Vergil in Averno

Whereas in other cities they had taken him to see the bears and lions, the dancing girls and dancing boys, or the chambers with the painted walls, all quite commonly done, and in one city they had done a thing by no means common: they had shown him the treasury, crammed with rubies of Balas and of Balas-shan, male spider rubies and females of the same, diamonds and adamants and pearls the size of babies’ fists, ancient golden anklets and amulets and silver newly brightly minted, chryselephantine with turquoise and sapphire and stone of lapis lazuli — here they had taken him, with every mark of respect and favor, to see the torture-chambers instead.

He had gone.

Had he not gone, would they not have tortured?

Besides: Are not the pains of the few to be preferred to the pains of the many? Did not the distant Idumaeans say, “Pray for the welfare of the Empire, for were it not for fear of it, men would swallow one another up alive”? And yet the Idumaeans loved the Empire not.

But as for torture. . still. . In Rome, the Consul Pretorius, who “kept the king’s sword” (King! as though the title had not long ago been subsumed into a vaster one!) was able with his words and ways alone to wring secrets out of the most forsworn to silence, and in Athens old Illyriodorus did as much with dreams (though these were different secrets, clean different ones indeed), but in Averno different ways were kept (and clean different ones they were, too; if not precisely clean). They took Vergil to see the torture chambers, as one would go to see the bears.

There were no such chill dungeon deeps as had caused the captive in the Histories to exclaim, “How cold are your baths, O Romans!” All was well warmed, all along the deep stone steps (deeper, even, in the center of each, worn, probably, by the passage of many feet over the passing of many years) all along the deep stone steps and long stone corridors, and, indeed, well lighted as well. His host had paused to take up a wax tablet which stood upon a stand, as though he were taking up a menu; his host was the Magnate Brosa Brosa. “Hm,” said he, “this morning they have someone named” — the name meant nothing to Vergil, whatever it was — “who stands accused of conspiracy and interloping.” He raised his eyebrows. “ ‘Conspiracy and interloping,’ ” he repeated thoughtfully with slight change of emphasis. “Can’t have that.”

He stood aside and gestured courteously, asked, “Shall we go in, master?”

They went in.

Vergil had gone in first, with some polite murmur, but he did not at first go in very far; for, the door closing behind them with a heavy thud that for some reason somewhat sickened him (as some sounds do), it was at first dim-dark. But even before his eyes regained full vision — he had with him, always, of course, a source of light of his own, but did not care always, or even often, to make use of it — even then he was able to see that, first, there was some glow of light from somewhere; next he saw, in that dim glow, evidently the man being “put to the question” — horrid obliquity of phrase! — a man, a young man, well muscled and unclad and arms upraised and wrists in chains; but -

“At least he does not barber his armpits,” said the magnate-host. . hanging, thus, that beautiful body, and face intent and in pain, the young man naked and in chains: Vergil pitied him with all his heart, what matter for the moment all philosophy and polity and prating of the welfare of the Res Publica, the Public Thing: the State? The muscles of the arms and breast and belly moved and played and writhed, the upper body bent forward and moved, the chain moved somewhat; somewhere near, a bellows sighed and sounded: and, gods! what mattered where he shaved or not?

“Else we had not hired him.” The soft voice of the host in Vergil’s ear. “We want no perverts for this work, you know.”

Light.

The young man all naked and all sweat was not the victim. He was the torturer. The chains were not those of bondage, he had merely wound them round his wrists for purchase as he forced the bellows to force the fire, working it to heat his instruments. It was, of sorts, a shock. The young man’s pain was merely that of effort.

And when the actual prisoner, uncomely in body and in face, was lifted forward and fixed upon the frame, white hairs crawling upon bosom and belly — even then attention and favor, even pity, certainly sympathy, once fast-centered, moved and changed with difficulty. For one long, unlovely moment it had seemed right to Vergil, and proper, that youth and beauty should torture old age and ugly. . and, or. . at least. . wrong that it should be obliged to tarry there to do so, for, clearly (from the torturer’s straining muscles and concerned face — scarcely observed, the commencement of the question. . the questions. . When last did you conspire to admit interlopers unlicensed to the trade and commerce of the Very Rich City of Averno in violation of its strict and meritorious laws?) clearly, youth could take and took no pleasure in this association with age, and surely beauty would prefer the sunlight and the cooler air outside, the sweet smells of gardens and of fields to this hot room, dark, and fetid with sweat and fear. Clearly, surely, then (it seemed), age, ugly age, should at once confess and die and set youth free, unchained, to go forth once more into the light and air to play….

Then, suddenly, simul and semel with the first groan and scream, it came to him, Vergil, that there was “outside” no cooler air, no sweet smells, no gardens and no fields, little better light, and certainly little in the way of play: He was in Averno.

The very rich city.

How came he there?

“Master in Philosophy. Master in Arts Magical. Adept of the First Three Grades at Grammarie. Passed Master on the Astrolabe. Astrologue, West of Corinth, and Astrologue, East of Corinth.” The voice paused, continued. “But not yet Incantor et Magus.” The voice ceased. It had not asked a question; it had made a statement.

Vergil said, “Not yet.” Also a statement.

The man of the voice had entered the hot-wine shop a half-moment ahead of him, and only in that half-moment had Vergil half-realized (realized, that is, with half his mind) that the other’s striped robe had already been in the wine-shop lane when he himself turned into it. As for turning, the man had not turned up his face when Vergil had come to stand next to him. . indeed, could have stood nowhere much else, there being but that much little room at the small counter where the wine-pots squatted in their hot-water baths above the charcoal glow. Giving their orders as the dramster looked at each in turn, “White and sweet,” said one, “Red and spicy,” said the other. Vergil was that other, and this was no pre-arranged signal, to be responded to with some phrase such as I have the key to Memphis, countered with (perhaps) And I to Mizraim, such sports as boys employ to obtain entrance to clandestine gatherings of boys who cannot yet get girls. Had the dramster stood a bit nearer in offering the steamy cup with one hand and holding out the other for the two groats — an ancient buffoonery among street-players: Spare two groats for the bath, boss? What bath? The one in Lucu’s wineshop. . Change the name for every street, it still drew its laugh from loiterers — had this dramster’s stance not made it necessary for Vergil to turn a bit to the left, he would not even have seen the other wine-drinker’s face in profile: no extraordinary face, say of not quite three decades, with a sparse beard and large white teeth.

Vergil had raised his cup and lowered his face and, while he blew and sipped, this other, this one in the striped robe, as though murmuring a libation-prayer, began that recitation of titles which, after a mere moment, Vergil recognized as his own. Had this other, whoever he was, and no memory of this other moved Vergil’s mind, not even as the lightest of breezes moves the surface of a pool, had he expected some show of surprise or even curiosity? None was forthcoming. He might as well have been Vergil’s aunt, asking “Has your sister come back from market?”

“Not yet.”

It was a tiny dram-shop, Vergil had been in privies that were larger, and it announced its wares with a reek as strong, though of course different. He had, in a sudden urge, desired a cheap sip: as cheap in quality as price, he could afford better now, but old tastes have a way of returning. Though you expel Nature with a pitchfork, she will always return. And now out of nowhere, as he drank the rough and raffish wine, was a stranger murmuring degrees and titles as though reading them off a tablet or a scroll. As though they had been gained as easily as they were being recited. As easily as a child gains names.

Vergil blew and sipped and sipped and swallowed. Spicy, it was not very spicy, some infusion of something much-infused had tinctured it, no more; probably the other’s chosen dram was not more than the very least sweet, had been mixed with the water washed through a much-washed honey-pot.

The pleasures of the poor.

But. . two groats. Price of admission to the bath, any bath, a mere token, of course, public baths being supported by public funds. The drink was worth what one paid for it. Somewhat it warmed him, somewhat it refreshed him, somewhat it brought back memories of times when there had been an adventure in buying a dram in a wineshop. The voice next to him now: “From Sevilla to Averno” — still the same casual mutter — “is a rather far journey. The dyer Haddadius might be pleased to learn of some of the many things discovered on such a journey. He might be prepared to.” The man set down the cup, belched politely, walked out. Vergil did not look up. The dramster took the empty cup, sloshed it in a wide basin of the coarse-painted pottery used for the purpose, set it back on the shelf.

“Another, boss?”

Boss shook his head. After a moment took his own leave. Sevilla. Sometimes called city of the sundry secret schools. Sometimes called sewer of a thousand different devils. Vergil did not constantly think of Sevilla, but to have heard it mentioned in the way he had, there in that dirty concrete cell with its pots of half-vinegar cooking at the counter (on the walls, rough-scratched graffitti: Polonio for President of the Lousepickers’ Guild. . Julia pisses better stuff than what they sell here …) — well, it was rather a surprise. And as to what it meant, who knew? Everything meant something, still, some meanings were revealed sooner than others. And that some were seemingly never revealed in no way disproved the fact.

Averno. And the dyer Haddadius.

“… might be prepared to …”. . to what? If the last word had not been “pay,” and it was not entirely clear what it had been, then what had it been? He did not bother to note down in his tablets, but he toyed with some half-formed fancy about the dyer’s hand, which, proverbially, proclaimed its owner’s trade.

And then, having other things to remember, this one he very easily forgot.

That night he could not sleep.

There is a certain book that is of hard-seeking, and, it is said, if found and opened by one who does not deserve to know what it contains, the book does not allow itself to be read. Evidently Vergil had, without wanting to, found it, here in his small library in this small port, the book disguised in the binding of some other and well-familiar work, for as often as he blinked, and trimmed the wick of the lamp once more, and examined the half-eggshell suspended above it and filled with oil to see if the hole was clear and the oil still dripping drop by drop by slow slow drop into the well of the lamp below and as often as he returned his gaze to the page, as often the letters melted and flowed. He would never get his lesson this way. Indeed, when his preceptor, old Vlaho, that good man, said to him, “Recite the syllogism which I set for you to learn,” he had to confess that, sir, he had not learned it. Old Vlaho shook his bald head, rimmed with soft short gray hairs, and raised his hand to hit him a reproving slap: the hand, from nails to wrist, was blue as woad.

A cock crew. It was near to dawn. He had fallen asleep anyway, and so, with a sigh, he turned over in his bed in the wall-niche. It was some while before he remembered that night’s dream.

Away, away, the Isle of Goats in the hazy distance, it thrust upward like any mountain, save in being surrounded by waves instead of clouds. Aurelio the freedman arose and bowed as Vergil came up. Aurelio did not point, but he moved his hand to where Naples glittered on its hills, also far off, but not near so far as the Isle of Goats. “Well, sir, we have the horsehair, as you ordered. Apollo! how they wanted to charge me for it, there in the city!” He wagged his head in wonder, but it was a contented wag. And a contented wonder. They may have wanted to charge. . whatever it was they had wanted. . but it was clear that the price Aurelio had paid was not the one asked. “All because I insisted it should be white horsehair only. But any excuse will do them. ‘Why does it need be pure white?’ the man said. ‘Dark horsehair is stronger, anyway.’ Well, I dunno it is or not, but I say, ‘In that case, all the more why the white should be cheaper.’ ” He chuckled. “And so, Master Vergil, sir, we are ready to begin mixing the plaster; there is the lime, and over here is the sand, sir.”

Vergil thrust his hand into the opened bales of hair, lifted, sifted, let it drop. Then he stooped and did the same with the sand, but this time he put some on his tongue; and this he did several times. “Yes, this will do,” he said. “We won’t want more than this much horsehair, just enough to give a certain roughness so it will grip and hold the coating.”

Aurelio had evidently been about to ask the question to which Vergil, unrequested, had supplied the answer; and now seemed satisfied, pleased. But now another question came into the freedman’s mind, and, thence, across his face. And this time too, Vergil answered it first.

“I tasted it to be sure it had not been mixed with sea-sand, because the salt would, for one thing, attract and hold the moisture and you would have damp and dripping walls at times. . at times when you would least want them, too: in wet weather. . and, also, the plaster would be less likely to hold firm upon the walls. And then, too. . salt. . the principal savor of mankind, though some things it preserves, yet, some things it destroys….” Vergil waved his hands a bit and raised his brows a bit, and made. . a bit. . a certain gesture that Aurelio understood; repeated. Salt. Sorcery.

Aurelio’s face, which had for just a moment clouded, cleared, and he grunted with gratification. “One has to have learned many things in philosophy, sir, in order to build a house correctly, sir.”

Vergil was undoing the strings of a dark bag of rich, soft samite. He nodded. The knots were not simple, but he had tied them himself. As the last one fell slack, he said, “Yes. Principles. Proportions. Mathematics. Materials. And more. Much more. Even” — he lifted out an instrument — “how to space and set and tune the five chords of this lute.” And he ran his fingers over them all five: yellow the first, for bile; red for blood, and twice as thick the chord, white for sperm, and thrice as thick the chord; the black chord, for the black bile, was the fourth, and was one-fourth the thickness of the first and the highest in pitch. These four had long been traditional; to them Vergil had ventured to add a fifth: This was of a color between rose and purple, and it represented that aspect of man higher than any humor, and this, though his own idea, had been suggested to him by some word or other in the Great Antiphonal of the Saracen, Syryabus, which nicked and clicked — as it had so seemed at the time — with some lines, a few, not more, from the nameless books of the music played at the courts of Asoka and Chandragupta, the Great High Kings of Ind. Then there was Vitruvius, and before him, Amphion; excellent exempla. And again he now ran his fingers over the strings. The workmen began to rise and to look at him more closely, even, than before. He tightened pegs a trifle, here and there; considered loosening them a trifle, there and here; decided not to. The day was clean, the air was clear, he lifted his eyes, gathered the gaze of all, gave a nod of his head, and began to play.

The name of his song was “The Walls of Thebes.”

The work of building went on, as it had begun, to the sounds of, and the rhythms of, music.

After a while the music began to enter a slower phase, and, the movements of the workmen, slowly, in time with it, gradually ceased. And, after some pause, Vergil said, “Ser Aurelio — ”

“Aurelio, Aurelio. It is kind of you and I am not of a rank to gainsay what a learned master such as yourself is pleased to utter, but if you please, sir: plain Aurelio. There are others who have not your gracious nature and much they would resent hearing I suffered meself to be called Ser Aurelio. Me. A freedman.”

The haze had burned away from off all the water. The Isle of Goats stood proud and high and blue and distant, like the haunt of a peri or of many a faun. Naples glittered brightlier than ever. “Your former master, Aurelio, then — ”

“The late and honored Aurelio Favio, Master Vergil. Whose name he was good enough to bestow when he manumitted me. And what of him, sir?”

Vergil stroked his short black beard, and then, as though stretching his fingers from their long stint at the lute, gave a stroke to each side of the short black hair that fitted his head like a cap. “Yes, just what I was going to ask. What of him? What sort of man?”

“The best sort. Worked hard, dealt honest, and I worked hard and honest with him, down there in the old wharf where we had the first warehouse.” Gestured. “He lived in a simple, frugal way, my master, and a chaste one; no boys, sir, and just the one woman, Julia by name she was, as kind as he was, and even quieter. Then she died, then he freed me, then he went to join her, sir, as they do say. And as we must hope. And left me his heir.”

Heir to no small property, or, from a small one Aurelio had by the same diligence and thrift made a large one; else he would not be building him a house of this size and on a piece of land of this value.

“And his business was —?”

“Everything at first, you know, though in a small way. As for, we did used to go along the wharf and buy seamen’s private trade adventures, such as they was allowed to carry free aboard — not much: a sack or a box or a bale of this-and-that at a time. Then one year he chartered the fruit harvest at one of the orchards. That was good, I liked that; hard we worked in the open sun and air all day, but the fruit was sweet to smell and eat; hard we worked, the day, but at night, sir, ah, how we young people used to dance on the threshing-floor, the grain harvest not being on at the same time. Folk playing music, like as you’ve done, sir. . the bright moon. . A look of quiet came across the freedman’s broad and sallow face. “And the next year the people made him an offer to charter the wheat harvest, and we did so well that after that it was mostly wheat we dealt in. . oh, yes, sometimes oil, yes, sometimes oil. But mostly wheat.”

It was almost as though Aurelio were acting the role of chanter for some mimetic play; even as he said these words the workmen were breaking into pieces the bread they had for the day’s first meal, and dipped the pieces of it into the dish of oil carefully propped on a heap of sand. Vergil was prompted to quote the old proverb of the Aegypts, “Water and the wheat plant are equal to the throne of God,” and Aurelio said, indeed. Indeed, indeed, sir, indeed. His old master, Aurelio Favio, then, he was not. . and his freedman Aurelio was not, then. . a dyer?

“No, sir, never. A dyer, Master Vergil? Why — ”

“But isn’t that madder, Aurelio, in the lines of your right hand?”

The freedman’s mouth opened. He turned his hand over, stared hard. Those lines of which the chiromancers make much were indeed a deeper red than anything but madder could supply. Aurelio looked. Puzzlement. Then a jerk of his head, a click of his teeth. Recollection. He nodded. “It was the other day sir, as I went indeed to the dye-house to see about the curtains for my bed. And the master workman poked his stick into the vat to show me how it was going and he hauled the cloth up and it began to slip and I, like a fool — as though he didn’t know his own craft! — I grabbed ahold of it. Well! And so the dye still stays there yet, in the lines of my palm. Sharp eyes you have, as well, Master Vergil, sir.” Respect, and perhaps just a touch of something more.

Not wanting it to be given the chance, just then, to become too much more, Vergil said, “We are making you a good house here, Aurelio. Will you live alone, just you and your servants?” No more encouragement was needed, the freedman opened his heart and spoke of his plans. He was, he felt, too old to marry. “If I need a woman for a night, I know where to find one. But what’s meet for a night is not meet for a lustrum,” he said. The vine might well be wedded to the elm, as anyone could see for himself who walked out into the countryside and saw the one, trained, draped round the other, so to speak: but old age and maidenhood, not so well. And to marry an older woman meant to marry all her family, “… some of which I might like and might like me, and some of which, well …” And had she no family, none, then to marry all her sorrow and bitterness as well.

But.

There was something else on the man’s mind and Vergil felt some sense of what it was, and a stronger sense of not wishing to show anything of what he sensed. He nodded. Waited. “There’s a young girl, oh, maybe eleven, twelve, or so, in the new wharf part of town, whom I been looking on for a while, you see, sir. And I see she’s a good girl and as clean as they leave her be, where she was before with some family, not a slave, no, just a servant-drudge. So I spoke a word here and there and I put a few pieces of silver into a few hands and I got her in with a better family where she can do more than scrub and carry — where she can learn the ways of a good family house and a good family housewoman: buying, spinning and weaving, cooking good food as she has bought, managing servants, and to read and write and keep accounts, and all such things as I needn’t enumerate. And in a while, Master Vergil, I shall adopt her and dower her. And then, without no haste, sir, then I’ll go cautiously inquiring around in the workshops of the good crafts, of the best of the crafts, sir, of promising young men who’ve about finished their journeyman time: and then I am going to pick the best of them as don’t have family to set them up well in trade and then I’ll marry the two of them off, if so be they’ll have each other, for I don’t believe in forcing such a match if they won’t. With the dowry, then, the young man, my son-in-law as he’ll be, he’ll be able to open a good shop and we’ll all be a-living here together in this good house which you’re a-building for me, and I shall have children then, you see, and grandchildren, and I shan’t be alone no more, then, nor in my ancient age …”

Quiet joyful anticipation for a moment, then, hastily: “If such be my fate, absit omen.” He spat three times and thrice he rapped upon a balk of timber.

