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

IV Young Vergil

As he was staring at the bottoms of the weathered planks of the moss-encrusted, ragged-eaten door, a foot or so beneath the level of the turfy ground, the door sank as it were backwards: what dread feet he saw, then! At once his eyes flew upwards. Swift, his thought-mind told him, “This is a particularly hideous old man dressed up as a particularly hideous old woman!” In a second, he changed his opinion at once. Later, some, he was to conclude that he had at first been right. More than this, or other than this, he did not for a much longer time suspect.

Getting up his courage to proceed, perceiving certain several things a-hang beside the door, he was in an instant both startled and afeared. But for an instant only: then he relaxed, recognizing them for the masks, simulate faces, which some clever hands were wont to make for this festival, this play, or that; sometimes out of painted cloth, sometimes out of cloth and scraps of trash-parchment glued together, sometimes out of untanned leather, sometimes out of leather, tanned. They were dreadfully like.

They stank dreadfully, too.

Down to the door. As in some long-familiar tale, told whilst peeling chestnuts round the winter fire, had “he rapped on the warlock’s door and the door opened instantly —” “— as though someone were standing right behind it?” — “— as though someone were standing right behind it!” “— and a voice spoke, saying?” “— and a voice, spoke, saying —” But he had instantly forgotten those kitchen congregations and their well-familiar stories. The door had not so much as creaked even a little on its leathern hinges; he was canny enough to test by the easiest method some sticky traces found afterwards adhering to his clothing; for with taste and scent, no argument, and taste and scent reported them to have been made by neat’s-foot oil. No magic, no sorcery; next to the pressings of the olive itself, or bread or wine, or milk or cheese, could there be a more common domestic substance? What witchery was here? none; what suspicion of alien herbs or of leaves or fruits of trees growing by Rivers Lethe, Abana, Oxus, or what-so-far-off sites and streams? None, not one.

The creature glared at him.

Vergil’s father had once been servant to a wandering astrologer, and had a habit of repeating under his breath, scraps of what he had learned; always winding up with the same word of advice, indicative that he, his son, was not to be expected to spend all his days at the plow, the harrow, the ox-goad, and the pruning or the trenching tool. “Taurus upon the Cusps of the Ram,” the boy would hear him repeating; “Taurus upon the Cusps of the Ram … Lord Saturn, ever a malign stellation … Lord Saturn … a malign stellation … avert the omen … Orion’s Dog is barking let not our fields all burn …” the boy would always remember that deep rumble-mutter; “Study, Mariu. Go thou and learn. Find thy book and mind it … Orions Dog … Sagittary on the Cusps of … Sagittary …”

Coming down to the main road from the home foot-path, narrow by definition, its berm bright with the yellow oxalis and the lacy-white membranes of the wild carrot, you saw ahead of you the stone obelisk with the blackish near-globe on top, whose words marked the boundary of the limits of the city (“Great City” it still called itself, but that was the mere after-glow of glory, for City-State it was no more). Always, even then, there was a mythic air of ill-being about that spot; “Don’t touch it, get away!” was sure to meet any surge of small boys towards the monument — surely a sentiment more than purely political; and although brats of the beggar-class, themselves outcasts, wearing the duck’s-foot sign on their rags — “oliphaunt-boys,” they were called in scorn, some said in connection with an hereditary disease, others saw in it a reference to their being descendants of Hannibal’s mahouts, still living out and living under the immemorial invasion and defeat — although such brats, snouts crested with unwiped snot, clambered and sat upon the plinth of the obelisk oft enough: firstly, this just proved its unseemliness; secondly, one did not play with such, one ignored them like the fly-worms in the horse-nuggets plashed across the road.

But — more: had a recusant rebel or exile returned sans permission been judicially slain at its base, or what were those stains? A clump of pines whose crowns were like rounded spread-out sunshades grew and shed needles, else only the cypress, the ilex, and the poplar met the eyes. Eventually the Spartans, as they lumbered by, were not only to fell every single tree for timber, but to destroy the obelisk itself by using it as a target for their ballistas; and the round, dark, red-streaked lump, once fallen, Herk Duk had had his helots smash it into bits and the fragments he distributed as talismans. For Herk Duk knew nothing of cast-out Brindusian malcontents, but Herk Duk knew much about cold iron. A trickle of water seeped from the berm even in the month of drouth, and there one might find the violet, unwoven by Sappho for all the poetic epithet, and the simple shallow chalice of the wild rose, its pale pink and white a copy of the flesh-tints where the sun had not much stroked the skin. A boy might kneel and gladly press his nose to both wildflowers, making feint to drink there rather than from the deeper, common spring and pool.

