The Phoenix and the Mirror

CHAPTER THREE

WESTWARD INTO the the sea the last rose strokes of sunset painted the sky. Smoke of wood and charcoal drifted up to Vergil leaning over the parapet on his roof. Fish and squid, lentil and turnip, bread and oil and garlic, and a little meat — Naples was having its supper before retiring for the night; though few in Naples would have all of these for supper. A few horses still thumped their way down the street below, and a single heavy cart rumbled. Horses and cart were probably heading for the great stable at the foot of the hill. Women spoke in tired voices, filling their amphoras at the Fountain of Cleo. A baby cried somewhere, the sounds of its wailing thin upon the cool air. The lights of tiny oil lamps flickered like fireflies, and here and there the mouth of a brazier glowed, redly and briefly, as someone fanned the embers or blew upon them through a wooden tube. From the Bay came the faint thump-thump of a galley bailiff beating out the rhythm for the rowers as the ship put into port.

“Abana! Bacchus! Camellia! Dido! Ernest! Fortunata! Gammelgrendel! Halcyon!… Halcyon?”

The voice called nearby. Someone clapped hands, summoning. “Halcyon? Ah… my pretty! Come along, come along.… India! Jacynto! Leo! Leo! Leo… ?”

The old madwoman was crying her cats home. Vergil walked to the side of the parapet, plucking a sprig of basil from one of the flower pots and bruising it between his fingers. He held the fragrant leaf to his nose and leaned over.

“Dame Allegra, where is Kingdom?” he asked. She fed her covey of cats on the innards of fish and whatever other offals she could gather up, poking about the streets and wharves and alleys in her stained and tattered gown. Sometimes a choicer scrap of victual fell her way, from someone who pitied her or — more likely — feared her for the Evil Eye; this she ate herself. Not because she was better or more deserving than the cats, she would explain. Because her taste had been corrupted and theirs was still natural.

“Kingdom?” Her voice came clearer now, as though she had lifted her head and was peering up through the darkness. “Kingdom, my lord, hath gone back to Egypt. Often did he tell me he would, an the season were aright for’t. To fare upon the sea, my lord, in these crank craft — nay, it were not befitting my handsome goddikin — in one of these common and stinking galleys? Nay, sir. But yestere’en, when the moon were all o’ gold, saith he to me, Cat Kingdom saith — Allegra, nursling mine, th’ imperial galleon goeth a-post tomorrow to Alexandria with my lord the proconsul aboard of her. And I’m half of a mind, sith, to gang along of him.”

And so, while the deep blue deepened into purple and thence to black, she crooned her madwoman’s tale of how Kingdom (a lean and rangy tom with scarred flanks) had been welcomed aboard as befit his demidivinity, provided with silver dishes and golden drinking bowls, and had sailed for home, promising to speak good words for her to Sphinx and to sacred Bull Apis and to all the hieratic hawks and crocodiles.… The truth of the matter, Vergil reflected, was that he — Cat Kingdom — had probably been knocked on the head by some starveling slum-dweller and was even now stewing with an illicit onion and a clove of stolen garlic and a borrowed bay leaf. Naples was known to relish a dish of “roof rabbit” when the chance and an empty belly occurred together.

Of course, it was not altogether impossible that some pious Egyptian actually had picked up the cat and taken it back to be cuddled and cosseted and reverenced in a village by the Nile for the rest of its life; and to be embalmed and entombed and worshiped after it died. What was fact and what was fancy? With old Allegra, it was often hard to know — and not with her alone.

Clemens had gone home, shaking his massy head and muttering, but had promised to return the next day to discuss the making of a major speculum. Vergil, alone, found study impossible. And so, he reflected, here he was, instead, discussing cats with an ancient madwoman. It was a diversion of a sort, and required less effort than most. And her withered womanhood could not taunt his missing manhood.

“How fortunate for Kingdom,” he said. “But you will miss him, Dame Allegra.”

