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

XII Tingitayne

As it were idly, but mainly to calm his still leaping heart and throbbing thoughts, he brought forth from his pocket the battered thin old copy of The Periplus of the Coasts of Mauretayne, and riffled through it, pausing here and there to read …

Ictoon, a haven with no port or town, but containing three flowing streams of good water. Deep-drawing ships, it is said, may enter either from the right or left, but the careful will ever prefer the left, except in the season of myriad heavy rains, when the river … The Harbor-town where is the siege of the Chief of the Kings of White Mauretayne, has a myriad of peoples, and exporteth reeds and rushes, such as those of the sweet flag or iris, which sometimes be of the best quality; you may know this by the scent or olor. Myriads of papyrus plants are here to be found springing up by the rivers and swamps, but they are too coarse to be used for writing or even for wrapping, so they are not prepared in the usual way, but are kept sodden and may be scutched for rope as needed. From this the Chief of Kings derives it is said a myriad of ducats in export duties …

Vergil sighed. The anonymous author or compiler was fond of the word myriad. The pages turned and turned.

… the waters are not sweet which proceed from the brooks of Bubastine, site of a temple to Cybele or Venus who is worshipped here as the genetrix of Genets, valued for their incessant hunting-down of mice and rats. Hither came Algibronius, Geber, or Gibber, whose alchemical texts are by the vulgus called gibberish. The Gebber here examined for minerals useful for his Art, and found, tis said, an excellent unctuous earth for preparing fluxes. But no mines are now worked. Here Gibber commenced to edifix an altar, but did not complete it, preferring … Sarsten by the Sea hath for sale without stint very good wheats and millet and spelt; also a scarlet dye sold in grain. Sarsten above the Sea prepares several special sorts of garlands which retain their scent above a lustrum …

Vergil gave here a great yawn, felt much fatigued. Came hither Gibber, delving, devoting, praying? And decided to erect his altar to the Great and Comely Mother, symbol of the Female Principle in the Universe, but did not finish it —? How like him. Algibronius came once to a symposium at the School of Illyriodorus, stroked much his long thin dark beard and spoke for above an hour by the glass: left with no one (perhaps not even The Old Master) very much enlightened. Yet there was about him an hint of barely banked fires and of almost-quivering excitements at the concealed wonders of the world, could one but take up the mantic sword Inwitsbane and with one stroke cut open the great egg of Zazma the Unknowing, abda ca dabra, and thus incipiate the Yolk of Per sis and the White of Selene and Luna and the Great White Porcine Sow if and so so on: much so on. And then departed abruptly, so much so that he awoke several students: Vergil would have mildly wished to know but never did: whither had he departed.

“Bring her out, bring her a bittle out,” Vergil heard the captain Polycarpu directing. They were standing down a coast, and he had not even heard the landfall called, not never so much as asked the ritual What shore? what coast of people? Had that much time passed as he droused over the Periplus? “Bring her a bittle out,” the captain had said; sure enough the barco swung a small ways out away from shore.

“Which side is the current coming down?” Current coming down? That meant a river.

“Starboard, Carp.”

“Then swing her in, making up the larboard side.”

The helmsman gave a slight grunt, gave Vergil a slight glance, as one should say, After all my years on the water do ye tell me so?

But the shore was, mere, a shore, a dry brown shore as like so many, here and there a small structure with a flat roof, and on yonder hill, of course, there stood a building, inevitably a tower: it was — ah the god — how dull, and Vergil’s eyes fled back to the book, over which he had pored and droused. Of a sudden in the book, a new page, not as usual the mutter of what many springs of water and where, of rocks and reefs, exports, imports: no. At this point, it was clear, the nameless compiler, or, likelier, recompiler, had set himself to copy something quite different, and the calligraphy, the “hand,” grew still and formal. Was this some lines from a Fasti, and if so, which one? Hmm, to see, to see. Somehow, already, skipping ahead and scanning words later even before actually reading carefully the beginning, the principio; somehow he had the feeling that this new entry, if that was quite the word, constituted some sort of a montjoy, that cairn of stones erected to mark the site of a victory in battle.