“This side, Brindisy be,” said a boy’s father (perhaps they were going to market with one calf or one colt, a shoat or a young sheep, say, a ewe-tep or a shearling: never more, back then). “And we be Brindisy-folk. Brindisy be foederate with Rome, Mariu. — Here we turn, so; beast, sooo, beast, sooo! We turn, here, and we remain on the soil of our city-state,” (for so he called it, though in truth its statehood was gone, subsumed in that foederate status); “We have the right to go further, Son, and to return, as the wicked again whom that inscription declares have not. But we don’t do so. Not today. And that way lead to Neapoly, which it were a kingdom once, now declined into a dukery or dogery, with its own doge; oh, a rare and rich city, too! Sooo! Keep the creature on the road-path, Mariu; if any man’s beast-creature strays and eats in our field, or, it may be, tilth, be sure we ‘pound it till his owner pay — I see of no ‘scriptin that this field’s owner be doing different — no one puts up a notice, All Beasts May Graze Here! — No! Switch ‘un, Mariu! Haul ‘un by the snout!”

And small Marius would be vigorously obedient, then, for he knew that the switch might fall on shanks not the hairy ones, did a small boy not be observant and obedient. One would not wish to tell one’s father how boys sometimes played forgetfully or furtively or fearfully round about the obelisk with its almost-round meteor-stone on top; or, how, sometimes turning half-aside and hoicking up tunicals to relieve themselves, boys might play rude games. This coarse play of theirs, they barely realizing that young boys are but young men not grown, was only once the subject of comment by any older person. That fellow Bruno, thin as the broth from thrice-boiled bones, had chosen to make his necessity his sport: scarce had he seen how far he spurted, when he (and they all) observed an elder woman pass nearbye: she wore the matron’s saffron veil upon her head and loose-tied beneath her chin; likely the wife of some citizen, but not, since she went afoot, of any rich citizen. The Bruno pretended for a second that he would spray her, too. She did not pause, but she, as she turned away, spoke only the brief words one said to those with neither pride nor shame. “You have no face,” she said. “You have no face.”

He answered with a hoot; next, mistaking a mere look from another boy for a scornful one, gave him a shove, a painful dig with an elbow. And said, therewith, something very ugly.

Outrage, he, “Mariu,” felt first, then a hate like heat, then a something like convulsion. A confusion and a trembling in the air. Shouts. Fears. Tears. Fleeing and tripping. Terror. Clamor. Alien sound.

Later, peace restored, the lads recounted what they now decided had, after all, really happened. “Then Mariu say to his wee black doggy, ‘Seek ‘eem! Seek!’ And wee doggy goed ‘reuch! reuch!’ and Bruno he piddle and he leap afar off! Har ho! Where’d he go, wee blacky dog, Mariu, man?”

“Mariu” made some sufficient mumble, and none pressed him for more; for he knew, and perhaps they knew, too, that there had been no black dog.

Of something which had happened to him in his earlier childhood, he had no clear picture, and had never tried to make clear the one he had: as though an actor would not interrupt his role to turn aside and look off-stage. He himself had come on stage, so to speak, that winter day with a falling of large soft snowflakes when the old shepherd, coming upon him in the hills behind Brindusy, had exclaimed (now he could hear him: even now), “Eh! Child! Whence comest thou, and whither doest thou go? naked, cold, and all alone …” Had he the child been lost from the house of his father, sturdy old Publius Vergilius Mago? merely lost? soon returned? had he been earlier stolen, later escaped, and then and thus found? Or had he been a child adopted into that family, his true origin as unknown and perhaps unknowable as though he were the Peacock in the Vase of Hermes?

Then, too, in earlier, very early memory, lying on the fleece or, rather, the sheep-fell, which was his only bed, in first dim-light before his aunt grumbled the fire brighter and himself onto his feet to do his chores and stints; even a taste of the boiled spelt or millet-mush yet hours away; before that, lying more-or-less awake in the grey dimness hearkening to the dame snore (different sounds she had made at different hours when his father’s usual bed-place alongside of him was empty for a while), always in that uncanny time he was aware of uncanny things: for one, his eyes wobbled round about and round and for long whiles he could not focus them; for another, one testicle would crawl up into a cave, tiny cave in his own tiny small body, and, in its own time later, come ambling out and sidle down again; the third play-thought-time-untold-of-thing, he would peep at the poker and make it roll from one corner of the fireside to another. Or shift the broom. Or —

No other boys ever said they knew of these things not, but they said nothing of knowing them at all, though they spoke often enough of another early morning thing of which he also knew. So he kept himself quiet. By and by his eyes became stronger and his stones stayed down and it must have been about then that he ceased to push his breath the secret way he knew and to shift broom and poker. And forgot it all. Came the incident of the wrath of Bruno, he had neither thought nor sought, the old familiar pressure came by its own; barely he knew how to suck back what he had forced. And it is dangerous, he thought. I must be taking care.

It was a while before he made a resolve …

The boys had broken into talk.

“Numa — they say? You know? Numa? they say his cave? — ” “He, Numa, you know, the warlock? they say — old Numa! Can give you a good luckstone, and —”

“— his cave — Numa’s cave? it be, they say, the gate to Hell!”

