, a fragrance, as of some garden in Cyprus… he thought, at first, he dreamed… Then he saw it.

But it was no garden. Up, up past a wilderness of polished stones glittering in the fading sun like giant gems the trail had led them, finally diemboguing into a high plateau. And there was a great pile, as large as a house, of logs: scented cedarwood and fragrant sandalwood and trees of myrrh and other odorous timbers of balsam and the like. Intricately carved and carpeted steps led to the summit and there was a pavilion somewhat furnished.

A clap of thunder, a blaze of light sounded and shone in Vergil’s head. Fragments whirled and danced and, suddenly, like pieces of a mosaic, came together in a visible pattern. “Man of fire! Man of Tyre!” a voice shouted as the Red Man dismounted and advanced. “Phoenician? No, not Phoenician alone, but…”

“Phoenix!” said the Red Man. His face blazed with fiery light.

Not just a Phoenician, but a Phoenix! Not, indeed, the symbolic, metaphorical bird of legend, but the actual being itself. Gone now was all semblance of fatigue; all was joyful haste, as of a man going to a long-awaited tryst. The words poured forth from him. He, too, was old — if not as old as the Cyclops — but he was mortal, and his mortality indescribably wearied him. Up and down the world and to and fro, he had been coming and going for centuries: and now his time was at hand, had been at hand for these two years past. Only the fire could liberate him from the fretting, chafing shackles of his flesh, and, by its destruction of his present body, enable him to renew his youth.

The sign of regeneration, Vergil thought. Eagle, serpent, phoenix.

Aloud, he said, “If such is your need, Captain Phoenix, then it is not for me to stand in your way.”

But the other looked at him, teeth and eyes gleaming in his blazing face. “You? You are nothing but a path on which I tread. The Phoenix has no need of wizards.”

“Then do what you must. Why you have brought me here, I do not at all know. Is it to kindle your pyre? The task likes me not, but — ”

An-Thon Ebbed-Saphir laughed his brief scorn. “I have little time to enjoy the irony of it, but I have brought you here to pull, as it were, my chestnuts from the fire. I know the Cyclops hates me. I was not certain that you would succeed in rescuing my bride from him — ”

“Your Bride?”

The Red One nodded. “Yes… You spoke of my need. Little do you know of it, that you ask in such astonishment. Yes, the Phoenix must have a bride! And, as the Phoenix is always male, he must take his bride from among the daughters of ordinary men. Our marriage, my marriage, the marriage of the Phoenix, is not an act of venery — though in such sweatings and writhings we usually join as gladly as the rest of you. No — only the union of male and female in the fire’s dissolution can result in the formation of the magical egg from which the new Phoenix will emerge. My bride!” — he turned to Laura, extending his hand — “my bride!”

With a gasp and a quivering breath, she drew back within the shelter of Vergil’s arm and cloak.

“You need not fear. The pain is brief and slight, the joy is exceeding great, and in these our wedding resembles weddings of mortality and flesh. Neither fear me nor disdain me, but come surmount with me our matrimonial pavilion on the pyre… You still fear? Believe me that you need not! I will be patient a moment more, but I have not forever.”

Vergil said, as the setting sun cast its red reflection on the other’s face, “But why, Phoenix, out of all the world of women, have you selected this one woman? You see she does not wish it, nor should you wonder. But surely in all the world there must be at least one who would?”

“There is. She was. Long ago, as this girl measures time, the other pledged her troth to this mystic wedding in return for long life, for love, and for the potency to gain a throne. She gained that throne, she shared that love, she was to live as long as her Phoenix lived… perhaps five hundred years… perhaps more… one can never be sure. But when the time to be translated and transformed came to her Phoenix, earlier than expected, this traitor woman shrank in terror. She refused to join me.”

Pale blue-green and cold were his eyes, but red, red his fiery face and skin. Vergil heard Cornelia’s voice, so low. My heart belongs to someone whom I dare not see. He did not wonder. He would not have wondered if the sight of her lover alone caused her to burst into flame upon the instant.

“Oh” — the other’s face twisted, his head went slant, in admiring love and almost hatred — “she is cunning, in this one way she’s strong! She was able to erect barriers against me for herself… but only for herself. So — ”

“What a man vows for himself, as all the world knows, can be fulfilled in his son; a woman, in her daughter. And thus it is now that I claim my promised bride. If it’s not to be Cornelia, Queen of Carsus, then let it be her daughter, Princess Laura. Let it be, I say. Come, my bride. Come, my bride.”

