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

II The Port of Naples

Back in Naples, he first turned the horse over to the stableman, with instructions to care for it after the journey and then return it with the next string of mounts going to the capital. The man would not take money from him, saying, “There’s no one that doesn’t know of his name, ser. That rich Etruscan? Fufluns Cato? He could buy and sell Yellow Rome, several times over … and a generous payer, we hear, as well.”

Vergil had wanted only to return to his house for a moment, pause, pack, and flee. To what point of peril had his involvement with the mantic arts brought him: Mantova, daughter of Tiresias, had established those arts and thereby and therewith founded Mantua … Mantua … the name seemed to speak to him with the vatic voice. But what was Mantua to him? at all? the Dame Mantova, her arms three black goats on a field of golden asphodel … He hastened him to his house, all thought of Mantova and Mantua gone a-glim; Cosmo Nungo would be there … one hoped … the man was an artisan, an artificer, an alchymist … the man was not what one more rigid than Vergil could call dependable. The talk of the Art in Naples was that Cosmo Nungo had (some said) three times (some said, seven) achieved projection — and each time, in his haste to sell the gold to gamble and to drink (“Let the mourner bury his dead, and the reveler hasten to his wine,” was Cosmo Nungo’s favorite proverb; hint enough to the wise: who or rather what had “died” in order for projection to succeed?) each time had in his haste forgotten the steps. Naples slurred over the small detail: “Cosmo could make,” and that was all. “Why that damned old rotten robe, Cosmo Nungo, man, when thee can make?” The man merely showed his mouthful of yellow broken teeth, and shrugged.

Sometimes Cosmo Nungo the artisan felt close enough to his origins (for he came of citizen stock) to wear his toga — grimy, nearer grey than white: but ah! the prestige! Sometimes he wore the remnants of tabard and trews. But generally he wore his work-robe and this was basically a mass of patches: squares which had once been madder, rectangles of dyers’ green, triangles of indigo, and shapeless pieces steeped in woad: whatever he had been able to pick up as he passed between one workshop and another, all sewed into his loose ragged cloak of (originally) grey or brown: and all of them and it: very, very dirty.

The rough robe of Cosmo Nungo the artificer had missed its annual washing for more years than one or two — glue, sawdust, paint, plaster, gesso, even here and there a glistening fleck of gold which he had probably stolen, the gold dust pinch by pinch, the gold leaf, leaf by leaf, grease, gypsum, here a smear of color and there a smear of oil. Vergil encountered Cosmo Nungo the alchymist fairly often, and sometimes employed him in one task or another: too poor, Cosmo Nungo, too inconsistent, too irresponsible, ever to have gained (or, if he had gained, not kept) the status of a master craftsman; always able to get employment and never able to keep it. Cosmo Nungo would steal the gold leaf from under the master’s nose and sell it to buy wine — the gold leaf, not the nose: though, had he been able to sell the nose for wine, be sure he would have stolen it, too — going without pay, often, when the employer was himself poor but the work went well; stealer of bread, lover of music, playing on the rebec with stained fingers, foul of mouth but in his love of arts very sweet…. “Solitary, mad, and indolant; shockingly eccentric, and unreliable” — Cosmo Nungo.

He had, Cosmo Nungo, a half-way face — that is, his face was half-way between crimson and scarlet — with a turned-up nose, a mouthful of yellow crooked teeth, and a small twist of white beard. Seeing him with his red, red face bent so near his work that the nose, had it not been fixed by nature at such an angle, would have touched said work, one might have assumed that his sight was bad; but Cosmo Nungo could recognize a drink of wine the length of a street away. Some other occasion, then, must be found to explain such close attention: and the explanation was — his work? He loved it. He loved something else, too, besides work and wine. He loved to gamble.

The story was well-known how, playing at the die and dice one lowering Winter day with a less tender toss-pot, the carver Valerian, luck fell, cast after cast, to Cosmo Nungo. How he mocked at Valerian! cast after cast, coin after coin, win after win, joke after joke, jibe after jibe. Ah — sweet little Hercules with the parasol? ah? ah? there goes the cabbage-money, Val! Will the old ‘oman sleep with thee, Val? You’ll have to play with it, Val! no foining or futtering this week, Val! it’s mine, all of it’s mine!