“Absit omen,” Vergil repeated. It was a bad thing to boast or vaunt, it would attract the envy of others. . other people. . others who and which were not people; it was a risk, but, being a risk which it was inevitable sooner or later at one time and another anyone would take, there was a remedy provided: one invoked the protection of the spirits of the trees, which resided, residually, at least, in any piece of wood; one spat, for spittle was deemed potent surrogate for potent semen. “Avert the omen. . Yes. Such be your fate. It is written in your palm, the lines outlined in madder. Yes, it will be a good house that we are building for you. So you do not go to Averno, then, for your dye-work?”

Pleasure in this prophecy, confirmant of his own chief hopes, made the freedman almost speechless for a moment, and he was slow to take the last question into his mind. It was with a sudden movement, almost a convulsive one, that he reacted to it in a moment; and his face twisted. “That black pit? That stinking hole? No, master! Oh, I’ve been, more often than I’ve wanted to, for every time I’ve been there I haven’t wanted to, but business sometimes obliged me — why else? — for as for them hot baths supposedly good for the health, why, rather sicken at home than go there for a cure! However, beg the master’s pardon, whilst it is true that they do dye-work and iron-work and in fact all such work as involves heats and fires, which is what keeps ‘em all alive and makes ‘em rich (besides from thievery and murder or worse) — why, no sir! ‘Averno-Inferno’ is what we calls it. If so it be as I can possibly help it, I prefer to pay higher price and breathe cleaner air….” Some sudden thought interrupted this not-quite-tirade. “They say there is a king there now, King Kakka I suppose it must be, a king of shit.” Contempt and disgust, and something more, struggled a moment more upon the fat face with its clear, if faded, blue eyes. Then: “Begging the master’s pardon for my rough words.”

Next, with no more than a twitch, this all was gone. “So my palmlines say I’m to live here in peace as I’ve desired, master, you say …?”

Vergil reached for his lute, to take it up again; made of wood, it was, and inlaid with that mother-of-pearl fetched up from the rich ocean-mines of the Erythraean Sea. “As far as the lines say me, yes. And as for further information, why. . one would not wish to go to Averno for it, would one?” He ran his fingers over the lute-strings, and then, seeing that the older man was troubled at this last remark, which (he thought) it would have been better not to have made, Vergil asked, “And how did you meet this young girl whom you plan to adopt?”

Aurelio’s face cleared once more. “How? Why, let me think. Ah. It was a hot day and I was toting a sack of good wheat to miller’s, to save the cart, it being but the one sack. And I pause to wipe my sweaty face, and she come over and offered me a cup of water, you see, sir …”

“Yes, I see. Well. . ‘Water and the wheat plant,’ eh?”

He began to stroke the lute; and the men arose again and the work went on again. And went on well.

• • •

The last to leave, of those who left the building site, Vergil bade good evening to the watchman (by special permission of the municipium, armed: not all knew about spells and such safeguards, nor did Vergil wish to make his own knowledge of them a subject for public clamor), and — some small devil entering into him — with a gesture indicated the signs deeply scored in the sand and dirt with his staff. “Don’t disturb my circles.”

But the man did not catch a reference one would have thought well known even to schoolboys; exclaimed, “The gods forbid, sir!”

Times had changed. For the better. For the worse.

Night. He had of course the standing invitation to dine with Claudio Murcio, but the thought of having to hear once more the standard bill of fare deprecated by the inveterate modesty of the host seemed just that much too much. Another time, then, Claudio Murcio. And there was the invariable reading from Homer at the salon the Matron Gundesilla, followed, invariably, by refreshments of high quality; again, no. Plutarco had, not two days since, suggested that Vergil might find his collection of charts interesting, and Vergil very well might. On the other hand, he would probably not find very interesting the long walk thither in the fast-fading light; and, even less, the long walk back, accompanied by a servant with a torch yawning for his bed. So, so much for that.

Home.

Someday he would be able to afford to keep his own horse or mule. Someday he would have his own litter and litter-bearers. Someday he would give his own entertainments and have other people come to him. Someday home would be so well furnished, so well supplied with books and devices, that the thought of home would never seem even faintly disappointing. Someday. . home would be. . somewhere else.

Until then, and meanwhile, then, at any rate: home.

Supper, supplied by the cookshop-tavern two doors down, was no surprise. Barley and cheese. Almost he regretted after all the table of Claudio Murcio, where, in between the eggs at the beginning and the apples at the end, there would be lettuce and snails and roast kid and — And also: The lettuce is not very crisp, I fear, Master Vergil. The oil is not, alas, the best oil; it is merely local oil, I fear, Master Vergil. The eggs are not. . I fear the kid. . I wish the apples could have been. . Ah no. Better the barley and cheese, which the cookhouse crone had not waited to deprecate, but had simply put down on the table and taken her leave. There was wine, his own wine; there was no old moss on the amphora, there was not even new moss on the amphora, it was a small amphora of what wine-snobs would call a small wine; the wine would never travel, and who the hell cared. It was not bad wine. He ate, drank, washed his hands, dried them. Considered: What next?

A woman? No wife, no concubine, no mistress kept elsewhere any more than here, and — currently — no loves, no intrigues. But there was Luvia, a few doors past the tavern, her person clean, her fee affordable, her purple gown (Averno-dyed) would look bright enough by lamplight. And then, the gown removed, a half hour in dalliance, the gown put on again; then Luvia would rattle and chatter and laugh. . and sulk if he did not laugh and chatter and rattle as well. Well, no matter if he did or did not, and tonight he did not wish to, then she would be off. And then what? Many men would then, simply, sleep. Vergil would not. At least, not after Luvia. Although old Tiresias had suffered much for frankly answering Juno’s question with Women, nine times as much as men, it was doubtful if, really, Luvia enjoyed their strokings and his delvings in any such proportion; as for the arithmetical reverse. . Enough that, though it left him in much measure satisfied in one respect, in another it left him restless. So. Then he would look to his books. . and so, all things reflected on and considered, he might as well look to them now.

Instead.

Someday he would have all the books he wanted. Theophrastus’ On Herbs, illustrated in good colors. The Pharmacon of Pseudo-Theophrastus. The Cookbook of Apicius, full of ghastly recipes for nightingales’ tongues in garum, elephant’s trunk farced with truffles, scuttlefish, and mustard sauce made with hippocras: he would need the entire Pharmacon to physic himself after such a supper. Someday he would have the complete Astronomica of Manilius, mistakes and all; Firmicus’s Liber Mathesus; the Parthian Mansions of Isidore of Charyx Spasini; Marsi’s Arts Magical (he had only the digest now); Vitruvius De Vitriae /?/. He would have the Catalogue of Ptolemy, with golden clasps and a silken cover, and a new Almagest in bright black letters (his own was faded, and half-illegible with interlineations and erasures); the Similitudes of Aristotle and the On the Formulae of Zoroaster — no! His mind had wandered: it was of course the other way around!

Meanwhile, what did he have which would bear reading tonight? He had Ctesias, that delightful liar, both the Persica and Indica. He had part of Proclus (though, someday —), and the Thrasyllicon and Sicander’s Of Mesopotamia Septentriona. Yet the one book that he took down was none of these, but the Patterns of Parthenopius, and for one full passage of the larger sandglass he went through every single one of the labyrinthine mazes there delineated. . went through them in his mind, of course; merely he checked them with those in the book when he had done.

He had done them all correctly.

He always did.

But it was well to be in practice, and besides: such splendid practice! such splendid exercises! And such splendid, splendid patterns!

After that he simply selected a scroll at random, raised the upper part of his jointed bed and fixed it fast with the rod behind and beneath, saw that the lamp was well, and retired. He folded the scroll as he unrolled it, so that each column was folded full-face clear, back-to-back with another column, so as to save the trouble of rolling (and unrolling) the scroll whilst he was reading it; began to read.

. . unexpectedly they were invited, in fact constrained, to join in a procession to the temple of Jove in Alexandria Olympia, where the Thunderer was worshiped under the Syrian name of Haddad. The procession had been organized at the first sign of bad weather by the local dyers’ guild, for, they say, the thunder affects the dyes in the great pots if the mordant has not already been — He was seized with a great start, in fact really something like a brief convulsion; the scroll shot from his hands and he sat bolt upright, the coverlet kicked off -

Asleep? Certainly he had not fallen asleep, out of habit he had turned the sandglass over as he began reading and the first few grains were just trickling through. What book was this?

He examined the label attached to the scroll’s tubular case. Seneca On the Four Cardinal Virtues? Hardly; clearly a mistake…. He got up and collected the fallen scroll, of course he had lost his place, well, well, he would find it again, and…. It was certainly not Seneca on anything, it was a fragment of, well, the gods knew what it was a fragment of, of something he had never seen before, so how came it here? Its text was not on the first wooden roller ever supplied it. Its text had been clipped and trimmed and glued and not recently, for the few marks left of the last letters on the part clipped off were quite impossible to decipher, by reason of who knew how many years of fingers — often greasy, often heavy, laboriously tracing the lines; how did it begin? It began, so the Esthish people who dwell by the Wendland Sea in a corner of the North, when they begin to winnow grain, address these words to the wind, O Wind, O Wind, O Heavenly Child. O Wind, O Wind, O Heart of Great Joy …

Vergil fairly hastily yet fairly carefully went through the rest of the scroll; it was the memoir of travel of a Roman knight who had gone north after some precious commodity, amber, perhaps, and who had recorded not only every ounce purchased, and the price, but also, seemingly, every proverb he had ever heard and every way station at which he had heard it. But as to those other lines which Vergil had read but a moment before, lo! not once did they appear …

Nor anything like them.

Nor did he find them in any other book in his cabinet nor on his shelf. And neither could he recollect ever having read them before in his life. Anywhere.

He set aside the scroll and its case with the errant label, let the bed-rod down and got into bed again, drew the cover up, blew out the light, snuffed the smoldering wick with moistened fingers, murmured a prayer, and slept without waking once, and without a single dream.

• • •

Averno was not very far as the crow flies, but it was a byword that not even a crow, scarcely the most delicate of birds, would wish to fly to or even near there; for “They be smudged black already” and “Them folk there begrudge them corby-crow a carcass, even”; and suchlike sayings, and more. But men went to Averno, and went often, even if not all men; and some came thence, too. It was but a short time after finishing the house of Aurelio (the mortar, made specially after Vergil’s own new-formed formula, might indeed prove better than the one commonly made; it would certainly prove as good, he would check it from time to time. . decade to decade. . for he had, he hoped, built the house to last forever: and so it might: barring quakes of the instable earth or some immense great overblast of Old Vesuvio. . or the Death of Rome come flying down upon it) — it was but a short time after finishing the house that Vergil had encountered a certain street scene of a morning. It was in between the old and the new wharf sections of the town port that he saw the man with a string of pack animals, laden down with, no doubt, madder and carmine and saffron and woad, indigom and hyacinth. Some fool of a lean-shanked fellow with stubbly cheeks had given a hoot, and, “Averno! Pho!” had cried. And held his nose. The crowd guffawed.

The Avernian merchant or dye-master (they were often the same) might have passed for a caricature of himself and his class in an open-air burlesque at a festival: fleshy, in travel-stained clothes he had not bothered to get washed, and mounted on a dark and dingy mule. He showed no anger, but, pressing his knees against the beast’s flanks, he had raised his massive rump a trifle from the saddle, and, having said the while, “Since you hold your nose at me, here is something to hold it for,” broke wind with a great noise.

The crowd’s mood changed in an instant; they were all (for once) on the Avernian’s side, roared their approval loud, and hooted the holder of the nose, who growled and sneered, but all the same took care to slink away at once. As it all pleased the populace and had certainly hurt him not, Vergil would no more than have shrugged, had this not brought the matter into his mind yet one time more. The prospect of Averno did not attract him, had never attracted him, and even now (he thought) very much did not attract him. But many things were not attractive that nevertheless needed to be done; it seemed to him, fairly of a sudden, that he might as well go to Averno, for, as witness this last incident, Averno seemed prepared to come to him.

And this prospect pleased him even less.

Much, much less.

“A horse? For sure a horse,” said Fulgence the liveryman. “For how long, a horse, the master?”

Vergil considered. “Surely not more than a fortnight.” He hoped.

The liveryman’s face, all expectation at his answer, whatever his answer might be, now changed. Brows flew up, eyes bulged, mouth flew open, hands flew out. “Ah, then the master will not want …” He paused, he licked his lips. Again scanned his customer, decided that perhaps after all he would not try to impress by a guess. “So. Is it that the master may want a nice bright filly for ambling up and down the streets? Or maybe the master wants something. . for show, not. . not a filly; a good sturdy mare, mayhap? or a gelding? For, maybe, the mud and dirt, the roads to trudge, the farms to see?”

“I am going to Averno.”

One more slow lick the liveryman gave his lips, the while he looked from side to side as though for witnesses to this incredible statement; but witnesses there were at the moment none, for the swipes and hostlers were gathered round a handsome stallion in a corner of the yard. The man took a breath. He held it. Let it out. Looked about once more. Shrugged. Gazed up as though the god-actor, descending from the hoist-machine in the amphitheater, would yet come down to save him. But — as he himself might have put it — a god from the machine there was not.

“Well, what is it, Fulgence, man, what is it?” Vergil was becoming impatient at this play.

“What is it? What it is? Heh-hem! Is going to Averno, says the master, says, and wants to know” — here control began to slip and voice to rise — ”Jove, Apollo, and Poseidon! ‘What is it?’ asks he! Is this: For one, for Averno, not a horse would be, but a mule. Is this, for another, so here are no mules, none. Mules, here, are not. Childs of whoring mares are mules, and in my stable have, I wouldn’t.” Several of the children of the whoring mares lifted their heads in adjoining stalls just then, displaying their characteristic ears, as though astonished to hear the morals of their mothers impugned and indeed their own very presence denied. Vergil grinned. The liveryman cursed. “The mules (some hangman stable boy brought in against my willing) — the mules I curse.” He broke off to explain and to excuse, and stooped as though for a stone to sling at them, a search somewhat handicapped by the fact that his hands, being both clenched into the position called the fig, with each thumb thrust between the next two adjacent fingers — a gesture sovereign and remedial against the evil eye in general, as well as specific spells and cantrips — his hands thus arranged were hardly capable of picking up stones to cast at mules, existent or otherwise. And at this moment when he was realizing this himself, and his dismay at the position becoming fast impossible to conceal, and the position itself already impossible to conceal — at this moment, concealed in yet another stall nearby, an ass began to bray: perhaps an epithalamion. The liveryman danced up and down in a hysterical ecstasy of helplessness and rage.

Vergil began to laugh, his head thrown back so far that his tar-black beard jutted straight out. “Bawd, pimp, and punk!” the man screamed, cursing the still-invisible though hardly inaudible jackass, kicking dust and dung toward its stall. “May devils ride your rod and may it dwindle! May your stones — ”

In a voice still weak from laughter, Vergil urged him to desist. “ — for suppose your curse came true?” he asked. “What of the jack’s stud-fees, man?”

A look of absolute horror expelled all other emotions from the face of Fulgence. “Twenty ducats cost me the beast, and me, I curse his rod!” He smote his forehead with the flat of his hand. “On me let it befall, on me, on me, and not on thee….” It was his voice that dwindled as he considered what he had just said, and his face seemed to writhe in a whirlpool of contradictory feeling, as the last bray ebbed off into silence. Very, very weakly, he said, “For Averno to go, a deposit the most immense it would be essential. A deposit — ”

The stallion gave a scream of pain, the liveryman at once forgot deposits, jackasses, mules, customer, and all; and in an instant was there with the stallion and its agony. “What!” he exclaimed. “Still he didn’t pass? Two days, what, and still no — The louse?” he cried, looking wildly and fiercely at the group of men and boys, some stroking and speaking to it, one holding it at the head, others standing carefully away from the great hooves. The beast was a bay, huge, and a beauty, and it quivered in pain.

Vergil asked, “He has a stricture?” Mostly they gaped at him, but one, the senior hostler by his looks and manner, nodded.

“Yes, master, he — ”

“The louse? The louse?” shouted Fulgence the liveryman.

“ — he hasn’t passed no water for anyway two days. Maybe two ‘n’ a half. The boss he sends out for to get a louse, you know, master — ”

“Ah. Yes, I know.” He knew, Vergil knew, the homely if uncomely remedy: If a louse was placed in the fundament of a horse afflicted with stricture, the crawling of the tiny parasite should produce a shudder that would relax the tautened or tightened orifice.

“ — but we couldn’t get no louse, boss,” a young stable boy grumbled. “Some days beggars be so thick, and everywhere you looks, a scratchin’ of theyselves, till you wants to leap away. Therefore. Dunno where they’m gotten to, today, we see only one, is all, old No Nose, but he — ”

But Fulgence would be butted no buts. “A handful of coppers, I give! Even, I told you, what do they want of me, the filthy, gold? Silver, a silver piece, even. Two hundred ducats cost Hermus, a price for a king! Oh, the gods! Jove, Apollo, Poseidon!” This mixture of the Roman and the Grecian was too common locally even to be noticed by those locally denizened. The great stallion Hermus. . and in truth he did seem a fine beast and perhaps fit for a king and perhaps too fine a beast for a livery stable; some story that one would never, likely, hear, lay behind his presence there. . the bay, Hermus, gave a moan. His master put his hands to his own head. The horse’s health was surely more worth than one piece of gold, but he could not bring himself to pay it; nor was it pure parsimony, either. “They would sneer me forever, upon may I spit; ‘Ha, ho, who, Fulgence! Who for a louse a gold piece did give!’ Hermus. Piss for me!” And no doubt they would, too.

Vergil meanwhile had himself replaced the man by the horse’s head, stroked its neck, stroked its belly, once, twice, thrice, murmured, “Hermus, Hermus, turbid with gold …” And stepped one pace back.

Had a demigod been then and there begotten, as upon Danae the daughter of the Argive king through Jove’s assuming the rather unexpected form of a golden rain to circumvent the locks upon the bronzen tower, there would have been no greater commotion.

Most of the credit at first, however, went to the horse.

But only at first.