Hercules, the Roman form of Melcarth, called the Tyrian Hercules, from the Punic Melec-Cartha, King of the City; but sometimes reverenced by the Gauls and Anglians and other Nortishmen as “King Arthur.” Melcarth was ever the chief deity of Tyre (Tur, Turret, Tower) and also of that City rich in Purple her chief African colony, Carthage (from Cartha Gedasha = New City). Some say thus: King Cartha, famous for his deeds of valor, metaphorically termed labors, erected twain columns at the western end of the Midland Sea; beyond which bounds he did no deeds, gestes, jousts. Others say they be named Gibber’s Altar and the Mountain of Atlas: but this is mere legendry. The facts are that twain columns were erected in the Temples of Melcarth at Tyre and later at Carthage by that great architect Hiram. (Note the progression Hiram, Hercules, Melcarth. The H/M and R/L shifts are according to the Laws of Letters as laid down by the Phoenicians or Punes, who invented letters. Is the procession noted?). The true significance of the twain columns is not surely wotted, though some have feigned wit of it, pointing at the double phallus of the Divine Priapus at Pompeii and elsewhere and saying that this signifies the Duplication of Felicity: o pópoi and peh upon them. The true significations of the Columns of Atlas, also miscalled the Pillars (or Gates) of Hercules or Melcarth, eek betermed Hiram’s Fingers, remain therefore one of the Higher Mysteries. Only this much is of a surety known: that their true names hight Jachin and Boaz. Melcarth bathed there. Bathes there still? So The Matter sayeth. And more, The Matter sayeth not.

Slightly dazed by all this (and perhaps, so, too, the scribe or recompiler, for he seemed to turn with an air of relief to: In Hirnon, the next place of haven and selling and lading are at all times and seasons to be found never less than an hundred holy harlots; and seafarers and men or merchantry always pause to do their devoirs to this Fane of the Genetrix …) But although at some occasions this would of course be of intense interest to Vergil, his appetites thereto seemed for now anulled. Why had all this happened? How, out of the bitter jaws of almost certain death, had he and all folk of this ship and perhap even the very ship itself, escaped with their lives and even their integuments intact? To whom did he owe a debt greater than any thanks? To any king or soldane or senate? to no ships of battle, certes. To whom or what, then?

An old ox-thrall.

Back he was in Tingitayne.

“ ‘King of Carthage,’ nonsense, my good citizen,” said the Proconsul, “there is no ‘King of Carthage.’ What the Viceconsul meant to say is that the fellow calls himself ‘King of Carthage.’ Name is Hemdibal, got it in my books, and I don’t care what he calls himself. What he is, he is a pirate. What those fellows with him are, they are also pirates. Got ships, have they? How many ships did you see? — saw one, just as I thought. Don’t know very much, but a man doesn’t get to be Consul Romanus (which I needn’t remind you I was, before I drew the name of this stinking, fly-blown pest-hole out of the urn according to the ways of our Fathers, as wise today as they were the day they were inst graven on the Iron Tablets), man doesn’t get to be Co-consul of Rome without knowing the difference between the singular and the plural. Don’t talk to me of grammar,” Vergil had not so much as mentioned the subject, “-urn, — us, -a, — i, -o, — a, -um, — us; tollo, tollere, sustuli, sublatum, don’t you see. Rego, regere, rexi, rectum. Singular and plural, indeed.” And he glared at Vergil with pale blue eyes set in a wine-dark face.

And Vergil, stifling any inclinations which he may have had about possibly extrapolating comments along the lines of rexi, rectum, realized full well that a man didn’t often get to be Co-Consul (the Emperor being invariably the other Co-) without being a jacanapes, a dullard, or a fool; the Emperor — whoever he might be — few emperors would ever wish to select anyone else to bear the conjoint consulate who was not all three. And, just to take no chances, the Emperor always saw to it that all the lots provided for the drawing from the urn at the end of his colleague’s term bore the name of whichever stinking, fly-blown pest-hole (distant, too) it had been decided to afflict with the retiring consul (the Imperial Member of the Roman Consulate never retired, of course). It was hoped that this experience would cure whatever Patrician from any further interest in the realm of politics for which his noble blood and subsequent unpopularity entitled him.