He raked in the heap of mean coins, he was not gracious in victory. Cosmo crowed. Valerian said nothing, produced a two-obol piece from his toothless gob, cast … won … cast … won. The luck was turned, clean turned. Cosmo Nungo lost coin after coin, cursed — cast — lost — tossed — lost again — Coin after mean coin moved from the one pile to the other. The vile wine with vile water was all drunk, even the water itself was all drunk, the stinking cheap oil failed in the little lamp, outside it began to snow: the two old villains played on in the dimness and the cold.

Val gave a great hoot of triumph — started to rake in the pile of scanty stivers — a cry from old Cosmo Nungo: Wait! Another throw!

Val paused. “Have thee another oboi, son of a sow?” No, Cosmo Nungo conceded that he had not, rapidly unlaced his right shoe (the left had long ago lost its lachet: the god knows how). “Shoes ain’t shiners!” was old Val’s sneer. And Nungo: “Call ‘em a oboi each! Valley them sandles at a stiver, one by one! Don’t be mean! Don’t ‘ee be no Longobard! Call the twin shoe a twain obol!”

In the face of the taunt that he might be as mean as a Longobard, Val grunted, agreed by gesture; see the shoes join the coins, see Cosmo Nungo cast — see him lose! Hear him curse! Val assumed a careless air. “Lamp’s gone out? So’s the game! What! Be it snowing? First time this year. Hands off!” Val smacked Cosmo Nungo across the paws. “Them is mine, now!”

See Cosmo Nungo’s yellow broken crooked grin. “I’ll pay thee the pair stivers tomorrow, lea’ me have me shoes!”

“Leave thee nothing! Thee’ll shit tomorrow … do thee eat tonight … the which I doubt: no cabbage-money? no cabbage!”

Cosmo Nungo was incredulous. What! surely his old ally Valerian was no Longobard, and — But the taunt, worked once, did not work twice. Cosmo, cursing, wished the parasol of Hercules — never mind where. Then he walked home. Cursing, barefoot, in the snow.

Barefoot in the snow!

Next day he got a small advance from an unusually tolerant guild-master, bought a pair of shoes. Not a new pair, you may be sure.

Much did Vergil wish to pause, then flee. But to Vergil, pause, by definition meant brief. Whereas to Cosmo Nungo, pause meant talk. And this day he wanted to talk of Vergil’s lesser loadstone, Great Adamanth, and, perhaps of even greater loadstones, Negedbarzel, it might be, and the legendary lapis ferrum attrahens, Exhaurio Antepotentis.

To Vergil, now, entering in haste, the older man said, “Ars requiret totum hominem, Master, and so we term —” His master said, hurriedly, casting a swift sad look round the lower elaboratory with its ranks of instruments, “Yes, I know that art requires the presence of the entire man, but I must now —” useless. Cosmo Nungo had the bit between his broken teeth, and was galloping down the track.

“The loadstone, ser, we term the heraclion, that is to say, the Lion of Hercules. And it is our function, ser, as alchymists, to slay that lion. To annul the adamanth, ser, and make naught the magnet. ‘Transmutation,’ ser? To be sure. There is more than one transmutation. For ensample,” he took hold of the border of Vergil’s robe, not yet was his master to be awarded the right to wear the Golden Garment; this was a shabby raveling travel robe, tucked in at the waist, with not a shred of gold about it. “For ensample, to transmute orpiment,” continued the inexorable Nungo; “orpiment — that is, auripigmentum — to make from it what we calls realgar, King’s Yellow, that is, or sand-áraca, sand-áraca, sanddraco, ‘the dragon in the sand,’ we call it, too. And this transmutation is one of your basic excersizes in occamy —”

Thoughts of haste, even fear, diminished; “Five hours’ fire in the sealed crucible should do it, I think. Eh?”