And after a while the liveryman Fulgence bethought him of his other business; grateful he must have been, his words of thanks could not have been entirely insincere, but like many another person in many another (and some might think, more exalted) station in life, he was somewhat chary, somewhat leery, of showing overmuch gratitude: and he looked at his customer with a somewhat slanting glance, no longer straight into the face. Gratitude, appreciation, these were all very fine things: but business was, after all, business. Fear of his appreciation and gratitude costing him something was evident; so was his fear of losing the customer’s custom. A nice balance. . and a mixed one. . rather, coming down to specific examples, rather like a mule. “A mule, a mule,” he murmured, waving his hands as though to wave away any reminder that he had ever denied he had a mule, let alone mules, in his place. “The best of mules the master shall to have, a gentle mouth how it has, a back so kindly, the how clever on by craggy roads its feet! As for the deposit …” Here he stopped suddenly. “Averno,” he whimpered, whispered. “Who goes to Averno, does they always come back? De-posit …”

The senior hostler said, low, respectful, but how charged with significance his words, “Hermus be’s the deposit, what me think.”

Fulgence hissed. Fulgence writhed. Slantingly he looked at Vergil. Appeal, greed, fear were in his look. Vergil, saying nothing, showing nothing in his face, merely looked straight on ahead. As it, however, happened, it was the great stallion Hermus who stood right straight ahead where Vergil was looking.

And so Vergil therefore looked straight at Hermus.

Fulgence gave one single short hoot of fear. Then he wilted. “It must be no mule,” he said, after several long and audible swallows. He gestured to his senior hostler, the gesture — toward some more distant stall — meant nothing to Vergil, but it evidently meant something to the senior hostler. And, it was clear, to the junior ones as well. Relief showed, and even respect. The older man bowed to Vergil, bowed to his own master, went off, nodding his head as he went. Another gesture, and Hermus was led away and into his own stable. Back came the senior, leading another horse, a roan, led it to the place where Vergil’s eyes still looked.

“This one be a good one, sir,” he said.

His voice placed a slight emphasis on good. The liveryman perhaps did not like the implication, his lips moved, then he shrugged, then he looked at his purse hanging at his belt over his slight paunch. He swallowed again. “I leave to the master his choice. Should he choose this Prima, he choose a good mare, no filly, no maiden-mare all so skittish, but he choose a matron-mare: steady, secure, strong, she. If she would have a sometime a little humor, just a little and no more would it be, to go a little right, or a little left to go, or to over her shoulder to look, well.” He shrugged again. “The master is no cruel and he would allow and it would all right be.”

“This one be a good one, sir.”

Vergil now allowed, first his eyes, then his hands, to move over the mare. All seemed true. She gave her head a slight toss. She seemed already to have accepted him. He seemed already to have accepted her. Already, in this short moment, they seemed familiar with each other. Vergil gave a long, slow nod. And once again he saw and heard the liveryman swallow. The only slightly protuberant eyes besought him somewhat more. Vergil waited.

“I leave to the master his generous, he would compassion have. Like a nobleman, he would wish the payings for two weeks in advance to pay.” Vergil thought this, from his own acquaintance with nobility, perhaps the very last thing a nobleman would wish; but he let the thought pass by, and, the purse being now open in Fulgence’s slightly trembling hands, he put money in it.

And Fulgence bowed. And Fulgence said no more.

Vergil and the mare were a ways down the street when he realized that there were three of them. The youngest stable boy had helped put on the horse-furniture, and then withdrew; now here he was again. “Thank you, boy, I shan’t need you,” Vergil said, sifting out a small coin.

“Ah, master, but I shall need you,” the stable boy said firmly. “He’ve kicked me out, old popeyes have, for that I didn’t bring him back no louse.” Likelier (thought master), likelier Fulgence, having still some small matter in the debit column, had paid it by this small act of anger — and better than to have kicked a horse. Or. . but. . “I suppose he’d liked me to fetch it back in me armpit or me crouch. And I shan’t get no other job in no other stable, sir, for they’ve got as it be a guild, and without the old boss gives his leave no new boss durst take you on. Leastly such a young chap as me. Therefore.”

He said no further word, but marched sturdily along by the side of the mare. Nor did Vergil.

If the lad had not already learned that they were going to Averno, soon he would.

The famous sunshine of the great Bay was absent the morning of their departure, veiled in a sour drizzle of rain and smoke. The boy Iohan sniffed, and liked it not, despite the felt capes provided for them both. “The gods might have waited a bit,” he said. “For we shall soon enough have much such weather, where we go. As master knows, I’m sure.” He was a moment silent, then added, in a flat voice, “Very rich.”

Vergil understood. It was said that the city of Averno had two unofficial mottoes; one was Money Never Stinks, a mere pleasantry (for Averno, a mere pleasantry); but the other, Thou Shalt Want Ere I Shall Want, gave pause for much thought. And there was also the matter of its official municipal appellation. The descriptives of cities were customarily twofold, with both adjectives preceded by the word very; there were exceptions, of course, and Rome, of course, had none. . needed none. . and Avignon, the co-capital, was termed the Imperial and Pleasant There might perhaps be a distinction between “pleasant” and “very pleasant,” but none between “imperial” and “very imperial.” Amalfi was the Very Free and Very Faithful, perhaps a contradiction in terms; and Sevilla was termed Very Ancient and Very Wise.

And so on. And so on.

But Averno was, very simply, Very Rick.

Which nobody would deny.

For a moment the mare, Prima, paused at the crest of the surrounding hills. The mare turned her head to look at the Bay of Naples, then it rolled an eye and looked at Vergil: and the look in that eye reminded him at once so strongly of the Matron Gunsedilla that he had to check himself — there on the sun-warmed summit — from murmuring, “Yes, madam. It was very well done, madam.” The mare rolled the eye back, hunched a bit, plodded on. Vergil smiled. They had told him that the mare had her little humors.

The Matron Gunsedilla, who was she? she was a knight’s widow. She was also a witch. There were those who, having devoted more time to old wives’ tales than to wives, old or young, believed that every witch had a white chin-beard and dwelt in a clearing in the woods, crouching by midnight over a caldron on a fire. Gunsedilla was still on the brighter side of thirty, her middle age a bit more than a lustrum off, and she had no children; neither had she a beard, though to be sure there was a very slight dark down upon her upper lip, not enough to attract Spaniards, though. Her late husband had left her a mansion in the city, a villa in the suburbs, three latifundia in the country, olive orchards and an oil-press, as well as such other legacies as interests in several ships and some blocks of tenements. Her only appearance at a clearing in the woods would be to pick mushrooms on a picnic. She needed, of course, neither spin nor weave, nor wash wool and linen by the brook. In part she spent her time in pious devotions at home and at the temples, she brought soup and sop to the pauper sick, and broken victuals as well; and her readings from Homer were a feature of the town, her reader being a learned Greek with a mellifluous voice and a keen sense of grammar and rhythm. And what she did if she crouched at midnight was her own affair. As at midafternoon.

Still, time hung heavy on her hands, and, not wishing to fall into idle ways, she had some while since betaken herself to studies such as would stimulate her supple mind: first geometry, then geomancy; then, by a natural progression, sorcery — of, of course, the benevolent sort, the other sort being naturally illegal. She was of great help in recovering lost objects, she would be of no help at all in helping them in getting lost. Her command over the contents of Macer’s Concerning Those Made Impotent Through Sorcery was profound, though she would herself do nothing to cause anyone to become impotent through sorcery. As for her efforts in moon-constructs, gentle and sweet Selena must have smiled on them and her as she bent close to the lunar reflection in the burnished mazer and the dark-bottomed wooden pan; rustics who would not have known a burnished mazer had one bitten them in the buttocks would murmur at sight of the matron or even mention of her name, “Ah, the Madame Gunsedilla, she can draw down the moon from the heavens! Aye, haul it down from the starry skies!”

Now and then Vergil would not mind a short visit of an afternoon to discuss this work and that with her, and she was very far from minding, either; and now and then he would take a seat at the reading from Homer. Why only now and then in either matter? Why, that the matron was inclined to be just a bit, just the slightest bit, importunate; she did not exactly fish for compliments, rather did she slightly nudge for them; how well he knew the roll of those large eyes. . and how well he knew that, did he not at once bow a bit and smile a bit and look impressed a bit and murmur, “Yes, madame. It was very well done, madame,” rather (he had once thought) like a butler approving the catering arrangements — why, then see that fine and mobile mouth with its slightly downy upper lip draw out and draw down in discontent, see that still-supple body give a rather unpleasant hunch of annoyance. A twitch. A shrug.

Life contained enough of toil, of pain, and folly, and he felt that these echoes or simulacra of such, however faint and petty, were hardly worth. . well, experiencing. Often.

All this had passed across his mind like the faintest of shadows, and whither he now turned his eyes he saw a deeper shadow yet.

Averno lay beneath them, so near that they could identify individual houses, yet so far by reason of the wandering way through the craggy hills that it might be near sundown before they arrived. And some such thought evidently being in the mind of Iohan, he muttered, “Smell thee in the dark …” and broke off to break off a piece of his bread and scatter a crumble, and mumble, “Hither for this offering, ye genius loci.” He who has cautioned us that art is long and life is brief has also reminded us that airs, waters, and places have powers of their own.

The genius loci did not at once visibly smile, and it would have been difficult to say how such a sign of favor would be manifest in that region, but at least at no time as they wound round and round and sometimes, briefly, up, but mostly always down — at any rate, at no time did any rock fall upon them, nor any lip nor barm of a tight trail give way beneath them. For a while yet there stayed some trace in their nostrils of what the poet Andersius has called “the sweet salt air;” scarcely were they aware of this when the wind went tepid and dull, and then a warm sullen slap of stale breeze in their faces gave notice of what was to come. . and, fortunately, it came slowly and in stages. The heat and stench were Averno’s curse, yes, but they were the inevitable results of Averno’s blessing, too, for the hot places of the earth, elsewhere buried deeply, were here very near the surface. Here waters bubbled boiling up with no fuel placed beneath them, and here mounds rose anvil-high and anvil-iron-red and hot-white-hot without the need for charcoal, wood, or bellows -

Often.

To be sure there were places, manywhere, whither flame and fire came not and whither firewood or charcoal was brought, places where the bellows plied and puffed; if the city were one vast hot spring or fumarole or one immense blacksmith-fire, there would have been no place, no inch nor ell, for the foot of man or woman safely to tread. But it was the presence of the other places — there, below, in that smoky bowl below, the places where flames either broke the sullen surface of the soil or lay so close thereto that the soil itself steamed and smoked — this was the reason for the existence of Averno as a city. Endlessly, no doubt, before the appearance of man thereby, these phenomena had been displayed therein: uselessly, as it were; wastefully, as it seemed. But now in all this valley-bowl “the arts of fire and metal” might be practiced without much real need to bring much fuel for fire. The artisans of Averno were not better artisans than those elsewhere, indeed, often, they were not as good; few swords or shares or scythes or axes or other tools of iron were made there: but many and many were the such-shaped blanks of iron formed to be exported, elsewhere to be sharpened for keen use. And these were invariably cheaper than those exported from elsewhere. The dyed garments of Averno were not so brightly colored, so fastly, nor so subtly as those of Tyre; not even as well done as those of Naples. But, though coarser, they were cheaper. Coarse metal, coarse cloth, coarse leather, coarse wool, these were the products of Averno. Or, reading from the other end of the line: cheap wool, cheap leather, cheap cloth, cheap metal. Had there been birds in Averno — which, save here and there a one or two or few sickening in cages, there were not; the very hens and cocks and capons were slaughtered on arrival — but had there been birds in Averno, this might have been their song: cheap-cheap, cheap-cheap, cheap-cheap.

The slow destruction and retreat of the forests of the Empire (indeed, of the whole oeconomia), with the resultant slow rise in the prices of firewood and charcoal, might work ill with the commerce of the arts of fire and metal elsewhere, but in Averno where one, so to speak, lived ill anyway, this was a blessing, a blessing and not a curse. A blessing, that is, for the magnates of Averno. They needed no skill in sales, were obliged to transport their wares to no distant shores, nor offer discounts nor sell on credit nor break themselves on racks to deal with competitors. Where they worked, there they sold. Others came to them, or did not come at all.

The magnates of Averno did not care.

They were cheap, cheap, cheap.

And so of course they had become rich, rich, rich.

Averno took no toll on private bag and baggage coming in, and it had long ago secured (and maintained) an exemption from the Imperial Imposts usually, elsewhere, levied (and collected) at city gates. . another reason for its being Very Rich. As Vergil wore no sword, there was no discussion over that; as for knives, every man, everywhere, carried at least one knife: how else would he cut his food?

“Write the book,” directed the gateskeeper, with a bored belch. He had already sized up Vergil as one who could do his own writing and so the services of a scribe were not required and there would be no fee to split. Vergil signed for himself and servant. The titles, in their abbreviations, did not impress the custos, nor would they have if indited in full; the man did not read. “Where you go?” he asked. He did not really care, but he had his reasons for asking.

Two of them.

The deeper shadow of the Great Gate encompassed them; shadow always lay deep on part of Averno. Set so deep as it was, the sun coming late and departing early, it was more shadowy there in the Great Gate, and pho! how it stank. “The house of Haddadius the dye-master,” said Vergil. The keeper looked at him and looked past him and held up two fingers. A trace of a grimace lifted one corner of his great grim mouth; the ghost of a rictus; hardly even that, of a smile. And he clicked his mouth, twice.

“Two birdies,” he said. The tiny coins being produced, he stuffed one into the purse deep in his grimy bosom, sent another one spinning across the tunnel-mouth of the gateway. It rang against the dripping wall, fell on the wet ground where a number of figures crouched. Most of them raised their heads, but only one. . the nearest. . raised his body. He got to his feet, after he had picked up the miserable money-bit, came over in a shuffle and a shudder. The gatesman said, “Addadi.” The man gave neither beckon nor nod, started off in a lurching stumble and stagger, pausing and doubling over in a cough that seemed to churn his lungs and cripple his limbs. As Vergil, and Iohan holding the mare, started to follow, the keeper called to the shambling guide, “An when y’pass the bones-pit, drop in. — You, too,” he added, to man and manservant. Hawked and spat. Returned to his stand.

Such was charity in Averno.

And welcome, as well.

Would Haddadius the dye-master be more welcoming? Vergil considered, as they passed through the filthy streets, as different from the cleanly thoroughfares of the small port town as the glowing sunsets there were from this filthy dusk, if it might not be better to seek an inn first. But some thought that Haddadius, having in effect sent for him by such devious ways, might have something else in mind for his accommodations, kept him from doing so. And so he followed after the lurching wreck of what had once been a fine large man; and when this one paused and leaned against a wall, though Vergil thought it was from weakness, on coming along up he saw there was a gate set into the wall. And on this the guide placed his hand. He did not even knock. He patted it once. He stroked it, once. Then he merely stayed there. And looked at Vergil from running, sunken eyes. Even when the man took the coin, and a bigger one it was than a “birdy,” Vergil was not sure if he was nodding thanks, or if it was merely the trembling movements of his diseased condition. By and by, he was gone.

If Haddadius had something at all in mind for Vergil’s accommodations it was not evident, nor was anything else that might have been on Haddadius’s mind. The magnate was hardly more welcoming than the gateskeeper, but he did not engage in open insult, possibly because this might have required him to rise from his bath, where Vergil found him after having been (dilatorily, sullenly) led thither by a slave with a cast in one eye. Massive, mute, and shaggy, Haddadius listened in silence to Vergil’s polite words. Though the words were polite, yet Vergil felt they were mere forms, for he did not care to state exactly his reasons for having come to Averno; surely they must be and had been known? If so, Haddadius gave no sign of it. What Haddadius gave, eventually, was a grunt, and the sign which he next gave was to a secretary who appeared so suddenly from the shadows that one less disciplined than Vergil might have started; to himself he said that shadows seemed appropriate to a secretary, by definition, even, the one who kept the secret things. The magnate muttered, the scribe scribbled, the mutter ceased.

The secretary handed over the set of tablets on whose wax-inlaid inner surfaces he had made his notations. They were well-made tablets, of precious wood and inset in mother-of-pearl with a rather beautiful picture of Ganymede bearing the cup. Where had this been crafted? Not in Averno. How came it there? Avernians were not known to fancy beauty. He opened the small wooden sheets; inside, on the scented wax (did it serve to refresh the sense of smell, in Averno so much-abused?) were written a number of names.

“One of these may have use for you,” was what the secretary said. And that was all the secretary said. Was it for merely this that Vergil had come here? — Had so (he thought) smoothly and with polite intimation made mention of the fact that “from Sevilla to Averno was a rather far journey and that many things have been learned on such journeys”? And. . for that matter. . was it for such curt congees, dismissals, even from an audience consisting of a barbarian in a bath, that he had himself made those long journeys? From Brundusium to Athens, Athens to Brundusium, Brundusium to Naples, Naples to this place, to that place and thence to Sevilla, and so, eventually here? In Averno? No, but then, for what purpose had he made them? In order to attain mastery over many things, and the first of these had been his own self and soul and pride and patience; and over them, well. And then, too, to what purpose all those dreams? Things were seldom simple; this was no exception.

Vergil expressed his thanks, neither magnate nor man made a reply, and he was left with nothing to do but follow the same slave who had led him in. . still dilatory, still sullen, and still with the cast in one eye. The door in the gate closed swiftly behind the parting guest. For all Vergil’s pains, what were his gains? The tablets. “And I am lucky the fellow did not snatch them back,” he said ruefully. He had felt his cloak catch in the gate, so swiftly closed it shut; now he turned to tug it loose, hoping it was neither so fast-snared that he must needs either knock once more to be released or else cut it loose and spoil the cloak and perhaps also make him a figure of mockery to the mob; but it had in fact been caught so slightly that the mere movement as he turned had got it free.

The tablets, worth no small sum even had the wax been smooth and blank, the tablets had yet some message graved upon them doubtless more worth than the precious covers. Vergil had indeed begun to extract his own set (of sturdy, worn-smoothed boxwood bearing no other design than monogram or rune-sign formed by the V and M woven each through the other) and stylus to copy the notations, but the magnate’s secretary, with a gesture of hand and an expression of mouth had indicated he was to keep the ones handed him, a gesture so curt and an expression so scornful as to make the recipient of the gift wish to throw it back in the giver’s face.

And now he stood with it in hand, and with nought else in hand, outside the giver’s gate, and in the street again.

“Thankful to see you safe, sir,” said Iohan, and indeed he did look thankful; and even the mare nuzzled him briefly, as though thankful herself.

A sort of heavier twilight had settled over everything. Westward, a delayed and brighter light, dull-red glowering through dull gray haze, showed what to the rest of the world was still the undying and unconquerable sun. Sulfurous smell, mixed with the stink of rotting indigo and the thick reek of tanyards and the fetor of putrescent fat and flesh clinging to the blue-green undersides of sheep fells at the wool-pulleries, all mingled in the haze and fume; this, then, was the “sweet breeze of Averno,” a phrase muttered elsewhere when a public urinal or cloaca gave evidence of badly needing cleaning. But the thump-thud of hammers and mallets beating all about did not slow down in the slightest, nor did traffic slacken in the street; only the torch-lighter passed by, bundle of tarry sticks under one arm and lighted link in one hand. He set in a stick wherever a holder hung on a wall, set it afire, and passed on — all this in a half-trot. As he showed no sign of swerving, the two newcomers drew back. “He might have run us down, else,” said Iohan, half in anger, half in wonder.