“My grandsir? you know, my grandsir? Numa, he be a man-sibyl, Numa? my grandsir say so, and —”

No one waited to hear more about his grandsire, they crowded each other, they pushed on the other, raised their voices to compete. “Numa? Hey, say, Numa? You know, bridges between men and the gods? Numa, he —”

And, “He give my old gaffer, once, a potion again the fevers, and he never took no money off him: Numa …”

It happened, as it often will, that all voices went silent at one same time: “Zeus prime,” it was the custom to say, and so one said it; there was not time for even a second one to say it, into the slight silence slid the Bruno: “Numa? He haven’t got no more power,” he said this in a taunting, mocking tone, with no concern for the primacy of Zeus (or Jove, as others say). “He haven’t got nothing — he’ve grown too old!” Whereupon several shifted their opinions, for all the world like citizens in some public assembly, quick to echo the loudest voice. But Mariu said no word at all.

A man might be too old to plow, and yet know the best day to start the plowing.

It was a while before he made a resolve to see Old Numa in his house-and-cave.

And a while longer before actually he went to see him.

The creature glared at him.

Why was he, Mariu, here? What was he, Mariu, here to find? How was he to do it? Some stray memory, stray but yet purposeful, entered his mind … of a milestone set by a path in a hollow, in a small wasteland of thicket and thistle and rubble and rock … perhaps memorable only because it was otherwise so unmemorable? No. If he wanted the best view of the bay, to contemplate the galleys crawling over the seas … sometimes they did not crawl but with oars put up and sails full of wind they skimmed along the main … from Greece … to Greece, or farther … much, much farther … perhaps as far as ancient Carthage, much loved by Juno, stained with purple and heavy with gold … perhaps (not merely unlikely, but almost impossible … still … still … that which was almost impossible was possible) perhaps, via the canal which joined the sweet fresh waters of the Nile to the salt waves of the Arabian Recess and past the Gate of Tears and thence into the vast fetches of the Erythraean Ocean and the Indoo Sea and entire way to the Golden Chersonese and its far-distant City of Lions and thus to many-fabled Cipangu (risks, hazards, horrids, stinking shallows, shoals, and depths without bottom) — Merely to contemplate: one had to walk even that mile, at least that mile, and to encounter that milepost. And then to pass it.

And, now, Numa was that milepost.

The boy stepped forward.

The creature glared at him swiftly thrust out a palm as black as an apeling’s. Its hung-agape mouth had a long spittle on the dropping-forward lower lip, this lip it folded back over some browned and crooked numbs of teeth, and in a harsh voice of curious tone, “Money,” it said. “Wisdom and wonder is not to be had for nought.”

Not, without thought, for think on the words he did, but as quick as any reflex, he handed over the peeled oaken wand, as some tale or other round about the chestnut-scented nightfire had indicated that he should (chestnuts in the fire, chestnut-wood with its ruddy heart … or was it carob? memory of, earlier, chestnut flowers scenting all the world). Scorn, and hateful scorn upon the creatures’ face. “Where is the wee white bit of silver for my master?” the harsh, high voice demanded, “What, no’ even a copper piece, such as the hostler-thrall may have at stables? Why cam ye here, saucy boy, saunce coin?”

Another voice now the boy heard, from the murkiest region of the room behind the door; at hearing this (to him) wordless grumble, Mariu at once understood that it was a voice of power, and that the grumble was not directed to him. The creature must have realized it, too, for it flinched, withdrew into itself a bit, yet gan a-whining for all that. “A peeled oaken-switch, lord warlock, shall I seeth it for thy supper? Or roast it by the coals like a fatling-kid?” Still its sarcasm, yes, hate, was strong and live, like the strong, thrang odor of some loathesome beast (and it lacked not that, either, the boy thought). He made a half-step back.

The other voice spoke again. “Belike we’ll lay it along thy humps and haunches, Caca, mayhap twill be this rotten head of thine we’ll seeth in pot, Caca, or thy runny rump, dern scabs and all. What! Caca, still stand thee there? Boy! Push it aside, come over the threshold, enter, enter, pleased to be coming in.”

It came not to push; the strange thrawn doorkeeper drew aside, and, sending the boy one last evil look, gat it gone — presumably to the cave which common talk agreed lay behind the heavy dark curtain at the rear of the house proper. But — as to the warlock’s voice! — for the warlock himself he could see nought of, save some large shape amidst the shadow and the smoke — to be sure the voice had begun with all the power of a king — and then of sudden, turned sweet. So that long later he was reminded of the famous play upon words which turned Ptolemaios, the name of Ægypt’s king, who had sent an hundred thousand only slightly suspected subjects to toil in his silver mines; turned Ptolemaios into Apo Melitos: Made-of-Honey. Aye, but they were subtle folk, there in Grecian Ægypt — and, aye! they had need to be. Haply it had amused them there, moiling by torchlight at the black ore — but, well! Claude was Ptolemy now, a philosopher for a king, a cosmographer, and … well … one must hope — no abuser of power. And as the boy was pleased to be coming in (and pleased he may have been, but he was not delighted), the warlock spoke again in his made-of-honey voice, “When the novice approaches the adyt, all clothing and other possessions should be cast off, charm, chest-cloth, ring and ringlet; there should be no retained objects.” To be sure the boy had heard a muckle tales of sacred washings, immersions, lustrations, ablutions, and so his fingers began working at fibula, belt, knot, and pouch — scarcely knowing where to begin, his fingers roved and roamed; but something stirred within him which demanded precedence, a mighty great caveat was growing, and a strong and cool caution alongside of it: they pushed his fingers away and they made smooth his face and voice.