“Yes, sir. It should, But sometimes the perentice doesn’t know how to find the fire, or how to fix it, nor even how to set his crucible, let alone how to make the proper lute to seal it. Nor sometimes he doesn’t even know about the five hours …” Vergil suddenly considered that he might have to break the man’s fingers, but Cosmo loosed the robe of his own motion. Vergil strode on. Adamanths! Realgar! Anon!

The Nungo trotted after him, still babbling. “Though some say, ser, that sandáraca is a resin, ser, and not a mineral. Sandrake, sand-dragon,” he intoned, “dragon-sand … as it sopped up the shed.”

Vergil, about to call aloud the name of Polydore, his house-servant; at this last word from the Nungo he had to repeat, “The, ah, shed?”

“Ser. Yes. The blood that was shed by the dragon in the combat, ser. In the great combat. The Combat on the Sand.” For one sole moment Vergil had a vision, quick and filled with red: a typical scene in the Arena, its floor all sand; the usual scene in the Arena: a gladiator had received his death-wounds, and the lepers licensed to do so rushed forward to drink his life’s blood in hopes of a cure. May it do them much good, he thought. One wound was nigh the navel and one between the collar-bone and the left pap. For the sake of decency, wounds in either groin were not licensed; nor were those above the torc; one does not know why not. It was sometimes very sad to see the lepers, who had run so fast, walk off with hanging hands and lagging legs, for the blood of a dead gladiator was, of course, not licensed to be drunk at all. Though only necrophiles would want to. But … hold! a dragon had no pap, no navel! and who had ever seen a dragon in the Arena? Nungo must have been speaking an alchemical metaphor, like The lion of Hercules or The shining golden vessels and the sullen bronze or — Enough! “Polydore!” he cried. The house-servant’s deep and drawling voice answered him from aloft.

“Your portfolio’s freshly packed, my Ser,” he called.

So that was done … Next: to his work, left aside for the trip north. He wanted to essay the fabrication of a salamander; first he checked the athenor to see it was in order: no controlled heat? — no salamander. It checked well. After that there were supplies to be gotten, for example naphtha, charcoal and sulfur. At no distant date he meant to make a grand trial of all types of charcoal and to see how they compared; perhaps he should do that now? No … he was suddenly too eager to wait for that. He would see what the suppliers’ had on hand now. Tests of the wood of all charable trees was far too slow a task; he would for now content himself with considering holm-oak; many decried its wood as being afflicted always with a hostile dryad, so that its fire was too hot, greasy, smoky, sappy. What would this mean in terms of charcoal? Well, one would see … Wouldn’t one?

Sulfur, too. And napth.

“Oliver is a well-tried wood for charcoal,” said Arland, his regular supplier. “Your olive gives a slow, true fire, me ser. Nothing so steady as oliver, me think.” To be sure that the appearance of olive-wood in commerce was almost a guarantee of its being old wood; the Jews, it was said, would neither eat nor tithe the fruit of a tree less than three years old, considering it too young: but many times three years must pass before the olive would bear, indeed, a generation must pass before the olive would bear. No one would cut down an olive tree for its wood, it taking so long to replace. Time alone should assure that its gross and fatty humors would have been outgrown … the common faith agreed that if one paused by a grove of silver-leaved olive trees at noon and paused in the heat and silence, one would hear the softly hissing sound of the trees “drying out” … to say nothing of the results of the charring process, the ricks of wood burning in the carefully-stacked kilns almost without air.

“A sack of olive, then,” Vergil said. “And a sack of holm-oak. To be —”

“To be delivered. Yes, me ser.” The man was almost as black as a charcoal burner in the hills himself, but just as pecunia non olet — money does not stink — said of the public sale to the wool-fullers, of the stale and rotting contents of the public urinals — so perhaps it might be said that money does not smudge. Might.

Now for sulphur, punk, and all the other ingredients.