“Yes. . they all might. . may…. We must find an inn.”

But something else happened to intervene before they found one.

Somewhat (somewhat?) belatedly, the City’s Official Orator and a very youthful assistant — like a great-nephew learning the trade (if not, by present tokens, learning it well) — appeared, to offer the only semblance of a civic welcome which, Vergil felt, he was likely to get: the Orator, in a fusty purple robe, local weave and local dye for sure, doing his best to read an official welcome and amend it ad-lib. . as it had never been intended for sage or mage. . and the lad at his side shifting from hand to hand, whenever he desired to scratch his pubescent crotch, the hand-brazier indeed full (well, partly full) of glowing charcoal on which it was intended someone should from time to time strew incense. But no one performed the role of “someone,” the lad gaped when he was not scratching, the Orator waved his free hand as he skipped not too smoothly over words intended to be laudatory of Vergil’s (nonexistent) military conquests and waved his free hand (not always the same hand, as sometimes he endeavored to pound the stripling on the pate, perhaps to discourage open and notorious crotch-scratching) to indicate he would delineate more particularly the details of “the most learned and honored visitor,” his learning and his honor, if only he had more than a hasty toehold on the matter. Suddenly Vergil to his vast, and then his less than vast, surprise, heard the words “Master in Philosophy, Master in Arts Magical, Adept of the First Three Grades at Grammarie, Passed Master on the Astrolabe; Astrologue, West of Corinth and Astrologue, East of Corinth ” — at which time he perceived, firstly, that someone had slipped, not a spoon of olibanum onto the charcoal, but a piece of papyrus into the Orator’s hand, which the Orator did not entirely successfully succeed in concealing behind the tattered and greasy official scroll of welcome; and, secondly, exactly who it was who had done so: a man with a light sparse beard and with rather prominent front teeth.

Though this time he wore no striped robe, but tunic and hose of solid hue.

— And all this while and, he, Vergil, now stopped his thoughts full stop and harked him back a ways, and yet a ways, and yet a ways beyond that, and all this while and he could not say for how long a while, save that it was and had been long. He now bethought him that he had heard at all times, now near, now far, not alone the incessant poundings of the forge-hammers and the fulling-mallets; he had heard in addition the endless cries of this as of all cities; but gradually now and at last swiftly it seemed to him that all the while he had heard also music, and not the formal strains of some solemn hymn processional nor the like of shrine or temple — gay, brash, Dionysic, now dim, now clear; he had declined to think on it.

Now, for one long moment (he could not say how long a moment), he had thought on nothing else.

His mind, stopped short, like the passage of a dog on a chain, was caught off-balance; soon enough it recovered. Where was the oddly knowing fellow who —? He was nowhere to be seen, was where? What was to be seen were the Civic Orator and assistant-boy, the small crowd that had collected, and on every face a meaning that Vergil required no divination to grasp. The small crowd, sensing it was time, set up a rusty growl of “Boons! Boons! Boons!” such as he had heard before, but now and here they were accompanied by no pretenses, no mention of Lord, “great,” or otherwise: nothing. A demand it was, no more. So Vergil slipped a piece of silver swiftly into one of the Orator’s hands (who, doubtless desiring to have both hands free, had already slipped his scroll into the presently free hand of his boy, who was now unable to scratch at all), and into the other a handful of birdies. Orator, with a few feints indicating in which direction he intended the distribution to be thrown, the crowd gathered thither — the Orator threw and, with a nod and a word of thanks, got him thence at no slow crawl. The crowd uglied each other as they sprawled and grappled for the small coins, and the few who muttered anything to Vergil muttered nothing kind. Had he given more, more they had demanded; had he given much, they had rabbled him for all.

He mounted the mare. The sight of him on horseback seemed to end the matter for the crowd, which at once ceased to be a crowd at all. “And I had to kick one away,” said Iohan, “for that he’d growed some extra little hands and was groping by the saddlebags, and a other I believe Prima woulda trod upon, but fall away so fast he did.”

Vergil nodded. He had been about to say something, some while back. No. He had said it. What was it? He knew only when he heard himself saying it again.

“We must find an inn.”

And, whilst the boy was in the stable attending to the mare, there in the taproom, someone else was found. “Ah,” said Vergil softly. “So here you are.”

“Yes, Master Vergil. The wine is better here.”

The wine is better here. Of what did this at once remind him, other than that the wine had been the common wine of poor folk’s daily diet?. . Where last (and first) they’d sipped. . for remind him of something else at once, most certainly it did. As though a pole were thrust into a murky pool and touched some. . something. . which had by the mere touch been shifted; little would one’s sense of what it might be be conveyed through the gross medium of the pole; and yet. . and yet. . The wine is better here. That is, better than there. What was there about the wine there which. . No. Here or there. The wine. Warmed in a crude hot-water bath, over a small charcoal brazier. Bath. Bath. A voice in his ear said, Wash.

Wash! the voice had said.

But there was no one at his ear.

There had been no one at his ear.

Here.

Or there.

So it had not happened. So it was yet to happen.

As Iohan would have put it: Therefore — one could only wait for it to happen.

“The wine is better here,” the man said, but said it with no hint that it was much better, here. “It would have to be. There, one may at least now and then stroll a few paces and look at the Bay. No matter how wretched one’s life, how hard one’s work, there, surely one may steal a moment now and then and see the Bay. Here one may only drink.” He drank. “And work.”

Vergil felt no need to wonder which the man did most.

An inn, almost by definition, is mostly for the convenience of travelers, which is to say. . usually. . people from elsewhere. Avernians, having doubtless their own taverns and wineshops, evidently did not much patronize this particular inn; and although the man sitting across the table spoke with distinct traces of the thick local accent, he did not in any other way resemble the mass of local people whom Vergil had seen about in the streets, or, for that matter, elsewhere. Perhaps the man had read this in his mind or perhaps Vergil’s thoughts had been as clearly written on his face as by a style upon wax. Or even perhaps all this had happened to the man before, and he was thus able to anticipate questions unasked simply because they had been asked so often before that he knew they would be asked again. And when.

“There is little old blood in Averno,” he said; “but to the extent there is, I am of it. My father thought me puny, and yet I lived.” Saying this, he shrugged. “More than one warlock or practitioner of divination in its various forms has offered to discern how long I shall continue to, but I have declined. I have been afraid. Of what?” He shrugged. “Of being perhaps told that my life will be long. To live in Averno, old? Horrible!” He shuddered, and he shook his head.

“Old people seem rather scarce here,” Vergil murmured.

“Children are scarcer. Well! But we are very rich. And rich men may buy that which is beautiful even if they themselves are ugly, and among that which is beautiful which such men sometimes buy are beautiful women. They do not particularly buy beautiful men, even those some who favor men for partners in that act which has been called love. No, slaves fetched here are fetched for brawn. Endurance. Do you know what the foreman in any workplace here is called? Not the overseer or the manager or the captain, as in other places. No, he is called the Big Slave, even if he is not particular big or even if he is not a slave. Usually, though, he is both. Sometimes he is ugly, sometimes not, this is of no importance, it is important that he have a broad back and large arms and know well the work and be indefatigable in carrying it out. Well, it fairly frequently happens that such a man is freed by his master and adopted by his master (who, recall, will usually be childless). Though now and then one knows of a master, magnate or not, who has bothered both to take a wife and maintain her elsewhere. So he will have had his children there, if he has children, and sometimes they come back when they are grown, and — ”

There was an interruption. Men drinking and talking at another table raised their voices. “Cadmus is king!” said one.

“King of fools …”

“King. He is king.”

“King of mud.”

“King of mud or king of gold: king.”

“King of shit — ”

I have heard those words before; where? —

Before Vergil could recollect where, the first man, half-rising, struck the other down. And down he stayed. In a moment the talk and babble resumed, no one paying the matter any further attention. If the fallen one was living or dead, dead drunk, or only stunned, Vergil did not observe, as he had fallen into the shadows cast by the small and flickering lamps.

“ — and take up the trade, whichever trade it be. And sometimes they put it into the hands of the Big Slave. And sometimes, of course, they find it simpler to sell the works. And who buys it, generally? Another Big Slave, past or present. White or Black. So most of the magnates who govern this colony of hell have themselves been slaves. And of those who have spent a generation, at least, toiling at the stinking forge or the stinking dye-pots or the stinking tan-vats, one need not, must not, expect a great measure of delicacy. You will take this into account when you make your calls.”

Vergil said, “I have already made one call. One whom you mentioned — the only one whom you mentioned, the dyer Haddadius — says he has no need for such things wherein lie my skills.”

Two tables over someone, by his looks an Avernian, grunted and spread his legs and lifted his tunic and made water on the floor. No one gave it any notice. No one attempted to remedy the matter by emptying bucket or jug.

“So said Haddadius? So. No doubt he had his reasons, he — ”

Things were being pounded on the surface of another table: fists, mugs, dice-boxes, providing some arrhythmic accompaniment to the constant thuddings from the fire-fields. Vergil waited till the noise had somewhat abated. “And you, sir, no doubt have yours.” He perceived a degree of glaze upon the other’s eyes, was it drink alone? He had seen a one rather alike it on the eyes of bridegrooms; others, still akin, on the eyes of those who have been to uncheerful physicians. He spoke on. “What may your reasons have been, to send. . or bring. . me here by the methods which you have used. . you alone? others? you and others?. . methods, which, by the way, imply a measure of the same skills…. Eh? Why?”

A woman then passed by, stopped, stroked Vergil’s head once, twice, said, “How pale your face. How black your hair and beard.” He had begun, slowly, to look up, to extend his hand — too slowly. Some rough voice from another table hailed her, Vergil felt no more than his hand touch the edge of her sleeve as she moved away. He looked back to his host, who shrugged without ceasing to drink, then said, “Why? Well, in part to pique your interest. Was it piqued? Oh, so. And in part. . well, had it been simply suggested that you come here because a contract might be obtainable, would you, considering the place and its repute? Probably not, I think. So — ”

Of a sudden the heavy doors were flung open and a man, a young man, who seemed far too slight to have done this, came in. He came in dancing, dancing he came in, and singing and clapping his hands, and he had small bells upon his hands and he had a crown upon his head. All rose and bowed. Despite the shock of the novel scene Vergil was able to concentrate attention upon the singing — it could not really have been called a song — but though now and then he made out words, and even, less often, sentences, the words together, even such of them as were not gibberish, made no sense. There was no coherency to them. There -

Vergil put his mouth close to the ear of the other man at his table. “Who?”

“That is Cadmus.”

“Who is he?”

“He is king.”

“King of Averno. King of here.”

The King of Averno, whoever he might really be, he so called, suddenly took hold of one of the posts that supported the roof of the taphouse and began to swing about it as he sang; he slipped, staggered, ceased not to sing, but the crown had been jarred from his head and fell, and Vergil caught it. In a moment it was taken from his hands, and, still singing and dancing, jinging and ringing, Cadmus went away. Leaving some thoughts ringing, at least, in Vergil’s mind. King. Well. They were indeed in the Very Great Empire of Rome, and an emperor is by definition a king over kings; indeed, the Greeks had yet not formed a word for “emperor” and called the supreme ruler, still, basil, king, prefaced and followed of course by very many appellations. There were, it went for granted, kings with the Empery; some by treaty of annexation (a politer name for surrender), some by Imperial creation; seven kings elected the Emperor himself. And there were, going to the other extreme and passing by such as titular kings who, whilst living within the Empire, bore the titles of kingdoms outside of it, and passing over such as (not often) bore the curious and singular title of King Without Country, the traveling tribes of tinkers who had their kings. In more than one place was here one and there one who was called King of the Woods and taught by night beneath the great oaks such things as were never taught by light beneath the colonnade of the stoa. And there was of course in almost every city and town and at least once a year one who was acclaimed and called the King of Fools at the Feast of Fools (or, alternately, at the Feast of Unreason, the King of Unreason; in one or two, the Mad Feast and the Mad King), when much license was allowed — slaves free from fixed task, students wearing proctors’ gowns, prentice-boys a-playing the master. . so on. If such feast, however named, was in season here, it might well be named the Mad Feast, for certainly if Cadmus was not mad; it was a most effective pretense, that.

The mood in the tavern, which had been lighter by far than before the Fool King’s coming, lapsed now again into the previous one of either raucous noise or sullen stupor. Gazing now into his own drink, Vergil said, “Those were not real jewels.”

“What, not? Assuredly they were real jewels. It is a real crown. He is a real king. He visited the Sicilian Sibyl and she told his fate. He was proclaimed and he was crowned.” So said the young Avernian. Vergil began to feel a slight bit in liquor. He gazed into his cup, and there he saw the face of Cadmus. The face of Cadmus was dark, but his eyes were light. . so light, in fact, that almost one might have thought him blind, which he was not. But Vergil had for one full moment, as Cadmus took swiftly back his crown, gazed into those eyes: and although the eyes were light, the eyes had no light in them. “But,” said Vergil, “surely he is mad.”

“Assuredly he is mad,” said the other. “A man may be mad and may be king.” He drank again.

And drank again.

Later. Lurching slightly, into each other, as they walked the stinking streets preceded by a surly link-bearer — for not every sullen alley was graced by street-torches in fixtures — provided by the tavern for a fee, which, however small, was yet not so small as the fee he himself would get; and who much preferred, and let this be well known, to have sat in his kennel tossing down the heel-taps which the tapster collected for him on the dog-lick-dog principle. “This is not the night of the night market,” said Vergil’s companion. “And, truly, it is not a very interesting night market, anyway. No wonderful things are sold there, though often one wonders, next day, how one could have bought them…. Stop!” He stopped Vergil easily enough, but the troll with the torch affected not to hear, and stumped on. “Stop, you turd!” — this, high-pitched in a sudden drunken rage — ”Shall I have you flogged, you sow-sucking son of a serf?”

The question, rhetorical or not, brought the link-man not merely to a halt, but, in a moment, brought him, slowly, back. He hadn’t heard master clearly. Them forges had fair foxed his ears this lustrum past. He hoped master wouldn’t — “Stop right there,” said master. “Don’t move, even if the fire burns your filthy fingers. Till I say so.” Then he turned to Vergil. Gestured. “Behind those doors there is the shop of our famous blind jeweler. Have you heard of our famous blind jeweler? Have not heard. I’ll tell. He comes from Agysimba or Golconda or some such damnably distant place with a-g in its name. And he can tell by smell what jewels are what. Which. Tomorrow, if you like, we will call upon him. Make him show. — But some say he tells by touch, really, and his talk of scent is but a play. Morrow?”

A thought struck Vergil like a soft, swift blow. “But let us pause a moment now and see this marvel. . if we may.”

The Avernian teetered back and forth as though either he had not heard, or was considering the matter. Suddenly started, said at once, “ ‘May.’ To be sure. If you wish it, it is not may but must.” So saying, he began to beat upon the door; at once to see the (momentarily) servile-stooping thrall commence to kick it and to hullow.

Vergil, in wine, and deeper in than he fully realized, burst forth of a sudden, “Am I to continue thus civil and elliptical and all but uninformed? You who first moved to move me here? Can you say nothing? Am I forever to go on creeping from door to door, like a beggar seeking boon and dole?”

At the exact moment his outburst ceased, one half of the upper half of the door (they were not notably trusting in Averno) was opened; there stood a man with a lamp in his hand and in the other he held a polished plate to magnify and reflect the light. “Come now, Messer Armin,” said this one, “is all this clamor and commotion needed? Will not morning — ”

Armin (at last! the man’s name! Vergil had had a sort of shyness in asking to begin with, and then the longer the time had passed without his being told it. . ah well: “Armin.” So.), if he did not at once become sober, at once became the image of sobriety. “We are honored by a learned visitor,” he began. Hardly had he begun when the man at the door, giving the learned and distinguished visitor one keen look, made a certain sign; Vergil returned it; the door at once was unbolted even whilst Armin went on saying, “… who wishes to see your famous uncle at his mysterious work …” Armin suddenly stopped, said quite soberly, “If he is at work now, that is. I wouldn’t wish to disturb — ”

Nephew, dark and wrapped in white, replied, “He is at work. Day or dark or dim, it is all the same to him. Come.” The door bolted behind them. A several few more doors were unlocked and locked before they came at last to a chamber, unlighted till they entered it, wherein an old, very old man, also wrapped in white, with sunken sightless eyes, sat upon a stool, fingers moving from one to another of a series of boxes…. The light and reflector coming a bit nearer, the contents of the boxes began to sparkle and to glow. Some rainbow had emptied itself.

Without much moving his head, the old man said, “These are none of them of quite first-chop quality.” An odd and singsong style of speech had he. Continually he moved his fingers to his nose. And while the nephew was saying “They were not paid for at first-chop prices, Uncle,” Vergil moved forward and placed his hands, open-palmed, before the blind man’s face. Who, ceasing the movements of his fingers a moment, murmured, “Beryls, emeralds, a star ruby large. . and. . three diamonds, small ones, I should say, though good, quite good….”

Armin, all eyes at the work of sorting the jewel-stones, and at the show of the sparkles themselves, seemed to have heard nor seen nothing of this brief scene. Visitor learned and distinguished, and nephew, exchanged glances. Nephew gestured a diadem round about his head. Visitor gestured yes. Nephew gestured silence. Visitor gestured assent.

After a moment more, visitor said, “I am quite convinced.”

Armin blinked, tugged his glance away and over. “You see. Wonderful. Well. Thank you, merchants, we would stay longer, save it is quite late.”

“How regrettable; still, I must yield,” the nephew murmured. In a few moments the doors and their lockings and unlockings lay behind them; and before, the street.

Often Vergil was to ponder, does a true king of fools wear a crown of true jewels? He could find not one reason to say yes; when he said no, upon the heels of that answer came yet another question, equally brief: why?

It was long and long till answer came to him.

Vergil paced up and down his private room, charts here and lists there. He had no need of globes, and had he, there were (back in his place in the port) only small ones. Automatically, as this thought recurred, came the dream. Someday I shall have one as large, quite as large, as that of Crates of Miletus. . if not larger!. . But this, as other dreams, went fading away. It was preposterous — was it not? Was it not absurd? — it was! It had been so simple, though he had not then considered it so simple: Aurelio had come to him and said, “Master Vergil, if so be your rules and practice don’t forbid you should work for a freedman, I should like to ask you, Master Vergil: Will you build me a house?”