She crooned, wordlessly, while her cats scrabbled on the roof and clawed the walls of her hovel of a hut. So she lived, so she desired to live.

“My lady fears for the fire,” she said, breaking off her keening.

The door of the Sun and Wagon burst open with a splash of yellow light and a stink of sour wine and the noise of teamsters and drovers and tavern wenches and tapsters; then it swung shut again, and in the faint echo Vergil asked, “What lady?”

Somehow he knew the answer without knowing how he knew it.

“It’s the Empire that’s wanted, my lord,” the madwoman mumbled, scuffling about for another handful of fish tripes to fling to her horde of pets. The bitter, nasty smell of their staling and spraying brought the basil leave to his nose again, but not before he was reminded of creatures more noisome — and more dangerous — than a pack of cats.

“Cornelia,” he said, half aloud… though his conscious thoughts had been elsewhere… Cornelia… musk and roses… but for the present and indefinite future, more dangerous than any, more dangerous than all. If I must search the dark halls of Hell, then let Hell itself be harrowed.…

“Cornelia,” he repeated.

“The Empire is what’s wanted. Leo! Myra! Nettlecomb! Orpheus! Hither to me, my conies. Dame Allegra will feed ye. She’s not for the fire, nay…”

The old woman’s voice died away. Was it the Samaritans who claimed that after the destruction of their temple by Pompey the gift of prophecy had passed to children, fools, and madmen? There was no use calling to this one, now. In her hut, on her sack of straw, warm and verminous and covered with cats as with a blanket, Dame Allegra had bid the day good-bye. It was time, Vergil considered, that he do the same.

Below and later, in his bedchamber, he considered his own day, and some of the questions it posed. Why did the manticores, who shunned light, collect lamps? How long would he have to postpone his attempt at their habitations? Would it not have been better had he never gone there? What did the proconsul hope to find in Egypt — rest? Plunder? Wisdom? How did Allegra know that he had been with the Queen of Carsus? What was “the fire?” How long would it take to make the speculum? How long would Cornelia wait? How could he still love her? How could he not?

He cleared his mind of all these questions by constructing in it a diagram of great potency and then concentrating on the center of this, in which lay absolute nothingness. Gradually, slowly at first, then more rapidly, the diagram faded away and simultaneously something else took shape in the center before the gaze of his inner eyes.

A door.

He saw himself get up, walk forward, open and step through it. He saw it close, saw it fade and vanish. Once again there was nothingness.

The humming was that of bees. He could not see them any more than he could see Mount Hymettus. He could smell the sweet scent of the violets growing on its slope, though, the rich carpet of flowers nourishing the bees. Illiriodorus sat upon his stool, and he at the old man’s feet, happy in knowing that the old philosopher was alive; vaguely troubled at recalling he had dreamed he was long dead. “A handful of wheat will do, my son,” Illiriodorus was saying. The other students weren’t present; whether they were in the Agora or where they were, Vergil neither knew nor cared.

“A handful of wheat, the flight of a flock of birds, the liver of a victim, an oracle or a prophecy. The truth exists and the truth can be known. It exists in everything and you exist in everything and therefore it exists in you.”

“Yes,” said Vergil.

“Since the truth exists in you, as well as existing outside of you, it is only necessary to bring it — somehow — out from inside, up from below, down from above. For this the focus is necessary, the precipitator. A speculum of virgin bronze will do as well. In this particular instance, perhaps it will do better than those others I mentioned.”

“Yes,” said Vergil. There was a small table by the sage’s side, and on the table was a bowl of honey, the fragrant and delicious honey of Mount Hymettus. Leisurely, he reached his hand toward it.

“No,” said Illiriodorus, warding off Vergil’s hand with his own. The bowl fell, falling slowly, striking the floor with the noise of a bell. Illiriodorus smiled, raised his hand in farewell. The sound of the bell echoed infinitely and echoed forever.