There was no trade, likely, that lacked premises which attracted a number of loafers. A charcoal warehouse, though, would not, of course shelter as many as a vintner’s. A vintner might sometimes turn to an experienced old nose and gorgel and say, “See what you think of this” — this being usually a taste from either a very new barrel or a very old one — and the experienced old nose or gorgel would sample it, rolling it round on his tongue after sniffing, swallow; and say, judiciously, something like, lacks body … too thick … smells faint, doctor it up … too thin … too raw … too old: make tolerable vinegar, though…. Now and then the old nose (advertizing its age and experience with assorted red swellings and pumples and streaks of pseudo-Tyrian purple) would put on a performance which a veteran thespian might relish, before pronouncing the test-liquor to be first rate: champion! But although a master charcoal dealer might indeed sometimes turn to an old dustbag retired from the trade and having never washed since, might hand over a black nugget with a “See what you think of this,” what could the old veteran do? crack the black bit, smell of it, taste of it, smear it on his grimey paw; and mutter that it was too dry … to moist … to old … fit to shoe an ass … or perhaps sometime, Not up to thy reg’lar standard but the cheap trade will take it … one would be moved only by respect for the standards of the trade, not a stimulus equal to bibbing wine; therefore loafers in this particular warehouse were thin upon the ground; nevertheless there were a few: just before turning away Vergil heard one saying to another something which made him suddenly pause and feign an adjustment of tunic and hose and belt-band.

A thin-bodied man with a large, naked veinous head had observed, “Tis said that tother day in little Yellow Rome a man did seize a Vestal by her little naked arm!”

And another standabout remarked, the while smoothing the skin of his face in which long secretions of charcoal-dust had enlarged the pores so that one had seen very small coins which were smaller, “Tis said twere done to save her little life from a little mule as had the hyderphoby and did go to bit she on the little sacred bod-dy —”

In a part of his mind Vergil acknowledged his awareness that the lavish use of the diminutive identified the users as true Neopolitans of the lower classes, for whom all the daintier pleasures of life would be very diminutive indeed; but most of his mind just then forebore philology and social comment. A third speaker was, if not elaborately clean, too clean to have spent much time sleeping on empty charcoal sacks; his comment was that, “In the reign of the Divinely Favored Marius there was such an incident, as sundry witnesses averred, that the man in the question did wrap his toga well-around his arm, up and down, before offering his elbow to the high-born virgin vestal to apport herself thereon; Tully sayeth, anent the chaste Lucrece, sayeth Tully —” By the man’s manner and faint Greek accent Vergil accompted him an old pedagogue pensioned off by his old master, an attorney … not so very lavishly pensioned, either. The fellow wound up with, “But as to indeed if to touch a virgin Vestal on her naked flesh whatsoever is a violation of law or merely of a custom having not quite the force of law, deponent sayeth not: it is not for a mere freeman such as your humble servant to comment thereupon.”

Hear now Pores, in a tone of admiration, say, “Ah, thou comports thy little self far too humble, Demosthese Mesalla, what? a great little scholard like thee.”

To linger longer in adjusting his dress would have been to attract even a little more attention than Vergil wanted; off with him! The conversation told that the news had reached Naples well before him — how, was vain to ask — and that reaction to it was ambiguous. Not at all ambiguous was the conviction to quit himself of Naples at once directly; Naples, where even the loafers in the archway already spoke of the incident in terms of the chaste Lucrece. His dream, like that of Quint, was coming more and more to seem vatic indeed. Above the bank-bong-rattleclamor of the swarming street came to his ears the sound of two instruments whose music together generally intended one sole thing. He moved closer towards it, while allowing nothing more in his manner to hint of any such thing.