Here he seemed under the control of a severalty of freedmen. Nothing was simple, no one condescended to him, few were even barely civil, he scarcely knew what it was that was wanted, or what the chances were of accomplishing even what he thought might be wanted. . or, at any rate, what might be done. Could be done. Might be. Might. If …

He might build for them an aqueduct, an eighth wonder of the world, through which might run hot water instead of cold. Might. Did, really, the magnates want him to study such things as the flow, the times, the force, of the up-gush of the steamy jets and gusts? Or did they want, and only want, some way to bribe. . or did they, even, think: trick?. . “The good gods of hell”. . Were they as scholars who truly wanted to learn how a thing be done, that they might do it (might)? or were they as those who desired only that others do a thing, that they themselves receive a benefit? Regardless of how. . could. . would. . might. Might.

That night the king could not sleep. These words Vergil clearly recalled having read somewhere, in a text whose Greek was a bit different from the usual; he recalled, too, having had reason to believe it to have been a translation, but no more did he remember.

That night the madman whom populace and magnates alike together had declared to be their king danced and chanted as he danced in the mud and muck of the mule market, and danced with golden armils; and danced as never had Vergil seen man dance before. And the harlots of the place and the (supposedly) chastest matrons did not hold back from dancing with him when he mimed and beckoned them to do so.

“This is life, Master Vergil!” A voice, Armin’s voice, spoke, so near his neck he could feel the warmth of the breath. White slaves and black held links and torches to enlighten the scene, magnates black and magnates white shook the sistrum, and the shrill chittering of the instrument, elsewhere sounded only for some sacred ceremony, and the shriller piping of the rude reed flutes seemed to send shocks through Vergil’s limbs and joints, urging him on to join the insane dance. But he felt he somehow must not, he thought of Ulysses bound to the mast whilst the sirens sang (and what song had the sirens sung? was it beyond conjecture? was it not, must it not have been, much like this? who knew but what the sirens might have danced as well. . as well as sung …): no, no: he must not dance.

Shut his eyes, he might, shut his ears he could not do; he did what he might and therefore shut his eyes, conjectured vision of things other. Clouds floated past mountains, and the dark trees raked them as the spikes of teasels combing fleeces of white wool, and -

“Life! Life!” the voice in his ear. “The Emperor may tax, and build ships and roads and wage war and make peace and mint coins and be carried in a litter from one palace or one temple to another; can he dance like this? Eh?”

“No.”

The answer gave, evidently, great satisfaction. “Then we need him not! For what? Not! Away with him, and off with his — ” The last word was not heard, perhaps was not uttered; Armin with a great shout tore off his outer robe (it was crimson, and woven with a pattern of stars and flowers in gold and white and in an off-white), which fell at once into the thick mire and stench of the market ground, and Armin leapt forward, and snapping his fingers and prancing high, he advanced before the king and took a hand of the woman dancing with the king and took the hand of the king and they danced, and they all danced and the tambours beat. The sistrum chittered and the reed flute shrilled and the tambours beat. And the tambours beat.

But Vergil very slowly withdrew. He had tried to think of other things, and, in much measure, he had. Consider the powers of the winds. What were winds but airs in motions, might not the very airs be harnessed? What was sailing, else? Molded? Might one not make a mill empowered by air? Might one not make a bridge of air? A wall? He cast his thoughts abroad into the fetid nightlike sounds; echo answered: might. Vergil very slowly withdrew and clum a flight of stairs and went along an upper colonnade away. This (these, for they proceeded quite a ways) system of walkways was not deserted, late though was the hour, but all who were there were leaning over the balustrade and looking, singing, shouting, clapping with their hands a distinctive rhythm; no one noticed one who walked slowly along and away.

In his room. “This is madness. To assume a royal title without Imperial permission, this is treason. Cadmus is mad, this is no thing new; but now half the city seems mad as well.”

“Yes.”

Vergil turned; he saw Armin stepping through the low window that he had just now opened for a last breath of (what locally passed for) air — he saw the same man who had not a half a sandglass ago gone leaping out to dance insanely. Armin looked nothing as he said one syllable, that yes, then he grinned, and it was neither a madman’s grin nor was it nothing. Vergil could not really bring himself to grin, nor even smile, but somewhat he relaxed. And, almost, he smiled.

“Well, my guest, how may I serve?”

His guest muttered, “I should have sate upon the sill, and not. . How serve? With water to wash my filthy feet. You need not — I hasten — think I mean you to wash them yourself, neither ought you, really, to call a servant, for they are surely by now all a-dancing in the mule market; may I take your consent for me to pour myself water? — this time I shall sit upon the sill!” He stooped, ladled, poured. His face puckered. “Hercules! Me Here, how it stinks! No mud and no stench like the mud of our mule market. . and then. . I do presume, but. . and then I should be grateful for something to toss over my tunicle, for my garment I did not truly care to retrieve.”

Vergil tossed him a robe of local cut (a gift, one among many), and Armin caught it and threw it on. “Why did you dance there, then?” asked Vergil.

The two men gazed calmly at each other. They were of an age, about, and of a weight, about; save that Vergil was thick in the chest and slender in the legs and narrow in the loins. The other’s form was more of a symmetry, more equal in proportions. Outside in the colonnade a cresset flared, then dwindled. No one was there to replace it, but a few lamps burned in the room, and the room was not much dimmer now than in the daylight once the shutters were closed, for no thin-pared panels of horn, none of lucent shell nor of oiled cloth pierced their solid panels. Vergil: “Why?”

Armin scarce shrugged one shoulder, scarce twisted one side of his mouth. “Because it amused me. Ah, me Here! How it amused me! That is why I, too, hallooed loud Long Live King Cadmus! when they set the crown upon his curls. Nor did he disappoint me, that one. He has put bright tappeties — ‘tapestries,’ you call them — hanging on our black walls, and flung bright garlands round the necks of our black horses. And — you saw, you heard! — there in the open place where the black mules spilled their black piss and passed their black dung, he danced! Me Here, me Hercules! how he danced! What will you tell them when you go to Rome?”

The swift transition did not catch Vergil unprepared. He stroked his short beard, and, as it, too, was black, he wondered (passing-swift and wry the thought!) how it would look offset with flowers. “I? I do not go to Rome,” he said.

Armin looked at him, head a-cant, eye a-slant. “Ah? No? But, you know, you know. . Rome may come to you,” said he.

But though long later men were to speak both of what they called, fearfully and darkly, The Death of Rome (some said, one man; some said, three men; none could agree on the names of any), and to speak, brightly and cheerfully (some men, at any rate) of what they called The Salvation of Rome, describing this as a series of mirrors in or through which the Emperor might see, and in good time, the advance of any army of rebels or of alien invaders — that morning, that is, the morning next, Vergil for one saw in no mirror any sign or signs of Rome advancing toward him.

So he looked into his tablets to see what names the secretary of Haddadius had at his master’s whisper engraved therein.

The first name on the list was that of M. Cnaeus Grobi, and at that magnate’s gate the door was not even opened for Vergil at all, merely a slat slid back to disclose a peephole behind it (Grobi, it seemed, was even less trusting than the nephew of the blind jeweler!), and through this an eye looked at him. Vergil stated his purpose, the eye did not blink and the door did not move; he showed his tablets with their inscribed list, the eye moved a bit, and then the eye went away. Dignity be damned! Thus thinking, Vergil applied his own eye to the peephole’s other side: naught he saw but some screen or buffer standing or hanging back a way. . not much farther back, he thought, than to allow a man to stand between it and the gate. No more he saw; did he hear more?. . more than the usual clamor from the nasty street at the lane’s end? He heard something like a growl from deep within what might be the chest of a rather large dog. Sign, Cave canem, there was none; who came upon the canine came without having been forewarned, such warning being evidently here at least regarded as an indulgence not the least necessary. But, by and by, Vergil, having withdrawn his eye (he had applied it very briefly), by and by there came the sound of slow and heavy steps, and the sound of slow and heavy breathing. … I should like, at least for a moment, to listen closely to those lungs (thought Vergil) and to inform their owner what said Hippocrates and what said Galen and what said such a one and such a one: and to advise him … and then an eye again looked out at him through the chink in the door.

It was not the same eye.

The heavy breathing continued a moment, the slat slid shut, the heavy footsteps departed. Vergil waited and he paced, and he paced and he waited; but there was no further response from behind the heavy dark door (it seemed, though, that perhaps the dog behind its wall paced him on his side step for step), and presently he went away. Those lungs shall not long continue to labor breathing this thick, foul air, he thought. But he thought this without malice, and without particular pleasure. And he thought, too, that if this was the way one was treated in The Very Rich City, he might another time prefer to hazard his chances in silted-up Parva Porta, so proverbial for poverty; where, it was said, pigeon soup was made by boiling pigeon feathers, and the very dogs were so weak that they had to lean against the trees to bark.

Trees! He saw none here at all.

The doors, however, of the house of Lars Melanchthus opened wide enough, and wide they must needs open if Lars Melanchthus himself had to pass through, for Lars Melanchthus was a wide man indeed. “Ho, you are a wizard!” said he. “You are a wizard. You are a wizard?”

“Yes, Magnate.” Clearly this was no time to ask if they should first define their terms. Nor, for that matter, had Socrates had to define the bowl of hemlock.

“Ho,” said Lars Melanchthus. He gazed at Vergil with large and reddened eyes. The eyes seemed respectful. But they also seemed to hold a look of what might be called shrewdness. Particularly by Lars Melanchthus. Who now looked round about his table, then picked up one of those jointed figures of a skeleton, made of ebony and ivory, which were usually passed around the banquet-board after the finger bowl as a memento of man’s mortality. First he picked it up, then he set it down, well away from the reach of Vergil’s hands. “So, Wizard. Make it dance. Make it dance, Wizard, so.”

Was it for this —?

Vergil made it dance. He made it caper, tread on its toes, he made it fling its arms up, and he made it dance the classic dance of Attic grace. Magnate Melanchthus was delighted, clapped his huge hands, summoned sundry members of his household, gestured them to look at the jiggling anatomy, and joined in their amusement. And when, after a while, the dance of death slowed and the skeleton sank down and lay at full length in repose, the magnate announced his own conclusion. “Yes,” he said. “You are a wizard. Oh yes! Yes.”

The wizard bowed. In what audience of what school of enchantment the magnate had discovered this singular, though simple, test of wizardhood, Vergil would have liked to ask, but he forbore. Melanchthus snapped his fingers, gestured. The magnate’s butler approached and handed Vergil a new robe and a single coin. A silver ducat. “Those are for you,” said Lars Melanchthus. “For you, for you. So. Thank you.”

“On the contrary, Magnate, it is really for me to thank you.”

“Yes,” said the magnate. He nodded his acknowledgment, looked all around, gathered the nods of others. Then he said, “All right to go now, Wizard.”

And the wizard went.

Was it for this —?

Someone had told him this: that, traditionally, and where circumstance permitted, in the sundry workplaces among the fire-fields of Averno, the day’s work began with the Big Slave, be he owner or the chief workman, tossing a red coal at, seemingly, nowhere in particular; there followed a sound like a gasp (so it was described in the account), followed by a jet of fire. The Big Slave had known whereat he tossed, and his red coal had found some fumarole whose foul breath was no merely foul breath, but inflammable air, called gas.

It was not that Vergil would not have wished to see this happening (vaguely he recalled having heard that somewhere this was involved with a lump of incense: surely not here!), and see it happen he might yet: but not here, now, yet; the day’s work had long ago begun, and, by the sound, was in no way slackening. At the home (which he had next sought) of a listed magnate, they had without either civility or incivility sent him with some young house-thrall as guide through a long lane into the open area where, for the first time clear, he beheld the fire-fields being worked. He stood for a while merely looking, thinking, appraising, calculating. When he looked for his guide to ask a question, the guide was gone.

Vergil shrugged. He would ask another one, then: this one coming up with an armful of iron rods.

“Magnate Boso?” The man bobbed his polled, scarred head at an angle, said, “Two-bib”; passed along. The syllables, immediately, made no sense. Only sight made sense of them. There, following the angle of the canted head, at one of many forges: two men, one holding with tongs the white-hot bar, one the hammer. This last was naked save for his thick sandals and his leather apron; the other wore a leather apron behind, as well. The odor of body sweat and singed body hair was very strong. He who held the softened iron continually turned it, and continually said he, “Strike!. . Strike!. . Strike! …” With each command, down came the hammer: at each blow, the softened iron splayed wider; was, at the next blow -

But he who held the iron in the tongs did not call for, by and by, a next blow; instead he did not even turn the bar: merely, he looked at it. Yet the striker, catching sight of Vergil, did not catch lack of command. Down his hammer came, too late he tried to stop himself; in the process was caught off balance, fell against the fire-hot forge, swerved back, screamed, managed to bring the hammer down to the ground and to lean upon it. There would be another scar, by and by. His breath sobbed. Yet it was not at his seared flesh that he looked. He looked at the smith.

Who said, “Bugger. Punk. Son of a sow. The Big says, Strike, you strike. The Big don’t say Strike, you don’t strike. Sometime the iron got to rest, even just a little, from the taste of the fire. And sometime the fire got to rest, too, even just a little, from the taste of the iron. Sometime even the smith, Big or other, got to rest, even just a little. And sometime the striker, too. Pig’s pizzle. Whistle-brain. You want taste more fire? You want take rest with the iron up your — What you look?”

For the striker, despite dismay, despite pain, despite even fear, had let his eyes wander to the source of his miscalculation. And the eyes of the smith, first, next his head, last his entire upper body, turned, and so for the first time he saw Vergil standing there. How level was his gaze, the smith’s. How cold (in all these heats) his look. How deep, yet deeply contained, the scorn. As if to ask, “How dared you come here? Who are you? I care not.” Vergil said no word. A sudden start, a movement swift, well-trained body (well trained for this) sensing a change in temperature which no else could sense, the smith swerved back to the forge, spat upon the bar up by the forge, drew from the very steam and vapor to which the spittle had in an instance turned, the knowledge which now made him cry, “Meherc! Miscarried monstrel! Too cold, now! Too cold!”

Before the smith had finished words, Vergil had, so swift, opened his pouch and taken from it a short length of wood of the thickness (and somewhat the shape, for fully symmetrical it was not) of his index finger, and of perhaps twice that length (and still from every forge the heats and smokes arose, the air was thick and murk); he twisted it, let some small part drop back, and saying calmly, clearly, “Ash. . Ash. . Aysh. . Aysh …” he leaned forward, his other hand closing his garments tighter to his body, and blew once, twice, thrice, toward the bar in the tongs. This had been ashen, next dull red, next it whitened, next it rippled with many colors, next -

The smith’s hands tightened on the tongs, he gave them the slightest of turns. “Strike!”

And the striker seized his hammer and with all full-measured strength he struck.

“Done,” said the smith. And drew the bar back once more.

Then he turned, sweeping his arm across his brow, to Vergil, who, with a movement too calculated to be called haste, had replaced the hollow rod. The smith asked, “Fellow, where you learned fire?”

“In Sidon, me ser.” Only after having said it did he bethink him he had answered in the tongue of Sidon. And from this place to that place …

“You be the mage we —?”

“Yes, Magnate.”

Boso cupped his huge hands around his huge mouth, shouted something. Waited. One would not have said that any voice could have carried over the noise and clamor of those forges; and this one needed not, for its burden was taken up and passed along. Very soon indeed a figure appeared through the murk and haze. “Go thither, Wise One,” said Boso, still in Sidonian. “To him, to him, to that one; he will prepare for you, and I shall come. . I shall come …” He gazed around and all about his works, his words fallen, stopped. Almost Vergil felt that the man would have wished to have been at every single forge at once. The face returned to look at him. Quite gone that freezing, contained scorn of short moments before. “I shall come presently.” He strode away to another forge, where even then the smith had taken one short step backward and seemed, though slightly, to totter. The magnate seized from him the tongs and turned the iron. . not much did he turn the iron, almost plastic in the smolder, but then he would know, as any master smith must know, just how much to turn it; and “Strike!” he cried.

As Vergil followed the one figure designated to “prepare” for him, ever behind him he heard that voice, heard indeed other voices from and at all other forges: “Strike!. . Strike!. . Strike! …”

And, after all, presently he did come, both “bibs” flapping. To Vergil he gestured an obeisance, omitted at their first meeting, one which the guest had seen before, though not locally: Brosa stooped, but did not stoop low, he dropped his hand, but did not drop it far; he brought it up toward the top of his head, but he did not bring it up to the top of his head — and all this very fast. He had, in effect, bowed to the ground and gathered up its dust and strewn it upon his poll. In fact, of course, he had done nothing of the sort. And whilst doing (and not doing) all this, he growled something that was clearly intended to be a respectful greeting, though certainly not intended to be a prolix one.

And the while he stole a glance at Vergil’s pouch.

But of what he thought might be in it, and of what he knew was certainly in it, of this he said no word.

Then he addressed himself to the meats upon the table. By and by, his mouth only partly filled, he said, “This a very rich city.”

“Indeed, Magnate.”

“It been richer.”

“Indeed, Master?”

“Could be richer, could richer be, than ever was. But how?”

“Indeed. Magnate.”

Magnate Boso poured into his goblet a draft of something thick and dark, poured on top of that something thin and light, swirled the goblet, once, twice, raised, and in an instant drained it, set it down. “Rich. Richer. Very rich. Riches.” Barely he paused, he looked at Vergil from beneath his hedge-thick eyebrows. “Interested?”

The possibility of gaining, and gaining swift and soon, the means of supplying all he ever had desired to supply for that place, as yet set no place, which his dreams termed home, lit up Vergil’s mind. And in the light, like the brief and fitful shimmer of a sheet of heat-lighting, something else he saw there illuminated as well.

At the Secret Sacred School, filing past Putto, the obscenely fat, who stood with a large and sagging sack in each swollen paw. Every student, by instruction (and one did not dally in obeying instruction; this was already the eighteenth lesson. . or. . it might prove to be; one did not always know. . till after) and without looking, peering, peeping, groping, fumbling, was to place one hand into each sack and withdraw one, only one. . whatever. The student ahead of Vergil was an Illyrian named Lustus, one with a clever way of seeming not the least clever, of lurching into one of his fellows, if not always (though often) to his own profit, then to the other’s loss, and similar tricks of which one could hardly or not decently complain. Lustus had taken hold of. . whatever. . with each hand; perhaps Lustus did not like the feel of what he had hold of by his left hand, clearly Vergil saw the wrist-tendons move, knew that Lustus was — Lustus, slightly, feigned a stagger, murmured apology — was letting go of. . whatever. . and taking hold of another. Lustus gave a short, sick, and sickening grunt. Lustus drew up his hand as though it was afire. Vergil could not clearly (thank the gods!) make out what it was that clung to the left hand of Lustus, it was too large for an insect and had too many limbs for an animal or reptile, and it writhed, writhed, and Lustus screamed, screamed -

— two of the proctors swiftly seized him, one from each side -

— if Lustus was still screaming or if what rang in Vergil’s ears was an echo, Vergil did not know; he knew that Lustus was no longer in front of him -

“In with them. Draw.” Said Putto, the obscenely fat.

