The Phoenix and the Mirror

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FRONT PART of the elaboratory and workshop of Vergil occupied all of one floor of the house in the Street of the Horse-Jewelers; the rear part of it rose upwards the height of two more stories. There, in the measured darkness interspersed with broad shafts of light slanting down from the upper windows (there were none on the lowest level), he addressed his few assistants.

“We want to make a speculum majorum,” he said, standing with one foot on a workbench. “You have all heard of such a thing, doubtless some of you at least have read of it as well.” Behind him rose tall engines, their wheels and hafts casting odd and baroque shadows on the floors freshly sanded — as they were at least twice a day — to prevent both slipping and the chance of fire. As he spoke, one of the men, turning his head occasionally and nodding to show he was both hearing and listening, added bits of charcoal to a fire under a closed vessel. He weighed each bit in a scale, and checked the time of adding it to the fire by an hourglass. The fire had been going, maintained with the most scrupulous care by day and night in order to ensure as even a temperature as possible, for four years without cessation. It still had two years to go, after which it would be allowed to die down over the course of a year, and then for six months to cool.

The master recapitulated the matter. “Such a mirror is made of virgin bronze, made carefully and diligently according to the arcane science of such a work, and without anyone’s looking into it during its manufacture. If this is done properly, then whoever is the first to look into it will see whatever he or she desires most to see. But the speculum majorum cannot see into the past, neither can it look into the future.

“Nor is it permitted to attempt to peek into the private realm of Immortal God. The sighting must be of something actually and presently existing on the earth and in the world of mortal man, ‘Who must,’ — says Hesiod — ’till the earth, for bread, or perish.…’”

The attentive silence was emphasized, rather than broken, by a slow clicking of a rachet wheel turning somewhere in the shadows of the great room. One of the men, white-haired and white-bearded old Tynus, made a reflective noise in his throat. “It will be necessary to seek a favorable hour with unusual precision and care,” he observed. “This is a matter of philosophy as well as artisanship.”

Iohan, a squat, long-armed man with a chest like a tun of wine, his voice rumbling and echoing, said, “But it is also a matter of artisanry as well as philosophy. I leave observations of nodes and cusps and houses and hours to others — for my part, I say, let the clay be of the finest quality, the wax of the purest, the ore of the soundest — and let the cooling not be hurried, no, nor the polishing, either.”

But Perrin, an open-faced young man with a smudge of soot across his face where he had wiped it with his hand, said, “Master, I don’t understand. The disciplines involved are rigorous, but beside the point. Such a project is impossible, practically. Iohan says the ore should be of the soundest. I agree. We all agree. But I have to ask, What ore? There has no ore of tin or copper come onto the market in Naples in my life time. Except for small specimens, samples, such as you, sir, keep in your cabinet, I’ve never even seen what these ores look like. Of what use is it to observe the signs and mark the seasons, as Tynus says, this being so?”

Perrin had hit upon the crux of the matter. Copper came from Cyprus — the island of Aphrodite was so rich in it that it had given its name to the metal — but the route to and from Cyprus was cut off by the ships of the fierce Sea-Huns, and had been for well over a decade. The Sea-Huns allowed, by agreement and for tribute (euphemistically termed guard money), one great fleet a year in each direction — from the Empire to Cyprus, from Cyprus to the Empire. There were, to be sure, blockade runners of a sort: small, swift vessels plying between the eastern shore of the island and the nearer coast of Little Asia. But these risked only cargo light in weight and precious in every ounce — gold, perfume, pretty girls.

Copper was too bulky, and not nearly so valuable as to justify the risk. Three swift trips in a smuggling craft and the captain could retire for life. Load his ship with heavy ingots of copper and he might well wallow in the narrow seas — and retire onto an impaling stake, having first been flayed (slowly) of every inch of skin. Or as near as made no great matter — a man in such an acutely uncomfortable position was not likely to quibble over an inch or two here or there. One did not in any event quibble with the Sea-Huns.

Once a year, then, the great heavy galleys and galleons came and went in their convoys, laden down and lumbering slowly over the tideless sea as far as the eye could reach. Vast as was the supply thus obtained, it was not yet equal to the demand. The trade was in the hands of a guild of merchants who charged what the rich traffic would bear; orders had to be placed years in advance. There were warehouses in Naples piled from tile roofs to stone foundations with copper — but it was copper smelted down into ingots for the most part — a small part of it still came in bullock hide-shaped sheets for the old-fashioned, country trade — and, in either event, it was not copper ore.