“I am not to do this now, my lord bridge-builder.”

A gust of air made the smoke billow up, but it made it billow in such a manner as to clear away the reek and fume where the warlock sate. Of nothing was the boy so much reminded as of the sight he had seen once in the market on a festal-day, an artist had for sale a pair of tablets made with colors of heated wax on slabs of wood. “This shows Mount Somma as she was before, as tall and strong as Mount Vesuviu. And this other shows she as she be now.” In the figure of the warlock Mariu instantly felt he could discern the shape and features of a fine, great man; but concealed, as it were collapsed, inside the slumped and sunken figure sitting in the chimney-corner chair-seat, clutching his requisite sword in ane great twisted, spotted fist; and to be sure, to be sure, a wolfskin kirtel hung loosely slung about him, and it still smelled so, one might think it freshly cut, or not so freshly staled upon: or was that but the lingering scent of the thrall Caca?

“Wolfskin,” but what did wolves smell like, really? A something which he later on came to think of as common sense, told the boy that, smell like what they may, live wolves and cured wolves’ hides (well-cured or ill —) were not likely to be found together. This thought was like a streak of cool in the midst of a feeling perhaps not really hot, and yet why did his heart swell so? and why did his breath labor?

This place was no flowerbed of spices. And —

What bleary eyes the old man had! It was not sure that he blinked now for a show of seeing you, or —

At once, the invitation to shed garb and gear now having been declined, at once the old wizard’s manner changed; his very tone, too. Gone was the royal We, and gone, also the made-of-honey voice. “Marius, hail,” Numa mumbled, in an eldritch toothless voice, as though lost in the palate.

“They do call you, ‘Marius,’ and not ‘Vergil’?”

Automatic formality, “Vergilius Marius Mago,” almost he’d said “Maro,” why? “of the —”

A cracked and dirty, very dirty palm confronted him flat up and out. “I know your gens, I know your tribe. Your agnomen I know, and I know your cognomen, too. Your great-grandmother, she had six toes upon either foot, and such is the reason for the family secret, why she would never never let thy great-grandser see her barefeeted. And I know where your blacksmith uncle had the scar of the burn by which he gat his smity-art, where none accidence could cause a burn to be. Your dam smiled upon me once, twas on the Gules of August, when the ewes do oester, Canabras was Consul then, and I gave her a small and rufous stone —”

“I have it yet in my pouch, as a luck-piece, a ward-piece, but I didn’t know it came from her … or from you, Messer Numa …”

The gum-welling eyes, reddled yellow and washed-pale and almost infant blue, played upon him, half-shut. ‘Aye, I have had great wealth, affording great gifts. And have had great costs. Yet maychance I be not so poor as I seem so to thee, Vergil. Maychance I need make no show of wealth. Or that I keep it by me in a secret place for a secret purport. What brings ye here to me, my wean? If ought else than that ye’ve learned you’ve some’at ‘ithin you that other lads have not. Shall I rid you of it? Take but that part-peeled oaken-switch — Oh? I shall not? Well, well, place that switch (wand, some call it) in the corner here, a-tween my sword,” grunting a bit he stood the sheathed sword on the floor; “a-tween my sword and my stave. Now see you against where now you stand, yet another part-peeled stick — a willow. Move yand wand to me; it was cut in the catkin-drooping grove of Persephone, strewing its pollen like gold, hard upon the misty bank of River Ocean, in whose baths the Bear hath no share — and so it may be made, may be made, I say, a sovereign ward against the bruin — move it, now! Thus. Aye. It moves. It ought not, ought it? Thou hast touched it not with either hand nor foot. Ah, thou rascal wean! Nevertheless, it does move.”

Numa sat back a moment, breathing somewhat harder than before. Then he sat again forward.

“So, now ye have moved it to thy home-garth, without anyone a-sees it move, save my servant, which had come forth again, I needed it, the thrall, y’see, for some’at and such and so. Ye planted the withe well, and when it had greened thrice three times, ye’d cut an other such switch from it, and ye brought it here with thee, plus three small sorbus-fruits from the garden in the Castle of the Crown, same as is be-called Castle of the Hawk. Those things ye had done —”

Numa was saying all this with such absolute and matter-of-fact certainty as almost to take the boy’s breath away. “Sir,” said the boy, “No, sir, no I have not.”