That such a holder of the Fool’s License was deemed, for one thing, incapable of contemplating a plot against the Crown Imperial, and, for another, incapable of succeeding in one: goes without saying.

Agrippa Pretorius: always an exception. Lupus was Emperor then (Arms: a wolf sejant on a field of dead men’s bones: so twas said) and, it seemed, Lupus could not do without Agrippa Pretorius … for long. In those odd grey eyes like some cold and shoreless sea whose depths could be neither plumbed nor fathomed, there lay, it seemed, an utter lack of any desire for glory soever. Lupus still feared him? Perhaps. Lupus had only to say to Chief of Guards, “Bring me the head of the Consul Pretorius”? aye … but Lupus, who, be he what else he might be, was nothing like a fool, knew that if he were to do so, it would then be far likelier that Chief of Guards would bring the Consul Pretorius the head of the Emperor Lupus. But it seemed the Emperor needed him. So every now and then Pretorius would be summoned from the farm where he reared his bulls and planted pears and willows, to be made Consul once again. Only thus was Lupus sure to be free of the Marmosets, the thronging little pettymen and functioners who buzzed round the Imperial eyes like a cloud of gnats; afterwards, of course, Pretorius would draw the lot for a fine rich province from the urn. Another tale.

Although it was so hot that the flies, being too tired even to fly, hung limply in clusters from cobwebs whose webbers were too hot to pursue them, the Proconsul was wearing the same woolen tabard and trews which he was sure to have worn at any occasion back in Yellow Rome where the formalities did not require a toga. He was sweating heavily, too. He was a rather heavy man, too, despite the tradition that all Patricians were imperially slim. Yet he rose to his feet quickly enough when the Viceroy entered the pale-blue-plastered room — perhaps — perhaps? certainly not because he recognized in the Viceroy his superior (a mere Member of the Equestrian Order, a mere knight? as his superior? pah …) and certainly not because the Viceroy was saying “I greet Your Upperness, that whom no one has a nicer or more discriminating palate when it comes to date-wine, and the Excise is rather perplexed if the five tuns which have just come in are to be classed as Highest Duty, or —”

“Date-wine? Sickly sweety stuff, fit to buy as treats for whores; Excise! not my department of course … but sometimes the Highest Duty stuff is after all not half-bad, and one wouldn’t want the Fisc to be cheated …”

His words died away into a mumble as he followed the exciseman with quill, ink-pottle, and roll of papyrus. The Viceroy dropped his official politeness as though it had been a rather sweaty towel, and he at the edge of the pool in the Cooling-Room at the bath.

“Of course I have been listening,” he said, and waited just a moment as Vergil automatically looked round for any tell-tale hole-in-the-wall; then, remembering to mind his manners, looked only at an imaginary spot between the Viceroy’s eyes: not that he expected any fascination to be exercized, his spirit paralyzed and subdued like the coney’s quailing before the serpent’s weaving head and fascinating eye — never had he known any Roman official who had this art — but it was well to keep in practice.

“Of course I have been listening,” said the Viceroy, “not only at the wall just now, and a damned fool I’d be if I didn’t: much do I learn that way —”

“Including Your Lordship’s learning the case endings for the neuter gender as well as the declension of two invaluable if irregular verbs. One supposes that a man could learn Latin that way, if one did not already know it and had a lifetime to listen.”

Kept his face quite straight. Officials often enjoyed a joke about other officials, but sometimes thought they were being leered at; in which event they might not enjoy it.

“You are pleased to play with me, Mage, and to enjoy yourself and almost to laugh. But I have also been listening down at the moles and jetties and my people have been listening for me: and you will not enjoy hearing what I have heard; come in, you!”

And the You who came in was a man whom Vergil had seen before on his first, brief stay in Tingitayne, although this time he was without the company of his twain serjeants-at-mace; his name …? his name was …

“Festus!” he exclaimed. Festus … the skipper of the “justice-boat”? Should he mention what he had seen of the fugitives the man had then asked about, seen of them that awesome night of the oliphaunts in “the Region called Huldah?” No. He would not. He would only —

“Have you located the right hand of the Colossus of Rhodes yet, Festus?”