He finished speaking, once more he extended his hand, once more Laura stepped back — this time too rapidly for Vergil to continue his protective vigil. And instantly the finger of the Phoenix moved, and two circles of fire sprang up, one around Vergil and the other around Laura. And when Vergil moved, his own circle flamed high and higher, imprisoning him.

Vergil stood there, motionless. The Phoenix beckoned. Slowly the fiery circle round Laura advanced toward its maker, and she perforce advanced with it. The sun’s great orb touched its lower rim to the horizon. The air grew dark and blue and chill. The wind riffled the flames.

The Phoenix said, “Come”

He extended his finger. He said, “I was able to attend at the pyre of my fellow in Cyprus. None will attend me here. But that matters not. I need no epithalamium.” Vergil, staring through the leaping flames which enclosed him like pickets and palisadoes, watched as Laura, fire-encircled, advanced numbly toward the Phoenix, who held out his hand. And she took it. Together they approached the pyre.

The Phoenix turned. “Farewell, Wizard,” he said.

But now it was Vergil’s finger which moved, moved in a motion contrary to that of the Phoenix, moved widdershins. And the fire blazing hot around him flickered… sank… sank… became a mere faint glowing circle on the ground. He stepped over it. Dumbly, the Phoenix stared.

“Phoenix of Phoenicia, I, too, have been in Phoenicia. Student of the secrets of fire as well as you. But I studied them in Sidon and not in Tyre.” A sound, half growl and half groan, came from the other’s throat. Tyre, burned to rock and ashes; Sidon, still enduring.

Vergil advanced. The Phoenix turned to face him. Vergil said, “My powers are the opposite of yours, and are not always deemed as useful. I am one of the few. Yet what think you quenched the blaze in my house in the Street of the Horse-Jewelers? Do you not know — you of all must know — that they err who say that the Salamandar starts fires? He starts no fires, he puts the fires out! It is this power of his which enables him to walk through the flames and the embers unharmed… consuming, but not consumed.

“Go, Phoenix, confront your proper pledged bride in Naples, and claim her, if you can and will. But this woman here is not she, and her you must release — ”

He staggered back. The night had exploded in flames in front of him. The rocks were fonts of fire. He flung out his hands. For a space about him there was an opacity, a blackness, and this spread. The fires hissed, fell back as though in pain. The rocks spat like griddle pans. A steamy vapor was seen in the air, and an unseasonal dew distilled upon the ground. Lightnings flashed and writhed, were quenched by rains. Fiery serpents large as pythons rushed upon him, met wet, black mists; the twain intertwined as if engaged in some dreadful, loveless copulation. The mists hissed, vaporized, grew thin. A cry of rage and triumph came from the Phoenix, he hurled out his fires, he blazed himself like a fire, he waved his glowing arms.

The mists thickened, became clouds, clouds and thick darkness, the air grew wet and thick and hot as a bath heated by a hypocaust. The nimbus-circled stars were obscured. The dark and steamy atmosphere was shot through with flames — white flames, blue flames, red and orange and yellow and green glames — but gradually there were less of them.

And finally there were none at all.

Vergil shivered, his flesh chill and trembling in the cold wind. Strange how the scent of the spicy wood, warmed by the fire, now came fresh and strong. Outlined against the pyre, slumped and shrunken, was the enemy.

“Phoenix,” said Vergil, “mount.”

The Phoenix raised his head and drew in a breath and held it. He brightened, he blazed up, he glowed like a fanned ember. It was his last effort. Then, totally, suddenly, the light went out of him. Dull, dull and defeated, he seemed to hang there.

“Phoenix,” said Virgil, “mount.”

It was painful, almost, to watch how he more crawled than walked up the carven stairs of the great pyre, how he dragged himself to one of the two furnitures there, half throne, half nuptial couch.

Round and round about the pyre Vergil drew with his wand a great circle, and blazoned it with rays. “Now, Phoenix, hear my bane,” he directed.

“Within the circle of this sun

Shall no fire burn

Nor water run

Until my quest be won.”

The cold moon rose and the strange rocks melted into its shadows. Atop his cold pyre, the Phoenix stared, immobilized, motionless as a statue.

The camels for once, seemed less than haughty.