The witchman smiled, and a vulpine smile it was, too; and like a very shabby old he-fox he seemed, too. “My wean,” he began — and very little did Vergil feel like that one’s wean, and very little did he wish to be such, either —“My wean, those of us who speak with vatic voice, sibyls and such-like, ye see, ‘prophets,’ as the Ebrews call ‘em, we sometimes describe as of the past or present that which, really, we descry in the future. D’ye see.”

In whatever space or place there was which lay behind the heavy crusted hanging cloth (and greatly dirty it was, too) thrall Caca had been muttering, muttering, and by the sodden sound and echo, stirred a something with a long stick in a large pot. A moment’s silence, the curtain moved sluggishly and the thrall stood within the room once more. Numa made moist his lips. “Thou has, Vergiliu, in a secret place about thee, a puny piece of silver. Give it to the thing. Go.”

The ancient epicene horror, Caca, all rags and stench and hate, now crept forward, its hand hunched out. The boy dropped the coin. Numa sank back into his chair, eyes closed. The fug inside was dimlight as by a sour and reeking fire. He was outside again, he stumbled a bit at the sunken threshold. Overhead gleamed the glittering stars.

Overhead gleamed the glittering stars; actually, directly overhead the stars were as yet faint and few and pale, full and bright they shone at or near the farther horizon. From the nearer horizon enough light glowed from the setted sun so as to keep, for the moment, most things clear enough. He was glad of that, and did not tarry, but made haste to get onto a main-travelled path. Words of what he had heard repeated themselves in his ears. “I can show you, Marius, a way and ways, Marius! to tell South from North and West from East, without regard to the position of the sun. And I can show you, Marius, Mariu, Vergiliu, boy: Vergil! I can show how to devise maps! arts which only twenty men and several have in all the whole world, Vergil!” and he ambled and rambled on and about the knowledges and powers he could impart, until Marius (he did think, now he thought about it, that best of all his name he liked Vergil) wondered, then, why if Numa knew all this, he chose to live, or suffered himself to live, like, almost, a beast in a lair.

He had yet to learn that great powers did not necessarily mean great prosperity.

And he wondered as well, right then and there, how came he to recall having heard those words, when well he knew, once he thought about it, that he had never actually heard them? … from Numa … or from anybody else. Was this, then, in some manner of illustration the vatic voice?

For, surely, now and before, it spoke of things he did not merely desire, it spoke of things, once glimpsed, which he lusted for to know. A direction-finding art! And how to make — not alone, for any doge might have one for money, not alone to have maps — but to know how to make maps! Compared to this, what was that some subtle something inside of him which could move willow-wands, cause pokers to roll, and could simulate the Power of the Dog? It was less … much less …

Later, of course, he realized that one thing had nothing to do with the other; rather, that one thing had much to do with the other: but that one thing did not occlude the other.

Several generations back, someone’s cousin had been married to someone’s brother-in-law, and not even then a first cousin. But although, even then, Vergil’s family had not been related to this other family, it had been thus connected. A very faint sense of this connection had shed upon a certain woman, Emma by name, the last of an earlier generation, a semblance of being some sort of twice-great-aunt. When he was small, he had thought My Emma, as he had also thought of another old woman as My Grandma; for all he knew, every small boy had an emma, too. Sometimes, not often, his own aunt, his own mother’s sister, who had taken the place of his own mother in the household; sometimes, not often, she had said, his aunt, “Take this to your Emma” … a festal cake, it might have been, a stuffed tripe, a new-enough kerchief, itself replaced by one bought more newly yet (the elder Marius had been a great one for kerchiefs, buying them for his sister-in-law whenever he’d gotten a coin more than he’d reckoned as his bottom price for a beast sold at market. Once only had he bought her a small bauble of glass and brass, immediately she had asked, “What about marriage, then?” and Father had withdrawn to muck out the byre, not returning for several hours; and after that he had confined his purchases to kerchiefs), a honeycomb in a dish deep enough to contain the drippings, a small flask of oil … such-like things.

Emma lived within what was a half an hour’s walk for a small boy; it was of course less than that now, yet he went there less often. Emma’s daughters lived in another village now, Emma’s son had died, and Emma’s daughter-in-law, Euphronia: a woman of no sweetness of temper, had married again, and her husband was her match. And old Emma lived on, and lived with them, the gods save us from such a fate as that! Aunt had paid them a visit, had not felt she’d been made to feel welcomed; her next small gift, carried by the boy “Mariu,” had been disparaged by the now-chief woman of old Emma’s house, and been deprecated as precisely that: small. As “Mariu” had, in all child innocence, reported.

After that, the aunt sent things seldom, and Emma (her humble gifts: two eggs, say, still warm in some straw in a tiny basket she’d made herself) sent things no more at all. Nor, evidently, was allowed to.

This man had brought with him to the marriage a son of his own first wedding. And this was the boy Bruno, who had soon enough taken upon himself to exemplify all the grudges of that house.