It was copper changed by the acts of man. It was not virgin copper.

The agreement to “guard” the convoy (i.e. to allow it through) had been wrested only with great difficulty from the three rulers of the Sea-Huns — or, at any rate, from two of them. Osmet was said to be the brains and cunning of the lot; Ottil, to be the fighting heart of the far-flung, restless, and water-borne hordes; Bayla, the third royal brother, was reputed a sot or an idiot — in any event, a cipher. The chances of getting them to make any change in an arrangement to which their greed and recklessness made them at best but luke-warm were nil. And the uncivilized crews of the black and blood-red boats of the water hordes would have no mercy on any independent craft at all.

“Copper is our second problem,” Vergil said. “First is tin.”

Tin came, of course, from Tinland, a mysterious peninsular or — likelier — island realm, in this respect if in no other like Cyprus. But whereas Cyprus had once been and still was officially part of the Economium, Tinland had never been. It was located somewhere to the west and north in the Great Dark Sea, far beyond Tartis. Nothing more was known about Tinland (though legends thereof were not lacking); almost nothing about Tartis. No man of the Empire had ever seen it — at least, none had ever left any account. A rumor persisted that Tartis itself had long ago been conquered and destroyed. It might have been — but throughout the Empire there were small colonies of Tartismen, living under a sort of autonomy by ancient treaty right. Each ward, as their colonies were called, was ruled by its own captain-lord. They were reported to own immense wealth. But they continued to trade.

“Tin is our first concern,” Vergil said, “because access to the suppliers is near at hand. However — leave the obtaining of the virgin ores to me. In the meantime, start the work of preparation. I do not know how long even the preliminaries will take — but begin to begin, now. I will have fair copies made of what is available in my books. Read them carefully, and read them again and again. Start laying in the supplies — the clay for the mold, the wax for the model, the crucibles, the fuel, the cutting and the grinding tools — even the rouge for the polishing. Check every item with the utmost care, and do not hesitate to discard anything which is not the best.

“Let the best vellum, pens, and ink for drawing up the plans be procured. And beware lest strife or impurity enter in upon you while this work is in progress.”

He paused. “We will not be alone in this work,” he said. “Dr. Clemens has agreed to assist us.”

The men received this news with mixed thoughts. On the one hand, Clemens’ hold on both the philosophical and practical aspects of alchemy had the men’s absolute respect. On the other hand, his many eccentricities and outspoken ways of exercising them (“Onions!” he would snort. “What in blazes do you mean by eating onions at a time when you’re working with gold? Do you want to turn it into dross? Nox and Numa! Onions!”), as well as his short way with dissenters, prevented the news from being heard with utter joy. But they would soon adjust to the situation. The very prickliness of Vergil’s friend would become a source of rueful pride among his men, and they would boast of it to their fellows.

After a few more words — the nature of the project was for the time being to remain confidential; the sponsor of it was paying well and they would share in the sum even if the scheme should fail — he left them to their work of preparation.

Tartis ward in Naples consisted chiefly of Tartis Port, a rather small harbor, and Tartis Castle, a hugh Cyclopean mass of stone. It was not in the least like any other castle in the whole dogedom. Passing from the Great Harbor into Tartis Port, Vergil was struck immediately by the difference in tempo. Everything was slower, quieter. Everything was… yes… poorer. A hulk lay careened, but no one worked on it. Another one lay half sunken into the mud, and had lain there long enough for a good-sized young tree to have taken root on the quarter-deck. A pair of calkers worked at no great pace on the bulkhead of a small carrack. And a short caffle of slaves loaded supplies aboard a galley.

And that was all.

An old crone, her dirty skull naked save for an even dirtier rag pulled askew over her few witch locks, sat plucking a thin fowl on the doorstep of a cookshop. She muttered at her task, but did not look up as Virgil’s thin shadow fell across her.

It was said that the Captain-lord was inaccessible, that he did not appear in public even at the coronation of a new doge, that he received the Imperial Legate on one day a year fixed for the purpose, and — after the brief ritual of passing a coin of gold over a tray bearing earth and water, corn and wine and oil — retired from the audience room and left the rest of the interview to a deputy.