Vergil without hesitation obeyed. The things did not feel, really, pleasant, but nothing seemed about to bite or burn or writhe; sweating, not looking, Vergil passed along. By and by they stood, the students, in front of the elaboratory tables. “Set ‘em down. Down.” Another voice, but no strange one; whence? Not moving his head and only slightly rolling up his eyes, Vergil got a glimpse of Calimicho, the gaunt, the gray, the grim, looking down from a gallery; it was not that Vergil would have sworn there had been no gallery there a moment before, he would have sworn — although he saw it — that no gallery was there now.

But that was not the lesson.

“Look at ‘em.” All looked. Before each was a fungus from the two bags. Two. Slightly cool, one; slightly warm, one; slightly moist. . or dry. . here or there upon it. . them…. Having not been forbidden to do so, swiftly Vergil raked his eyes from left to right; mostly all the students were doing the same. No two fungi, he was sure, were quite alike. What — “Looked at ‘em? You’ve studied Theophrastus, you’ve studied Dioscorides, Hippocrates, Galen, you’ve talked with the simples-women and you’ve walked with the witches of the woods. You may — when I give you leave — look some more, you may poke and pare and peer and smell and taste. Don’t touch!. . yet …” He held between thumb and forefinger the smallest of sandglasses, such as the frugal housewife uses to time the boiling of a pigeon’s egg. “When you’ve made up your mind. If it’s medicine, throw it before you, off the table. If it’s poison, throw it well behind you. If it is neither, but just fit for the pot, leave it where it is. Prepare.” He turned the tiny glass, set it down on the railing (who failed to hear that tiny click?). “Now.”

Seldom had Vergil passed oh-so-short a moment, yet ah such a busied one before there came that second slight click: “Stop.” The last word was not emphasized, but no hand moved more.

“That one which now remains in front of you. Pick it up. Eat.”

Later he heard that same Northishman, he whose father was an earl, ask, “Ser Proctor, was it needful that those who erred did die?”

Said the proctor, “Their clients will not die.”

Even as the vision of what this intimated share of richnesses might secure for him was fading quite away, Vergil heard himself reply, “I have no doubt, Magnate, that the Very Rich City will deal with me generously. In wares and merchandise, I myself do not deal.”

Boso’s brows, like unpruned shrubbery, came together, paused, parted. “Wise one, we shall meet again. Aysh. Aysh.” Fire. Fire.

G. Rufus Rano was, clearly, nervous. He had a singular lack of any personal charm, but his clear and evident nervousness was almost sufficient to make that overlooked. He began to say things, stopped with the things unsaid. He looked at Vergil, from Vergil he looked away, and from looking away, again he turned and looked at Vergil. The most complete thing he said was what might have been a suggestion that the two of them should meet in Rano’s warehouse; on the other hand, it might have been an apology that they could not meet there, or a ban on their meeting there at all. Now and then, as his eyes fled here and there, and his wide mouth stumbled on this word and that, he looked sometimes at his wife, as though perhaps for help; perhaps, for something not the least to do with help; she, in any event, sat silently spinning her wool. The silence became at last infectious, and feeling that perhaps it might become permanent, the visitor suggested that he would, if welcome, return another time.

Disappointment, irresolution, relief mingled. Relief won. Rano arose, Vergil arose, the matron remained as she was. “Again. Again. Master. Yes.”

It had not been precisely a fruitful meeting, but it had been a long one, and by the time that Vergil arrived at the house of the last-named on the list in the Ganymede tablets, Magnate Brosa Brosa (and a mental note not to confuse same with Magnate Boso), he found Magnate Brosa Brosa at dinner. Or perhaps it was not precisely dinner, but there were precisely about it anyway some of the niceties of the rest of the world. Vergil was at once gestured to a place, and at once there was placed before him an excellent soup of cock and veal with leeks and small dried plums, followed by lampreys cooked in blood and wine, followed by songbirds in grape leaves, followed by Magnate Brosa Brosa giving several absolutely enormous eructations. And there was another simulated skeleton, which Vergil was, however, not asked to make dance, which followed finger bowls scented far more strongly than was elsewhere considered in good taste.

But few places elsewhere had to contend with the airs, the sweet breezes of Averno.

Once again the butler was signaled, and once again Vergil was handed a coin. . followed by a new robe. . G. Rufus Rano’s butler (if that was indeed the troll’s title) had issued him two new robes, but no coin…. This coin was of gold.

“Come see us early tomorrow morning,” said Brosa Brosa, “and we will show you some sights. And we will talk some more.” Considering that this was all the talking they had done, it would clearly not take much more talk to talk some more.

Vergil returned to his inn, ordered (and paid for) other and larger rooms on the upper floor of the annex off the colonnade, saw to it that Iohan had been taken care of. Asked, by and by, “What is all that sound all this late and where is it all coming from?”

Answer: It was coming from the forum.

And that was the third time that Vergil was to see the mad king dance.

In the morning they did indeed show him some sights, videlicet the torture chambers. And after that they did talk some more.

As they passed through part of the city Vergil observed in daylight, with the eyes, that which had in the obscurity of the nights commanded the attention of the nose alone — namely the shallow canal that went from the Portus Julius, adjacent to the coast, to the equally shallow canal basin of Averno. Black walls, black mules, black dogs, black hearts — had he heard this? read this? conjured it, as a summing up, himself? To which, whichever, he now added, black canal.

It stank, and it stank not alone from the sea-sludge that traveled sluggishly along it in the slight eddies caused by the passage of the mule-drawn boats (black boats!), nor from, as well, the sulfurous emanations inseparable from Averno and all its fumes; it stank in addition with a distinctive and horrible feculence caused by its being the repository of all the night-buckets of the city and all the watery runoff of the rotting matter of its leather- and dye-works. The Midland Sea had scarcely any tides of its own, and this canal had none at all to scour it clean. Vergil, considering, wondered if the canal were to be dredged — not merely cleaner, but deeper — as the Emperor Julius had caused to be dredged the port that bore his name — just a bit deeper, even, and at just a slight slope. . provided with a sluice at one point and a sluiceway at another and a lock at the end…. But probably the Avernians would see no reason to bother. In Manjay, near far Cathay, the lands of the so-called Thinae or Sinim, whence came silk-substance combed from floss deposited on trees by (so, incredibly, it was reported) worms, it was also the practice to dump the outscouring of canals onto compost heaps; thence to gardens. But in Averno there were no gardens. In Averno grew nothing green. . save slime.

Stinking and sluggish the canal was, and narrow and shallow and slime, provided with more than one portcullis to check any possible use in either invasion or escape (and, for that matter, interloping), and used only for the transportation of cargo too heavy or too bulky or too otherwise unsuitable (crushed sea-nail for the dye-vats: example) for the winding and narrow overland route through the crags that surrounded the city — city without as well as within its walls. The canal as it was and long had been probably suited its masters exactly so it was. So, envision as he might (and did) some swifter, cleaner current come gliding in via, perhaps, a mountain stream or two, soon and swift he dismissed the thought.

Hiring masters and hireling mage. . “But not yet Incantor et Magus”. . “Not yet”. . echoes, echoes. . but, still, if not magus de jure, mage de facto. . and as he had been, in effect, hired: hireling …) all in an atrium.

Brosa had brought him thither. It was not Brosa, however, who was about to speak: Boso was. Brosa and “they” had brought him, Vergil, earlier, to see the torture chambers, as elsewhere, some other “they” had taken him to see the bears and lions, the dancing girls, the chambers with the painted walls. Boso had been there as well, one or two others. Three? Had the same number left as entered? Did one or two remain to see the sport? Was it sport alone? Some particular taste for witnessing unspeakable pain, intense and shameful agony? Had the trade of any one or two or even three of the magnates been particularly rather than generally affected by the “conspiracy and interloping” of which that wretched fellow had stood accused? Was it that this magnate or that or those as individuals felt their commerce and industry risked loss if outsiders were allowed to buy without license? Was it particular details that he or they wished to hear? Or -

These questions in turn had not been slow in raising at least one other question in Vergil’s mind: Could the visit to the torture chambers have been no mere showing of a certain sight, but a caution? A warning? And if so: to whom? Vergil was not a resident, a denizen of the city Rome. But he was a Roman citizen, a Citizen of Rome. Mere birth within the Empire did not confer this right and status. Status and right were of immense protection. But although Averno was under the rule of Rome, Averno was not Rome. He was not in Rome now. He was in Averno. Averno was not Rome.

Boso was the first, after some small silence, to speak. “Now see thee here, Master Vergil,” he began, in his stolid way; stolid or not: an enormous change. Yesterday, face-to-face the two of them, it had been “Wise One.” Today, here, here in the company of his fellow-magnates, it was merely “Master Vergil”: well. In this Boso was perhaps merely conforming to local usage, discarding the semblance of great respect which something from his own past, perhaps; perhaps the brief use between them of the tongue of Sidon, had prompted. But — See thee here …! Why, Vergil’s own servant would apologize for addressing him in the thou-form! Was the hired man, citizen or no, to be shown his place? Or. . or was this, this over-familiarity, the semblance? The dissembling?

One would see.

Boso, squatting, was drawing in the sand of a part of the atrium with his finger. “Them fires which are the gifts to us of the good gods of hell, they are, like here” — he scratched — ”and here. . and here, and here …”

As for the “rogues, retainers, henchmen, partisans, thieves, runaways, and gamblers,” such as were alleged to frequent the places of notables everywhere, he saw no sign here. Neither did he see any likenesses of the urban great in marble or even in wax, as he did sometimes in other cities. The magnates were not there and then as Vergil had seen some of them (and was to see, eventually, all of them) elsewhere. Of course no torches were needed in level daylight, but neither did they wear crimson to show they were rich, nor dingy black (“It shows no dirt”) to show they cared naught for being rich. One of them in fact wore close to nothing at all, and this was Haddadius, in a breechclout. Now and then he raised a thick and hairy arm and examined his armpit; the gods knew how many years in filth and foulness had laid the foundations for a gesture that had become a lifelong habit. Haddadius now found nothing in his oxters, he (as Vergil had seen) had his own baths, and used them and was clean. But ever and again: the telltale gesture. As for Grobi, whom Vergil knew at once, before even seeing his eye, by his heavy breathing — Grobi was dressed in the lightest of silks, the lightest and the costliest, but his hard and heavy hands continually rubbed his marked and marred wrists and ankles, and perhaps that was why Grobi always did move so slow: Grobi still felt the shackles and the chains. Lars Melanchthus was silent and sober-faced this time, but his eyes still full-red, perhaps from years of peering into the smoke of forges. Perhaps his eyes would never be clear again, perhaps his vision neither.

Boso went on scratching and speaking; gradually Vergil put a picture together, as the mosaic-maker does from fragments of colored glass.

The fire and steam and smoke engirdled the city round like a fiery zone, irregular in shape, and sometimes varying: now a circle; and now extending and also narrowing: an oval. From a fumarole whence last year spouted flame, this year perhaps came nothing but a hot and sulfurous stink; sometimes areas larger than an urban “island” of tenements might be affected; then there would be a laborious moving of forges, vats, workshops, and bloomeries to areas where the fires and fiery gasses freshly escaped the rents and fissures of the tortured earth.

“… and some. . here. …” Boso grunted. He finished his scrabbling and sketching and stared a moment. Then he sighed. “This day,” he said. “This year. They don’t stay still,” he said. “And that is the kernel in the nut and the nut in the hull, Master Vergil. Them fires wander a-roundabout, and this cause us the worst kind of troubles. And of lately years they wander roundabout all more than before. Fewer. And weaker. Which is why we have had you here. We’ve put you to test. You’ve passed test. You’ve read certain, like, secret message. Given right answer. All so. Now, Ser. Master. What’s to be done about all this?”

And he sat back on his haunches, evidently convinced that he had made everything as clear as it could possibly be, and gazed at Vergil with his bull-like eyes.

But before Vergil could speak, someone else spoke.

“Hecatombs,” said someone, in a thick, slow, heavy, halting voice. Repeated it.

“Hec. . a. . tombs …”

Paradox.

Illyriodorus, once, when asked, “Master, what is it that you seek?” had answered, stroking his classical beard, “I do not seek. I find.” A moment’s silence, in some measure awed, in all measure respectful, followed this epigram.

And the moment was followed by Vergil’s (audacious youth!) — by Vergil’s asking, nonetheless, “And. . Our Sage. . When you do not find?”

The silence this time was a shocked one. Illyriodorus, however, seemed not shocked. One more stroke he gave his beard. “Ah, then,” he said, quite calmly, “then I seek.”

But that was in Athens. And Vergil was now in Averno. They were nothing like. Nor was either the least like Sevilla. Sevilla. Why did he think of Sevilla now, the Very Ancient and Very Wise City?

Sevilla. Often it was hot there, though never of course was the heat of such a quality as here, here, in the fire-fields of Averno. Oft, when then wearied, had he walked with slow steps to a certain space round the ramparts of Sevilla, where once he had watched a cafila of strange beasts: they were called camels. Awkward and splay-footed their walk, and their upper lips, split like those of giant hares, writhed, groaning, perhaps in pain. And each beast bore upon its back a great hunch. Now, as he passed the fire-fields of Averno and saw among the fumes and fumaroles a line of slaves, staggering and lurching through smoke and steam, each with just such a hunch or puckel on his back — though these were leather sacks filled with, as it might be, lumps of ore — he was reminded of those camel-beasts. The necks of these men who bore the burdens here were of course not longer than other men’s, but like camels they twisted them from side to side, like camels their upper lips were split, and like camels they writhed their lips; indeed, like camels, too, they groaned. Too clearly why: Some canny Avernian had gathered for himself a stable of hare-lipped slaves, for such sold always cheaper. Of course here and for such labor it mattered not the slightest that they could not, their palates being cleft, speak distinctly. No one needed them to speak. Damn their speak. Let them slave.

And when any of them staggered too much, imperiling his load, or slowed as if to pause, the whipper-in, who in fact carried no whip, merely a stick, merely swiftly thrust his stick into one of the glowing holes all round about and between which the cafila struggled. At once the stick burst into flame, see then the driver swing the stick sufficient to reduce the flame to a mere glowing coal-end, and press it against the slave’s heaving side. Swiftly. Slightly. Only slightly. One would not wish the man-camel to drop his humpy burden. . of course. Although sometimes, if the sides of the slave were greatly scarred and toughened from other burns or galls or floggings, then the warder would press the stick a bit harder.

In Sevilla, called though it was by some a sewer of a thousand different devils, Vergil had seen no such sight.

Sevilla. In Sevilla, young Vergil and an Apulian of the same short age (what was his name? how could he have forgotten it? he had forgotten it because although the young Apulian was of great importance, his name was of none) had after no small wait been admitted to the lodge of the beadle of the school, a slender man with a small head. “What have you learned?” asked he. The Apulian, before Vergil could more than wet his lips in preparation, had said that he had studied trivium and quadrivium.

“And here are my certificates,” he added, making to display them, but the beadle waved them off.

“The boys without a hair on their bollix, who play with themselves when the proctors are not looking, have studied trivium and quadrivium. What have you learned?”

There was a pause. Then, a shade sullenly, the Apulian said, “I have been in the woods” — an elliptical reference to the Wild Schools.

Beadle said softly, “Ahh …”He seemed impressed. The Apulian took a breath, caught it, stood straighter. Then and without any warning the figure of the beadle swelled, changed beyond recognition, became that of something worse than any demon; and it opened its hideous mouth and it screamed with a noise that Vergil had never heard before, producing sounds alien to a human ear. The sound echoed forever, the sight went swirling in a great concentric circle, the air was instantly cold, something struck the side of Vergil’s face, and he did not even know it was the floor, for before he could feel pain he had from feeling terror fainted quite away.

However, not for long. Vaguely he was ware of his young fellow-aspirant tossing him over his shoulder and carrying him. . the prickle of straw. . he made to get up. . he fell back….

“One of you has failed the first test.” The beadle’s voice.

“Silly kid. Couldn’t take it, huh, Ser Beadle.” The Apulian’s.

“And the second test too. Where is your gear and baggage, boy?”

“At the door. Where do I bring it?”

“Wherever you like. Back the way you came. Or any other way as pleases you. But not in. Out. Now. So, go.” Soft the voice. But firm.

A pause. Eyes clearer now, Vergil saw his fellow stare bepuzzled, then grow angry as well. “Say, Ser Beadle. What you mean? He was the coward. I stuck brave. Didn’t I? So — ”

With, it seemed, no more than one finger, the beadle turned the boy around. “When you reach the exit gate you will find a caravan about to start. Say to its master, ‘There is a beast reserved for me,’ and he will point it out. Your charge and victuals are paid at no cost to you. And when you reach the port, there you will hear the drummers announcing the departure of a ship for Africa. Its voyage purpose is to find, capture, and bring back wild beasts for the arena. You need not join, though I expect you will. Do not tarry. Go.” The finger prodded, the Apulian moved. He moved unwillingly, still he questioned.

“You say ‘one of us failed the first and second test’ — how come it’s me?”

By this time they had passed from Vergil’s sight, he lying on the straw, sick with shame. The beadle’s voice drifted back.

“The first lesson is to know fear. The second lesson is to feel humility. It may be that you will learn them both. Not, I believe, very soonly. Meanwhile my finger grows weary, so I adjure: Begone.”

When the beadle returned, Vergil was on his knees, watching the vapor arising from a tub of water that had certainly not been there a moment before. Said the beadle, “Wash.”

Gladly would the young Vergil have drowned in it; “I have soiled myself.”

Something not even faintly like compassion, something faintly like impatience, tinged the beadle’s voice. “Another good reason, then, to wash. Wash.” And, when Vergil had done so, he was shown a certain door, one of several. “Go through that one. That one. Mark it well. It won’t be pointed out again. Now. . go …”

That young aspirant also had a question, but he asked it as he went.

“What of my baggage?”

“It will follow,” said the beadle.

And so it did; whenever the lad’s feet lingered, lagging along that long corridor, longer than any he had ever walked before, he could hear it following; once he looked behind. Only once.

But as to how it had been made to follow, this was not the third lesson. It was not even the thirty-third.

It was twelve months and several before he saw the beadle once again.

The Apulian boy, though whenever (seldom) Vergil went to the arena he looked for him, he never saw more.

• • •

Armin had come to visit Vergil again. He seemed tired, had little to say as they sat by the slatted window-shutters, though Vergil tried to play the casually cheerful host. “Hecatombs,” the host repeated, taking up the note on which, more or less, the meeting with the magnates had closed. “Hecatombs can only help, for, after all — ” He paused to pour drink. “This is called beer,” he said. “Curious. It is much drunk in Egypt, so far south and east of here; and it is much drunk past the Alps, so far north of here. But it is not drunk much here. Is it that our grapes are better? Our barley not as good? What is that dreadful noise?”