Charcoal might come into Naples packed on horses, mules, or asses; it might come loaded aboard a ship of burden; even one might see a quarter-of-a-rick abaft the back of someone deeply bowed, stunted, smutched, splay-footed, gnome-like: naphtha came by ship alone; and, having crested the hill of the Reins-makers, Vergil prepared to come down the precipitate slope towards port, his eyes on his feet and his feet at an angle. Espying a pair of feet wearing shoes so high that almost they merited to be called boots — automatically, he looked up. And found himself looking into a pair of eyes: so deep-set, so cold and grey, so cruel: that almost he stopped and gaped. But dropped his eyes again. And wandered on. There had been, he noted, several pairs of such boots — thick-soled and adorned with nails. Somewhat further on he paused and feigned to pause and do this and that to his own shoes. And looked back. They still stood as they were clumped together, short black robes and short black cloaks. They were looking the other way, so frankly he gave over pretense and straightened up and stared. Someone coming along caught his stare, turned to see, saw, turned back. From the portion of cooked tripe he carried in a cracked pannikin, evidently he was one of the vast mob who did not “keep their own kitchen;” he said to Vergil, one citizen to another, “Ever see that like afore in our itty-bitty street?”

“No” — truthfully — “who?”

“Calls themselves ‘Slaves of the Immortal Gods,’ know what that means? no Isis, no Cybele, no Diana of Ephesus, no; only our good old native citizen gods and goddesses, down with all forring deities, Respect! Our good old native citizen gods, fluking foreigners pulling all our itty-bitty jobs away. ‘Tis said th’emperor is behind ‘em, shouldn’t like to meet ‘em in a hobscure halleyway; pre puce! My tripe’s a-gitting cold! won’t she yell at me!” And hustled off.

Dismal, Vergil asked himself: was Vesta “a good old native citizen goddess”? Dismal, conceded that the matter admitted of no discussion: oh she was! And … “the emperor was behind them”? this ugly snooping coven? Best be gone!

A stripling came down the street, hands holding the fipple flute on which he blew, and behind him a gobbo, bowed down probably by the sorrow of his condition — it was good luck to touch the puckle of such a one, but it was scarce good luck to have it! — and certainly bowed down by the drum he bore and beat upon. Every few minutes the stripling called out in his crisp fresh tones, “Drink the sweet waters of Corsica and taste her fragrant acorn meal! drink the sweet waters of Corsica and taste her fragrant acorn meal!” And at once the gobbo declared, in his hoarse voice, “The voyage having been accried enduring two full days and to say this is the third day, the stout ship Zeno her adventured navigation until isle Corsica shall be cried no further day! All cargo and any baggage a-larger than a common portmantle must be aboard afore ye night do fall. ‘What shore, what shore! What coast of people?’”

And, “Corsica! Corsica!” cried out the stripling. “Stout ship Zenos leaves at first light for port Loriano on ye isle Corsica! This ship shall sail with such despatch as the goddus does admit and shall not stop at Ostia I repeat shall not stop at Ostia but sails with full despatch for port Loriano on isle Corsica at first daylight in the morrow from the great mole a-nigh the Mole of Lucullus and take notice that her owners and master have avowed to offer a fine fat freemartin for the safety of this voyage and to burn her fat and thighs on the foreshore by the Temple of Neptune!”

And with a final invitation to drink the sweet water of Corsica and taste her fragrant acorn meal, the young man began again to sound his fipple flute and the gobbo to beat upon his drum; and they passed on until they should stop for announcement before another “island” of tenements and warehouses. And Vergil pondered what he had just heard!

Corsica! He had no pressing business in Corsica, nothing waited him there — yes! something did! Safety awaited him there! True, that Corsica was nearer to Rome than Naples was, Corsica was north of Rome — but the ship was not going to stop at Ostia, the port of Rome — assuming (and it could be only an assumption) that They were out looking for him, for Vergil, there was nothing to suggest to Them that he would go to Corsica — besides: Corsica was not only northwards from Rome, but was also westwards of Rome — ships left thence as well as came there — westwards the Mediterranean was an open sea and he might get him gone if need from the Empery itself by the opening of the Straits of Hercules … at least until this excitement died down, as surely it must….

“I am off again,” he told Polydore and Cosmo Nungo. “Do not use the athenor, or any other furnaces save one, and have the fire banked. Clean the smoke-vents and keep them clean. Hire no one. Let none guest have the house, save by my hand and seal. Has my portmantle been repacked with fresh things? Hail and farewell!”