From time to time one would see the three of them doing butcher’s business out of a wheelbarrow in which a slaughtered pig had been taken from the shambles; they raised swine, took each, live, as far as the abattoir (where it had by law to be killed so the tax could be collected), then wheeled it, dead, just past the official limits of the town, where they sold it, cut by cut. By thus avoiding setting up a booth or stall within the lines of the population, they saved a certain amount of money. They were rough people and sold their rough-cut pork to other rough people — either those rough by nature or rendered perhaps rougher by poverty, which seldom smoothes the manners.

Thus, they cried, “Fresh pork for sale!” and hacked, awkwardly (perhaps cutting up even a skinny swine in a wheelbarrow was not the easiest of work: but they paid no public market fee; ah! they paid no fee!), and slashed, awkwardly. And … so the boy, not yet much called Vergil, thought … had they been but a bit more brazen, to be sure they would have cried, “Hog’s liver! Fair fresh hog’s meat! A penny for half a snout, and a halfpenny for the tail,” from the very base of the obelisk itself. Once or twice he saw them slow the barrow as they came to the monument, they seemed almost to hesitate — but they did not dare.

By and by the boy, Marius, had summed up some few certain things: Did he walk with his own father, a man rather taller than the average, and did they encounter Bruno, he scowled, that one. But he passed them by, or he let them pass him by. And that was all. For then. Did Marius encounter him, of a sudden, face to face, or with his, Marius’s friends, he got no more from the Bruno than a lowering look. One had learned that it was useless to smile at him … unless one had use for a sneer, which was all that one got in return. But, more than once — indeed, almost often — if Marius were walking by himself, all alone, a stone or a short piece of wood or a small chunk of a broken-brick or such-like rubble, would sail past his head: at once, did he turn quickly around, who was there, arms still and looking somewhere else? Bruno. Was who. Of course one could walk quickly towards him, one could even run towards him. And he would run away, laughing his unlovely laugh.

And for all that Vergil had the longer limbs, and for all his anger, he could never catch the lout. In fact … that is, it was probably a fact, but never put to the test … had Bruno belonged, or had his family belonged, to any even small confraternity or society, he, Bruno, if matched among other contesting athletes at one of the set competitions, with their limbs oiled, and dusted with any of the socially-approved colors of dust; Bruno, if started off by the tran-tran of the starter’s trumpet, might have been able to win a race. And, hence, a prize, not of money value, but a prize.

But his family cared for none of those things.

What they cared for was, that Bruno, when the barrow was not at use for wheeling a scrawny shoat, head lolling loosely in a puddle of congealing blood (later carefully removed for a blood-pudding, and never mind what loose bristles and worse, even, filth one might find in the pudding: they could be simply spat out), should wheel the barrow as near along the public path to someone else’s land, anyone else’s land so long as someone/anyone was known to be elsewhere at the moment, as might be: and then Bruno would steal as many of someone else’s chestnuts, even beechnuts or acorns, mast was mast, as many and as much as he could stuff into a sack. And dump the sack into the barrow. This to be repeated as often as Bruno felt like it. Usually not for very long, for he was no lover of labor; but so long as he brought back something, neither father nor stepmother was likely to make much matter of it. For, if they dared, they would (and sometimes did) let their pigs gather mast right off the ground on others’ land. But they seldom dared, save only if they knew the owners or tenants or their keepers were afar off and gone elsewhere. Therefore even a sackload of stolen stuff in a barrow was to them a victory of purest gain.

They laughed, likely, when speaking of it.

And although they were slovens even in the manner in which they dressed the carcasses, still, a fire they had to make to boil water and scald the swine somewhat so as scrape the bristles off … almost off … and into the embers of the fire they tossed the trotters of the pig, to loosen the skin so as the easier to rip it off the slotted feet (figure what nice matter had accumulated between the slots), buyers how grubby or how gruff expected at least a somewhat clean couples of pigsfeet. And Bruno liked to nibble on these toasted skin-flaps. What did he with them, after nibbling?

Once, Vergil (Mariu, Marius) was walking that way, alone: something struck him, clut! Between his shoulders; swift, he swiveled round; something struck him, clut! Upon his chest. Facing him was Bruno, no dissembling now, as to who had or who had not, thrown; no readiness to run: he stood, as it were, between his father and his stepmother and (eyes drawn, instantly, to the ground; what saw he, the Boy Vergil, there? the nasty suckets of the swine’s foot-flaps, moist from the Bruno’s mouth, saw he there), and Bruno called out, “Ya! Foh! Oliphaunt-boy! Grey-eyes! Son of a bitch!” and “Bastard!”

