The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series

Introduction

THE SCARLET FIG is the third and last Vergil Magus novel to come from Avram Davidson’s pen. It is steeped in the millieu of its predecessor works, The Phoenix And The Mirror and Vergil In Averno, and — perhaps more comprehensively than any other of his works — in the knowledge, lore, mysteries and other enquiries that engaged Avram’s mind in the production of his magnum opus.

As Avram explained in his introduction to The Phoenix and the Mirror: “From the Dark Ages to the Renascence the popular view of the ancient world as reflected in the Vergilean Legends was far from the historical and actual one in more than the acceptance of legend and magic and myth. It is a world of never-never, and yet it is a world true to its own curious lights — a backward projection of medievalism, an awed and confused transmogrification of quasi-forgotten ancient science.”

This process of transmogrification takes place in THE SCARLET FIG in endlessly inventive ways; in the substitution of SQPR for SPQR, in the conflation of the two Diomedes (of Argos and of Thrace) into a single figure, in the delightful neologism of Byzantinople.

The ancients held the world to be immersed in a “universal aether”, a sea of knowledge. Avram too existed in just such an aether: into this sea he would dip his nets and draw up the strangest of fish, and set them gently before his readers. One manifestation of this was the vast card files that Avram established to support his Vergil sequence (and for which Avram employed the working title The Encyclopaedia of the World of Vergil Magus), copiously cross-referenced, full of tangential connections and cryptic references across a huge array of source texts. A selection of these cards are reproduced in an appendix to this volume and they demonstrate the scale of Avram’s ambition for the Vergil sequence.

Drawing from this unique resource, THE SCARLET FIG teems with all manner of wonders and strange notions, all vividly rendered: Castor and Pollux, harpies, basilisks, the satyr-infested Isle of the Lotophages, Sindibaldo, the origins of perspective, Phoenician dyes, the derivation of that most Dutch of birds — the Flemingoe, the magical powers of wand and twig (also known as virga, a play on Virgil in Latin).

THE SCARLET FIG is in many ways a paean to the love of knowledge, of pure knowledge, the knowledge which gives meaning and context to our world. Vergil’s world is experienced as much through the gaining and giving — the interchange — of knowledge as it is experienced through Vergil’s physical journeying, adventures and sensations. This happy marriage of the intellect and the senses, viewed through the looking glass of “unhistory”, makes the THE SCARLET FIG one of the finest expressions of Avram Davidson’s art.