The skipper, as was traditional, scratched his head. “A marvel that you remember my name, me ser. Ah, what? Well, no, but we’ve a report as to they say it’s been located in Neapoly, but changed unto marble … Ah! I perceives as me ser has heard this heself!”

“But … the great Marble Hand has been in Naples as long as I can remember.”[14]

“And the right hand o’ th’ Colossus of Rhodes has been missing, long as I can —”

The Viceroy cleared his throat, and Festus instantly fell silent and stood to attention. “Those memories can wait upon some other occasion. To settle and set aside: You were marooned in Lotophagea?” Vergil nodded. “Marooning, except for reasons the most extreme, has been forbidden by The Law of the Sea since the Rescript of the Divinely Favored Julius I. I shall make complaint on your behalf, Ser Doctor Vergil, to the Admiralty Court; as to next —”

Vergil, aware that perhaps he should remain silent, could not help hazard the suggestion that it might be best be made by himself, in person. “Best it might be, but you shan’t have time. As to next —”

Though vastly astonnied, Vergil said nothing; fixed his attention on the opposite wall, where, who knows how long ago, some plaisterer, not content with having applied the plaister with his own bare hands, as witness the not totally unpleasing swirls which a common harling or screeding-tool would not supply, had briefly placed his hand flat upon the wet surface: and Vergil observed that the man’s index finger lacked the first joint; this quick glance had sufficed to keep his face quite blank; and, as really he did not wish his mind staying blank as well, switched his attention from the wall to the Viceroy’s face. Which was not alone stern, but aseemed a good bit haggard.

As had he not observed on their first meeting.

“As to next, the talk around the water-butts along the fore shore is that you, Doctor Vergil, by some arts magical into which I shall make no enquiry, Festus informing me that he knows of a surety that you do have the doctorate, license being implied …” He had been speaking indeed very fluently, then slowed down, then stopped. Remained a bare second silent. Then resumed again: not indeed slowly, but slower.

“The fact, I understand, is that certainly the ship pursuing you was greatly disabled, though, one hears, not foundered nor sunk. And I must suppose it to have been a ship of Carthage, whatever that may mean. Did you perceive aboard of it any person you know by sight or —”

“The Pune whom I observed on a ship, the Zenos, passing between Naples and Lerica, and later ashore in Corsica; and yet again in your Lordship’s office. I knew him as Hemdibal; you told me he is also called Josaias.”

“King of Carthage,” they finished, simultaneously.

“Yes … Well, Ser, or rather Doctor, I have heard that this same man had evidently recognized you. And has sworn to pursue and to burn you or drown you, posting over every sea …”

“Such a report, if true, has reached here very quickly —”

With a weary gesture, the Viceroy said he sometimes thought the very birds brought words; and Vergil bethought him of the harpy-birds: had they witnessed the scene at sea? were they perhaps grateful to those who provided carrion? if indeed it was carrion-flesh they ate? or were they eager to provoke combat to the death between any groups of men? Fire burns, water drowns, Carthage hates Rome, Harpies are no friend to man …

“The same rumors say he aswore vengeance on, what’s his name, Polycarpu, his ship and crew. Therefore. I have told Polycarpu to take his ship up the coast where there are a few shipwrights and their ways and have his barco repainted, taking not even time to scrape or caulk or make repairs, to fit himself for sea in haste, with new masts and new shrouds and new sails bent on, and to make his way west with all speed. I’ve also told all men with beards to shave them and all men who have no beards to let them grow. Mayhaps these deceipts will bring them safe to Sardland; and further my advice to them is to avoid the western seas for long and long. Until this matter and this menace be cleared up.”

Here the man stopped and ordered by gesture that a tassy be filled for him out of a jug; he drank, he began again to speak.