More shocked than angry, the boy’s eyes now went at once to the faces of the older couple; at once (he expected) one of them would give the Bruno a cuff — no such thing. Bruno held his nose (it had but a bit before snuffed up without dismay the stinking contents of the unemptied hog’s guts), then, releasing it, cried out his insults yet again. Surely, if the parents did not wish to cuff him publicly, at least they would speak to him — no such thing. They spoke nothing. “Pfew!” cried Bruno, making anyway a show of holding his nose (not free of smuts, itself); “O pópoi!” and again he called out his insults. Vergil’s eyes kept turning from the parents to the son; at any moment one of the elders would turn and give a look of deep disprovai. Surely. A gesture, then — Surely?

Husband and wife stood there, their faces carved out of dark marble, they heard nothing, they saw nothing: she with her huge dugs and haunches; he with his head as hairless as a snake’s. Then, almost as though on signal, each, both, they opened their mouths.

“Hogsmeat, fresh, fresh!” he called. And she —

“Cheap, cheap! A stiver off!”

“There are persons and places where one with the wit may learn more,” Numa had said. “Of course, ‘In the woods,’ of course, of course.” His large hands, broken with age, moved, then, as though rather dismissing what everyone knew … knew, in this case, what was meant by “In the woods.”

“There are certain schools, ‘secret schools,’ some call them; they are as secret as the smoke from Etna, from Mongibel’s dark stithy; and of these, likely the best is in Sevilla. You would laugh, were I to tell you the price, now you would laugh, but afterwards you would not laugh; besides … you might never have to pay it. And in Athens there are sundry schools, sundry seigniories of learningship, as it were,” he spoke on, he spoke lower than before, almost as though he were talking … not to the boy, there … not to the thrall creeping along the wall with — was that a rat in one hand, which he was holding by the tail? “the thing” slouched away into the shadows, the curtain-hanging moved and then moved no more: the slight sounds of the stick stirring in the tub began again. “… Illyriodorus,” the warlock was saying, “though he and I were never fellow, sour wine would turn sweet in that one’s mouth. Nevertheless.” What that nevertheless might bode, Vergil was not, then and there, to know.

And by and by the old sorcerer, if that was what Numa was, said, Go.

He had gone. So. His thoughts had much occupied him in the going. Suddenly he realized, not exactly that he did not know where he was, for well he seemed to know the way, but that had he known in his everyday mind it was likely he would have gone another way. Though, as he clearly realized in a moment, he should have come this precise way through the woods. It was still somedel light.

“My child! My boy! Mar! My Mar!”

“Emma!” They embraced. She was grown rather smaller and lighter, he thought. She still kept her old, usual place: a section of a log with one end hewn and sunken in the ground, the upper one long ago adzed shorter and then smoothed for a seat. Her ankles, her feet, he saw, were vastly swollen. Scarce, he supposed, might she totter from her bed to her seat in the dooryard. She kissed him yet again, then murmured something which he could not at first catch; then he knew he had, after all, caught it, for it was repeated by a voice now raised within the house, where the light of one (he saw it could be no more) tiny lamp yellowed, slightly, the shadows by the partly-opened door. The voice had been going on, going on, but in his happiness to have again the dearly-loved old woman to hug, and in his guilt at not having wished enough to have come before this long time despite the possibility of a scene with Bruno, he had not picked up what that voice had been droning; it suddenly seemed that people had been murmuring, muttering, whispering, droning at him all the afternoon and evening …

“… sits all day and does no work and yet wants water,” the voice burst out into a higher note, “let her drink her own,” and the voice droned down again.

The dim sweet face turned to him and her age-softened hand held out a broken cup to him. He nodded, took it. He knew where the spring was. In a moment he was back; she did not even nod her thanks, but drank at once. And drank. He went softly once again and filled the cup. This time, as she finished, she signalled something to him. Suddenly he found an egg in his hand. Poor old woman, she had no pet, somehow she had always a hen about, pecking and dipping its head at the bits she fed it from her own bread. An egg: that was always a treat she had for him. He nodded gratefully, bent over, ready to throw back his head and drink it so soon as he had cracked the shell; suddenly of a sudden some huge shape had swum swiftly out of the darkness, and had deftly snatched the very egg from his hand: the woman Euphronia it was: and she made some ugly scornful sound in her thick throat, and swiftly she was gone. She did not even bother to shout at him, for well she knew that she had wounded not alone one but two people; and that her sudden swooping-down had startled more than a shout; moreover, she now had the egg.

Sudden tears flowed on old Emma’s cheek. And much I would, he felt the words, it was more than thought and it was other than speech; the dame Euphronia had snatched off Emma’s egg? And much I would that she would find scald Cacas rat inside of it; what noise now issued from the house? No mere scream, but full-voiced ullulations of terror, welling forth, and louder and louder — He blew a kiss to the old one, Emma, and, light-footed, soft-footed, so hurried away into the gathering darkness. He knew that for now, at least, no one would follow him.

And not long afterwards he thought of a sort of equation.

Numa: Power without goodness.

Emma: Goodness without power.

And for long afterwards he thought of that equation. And when he learned well how to write letters, he wrote that down. But there were things, he was learning, and things he was to go on learning, questions without answers and answers without questions, and statements beyond orderings; things and thoughts which could not be written down: not written down as simply as an equation: things not writable, things not to be written. At all.