Zenos was a fine ensample of the old black ship, it did indeed have purp le cheeks with its masts and spars made red with minium; the white sails and the red, black, and purple went very well together. That is, all this had once been so. But many years carrying sacks of wheat and barley and giant jars of oil and eel and tunny and olives in brine, many years of buffeting by the angered seas and wind and salt, had stripped Zenos of every trace of color; even her once-white sails were dirty and dulled. She no longer released the scent of fresh-sawed oak and pine and cedar, she stank of bilges and of all the rotting off-shake and sullage and spillage of many cargoes. Vergil settled his portmantle next to the pack of rations which the porter had carried aboard at his direction. There were to be sure ships which victualed their passengers, but not Zenos, and not for this voyage. He did not need to fumble to reassure himself of his gold, he felt it securely settled where he had set it: here a little and there a little, so it would not be obvious and neither would it unbalance him. And besides his supply of food and the portmantle with changes of clothing he carried a few sundry other articles in his old doe-skin budget. Claudia! I flee into exile for thee!

So said his heart. Aloud, his voice said, “Set it down there. Here is your agreed fee. And here is one coin more.”

Aboard ship: night, the stars and the sound of spray.

The sudden thought, he had found, was like a flash of lightning, and might be compared with the practical consideration, which was like the small dull light of the oil-lamp or the stinking rush-light soaked in suet, lard or tallow and sold at four to the copperkin (in the language of accompt the smallest coin was called the obol and in flash usage this was the stiver: never, though, did it quite lose its old, old name of copperkin, little copper thought it contained anymore … old speech died eventually, but it died hard). The flash of lightning lit up the nighttime sky in greater detail than the noonday sun, a man might note a dragon on the distant horizon in a flash of lightning: in an instant it was gone, see descend again nox niger, the black night. Such a consideration as, Gather thy clothes for the washer-woman was a dim light indeed, and by its glow no one would like to write a poem; but unless one wanted to be deemed a stinkard….

The thought flashed cross his mind, Petition the Emperor To what end? Suppose he asked a reward for saving the Vestal from a fall … if it were granted, then he was safe…. Si licitem, was the way the Emperor concluded his replies to those petitions he was pleased to approve; if licit; if it were not licit, too bad: of course the Imperial Prerogative (which automatically made all things licit) was something else. The Emperor could slide sideways from granting a reward by a pious hope that the immortal gods might requite the petitioner: still, did not this legitimize, post facto, the petitioner’s act? Who dared say Nay? Hope flared in Vergil’s heart. And in another moment, realizing that the petitioner must give a full description of himself, including where he was to be found, he had a picture of himself waiting, waiting … waiting … all very well if you tilled a farm and had petitioned to be free of mill-tax. But did he wish to be bound to any place, any one place? And suppose the marmosets (as they were called, the little fellows who — despite whatever high-flown titles — attended to the Emperor’s niggling small affairs for him) suppose the marmosets, perhaps in accord with the Archiflamen, decided that it was not licet? Did Vergil really want to call attention to himself and his deed? let everyone know where he might be found, should it come to that, by the lictor with his bundle of rods bound around a single-headed axe? He had no reason to think that he had actually been identified, though to be sure the Vestal herself had surely noticed him (noticed! had the same flame of fire run up her arms and down through her heart and into her privy female parts? she was a sacred and a holy woman: but she was a woman!) and even in the dreams which he and Quint had dreamed, she was not shy of declaring that notice —

The flash of lightning died away quite, leaving him in darkness. He had had a madcap notion, but it was gone, he would certainly send no message to the Palace Imperial; the Vestal would stay in Rome, she would certainly not go to Corsica, and if she had a great desire to drink of its sweet waters and to taste of its fragrant acorn meal, why! they might be brought to her; she would stay in Yellow Rome to feed the sacred fire, and had assuredly no desire to attend her own public funeral while she was still alive. And he? He would certainly never come near to Yellow Rome again for a very long time. A very long time.