They peered through the slats. Some throng had turned a corner. “It is nothing,” Armin said, dispiritedly. “A coiner. A false-coiner.” Below, a man was being dragged along behind a cart to which he was bound. At every fourth step, the local beadle gave his whip a flourish and lashed the malefactor across his naked back. Someone, perhaps a friend, had stepped forward and thrust a piece of wood between the condemned man’s teeth. It could only have been a last gesture of friendship, pity would not be encountered at such a scene. For one single stroke more the counterfeiter bit deep into the wood to muffle his own cry. But the effort was not to be made more. The gag dropped at the next stroke of the whip, the lashed flesh bled, the criminal shrieked. He did not wish to be brave. The Spartan virtues did not flourish here. And at every shriek the mob howled, mocked, imitated, flung stones, pelted with mud. Why not? He had made false coin; had any one of them found such a one in his purse or till, he must need either have borne the loss himself, or else risked the same fate, for the penalty for passing was the same as that of forging. The grim procession passed slowly out of sight and, somewhat later, out of sound. Fairly soon enough the forger would be burned beside the same dung heap where his ashes would be scattered. Burned to death, the sentence was uttered.

But before that time the man would already be dead.

Stern and meritorious law.

Host and guest sipped beer in silence.

Vergil did not resume his comments on hecatombs, but his thoughts continued. A hundred magnates (at the most, a hundred) and their wives and households could hardly eat a hundred oxen, even after the prescribed parts of the sacrifices had been burned upon the altars; victims offered in such profusion would inevitably yield up festive meats for slaves, and slaves seldom got to eat flesh-meat. Usually they must count themselves lucky when they had wheaten bread to eat, instead of spelt; often enough their diet must have been heavy in spoiled spelt, at that.

“I confess I miss the views of the Bay,” Vergil said, by and by. “The Isle of Goats. . and others. The gardens. . I confess I have a passion for islands, gardens, trees — I see you wonder at that.”

Armin said, “Not in particular, no. Merely I wonder that anyone should have a passion for anything.”

Vergil raised his eyebrows. “But that dance you danced. . surely, a passion?”

Armin shook his head. “Ah no. Merely a sudden lust.” Equally sudden now, his tired eyes changed. “You wonder. Such excitement for a madman. But you can’t know how different his madness and gaiety is from the madness which is daily life in Averno.” His gesture took in the scene that had just passed. “Day after day: heat, fire, sound, stench, coarseness, cruelty, picking pennies with one’s teeth from dung heaps; no gardens, not a tree, not a blade of grass — the fumes would kill them off — all but those painted, and painted badly, on some walls. . and them the stinking airs, the sweet breezes soon discolor, and mostly no one bothers to paint them fresh.

“Life in Averno — a contradiction in terms! This is a hell, death is our daily fare, we moil in the muck for money, and try to forget it by gorging instead of seemly dining, and sousing instead of decent drinking! One speaks with respect, with awe, of the Senate and the People of Rome, but never, ever, of the Magnates and the People of Averno! Ha, ‘the people of Averno’ —!” And suddenly, he wept, and his weeping spilled over on his cheeks.

Vergil murmured, moved, “Ah, ‘the tearfulness of things …’ ”

Armin, checking his tears with his sleeve, asked, “What?”

“Oh, only a phrase from somewhere. I forget. No — I don’t. From the Oracles of Maro.”

With a laugh still half a sob, Armin said, “You have seen their wives, the magnates’ — is that not tearful enough?”

Victory over pride? Victory over arrogance. The Nine Muses the matrons of Averno, as he had seen them, certainly were not. Need they have been? He thought for some tactful comment, but even as he sought, he found one question had now formed itself: “Only one, I did notice, spun. The classical duty of a Roman matron.” Vergil did not look at his visitor, he poured him drink, wondered about his own work here, and how he would next get on with it. His visitor spoke.

Spoke in a tone that indicated he wished his emotions, immediately past, to be not spoken of. “Ah, that was Rano’s wife. The Matron Poppaea. Of her some stories are told.”

Vergil said merely, flatly, “Ah.”

“Some stories are told that Rano for a while maintained her in another city, some say Potuoli, some say Naples, others say it was in a villa in the country. Some say he had reason to doubt her fidelity. It is said that he had no other reason to doubt except his own ugliness, however. It is said otherwise. And also, it is said, that, as he sent her there to live, so he brought her here to die….”

“Many things, in short, ‘it is said.’ ”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Putuoli made me, Averno unmade me. He who — ”

“It has not unmade her. Anyway, not yet. What? ‘Potuoli — ’? Another citation from those Oracles? I don’t know them well.”

“No. Another source. Not cited; rather, paraphrased. So — ”

But Armin would not wait on So. He got up. “Master Vergil, as I was one of the means of bringing you here, I hope that neither you nor I will regret it. I am not always clear in speech; forgive me. Neither am I always clear in mind. May I bid you civilly good night? And feel as free as ever to call on you again? Whenever …”

“Whenever. Yes. Certainly. I share that hope. Are there lights still?”

Armin, brushing his face again with his sleeve, brushing his scant beard, murmured that there were lights enough. A formal word or two more, and he had gone.

At once upon the man’s departure, Vergil’s boy appeared, rather as though he had but been waiting. Master looked at him, looked him over quickly. Well fed enough, well clad and well clean enough he seemed. Well content he did not seem. “Iohan. Time enough to bid you, too, good night. I’ll have some hard work for you, soon enough. Therefore don’t wear yourself down with trivial things in the meanwhile. Avoid provocation, fights, and all the like.”

The lad’s look seemed troubled, but not markedly so; he expressed his assent, made an attempt to begin an accounting for some small sum allotted him for some small purpose, was waved aside in this until another time, made his brief respectful bow; then, too, was gone.

That night the king could not sleep? E’en king, e’en queen…. But this night would Master, Adept, Astrologue, and all the rest of all of it, sleep. He could have done it by arcane means with full ease enough; suddenly he did not wish to. He took a small flask from his kit, subjected its stopple to a few sundry twists that an observer would have found too complex to follow. . and would have been meant to. . dropped scarce a scruple, by no means a dram, into the remnants of his cup of drink; downed it in two drafts; swift he sought his bed; let the lamp smolder to a dull-red smoky coal. The room contracted, the bed enlengthened, he felt his body change, expand, felt his spirit leave it but leave it by but a span of a hand; and hover there, content. He felt content, he did not feel asleep; he knew that he slept, he heard the cocks crow, bade them be still, knew there were no cocks in Averno, dwindled, faded, ebbed.

Felt himself at rest. At rest.

Something beat. His pulse? The anvils, hammers, fulling-mallets and the ceaseless pulse of here? Not any matter.

Sleep.

He slept.

The Matron Poppaea Rano was sapling-thin, and she sat with wool and distaff and spun and spun, and — as Vergil had observed before — she spun rather badly. It was certainly not the coarse wool commonly worked in Averno, and he wondered why she alone should be working expensive fleece and yarn when she worked it so ill. But it was a subject for wonder, the whole thing: First a message had been brought to him inviting him to call once more at the house of Magnate Rano; next, another message had directed him to go instead to the magnate’s warehouse. And whilst he was in the broad street and inquiring more precisely the way, crying, “Ser! Ser! Master!” there came running Iohan.

“He’ve changed his mind again, Master,” said the boy. “Wants you to go to his house, after all. I’m not sure, do he mean to join you there, or what, and this old besom, she won’t say aught to me.”

The old woman was indeed as lean and rugged as a rustic broom, and she said no more to master than she had to man, merely she indicated by an inclination of her head the direction intended; then she walked off. Vergil gave a half-rueful shrug, told Iohan to get him back to their inn in case yet another change of plan on the part of Rano might be forthcoming; then he followed after the old she. Who did not indeed lead him to the main rooms via the kitchen, but she gave some shrill call as she — as they — came in, and, before they had gone more than the length of another anteroom (the ill-fitting tiles, their mortar not replaced for. . for who could say how long, going click-click beneath their feet), a squat and ugly servant of no particular sex brought her a bag of what was soon revealed to be beans, and a few pans; this house-thrall then returned. . wherever. And the “old besom” by and by simply sat herself down, squatting on her withered haunches, and began to sift through the dried beans, handful by half-a-handful, separating pebbles and clumpets of earth, a task he had times past seen the women of his own family doing so often — and, more than merely sometimes, he had helped, he felt he could here and now fall to and do it once again. And do it quite as well.

However.

After merely a moment, a manservant appeared, one whom Vergil had seen before; this one gave him the sort of ridiculous bow of the sort seen in pantomimes and street-plays, the spare-two-groats-for-the-bath-boss sort. At first the visitor felt he was being mocked, almost at once he thought that perhaps the man had never in his life seen any real sort of bow performed; this was, this was Averno. And so, the lumpkin having straightened up and made an equally absurd gesture, Vergil, following it, entered the room where the woman sat and spun.

She rose as he entered, then, the spindle dropping, she lurched to catch it, caught it, gazed down at it a moment as though not sure what it was. Then she sat down again. After a moment she said, “Poppaea. I am called Poppaea. Did you know? Poppaea Rano.” (“Matron,” he said, with a bow she did not see.) “Rano sent to tell me you were coming.” Her voice was clear and had no particular accent; neither did it seem to have any particular weight of meaning.

After a moment, as she stayed still, clumsily working her wool, and did not ask him to seat himself, he looked about, and seeing, at a respectable distance, to be sure a bad chair — but still, a chair — he seated himself. Another slow-passing moment. There seemed nothing wrong with her slender fingers, there were no marks of shackles on her wrists, merely this was an art which she had not. “Will Magnate Rano be returning presently?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said simply, and with the slightest air of surprise that he might think she should. Well, here there would be no discussion of readings from Homer; Sappho had woven her violets in vain as far as any analysis of her or anyone else’s poems was concerned. It was up to him to close the gate against silence, if the gate was to be closed at all. And so, with an inward sigh, he asked, by and by, “Do you have children, Matron?” At once he felt his words as a scalding draft in his mouth, but he could not call them back again.

“Children die young here,” she said. “Not many children are born here.” Her fingers flexed the supple thread, the thread broke and she gathered the fiber again. “I have had two children here. . well, they were born here and they died here. The air was too thick for the older, I think, she had trouble breathing it. And the second had a disease. . what do they call it? Anthrax? It is worse with some. At least mine did not fall into a pool of boiling water or stumble into a fire-hole.” She gave him no chance to change the conversation, nor even to think of how it might be changed; the clear voice, devoid of passion, it seemed, and even concern, went on. The gate had been closed against silence. “When he died, my second one, I recollected and felt I understood that story, oh, I don’t recall where it is from, of a place where people weep when a child is born and they rejoice when it dies. But until then I thought, how horrible. Of course I didn’t really rejoice. ‘Sleep well, now,’ is what I said. And since then Rano says he asks nothing more of me, only to spin. ‘A woman must spin,’ he says. Rano says.”

She repeated this as her fingers gathered and the spindle whirled.

“I don’t do it well, but one must do something, and — ” She broke off.

She sighed a very small sigh. A thin sigh, he thought it might be called — appropriately: she was so thin herself. “We are rich here, we magnates and matrons, and so we may afford amusements. But we don’t spend money on them, really, we women here. Brosa. Do you know what her amusement is? She abuses her servants. Really.” Not likely, Vergil thought, that Poppaea could abuse the grim figure whose dirty toes were just within his sight, as she rattled her dried beans from pan to pan. And an odd duenna she was…. “Well, to be less delicate, she tortures them. Oh, not too heavily, no. They are always able to go back to work afterward. I know what Me-lanchthus’s matron does, she does her hair, she has wax-pictures of different hairstyles, and she copies them and does her hair and she looks in her mirrors and then she undoes and then she does it all over again. Grobi, she keeps the accounts; fancy me keeping Rano’s accounts! Do you know who does? You don’t. You will. And Haddadius’s woman, what’s-her-name, takes care of her children. Ask her if she has children.” Again he felt that scalding draft in his mouth, but she was not trying to punish him, the glancing look she cast at him at once after saying this was merely quizzical. “She has quite a lot of them, and she dresses and feeds them and talks with them and plays games…. Actually, of course, no. She has no real children. They are of course all mommets, dolls. Mommets are dolls and poppets are dolls, too; isn’t that curious?”

He had been looking down, half trying to make out the designs in the mosaic-tiled floor; now he looked up. She had been looking at him, but her gray eyes fled direction as he lifted his own.

He said, “And you do nothing, then, save spin? Have you no amusements? Even inexpensive ones?”

She nodded, and gathered wool from the distaff. “I read. That is, I am read to. Rano allows me to sell the thread and yarn, and, well, they aren’t really very good, but it’s good wool, that’s good, it can be used again to make better thread and yarn, and I have no need for money, so there is someone who takes away my basketful and in return brings me books and I am read to. While I spin. When one of the Greeks can be spared to do it, who can read Latin, too, you know. And after they are read, the books go back. In that box there is the one the Greek, Demou he’s called, was reading to me, but he was called to the warehouse for work and he hasn’t yet come back.”

The house of Rano was one of the older ones, black and squat and reeking, although attempts had been made to give it some sort of gloss, as witness the floor — at this exact moment the she-troll cleaning beans cleared her nose and throat and spat upon the floor adjacent her — and the furnishings (as though furnished from some captured town, the troops having had their three-day plunder, the followers allowed three days more before the torch was set and all these furnishings gathered in haste late upon the afternoon of the sixth day). As for the box indicated, it was the sort of box that a yeoman farmer might have purchased in some good year, long ago, the taxes being paid and for once the larder and the corn-cribs full. He knew that sort of box full well.

“Would you like me to read to you?” asked he. Where was Rano? Was he never coming back?

And she answered, her eyes so low cast down, “If the master wishes. It would be very kind.”

He opened the box, it contained the usual jumble of broken fibulae and bracelets sans catches, here a charm and there a bauble; and set aside from all of that a smallish book, a codex in form and binding and not a scroll. “Where shall I begin?”

“Where you may be pleased. Perhaps he marked where he left.” She pinched off a bit of wool and was about to add it to the thread, and it broke; she caught the spindle and, with a sigh, made to mend the work. The servant, likely slave, had indeed left a bookmark; thither Vergil turned. A glance showed him the book was entitled The New Anabasis, and he was sure that he had never heard of it and that it deserved no such grand titule. The calligraphy lacked the cunning of the professional book-copyist; whichever old soldier had passed declining years in composing the work had probably pressed his own servant into use: whichever one could, as it chanced, belike, write: to scratch and scribble with a stylus into cold wax was one art, but to make and mend a pen and write cleanly with slow-drying ink — this was another art yet. And a harder one.

Vergil cleared his throat. “Here they were invited, in fact constrained, to join a procession to the Temple of Jove in Alexandria Olympia, where the Thunderer was worshiped under the Syrian name of Haddad.” He was mistaken, he had read this before: where? “The procession had been organized, at the first sign of bad weather, by the local dyers’ guild, for …”He heard his voice growing slower and slower as, incredulous, he recollected where. . and when. . he had read this before….

About to beg pardon for interrupting the reading and to ask more precisely whence she had this book, he looked up: Their eyes met again, this time met full on, and such a flash glittered from hers that he had, even while he gave the motion no thought, to lunge and save the volume from falling to the floor.

“Who are you, then, Poppaea?” he demanded. “Who is it that you really are? And what is it, then, that you are really doing here?” He did not touch her.

The eyes that had glittered a moment before now flowed with tears, and she wiped them clumsily with the wool-full distaff. “It does not matter,” she said, weeping. “Oh, it does not matter, not at all. I am the matron of a magnate of Averno, and I sit in his house and I spin. The spinning is worthless, but a Roman matron spins, she spins, and when Rano remembers that he has a wife at home who sits and spins, it makes him feel that he is something like a Roman patrician. And as for me. . it occupies my hours and even when no one is reading to me, the labor of it soothes my mind, and helps the time to pass. How white your skin is, and how black your hair and beard.”

“But, Poppaea, if it was you who — ”

She shook her head, the tears still flowed, she took up now a gauzy stole and wiped them, and they ceased. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t speak of it, please.”

Half, he rose. “Shall I not go then?”

She said, somewhat in haste, almost in alarm, “Oh no. No. At least not yet. Rano has told me to show you high respect. He instructed the servants, when the clepsydra strikes — ” She paused. He hearkened. In an inner part of the house, a single hollow ring. The hollow metal ball within one of the chambers of the clock had, as the last of the water dripped away, struck against the floor of the chamber. A murmur, followed by the bustle of things being moved, feet sounding, and the rustle of garments; the dirty toes meanwhile vanished, the dried beans rattled in the pans, their selectrix gave a hortatory squall or two: In came servants bearing wine and water and plates of cakes, olives, nuts, fruits, and sweetmeats and tables to set them on; and scented water to wash hands and fingers and napkins with which to dry them. The settings did not match, but what matter, they were heavy and rich, and looked as though they might have come from the plunder of the first three days in several cities.

“… and I hope, Master Vergil,” said Poppaea, “that you will especially try these pears conserved in mustard and honey, for it is a very especial honey and comes from far away, far across the Indoo Sea, and it is a honey that flows from a sort of reed, called saccharum.”

Gravely he thanked her, tasted with an air of judgment, nibbled in silence; then praised. She smiled faintly. The clod servants grunted, lolled their thick tongues in their mouths; one of them actually shoved the conserves closer. “Take more,” said this impertinent hobgoblin. “Take more, Wizard Man. Master very rich.” Doubtless his and the other thick tongues would help lick the platters clean of whatever costly syrups could not be scraped back into the jars. It would add a relish to the beans.

And the spelt.

Master very rich.

I am the matron of a magnate of Averno, and I sit in his house and I spin.

Very true. Very true. But not only did she know that the honey called saccharum came from beyond the great isle Taprobane, from the other side of the Erythraean Sea, farther than which no Roman ship had ever fared, she knew that no bees produced this novel and fantastically costly syrup; what else did she know? She knew how to send him in dreams the text of a book that she herself could not even read. She spun, as a matter of form and status alone, her woollen yarn and her oft-breaking thread. What else did she spin? he wondered. And the answer, not spoken aloud, was, a web.

And one that now seemed sure to hold him fast.

To hold him fast indeed.

As always, when he began, had begun, to be attracted by a particular woman, the air seemed full of little flecks of gold; so, even here, in the thick, hazy, stinking air of Averno. But. Even so. So or not so. The work, his work in Averno, continued — and he reflected once, quickly and with some small wry amusement: If it continued at its present pace he would be here longer than the two weeks for which he had hired the mare; the likelihood of Fulgence the liveryman following him was, however, extremely slight — and as it seemed not unlikely that the work would pay more than had been hinted (however slight those hints), Vergil moved yet once again; and this time to what passed in Averno for a better neighborhood. How much better went up in his estimation when he saw a litter and its bearers in the street outside — though some second thoughts he had when he saw that not a litter alone stood there, but a lictor as well.