Some time had passed. It was another day.

You require to be a mage; we have none such about here. About, where, then, did they have one such? Or more than one …? Was there an order of them? Numa had spoken of a man in Athens, and of schools in Sevilla. Clearly, he, Numa, had met and known the man; it was not clear if he had gone to such a school or schools, or even if he had been in Sevilla at all. Of course one might ask. Suppose, though, that asking such a question and receiving an answer to it were but part of a sequence, and of a limited sequence, too. Would it be well to begin, so to speak, using it up? It was far from being thrice three years, at which time he would be under some sort of command to return to Numa. But not yet.

What yet?

Seeing, he fell asleep again. He had been mistaken. It was not a dream and he was not at sea. He was in a forest, there ahead of him was Numa’s house: but what a change! It lay fallen in, in ruins, and the grass, the creeper, and the vine had grown over it. Moss lay upon the shattered boards. Someone or something was panting heavily nearby.

How near? He turned his head. Caca was there, the fouled clothes sloughing and in tatters. Caca was there, on all fours, with offals in the mouth. Observed, the creature dropped them between the forepaws, and snarled, like any dog. There were sounds from behind, swifter than thought something sounded, whirling, whistling, past Vergil’s ears, and Caca leaped, writhed, fell back twisting, lay dead with a crossbowman’s bolt in the side.

Overhead, the glittering — It was a dream. He was awake and on the deck of a ship. He recognized the tawny shores of land, needed no cry of, “What land? what coast of people?” which was the traditional question asked of the pilot. Brundisium lay near ahead, and there he had been born; thence the Appian Way led whither all roads led: to Yellow Rome. He had much to do, it was some weeks before, even, he bethought him of the port; then one day he heard the fluter and the middle drum which signalled that a ship was in preparation for a voyage, and that all who would go with her had better hasten to be on board. In fact, as he walked towards the water he heard one man ask another, “What keeps her here? I thought she’d gone by now?” He asked as one might ask an idle question. And, as easily, the one he’d asked made answer. “It seems they await one sole passenger more,” and they strolled away, easy of mind as it appeared, as well they may be, whose way is not with water.

Now he heard a hoot and a whistle and a yammer of words which, for the most part, were really no words at all; he recognized the voice of Bruno. Bruno he had not seen often, lately, but once in recent months: he saw him peeling a scab off some portion of his unsweet person, deeply intent upon the matter, as one examining a leaf from some sibyl. But now the fellow was at another occupation: as often, he was jeering at someone. And of a sudden, no longer hidden from Vergil’s view by trees, there went along and alone, who but the nigromant, Numa, of whom Bruno had sneered that he had no more power, that he was grown too old: none the younger just now. What had brought him forth from his feculent den? the young Vergil wondered … asked himself, did he want to be like Numa? No. Was that the price one paid for wisdom; some said the price was one eye: No. No more than he wanted to be like Bruno. At all. Still …

What had brought Numa forth? For sure, only an errand which he could never even trust his thrall Caca to do … fetch a small jug or gourd of water (was he not holding something like that in his farther hand?), say, from the live waters of a running brook; not to wash with, God knows … perhaps for a certain ceremony or spell requiring a certain hour … if indeed he was on a quest and if indeed his quest sought water … Or perhaps “the thing” had since died (in which case it had been no dream). And now the flutist and the drummer suddenly broke off their music; certain men appeared upon the side of the vessel, voices called, voices answered, gestures made, gestures returned; and now it seemed evident that Numa, stooped and slow, was the “one sole passenger more” for which the ship was waiting? And then where was he going? Likely enough, where the ship was going … if not beyond. He seemed indeed very, very old. And he did not hasten him.

Half-loping behind Numa at a half-safe pace (willing to wound, but half afraid to strike), came the lout Bruno, ever enjoying to harass someone for nought … or ought. “Quack! Quack! Duck-foot!” he gabbled, only meaning but to mock; “quack-quack, duck-foot! Numa! Foh! Pfew!” he held his snout between his fingers. Old Numa turned and looked: no word he said, then; he only turned to look. The louse-bub chuckled his booby pleasure at seeing another either vexed or (better yet!) in pain. “Pfew! Numa! Foh! Clout-rag! Suck!”

And Numa, old Numa? He, as he turned away, spoke only the brief words said to those without pride or shame; Vergil meanwhile (suddenly, in fact, he could not have said why) bethought him of what he’d seen a-hanging and a-stinking before Numa’s door; and of the vatic voice. And of the vatic voice, what?

And Numa, old Numa (tattered, dirty, old evil Numa: but still …)? He, as he turned away, spoke only the brief words said to those without pride or shame. “You have no face,” he said. “You have no face.”

And, in a moment, even before the Bruno began his shrill and terrified and endless scream, Vergil perceived that this was now quite true. And was utterly sure that he knew where that face now was: it was hanging by the door of Caca’s cave.