“This one here, to thy left — shall we cut his heart and take his purse and cast him privily to the monsters of the deep?” — what was this?

He realized instantly that this was the pair of foreign men, his fellow-passengers, who were they, he’d asked the bosun; Corsicans? And the man had answered, carelessly, “Carthagans,” and turned to his ropes. Vergil had spent enough time in Sidon to ken well the Punic speech, was not Tyre (“Toor,” they called it there, from its towering rocky citadel) the next city on the Punic coast of the Levant, and had it not in Africa founded Carthage? Instantly, too, he realized this was a trick: did he cry for the captain the Punes would loudly scorn him for not kenning a familiar-enough shipboard-type of jest or jape: neither was this either jest or jape. He stretched, yawned, slipped off his shoes and explored the skin between one set of toes with the toes of the other foot. “Scorn him,” almost by second nature they did already scorn him; their first encounter on the ship he had greeted them. They paid him no more mind than if a hen had farted. Big men, vastly bearded, there was a suffused rosiness in their skin but it was not a European rosiness. Wild, fantastic, handsome men. Arrogant, too. What did they here? Corsica had been a Punic fief once, indeed, but that was long ago. Odd. What did they here?

“Doesn’t understand,” murmured one; almost at the same time the other grunted, “The dolt wots nothing.” It had been a trick, done to test if he could ken their speech. At once they switched to Latin.

That is, one of them did. With an almost theatrical gesture and a sort of sub-theatrical voice, he quoted the proverb, “‘Like burning Elba in the dark of night.’” The forges of Elba were famous to the point of commonplace. Vergil said to himself, Like Elba, yes: in the dark of night, a light to guide by; ashore, in daytime, it would probably bewilder, with its guideless mazeways between the toiling, moiling forges — the Labyrinths of Elba, they were called. Olive-shaded Elba, shades of the days there before the Age of Iron; say, also, olive-haunted Elba; and where was oft-seen the pallid cheek-bones of the Frank, come to buy well-worked forged iron for the battle-hammer and the spiked battle-flail called “morning-star.”

But aloud Vergil merely said, “Some little sight.”

The Pune who had not spoken to him growled in his native tongue, “Ruman dog, die costive!” And at once the other remarked, in a tone of one already tired of the talk, “My brother does not know Latin well,” and turned aside. What was the point of this charade or masquerade? why had they not simply kept aside to themselves? A moment’s thought told him that the answer lay in the brisk wet wind: in this corner of the ship one was more sheltered; though this might cease in an instant, did the wind or ship change course — outwardly, he merely gave a sleepy grunt, and stretched some more, pulling his mauntle over him.

“Die ithyphallic, die!” the one Pune grated, grinding his teeth.

But his brother, if brother he really was, it was widely held that all Punes looked alike, had more on his mind than routine if sincere insult. “You are sure that they know it?” he asked, referring to … and in a moment revealing what he was referring to: “the long road to the pass of gold?”

“They know it, they know it, they all know it! Yes! Yes! Juno!”

“And does she know, too?”

“She knows everything else. She knows what we say now, slut! bawd! vulva!”

“Let her know, then. The long road…. You are quite sure? Yes, yes, very well … Only … even on the Greatmap of Reuben the Moor, it does not — Very well. — So. She knows about the gold. And the teeth? The teeth?”

“She does not allow the teeth.”

A string of curses followed; not all of them Punic … Vergil was not sure what some of them were, others he knew referred to the masturbation of the Egyptian sky-god (to which the Ægyptians attributed great cosmological significance), to the servitude of a great Punic hero as umbrella-bearer to a Queen of Lybya; others he simply did not recognize, though some of them he thought might be in the tongue of Tartis Land, and at some phrases he could not even guess, merely assuming by their tone that they, too, were curses. Suddenly Vergil decided that he simply did not care about the matter at all, made an effort to forget them: succeeded. Long later he was much to wish that he hadn’t. The Punes hissed, muttered, gurgled throatily; Vergil slept.

But that wish was after he once again remembered.