There were no guards posted at the foot of the castle steps, which might indeed have been built by the gigantic four-armed Cyclopes in the Age of Dreams, so wide and deep and tall (and so irregular) was each vast shelf of stones. Vergil toiled his way upward, pausing from time to time to rest — and to examine the view. He had never before seen it from this particular angle or series of angles: Vesuvio and its almost invisible fume of smoke, Mount Somma hard by, the Deer Park beyond, the blue waters of the Bay, the Great Harbor (its clamor now barely a distant hum), parts of the city and its near and distant suburbs. Now and then as the steps curved and turned — its blocks and those of the walls to either side so irregular and often protruding that it seemed only the weight of the others piled on top kept them from slipping out of place and hurtling down like so many thunderstones — now and then the view was cut off as the steps sank or the walls rose; then, when he had for a moment forgotten everything but the task of mounting the stairs and placing his feet so that they did not slip in the deep hollows worn by endless ages of use and passage, an entire new panorama would flash open before his eyes again.

There was no guard at the top of the step, either; indeed, he had not at first realized that he was at the top, so gradually did the steps become shallower, so irregular did the footing yet remain. He did not at first notice the man in the scarlet cloak, either.

It was the legs he noticed first.

They stood upon a block of stone set by itself in the middle of a courtyard, by their look strong and healthy legs; and yet they trembled. Planted firmly on the stone, feet unmoving, tremors of nerve and muscle ran through them without ceasing. Vergil raised his eyes.

The man was dressed in the embroidered and pleated linen garment that was the traditional habit of the Tartismen, and over it he wore a short cloak, dyed in scarlet. All this Vergil saw in a second, and in another second he had said, “Sir, I seek the Captain-lord”; but before he had finished saying it his voice had almost faltered, having seen the man’s face.

This man is blind, this man is deaf, he is looking out to sea for a ship that will never come — so ran his rapid, startled, and successive thoughts. Then: He has taken a vow to stand here, thus, for a certain length of time, and will stand here thus though the Heavens may fall… and the man turned his gaze on Vergil.… This man is mad. He would kill me, if he could. The eyes were like dark green stones lain long under water, full of something duller than rage and sicker than pain. The lips were tremulous with a voiceless mutter and a drop of sweat — though the day was not at all hot — ran down his brow from his hairline to his nose.

In a low voice, Vergil said, “Sir, my pardon for disturbing you.” And he passed on. Rounding a corner, he came upon two other men — both wearing Tartis clothes, but neither in a scarlet cloak — emerging from a door into the interior of the castle; and to them he repeated that he was looking for the Captain-lord.

Both showed surprise, as much at his presence as at his request. One of them nodded, the other looked over his shoulder as they continued on their way, and he followed them. They spoke together in what he assumed was their own language. Down a ramp the three of them went, into a roofless chamber, turned at a right angle and went down another ramp, crossed through a balcony overlooking a hall as high as his house in which other voices echoed thinly, came by and by to what appeared to be an office or an antechamber. The Tartismen gestured to Vergil to sit — and vanished through a narrow door that closed behind them. Vergil sat.

This was the first part of the castle he had seen that was furnished, and its furnishings were scanty and curious. There was a saddle rug, or blanket, of Parthian weave spread on a wooden trestle with carved ends, a desk on which lay a codex in an extreme state of disrepair, a silver dish with a stale piece of bread and a fish bone, and a leather screen. Feeling the muscles in his legs begin to ache from the climb, Vergil sighed. From behind the screen something stirred.

“I didn’t know anyone was here,” a voice said, and the screen was pushed aside. The light from the embrasure fell full into Vergil’s eyes and he squinted, shielding his eyes with his hand.

“I am waiting to see the Captain-lord,” he said.

“Ah… please, then, come and wait here. It is more comfortable.” There was a long bench by the window niche. His eyes adjusting now, Vergil examined his host. The man’s voice hinted of Punic or Syrian origins, his clothes were of good Neapolitan make. His manner, though tense, was controlled. He might have been of any age. His eyes were pale, pale blue-green. His complexion…

“My name is An-thon Ebbed-Saphir, but they call me the Red Man. It’s easy to see why. I’m a Phoenician. Our skins seem to take the sun, to retain it, but we do not tan. ‘Phoenician,’ of course, means just that — the Red People. But you know all this, of course.” He waved his hand a trifle wearily. His voice died away. He took his place at full length upon the bench. After a moment he said, “The Captain-lord. I have never seen him, myself.” Giving over the effort of speech, he invited Vergil, with gestures, to admire the view. He did not look up or speak when a Tartisman with a woolly beard came bustling in and motioned Vergil with both arms and an expression of great importance to come along. Vergil tarried a moment.