While it was, of course, treason for a subject to assume a royal or imperial title, still, lawyers might have pretty sport and long make delay over such matters as: was Josaias indeed effectively assuming the title of a kingdom which no longer existed? “I can see the advocates there, prancing and preening in Apollo’s Court; knowing that no Roman judges will now accept that there is such a res as a Kingdom of Carthage … Ah, my Herc and my Merc, it’s all futile! Is there still a Roman fleet, swift to punish violations of the Pax Romana? There must still be, where is it now? — all round about the Italian boot, keeping guard against enemies out of the east. Against a rabble of scum and barbarous dogs in bumboats called Sea Huns! And what of the west, eh? what of the —”

Nothing but the need to swallow the spittle which filled his mouth made the Viceroy stop a moment, and in the silence while the muscles worked in the man’s face and throat, quietly, Vergil asked, “My Lord Ser, regardless of legal status, where is Carthage now?”

A helpless but eloquent gesture, such as the ruffian caitiff Junius had given at the funeral of one whose name differed from his own by a letter: murderer, assassin, blood fresh-washed from his hands; and then a cried, What title had Casar to the Empery? and for the matter of a title delivered Rome over to something worse than an Emperor: to war, to civil war, over to two-faced Janus, with red mouth straining and with teeth all bare … “It, or whatever place these Punic brutes use as base, it must be somewhere, must it not? Even pirates require a base, an armada however hostile can’t subsist on fish alone, can’t draw bread and oil and weaponry in with a net. Tartis …!”

Vergil leaned, the better to hear. Tartis from its ruined and ruinous city near Gades, next trade entrepot north of … of … of Gades! sands of time! yet another name for that pass between the seas: the Great Gates of Gades! … Tartis, that once-great league of kingly sea-traders, established not only before Rome and before Carthage and even before Tyre and Sidon and before the spread-out lands of Greece; Tartis was now like some great sea-orme, its head a-stricken off, yet its coils still twitched … some of them still had life, here and there a trading-post, there and here a castello. Tartis …

“Tartis reports, in that antique and oblique way of Tartis, ceremony interminable; come reports, if one may call them so, that black ships, not our small Midland Sea barco-boats daubed black: but ships of burthen as large as any ships of war, flying, shamelessly, bold as brothel-bawds, some banner we here know is the old Punic banner …” The man paused as though summoning strength to staunch his own rhetoric; went on, more slowly, slowly, on. “One hears that of late these ships do great trade in many far-apart marts: buying wheat which they have some way of boiling and drying out so it neither rots nor rusts nor moulders: buying iron, buying steel, buying old copper, copper, tin, buying timber, tar, and flax, buying leather, buying hide.” He had given name to just about all materiel of war. “I hear of such trade, much, but see no such cargo coming past my Tingitayne, to pause and pay the export-tax. With what do they pay? Why, they pay with purple, and I hear that sometimes they pay with gold, and tales incredible I hear: such as, they pay with silk —

“Silk. I believe it not. Nor do I believe other reports, that they pay with yet something else of value, which it seems folk be shy and coy to name … But of this, enough. So men say. As for you, if these ships be bold enough to enter our Roman sea and swear reprisal on you, it is time that you get gone. Right soon. Now. You are, it seems, wanted at Rome, the August House has want of you, it wants you hard, I wot not why. I do wot that Himself, that Wolf, will have my head if he gets you not. And since you cannot go by sea, by this sea of water, you must go by land, across the sea of stone, the stony land, the Terra Petra: and so even if that Pune or some Pune or other or any posse comitatus all of Punes; if then they swoop down and burn my Tingitayne, stinking sullen sulky Tingitayne, burn it like an hut in a cucumber field: at least word will be gat out that you have gone safe from here and so that wolf will not burn my own brothers’ lands and fields and houses, holding them at guilt by right of frankpledge. Horses are being saddled for you and guide, leave by the black lane at fall of night. These Berbar horsemen can guide themselves by faintest starshine so don’t bother and bootless stand, begging for delay. If you have prayers to pray, go quick to the temple in the courtyard. Dusk falls, it gins and commences to fall right swift, there is time to take neither a woman nor a bath: here is the double purse of gold. I shall offer for you, let us be hopeful. Tell them at home that the Viceroy Caspar at Tingitayne filled his orders full. Go.”