He dared not risk a return by the same route. There was danger that the hideous and treacherous Troglodytes might take them unawares. There were the petromorphs, stone things which came alive, reversing the process whereby living things became stone. Drink and baffled greed might well have turned the chieftain Abèn-Aboubou into a confronting instead of a stealthy enemy. And any other route to the coast he did not know and dared even less to hazard.

“We must turn south and east.” he said to Laura, having explained this to her. “Unless perhaps you have thought of something else?”

She laughed, and wound her fingers in a long coil of hair which had come undone. “I’m not used to being asked my thoughts,” she said. “I shall have to bend my mind… bear down upon it…” She frowned her unaccustomed concentration. “Northward lies the Middle Sea? Is that right? and westward… ? The Western Ocean. That seems fair enough. But what lies south and east, Ser Vergil?”

He sketched a quick map for her upon the moonlit dust. South lay the mountains clove in two by the thick, black waters of the River Nigir, upon which was said to lie the great rich city of Tambuctone. Beyond river and mountains was the land of the Garamantes and Ethiopea Interior, the Equinox, the region called Agisymba, and the Terra Incognita whose extent and terminus not even legend had touched upon. A southeasterly course would traverse Proper Ethiopea, Nilus, the rivers Astapus and Astaboras, and so to the Sinus Barbaricus and the Erythrean Sea.

“South is more or less an unknown quantity, and southeast would consume an infinity of time. I think then, that we should descend sufficiently south to leave the hills, and then head east — hoping that, if we are fortunate, we may meet another caravan intending for Upper Egypt. There…”

She apologized for yawning. “You see I am like a servant girl of no manners, despite having been benefited by Queen Cornelia, daughter of the Doge and granddaughter of the Emperor. I was never outside the Carsus until all this began to happen. It’s been all very terrible, and I’m very glad it’s all happened. Shall we go to sleep now?”

Toward the end of the next day, in approaching the end of the foothills, they were fortunate in finding a spring of water welling up from a cleft in the rocks into a shallow pool. It could not have been called an oasis, for evaporation evidently prevented the moisture from ever spilling over onto the adjacent ground, and the ground around it was so rocky that only a single and small pocket of soil had survived the restless buffetings of the winds.

They drank their fill and let the camels drink and filled the leathern water bottles. Then they mixed with water the handful or so of parched ground grain, which was all their food, and ate the only faintly salted paste slowly. “It is utterly tasteless,” she commented, licking her fingers. “Horrible stuff… I wish there were more.” She patted her pockets and examined their contents in her lap. There was a tiny handkerchief, a coney’s foot amulet (“There’s no meat on it, I’m afraid!”), some loose beads, and something brown and crumpled and smelling faintly sweet.

She smiled. “The core of my last apple,” she said. “The gardener at Carsus gave it to me when I left and I said that I would keep it to remember forever… but by and by I got hungry, so I ate it. Those are only beads, they have no value,” she added, as Vergil picked them through with his finger. One seemed to catch his eye.

“Where did this come from?” he asked. It was a nacreous off-white, faintly iridescent, with tiny flecks of blue through it.

She shrugged. “Why? I don’t know… oh, it was picked out of a river bed one dry summer. Has it a name, Ser Vergil?”

He inclined his head. The pebble seemed to weigh rather heavily in his hand. “A river bed. One of its tributaries has evidently an origin far north of Carsus, for this seems to be that stone which the Sarmations call ‘Timebinder’.… There is scarcely any telling what might be done with it, if it is real… but in our present situation we must make one certain experiment, and one only.

“May I break your bead?”

She made him a japing, low curtsy, dress spread out wide, somewhat disconcerting him. Immediately, she was all remorse, and begged his forgiveness. He murmured something, searched among the nearby rocks. He placed the blue bead upon one and, still murmuring, struck it with another. Twice more he struck, and at the third blow it severed into three parts without shattering.

“Now give me your apple core.” He took his wand and pierced the sod in the pocket of soil and dropped into the hole one single leaf of arbor vitae from the tiny packet he carried in his pouch, slightly widened the hole, dropped the apple core into it, tamped it down with the blunter end of the wand, replenished the hole with soil. Then he planted the three pieces of the timestone so as to form a triangle with the buried core in the center. Of what he did and of what happened next, she told him afterward she could never be clearly sure. She remembered, with perhaps somewhat greater clarity than one commonly remembers a dream, the sun and the stars and all four phases of the moon rising and setting and wheeling in retrograde and then back again, to and fro, but all this within what appeared to be a vast triangular embrasure in the Heavens distinct from the major portion of it. And, as she turned her astonished and bemused gaze from the Heavens to earth and back and again, she beheld a shoot break through the broken soil and become a twig. The twig grew apace into a sapling increased in girth and stature.