In a low voice he said, quickly to the Red Man, Ebbed-Saphir, “Who is the one in the scarlet cloak?”

A flicker of something disturbed the raptness of the Phoenician’s gaze. “Don’t ask, do not interfere,” he said. And his look returned to the prospect of the suburban villas stretching along the Bay for miles.

“Well?” cried Woolly Beard. “Well? Captain-lord? Why?”

And then he screamed — a scream of utterly unbelieving agony, such as tears unbidden and unchecked from a laboring woman by whom a child struggles to be born.

Scarlet ran before Vergil’s eyes. Woolly Beard lay doubling on the floor. The Phoenician was not to be seen. The man who had been standing outside on the block of stone went rushing through the inner door, his cloak streaming and whipping. His voice cried terrible, inarticulate things. His short sword ran blood. And Vergil ran behind him.

The course he ran was a nightmare course down the endless Cyclopean corridors, echoing with the frenzied cries of the man ahead — a man who, every now and then, would turn and lunge at him. The face was no longer more than faintly human. Vergil fell and hit his head a sickening crack against the stones. The man in the scarlet cloak turned around and ran again. The cloak caught upon the protruding socket of a burnt-out torch, ripped, hung there. Vergil snatched it as he ran past, holding it in one hand as he groped desperately with the other, got hold of the writing case in his belt.

Suddenly they were in a suite of furnished chambers. A door burst open and a man stood there, frozen before he could show either astonishment or terror. The madman howled, leaped forward. Vergil leaped after him, bent, whipped forward the cloak with the writing case knotted into one end of it; stopped short, jerked back.

Tripped, felled by his own cloak, the attacker lay before him on the floor, motionless for an instant, which Vergil dared not let pass unused. He jumped, coming down with his knees and all his weight upon the place just below the ribs, turning his toes so he could move back on the balls of his feet; and pinioned the madman by the elbows.

Now men poured forth, it seemed, from everywhere. They beat the manslayer to the floor again, and one of them raised the sword.

“Good is the strong wine,” the Captain-lord said, in his guttural voice, “and I have had put in it a medicine or two. But it is to be drunk, not held in the cup.”

Vergil drank. The wine was of a vintage strange to him, and tasted of herbs. It was somewhat bitter and despite himself he shuddered. Then, as if with the shudder, all the weakness left him. “Why did he want to do it?” he asked.

The Captain-lord took in a hiss of breath, held it, shrugged. “To explain it, fully, would take long — and then there would be explanations of the explanations. I will speak shortly. There was a matter of a woman, a punishment, a consent I could not give.” Seated, he looked immense. Huge head, huge chest, broad shoulders. His legs were short, though, and he limped. The thought came to Vergil that in this, as much as anything, might lie the reason for the man’s inaccessibility, his never appearing before the gaze of strangers. His hair was white; his face, seamed.

“Once there were guards all around,” he continued, “to protect from a danger. I, thinking there was none, removed them. And so — look — danger… and from within. Tell me, now, with truth, who you are and why you came.”

The room was elaborately, richly furnished, but everything seemed a little old, a little shabby; a little dirty, too.

“Speculum majorum, I have never heard of a one. Magic. I have no concern in it. Queens, Carsus, copper — all things strange to me.” The Captain-lord shook his massy head. He raised his eyebrows, his great chest filled with air. “But — tin? Ho! Tin! Yes! With this I have a concern. The Captain-lord does not sell you tin, but he can give all you want. So… Vergil. Doctor. Magus. How much tin is enough?”

Slowly, carefully, as simply as he could, Vergil explained that he required only as much tin as would fit into the palms of his hands… but that it must be virgin tin.

“I understand,” the old man said. “You explain to me most carefully. I will explain — I will try to explain to you, also carefully. Look. You are in your house. You want something, you send your slave to the market. You say, Go. Buy this. So? Simple. But what you want now, it is not simple. Goods come down to us slowly, from the north, from the west, from ward to ward. Virgin tin, it comes not here. It is cast into ingots so far away that I, even the Captain-lord, I do not know where. I can try to obtain. But I am only Captain-lord here. In another ward I am only another name. Far enough away to find virgin tin, I am not even only a name.