There was a painted room and in it lay a figure with waving hair and full lips, a figure that was human-like, but as a great doll might be human-like. This figure, which was neither man nor woman, made an agonized face and turned the face away from him. But he was in front of it, facing it; he was always facing it. The creature groaned, closed its eyes, opened them a moment later — hopefully, fearfully.

“Still there,” it said. “Still there,” moaned the epicene voice.

He said nothing.

The room was brightly, almost garishly, painted, as it might have been by a somewhat talented child, with the figures of people whose faces — eyes round as circles rimmed all about with long lashes; red spheres for cheeks; double cupid’s-bow mouths — whose faces were turned full frontward but whose bodies stood sideways underneath trees almost their own size and alongside flowers even taller; with the pictures of striped and dotted birds, blue dogs, red cats, green marmosets… an almost insane panorama which, still, arrested rather than repelled.

“I have had this dream before,” whimpered the figure on the bed, sexless as a doll. “I know I have, and I have caused it to be written down and I have referred it to the Wise Men and the Chaldeans and I have consulted learned Jews and even the Women Who Serve ‘Ditissa… no one has given me a good interpretation, not one.” It looked at him, consumed with woe and self-pity and a measure of genuine foreboding and horror.

It wept a little and it sniveled.

He said nothing.

“I would give you what you desire, if I knew what it was. You smell of Rome to me, and of all known things I fear of the Romans. They burn and they slay and they carry off captives. Go away!” it screamed. “I will not have this dream! Go away! Go…”

He was in a chamber hewn out of solid rock. A candelabrum of three lamps supplied thin light. The room was not large, and it was crowded. Matrons wrapped about the head with gauzy veils were there, and those whose dirt and ragged nakedness proclaimed them to be slaves of the lowest sort. A patrician was there, next to him an apprentice boy, next to him a girl in a rustic robe. Vergil seemed to be up toward the front; others, whom he could not see, pressed close around him.

Up at the very front was a table bearing vessels, some of common use, others whose function and design were unknown to him. To one side stood an old man with a long gray beard, his countenance thin so that the bones showed.

“Yet a little while, my children,” he said, “and all this shall pass away. Why do they persecute us, indeed? And why do they harry us? Have we swords? Do we plot rebellion? Are we bandits or brigands, pirates or thieves, to be treated thus? Ah, no, my children. We are weak, we are few, we are humble, we are peaceable. We are here to worship our Lord and Savior Daniel Christ, who gave His flesh to be eaten by lions and His blood to be licked by them, in order that we might be saved and have everlasting life.”

The congregation murmured a word, evidently in response, which Vergil did not know.

“And as for those lost in heresy,” the old man declared, his face becoming burning-fierce, “worse than those who merely persecute our bodies — as for those who say that our Lord and Savior Daniel Christ did not die in the lion’s den, let them be anathema!” The crowd responded with the same short word as before. “And those who claim that The Christ is yet to come and that he will bear some other name or die some other death, let them be anathema!” Again, the response. “Let them be harried, let them be persecuted, may their flesh be torn and their blood spilt! May they be hanged and nailed upon the limbs of trees! For the Lord Daniel suffered pain and agony for them, and they refuse His sacrifice! Woe! Woe! Woe!”

He took a deep breath and opened his mouth again, but before he could speak a girl screamed. The room was suddenly full of soldiers, seizing and binding all who were there. For just an instant the old man shrank back, his tongue running in and out of his mouth like a snake’s tongue. Then he thrust himself forward, his face almost truculent, and offered his wrists to the cords.

Heart numb and swollen and cold with fear, Vergil waited, but no one touched him. No one noticed him. All were silent, all went dim, all vanished from his sight.

The lulling noise, as of waves lapping against a hull, died away. Light, with reticulations of darkness, shone upon his eyelids, and Vergil awoke. The morning had come, brightening through the thin plates of horn in the window lattice. He was in his own room once again.