“Oh!” she cried, rapt, and clapped her hands. The dry and vacant air was filled with the scent of snowy apple blossoms, and then these, too, faded away like snowflakes. And presently the boughs of the noble tree sagged earthward like the breasts of a woman filled with milk, and the apples hung heavy upon the boughs.

They ate their fill of the food, which was also drink, and they let the beasts have their satiety as well. Then they filled the saddlebags and made sacks of their blankets and their cloaks, and filled them, too. And then, refreshed and supplied, they set off once more.

In Garamanteland the climate was so hot by day that water exposed to the sunlight boiled at noon, and by night so cold that the same water, if poured out into a shallow vessel, froze at midnight. The rigors of the climate were fortunately not matched by the severity of the people, who neither hinder travelers nor help them. The Garamantes are so shy and eremitical as to be willing to greet strangers only from a distance too great for voice to carry; often Vergil and Laura would see their strange, cloaked figures, arms upraised, outlined against the hill or sky. Always at their sides were their dogs, which the Garamantes love more than they love humankind; and this love is returned, for when the Numideans carried off captive the King of the Garamantes to hold for ransom, no less than two thousand of his own dogs followed his trail by scent and by stealth until they burst upon the sleeping camp to destroy the captors and release the king.

In Outer Nubia they were perplexed by what they at first took for the ghost of a woman who had died in trying to abort her child — doomed forever to seek the babe unborn, weeping and wailing, forever following, never seen, sobbing and calling out. But it did not respond to exorcism, and so Vergil realized that it was no human ghost after all, but that inhuman loathsome creature sometimes called Jaekal and sometimes Hyaena, which imitating the human voice like a perroquetta, or Indian jay, it often lures men and women to come in search of it; whereupon it leaps upon them from behind and laughs as it devours them.

At last, alternately burned by heat and numbed by cold, they met up with a caravan which led them into Meroë on Nilus, a river port famous for its trade in the hides, ordure, and tushes of cocodrilli. By one of those paradoxes in which Nature seems to delight, these stinking beasts pass perfumed dung exceeding the primest musk, much sought for in confecting ointments and scents; its teeth are in demand for treating pains and affections of the bones and joints, as well as being aphrodisiacal. In Nilus Meroë they obtained places on the downriver packet boat, and allowing only for two or three stops en route, would be in Alexandria as swiftly as the current flowed.

To eyes used to the mountains, hills, valleys, isles, and coastlands of Europe, the Nilus and its banks could not but seem somewhat samely and monotonous, but to Vergil the mere greenery was grateful after the fret and glare of the desert. And to her it all had a charm for being new. The bending trees all a-gaze at their reflections, the vasty hippopotami — once, even an oliphant appeared, and gnashed its enormous teeth at them — the incredibly rich fields full of heavy heads of grain, the ornately carved entrances to the caves yielding the precious and essential balm called mummy, and perhaps above all the huge pyramidical structures which were the treasure houses of King Pharaoh… treasures which continued to baffle the searching zeal of those who would find them.

He thought that she was entirely absorbed in these sights, and it was with surprise that he was roused from his own musings by her question, “Ser Vergil, why did you come to look for me?”

Some foolish compliments hesitated at his mouth. And yet, fatuous as it might have been for him to have said, Your red hair with its glints of brown, your brown eyes with their glints of red, your white skin with its tracery of blue veins, your delicately formed and coral-colored lips, the gracious arching of your brows and the sweet rise of your bosom — all, all seized hold of my eyes and heart, and beguiled me from the bitter reek of my elaboratory and the musty but beloved scent of my books.… Was it not the truth?

He stammered a bit, then told her instead that he desired to follow the matter of the mirror to its conclusion.

“And not leave it unfinished,” she summed up.

“Yes… and not leave it unfinished.”

She nodded, seemed to follow this well, be satisfied; then she grimaced. (“What… ?” he began.) “The Queen,” she said. (“Oh,” he said. “Yes. The Queen… Don’t worry.”) She looked at him and raised one brow. Then she smiled faintly. “I won’t, then,” she said.