“Here I have power of life, power of death. Elsewhere, I have no power. My influence is strong at Rome, weak at Marsala. Ice — do you know ice, Doctor? Pass one piece from hand to hand. It melts. It melts away…”

More than ice and personal influence melts away, Vergil thought. The whole Tartis system seemed to be melting away, seemed to be in decay, a shadow of its past. And so seemed he himself.

But so long as even a shadow of it remained, he had to make use of it.

“I will try,” said the Captain-lord. “Why not? It is gratitude. Perhaps in three years time — virgin tin.”

Someone came and lit the lamps. No longer dim, the room seemed no longer shabby, old, worn. In the dancing shadow the old Captain-lord grew younger. A spark of light glittered on the boss of a round shield hanging on the wall by an auroch’s horn.

“Sir,” said Vergil, “three years time will not do. Three months may be even too long, too late.”

A faint, wry smile touched the old man’s lips. “Doctors of Magic and Science, even you are bound by time? And what, then, of me? Never mind. Bring here the horn.”

The lowing note sounded deeply. After a while a servant came. Torches were obtained, by their hissing flames they were lighted down the same vast, turning, Cyclopean steps; and into a courtyard filled with a strong, rank, sharp odor. A man with leather wristlets looked up from placing bits of meat in a bowl of water. He was obviously a falconer, thought Vergil. But where did the Tartismen hawk? And who had ever heard of their hawking? Furthermore, not all of the equipment to be seen was the familiar “hawks’ furniture” of falconry.

The two old men spoke together in their own language, then turned to enter a wooden outbuilding built against the castle’s wall, the Captain-lord beckoning his guest to follow. The place smelt like a mews and there were subdued bird noises from the cages and roosts.

“This is the Master of the Air,” said the Captain-lord. Vergil bowed. The Master grunted, looking far from honored, far from pleased; and when his commandant went on to say “He will arrange the sending,” the Master of the Air protested bitterly — so his tone and manner showed, though Vergil could understand no word. Still muttering, he reached into a cage and took out a bird the like of which Vergil had never seen before. It was gold in color and had a crest upon its head, and it bent forward and nibbled gently on the Master’s index finger with what seemed like affection. The man’s gaunt face softened, and he spoke to Vergil for the first time.

“She was sent me in an egg,” he said. “One of a clutch of two, under a broody hen. The other hatched not. I raised, I taught. For only great danger was she to be sent — ”

“The danger came today,” the Captain-lord interrupted. “And he, this Vergil Magus, saved from danger. He has earned the sending, I say, enough.”

The Master of the Air seemed almost about to weep. Touched, Vergil would have liked to decline whatever it was — he was still not sure — what the order touched on. But he remembered his own need, and his own pain. And he stayed silent.

With a final mutter, the Master of the Air tucked the golden bird under one arm and went off into the shadowy corners of the mews. He came back with a small falcon-eagle on each wristlet, glaring fiercely from their yellow eyes. The Captain-lord took the bird of gold in his hands, gently, and the bird looked up at him. He spoke to it, and it seemed to follow. He spoke again — stopped — spoke again. The same words seemed to occur each time. It was as if he were instructing the bird.

“Am I to understand,” the thought occurring suddenly to Vergil, “that this bird of gold will carry a message? You will teach it to speak the words — like a popinjay? And will it learn them quickly?”

“No. It cannot speak.”

“Then…”

“It will carry your message as my message. And where it puts down, there it will write the Word.”

Write!

And the Captain-lord did not believe in magic!

“Enough, then. It has learned. The two others go with it for guardians. Master of the Air, let it be done.”

The Master of the Air caressed the birds, all three, lovingly, gently. He whispered in their ears, he kissed the fierce heads of the falcon-eagles. Then he loosed their leathern jesses. They fluttered their wings. The bird of gold was tossed up. The torchlight glittered on her golden pinions. She circled once. Twice. A third time. The falconets shot up like crossbow bolts. The three vanished into the night. One soft gray feather came floating down and landed at Vergil’s feet. From far, very far and above, a faint scream sounded on the night wind, and the torches smoked and flared.