The fasces was there, that grim bundle of rods with which to flog the condemned, from which protruded the ax with which to behead. Neither rod nor ax had been used to work affliction upon the wretched false-coiner, although his own more dreadful punishment was not alone legal but even customary; perhaps rods and ax dated from a time before coinage, full or false, had reached Rome. Technically this symbol belonged most properly to the chief magistrate of a city, but Averno was a special case in this as in almost all other things; the fasces and lictor meant most likely something else -

He hoped the litter did, too….

The lictor was (highly improperly!) holding the bundle under one arm, and applying to his nose a pouncet box. He tried to come to an attention when he saw Vergil, but first the one thing slipped, and then the other. Vergil seized the pouncet box, this at least seeming in no way a form of lese-majeste; from it arose the strong and fragrant medicinal odor of the pomander; and it was he who stood to something like an attention until the lictor had gotten himself in order. Then -

“Master Vergil, a Citizen of Rome?”

“Yes, Lictor.”

“I greet you in the name of the Senate and the People of Rome.”

“Stinking place, this, isn’t it?” Vergil did not feel in a mood of much formality; neither, by his look, did, much, the lictor. Who -

“Oh, the gods! Well, sir. As you were kind enough to save the medicine from falling to the muck, I take liberty to offer that you bear it yourself, and I of course must bear the fasces, and lead on as — Oh. . Forget me own agnomen, next. Ser Vergil, his Honor the Legate presents his compliments and sends his litter and hopes that Master Vergil is to find it convenient to honor his Honor by taking some very good wine with his Honor.”

The Legate. That meant, of course, the Legate Imperial; in such a special case as Averno’s, he would be part governor, part ambassador, part viceroy. . all, very much for the most part, pro forma. For the most part, then, the Legate Imperial was locally the Imperial official of highest rank. Mostly his duties were such as could be reduced to no simplistic legal formula. Had he the power to compel Vergil’s acceptance of the so courteously worded invitation? Very likely. Was Vergil’s position honorable enough and his conscience clear enough to persuade himself to acceptance of the invitation without more ado and less mental quibbling? Very likely.

“Of course, Lictor. I am honored by his Honor’s invitation and by your own kindly offer. However” — he delved into his pouch and disclosed his own pouncet box. Its classification as “medicine” was, in his own opinion, doubtful: but the stinking and maleficent air was less afflictive when strained through the dried spice-studded fruits and fragrant herbs. He had gotten into the litter even while the lictor murmured his appreciation at getting his own pomander back. Dignity did not perhaps allow him to bear it openly in one hand as he marched holding the fasces, so he thrust it high into his tunic and bowed his head so that his nose was almost next to it.

“Litter-bearers! Up, litter! March.”

March they did, through the grimy streets. It might well be that money did not stink. But it was not money that Vergil saw through the slightly parted curtains. He saw garbage and slag and slops which had not waited the collectors of the night soil, and people with cutpurse (and, for that matter, cutthroat) looks; and — endlessly — slaves crouching and stumbling beneath every sort of burden; bundles and bales of rags awaiting the sole washing ever they were likely to get before being dyed and clipped and resewn; saw the as-yet-uncollected recently dead, and the as-yet-unrelieved-by-death, animal and human. Saw faces sullen and faces scornful and faces devoid, seemingly, of capacity for expression; saw faces all filthy and glances grim. He saw the steamy tipped-out rank residue of the reeking dye-pots, and smelled, above even the sulfurous and omnipresent breath of “the good gods of hell,” the rotting offscrape of the inner, fleshy sides of pelts in the wool-pulleries; used-up wads of foul, fetid tanbark -

In short: all, or most of all, of the characteristic sights of the Very Rich City. He did not, though, as they marched, and at no slow pace, see the torture chambers.

But then, of course, he had already seen them.

Sissinius Apponal Casca was the gray-faced shadow of what had been a large and healthy man, as witness his own bust in a niche in the wall. Since those days he had lost most of his hair, most of his teeth, most of the flesh beneath his skin, and most of that sense of firm control of life that the bust (and it alone) presently commemorated. He did, however, both look up and, somewhat, cheer up, as Vergil entered. The Emperor Julius had of course been bald, and the Emperor Sulla, that famous Sulla, entirely edentulous, in their days of command, victory, and glory: neither of them had looked a tithe of a tithe as bad as this Legate Imperial, nor would they, had their losses in one countenance been combined.

“One doesn’t dare attempt to keep wine, once it’s been opened,” Casca said, formulas of greeting and respect done with; “not here. My butler is opening the best jug right now. Also I have fresh spring water brought twice a day. . from a spring well outside this horrid place, that is. . to use the local water to mix even the worst wine, let alone the best, well …”

Understanding looks were passed, the wine was decanted and mixed, libations poured, and the wine tasted. “It is good,” said Vergil.

The Legate’s next words almost caused Vergil to spill the wine, good as it was. “What of this fellow who is called King Cadmus?” asked S. Apponal Casca. And suddenly Vergil had an image of those rods lacerating the dancing madman’s back, of that ax severing the curly head from its wounded shoulders.

He obliged himself to speak carelessly. “Why, he is mad, that’s all.”

“There was a certain madman who claimed to be a certain emperor, after the real emperor was dead, and kept half of Little Asia in turmoil for two years and more.”

“Ah, but that fellow was merely mad enough to believe his masquerade could succeed. This fellow — Cadmus — is utterly mad. Doesn’t know the calends from the ides. Surely you have seen that. . if you have seen him.”

“I have seen him. Yes.”

“Well, then.”

But beneath the gray and wasted skin some muscle twitched; the flabby mouth suddenly became, somehow, firm. “I haven’t asked you here for you to say, ‘Well, then,’ I have asked you here to ask you what you can tell me. And by that, I mean everything.”

In the brief instant of fear that shot through him, Vergil now recalled something which had flashed through his mind as he was getting into the litter and as swiftly had flashed out of it. A brief exchange of words, that time past, with Armin, the young Avernian. . Avernian so different from almost every other Avernian, young or old, whom he had so far met.

What will you tell them, when you go to Rome?

I do not go to Rome.

Ah, no? But you know. . Rome may come to you….

Rome, in the form of the lictor and the litter, had gone to him.

And so, of course, in effect, he had now gone to Rome.

“Well, your Honor, as I understand it — merely, I have heard, this happened before my arrival — the man was elected as a King of Fools at the local Feast of Unreason. As such he was crowned. Surely a greater fool, in the old and real sense of the word, could scarce be found. And so he wore his crown, why not, and so he danced. I must say he dances uncommonly well.”

The Legate stared at him, gray and wasted face unmoving. “The Feast of Unreason was over some while since. Yet, still he dances. And still, he wears his crown.” Vergil said nothing. A silence fell between them. Neither was trying to stare the other down. Then, again: “What can you tell me?”

Vergil cleared his throat. “Have the taxes been collected, paid?”

“If you mean the Imperial tributes, they have all been collected and paid. If you mean the municipal taxes, they are no official concern of mine, but I assume that if they had not been gathered all as usual, I should certainly have heard. No, no. In this you are of course correct: a place on the verge of rebellion — ”

“Rebellion!” Vergil made to rise; the Legate gestured him down.

“ — does not bother to pay its tributes and its taxes promptly. No. . again you are right. Rebellion, no. O Apollo! this is a perfidious place! I have served in every corner of the Empire, even have been beyond the farthest realms of the oeconomia. What haven’t I seen! Villages, two of them each claiming to worship the evil god and each full of hatred because each had a different evil god; when a man from one town was rash and ventured near to the other, they would catch him and eat him alive: fact! Travelers’ tales about ‘the blessed Ottocoronae,’ you’ve heard about the ‘Blessed’ — indeed, fellows are so filthy and crawling with lice a civilized man daren’t go near them. The Melanchlanae, do you know what they do, those supposedly oh-so-sage fellows in their long black robes? Eat their own dead is what they do! Fact! Filial piety, they call it. Ha!

“I’ve been in places where one might perish with the cold if one stepped outside between autumn and spring, and I’ve been in places where the very houses are built of salt, and skin sloughed off and left a man looking and feeling raw and flayed. And one place, you know, near the Great Zeugma, richest toll bridge in the world, men are so pretty you’d think they were girls, and the women, O Apollo! the women are ugly as sows and have beards as black as yours: Facts! Facts, Master Vergil!”

He paused and drew thirstily at his wine. He began to wave his hand while his mouth was still full. Then, having swallowed, said, “But this place may be worst of all. How near it is to the sunlight and the beauty of the Parthenopean Bay. . how ugly it is, how it stinks, what a moiling mob of brutes the people are, one can scarcely breathe…. Well, well, I know they do needed work. And though they are savages and swine, they know well enough I’ve only to send one signal, and” — he blew an imaginary trumpet — ”down comes the legion. And that’s the end of that. — What do you have to tell me?”

Slowly some thought had been working its way up through Vergil’s mind, came, at last, into clear compass. It both troubled and comforted him. “But surely, Legate,” he said, “even if this man Cadmus should be charged with lese-majeste, he would draw the Fool’s Pardon?” But Casca was not concerned with that. He was thinking of beginnings, not of ends.

A silence fell for long enough for Vergil to become aware once again of the din caused by the clashing of hammers at factory and forge and the thumping of mallets as the fullers expressed from the coarse wool cloth the urine in which it had been steeped to dissolve the suint. At length the legate said, “Tell me then. . yourself. . here. . what …?”

Vergil told him as much of his task as he felt he could without much wearying the man. Casca nodded, but it was a slow, fatigued, nod.

“Not my sort of thing. I don’t know about such …” He failed to find his word, simply surrendered the attempt. “I know you are the — what do they call you in my signals here” — he rummaged among the documents on his desk — “ ‘Immensely Honorable’ — where is it? Ah, but I remember: Master, Mage, Leader, Lord.. . What?”

His guest had shaken his head, face confused between amusement, amazement, confusion, respect. “ ‘Master’ alone, Ser Legate. Nothing more. Ah, no.”

But the half-dead face was obstinate. “Yes, I say. ‘Immensely Honorable …’ And Magister, Magus, Dux et Dominus. Where is it? Here is it.” He picked it up, read in a mutter, put it down with a shake of his head. “No. Wrong one. No. Right one. Here’s my monogram, just where I scribbled to show I’d read it. Master, Magus, Leader, Lord, can’t find it, tell you it was there; going out of my mind. Averno. Averno.”

A moment he sat, blank, sick, silent. A servant appeared, poured more wine, more water, mixed it, poured the water into cups, removed the used ones.

Vergil spoke — so he hoped — soothingly. “A mere flux in the light, Ser Legate. The light here, my ser, is very changeable. It no doubt affected the perception of the words so as to remind you of something you had read at another time. Pray dismiss it from your mind. This has happened to me too.” But this thought, once spoken, did not soothe himself. He repeated, nonetheless, “Dismiss it from your mind.”

But there was that which did not dismiss so easily. Said the old proconsul, “There is something wrong of now, Messer Vergil. It is in the air, I smell it. The air is too thick and murk, I cannot see the matter clear. The hammers beat and beat and beat — somehow even so I almost hear it…. Whatever it is. It is not good. Not for Averno, not for Rome. And not for you, ser, and least of all for me. What can you tell me? Eh? What can you tell me?”

But Vergil, though he felt more troubled, Vergil could tell him nothing more.

Though Vergil had already observed exceptions, he had observed the general usage in that the magnates of Averno usually found the cheap woven stuffs of their own manufacture good enough to wear themselves. He had learned that sometimes, though certainly not all times, they liked to swathe their wives and women in apparel the most gorgeous the world could afford; and for such times and purposes they bought such stuffs by the bolt. In one foreign-owned shop in Averno, where cloth of foreign weave was sold in shorter lengths than the magnates deigned to buy it, Vergil fell into idle talk with another outsider, one waiting for his doxy to make her choice of brightly colored kerchief-stuffs. The fellow was a sailing man, come thither to Averno to make purchase for his own private trade-adventure, one who had made many navigations into the farthest reaches of the Erythraean Sea; teeth whitely agleam in a darkly colored beard, he spoke of Tambralinga and the Golden Chersonese and an island at the end of that peninsula where lions come down to the beach-shore and roar at passing ships; and he spoke of M’Amba the daughter of the Serpent-King, and of all the rich merchantry of those vasty Indoo Seas and all their circumjacent coasts: spicery, perfumery, gems and pearls and golds; he was about to speak of more (and Vergil to ask of the honey-reed, the thought having sudden-come to him), but then the sailor’s wench had made her choice and he paid up and got them gone, leaving with no farewell; leaving Vergil to reflect a moment more on those bright images — and to make the transition, for a moment difficult — to the present place outside the shop: dim, dull, hot, stinking, cruel. And in a moment the merchant had queried him, and all else faded as he described his need for cloth that was at one and the same time translucent, pale, and strong. He left with it done up in a roll of unsized papyrus fit for wrapping though not writing; faint glimmering reflection of enchanted seas. . then all was gone.

For now.

Not even the plea of “being upon the public business of the municipium” could obtain leave for the lad Iohan to take water and leave or return via the canal; this was reserved purely (or impurely) for the magnates’ cargoes, for themselves, or for their servants. Vergil was vexed. Iohan was not. He shrugged. “ ‘Twould save but small time, master,” he said, “and ‘twill stink less by the road.” It was surely true that this single waterway of the Very Rich City received the effluent of the single cloaca which sluggishly flowed into it, when it flowed at all; and equally it was true that the overfill or overstow of such cargo as the crushed sea-snails from which a pseudo-purple dye was boiled added nothing like the scented offshake of a ship of spices to the canal. When the rains somewhat washed the cut cleaner, it merely stank abominably. So Vergil replied to Iohan’s shrug with one of his own, put money in the lad’s purse, repeated directions and instructions, and saw him off. Meanwhile -

It was essential to begin making charts — in time, in space. As he was in effect measuring a circle, even if an immensely imperfect circle, it did not matter where he began. However, after considering it both ways, he concluded it would be easier to chart the matter of time, of times, if he had already charted the space and the spaces. The Etruscans and others, they charted the heavens above the earth; he would chart where beneath-the-earth broke through upon land between. He asked, therefore, for a map of the city. Was met with blank faces, slightly open mouths. Any map of the city, he said. In the Chamber of Magnates they said, What he means, a map? In the barrack room of the City Guard, they said, We needs no map. There was — one might not have thought so, but there was — a Civic Library; thither, briskly, Vergil went.

The building was a sorry, a very small and very sorry, imitation and on a very minor scale, not of the one in Alexandria! but of one in some new-colonized town on a far frontier. Working from standard plans, a library would be erected the same as a bath and a temple and a this and a that. It was not well furnished with books, but the books took up all the space for books there was. An aging man, wattles wobbling, looked up from whatever shabby sheet he had been looking down on, and stared in amazement so great that Vergil wondered when last someone else had entered. “I have come about a map of the city,” Vergil said.

The librarian hissed. He stood, he actually stood upon his toes and peered to see if someone was to enter following. No one was. Next he beckoned Vergil close, quite close, and — and still looking over Vergil’s shoulder — whispered, “Ser, my ser, I will give you what I have, I will give you all I have, I will give you three pieces of silver! —

“ — if you will let me copy a map from you. I will even give you one piece of silver, good silver, old and pure, messer, old silver and pure and full weight and neither sweated nor clipped, if you will merely let me see your map of the city! Eh? Do you want to see my silver? Here!”

And stop him Vergil could not, see the silver he must, and so he did. And watched the man sag as he listened to hear that Vergil wanted such a map as much as he himself did: and had none. “Though I shall try and let you see, and. . if I have time. . and let you take a copy of my own, when I make it. And your silver you may keep.”

Finally, in a sort of not-yet desperation, and acting upon what the librarian mentioned as a wild hope, he took the way to the tax office, where he was, reluctantly, and after several applications and armed with orders and permits, reluctantly allowed to copy a copy of the cadastral map. “Who knows who mayn’t begin to complain about taxes if he get a chance to see where his own property lines be drawn; ah, well!”

And with this as his prime material he began his next stage of work. After he had made sketches, after he had checked and rechecked the sketches, next Vergil drew more orderly copies. He made grids. He brought to play all he had learned from Euclid and Apollonius and Ptolemy. He did not of course have to show latitude; it was enough if he was able to show scale, and — of equal importance — keep the same scale on each of the maps.

Which is where, space having been established, time entered. And this took even more time than had the matter of space.

Regretting the present absence of his servant, he had perforce to carry on by himself; with his wax-inlaid tablets in one hand and his style or stylus in the other (its well-worn handle, of nondescript wood, had by long usage almost become fitted to his hand; its iron point had been sharpened more than once, though its use upon the wax would hardly ever exemplify the old principle that “the anvil wears the hammers out.” Unceasingly, hour to hour, from day to day, he went about the city, questioning not the magnates alone but their foremen and servants and slaves; when the tablets were on both sides filled up, he transcribed the data into a book he kept always with him, and with the blunt end of the style rubbed out the former notes and rubbed the waxy surfaces smooth, then began again. He dragged up ancient hulks and wrecks of human refuse from gutters, from under the arches of the aqueducts where the cold water dripped upon them, from the ash-tips next to whose heaped hot refuse those without homes kept warm, he asked them,

“Where were the flames when you worked?”

“When did you work?”

“Where did you work?”

“How do you remember?”

“How do you know what year it might have been?”

Clear and crisp the questions might have been, but clear and crisp the answers could not be; not, considering, who was being asked. Much watered wine — cheap, bad, the worst, nonetheless welcome, nonetheless essential — was supplied, gulp by gulp; and much broken bits of bread — also cheap, and, as sometimes, if it was too stale, into the watered wine it went to soften — was supplied, before minds could bethink them and mouths mumble answers.

“What other events happened in such and such a year?”

“Do you recall having heard the number of the year of the Reign?”

“You are quite sure that was the Emperor then?”

“Who was consul?”

“When your master’s works was moved because the flames ‘went sick,’ was there news of war? With whom, war?”

“Heard you anyone speak, those years, you do not remember exactly which years, of prices rising or falling? Which prices?”

Understanding of what he intended there was probably none, it was to none of their immediate advantage to figure what it might be or to guess at it; likely beyond capacity, for that matter. Interest? At first, none. . save for the wine and the small coin and the bread. How did Vergil, how could Vergil know, that they were not merely inventing, filling a vacant mouth with lies in order to fill a vacant belly? Had he begun with them, those, the castoffs, he could not have known. By having begun with those whose interest it was he should know the truth — the magnates — he had therefore somewhat of a list to check against. And. . among those at the bottom. . or as near to the bottom as they could get without getting to the top of the bone-pit. . it was curious to see how indifference of one would sometimes, often, increasingly often, change to interest when hearing what some other outthrown had to say -

“Nuh! Nuh, master! Julius was Emp’ro’ when they move them work to South Gorge. Him’s wrong” — gesturing to another.

And: “War! I say, was war!” was the other’s reaction, he having said nothing at all about war till then, and who ignored his possible error in re the name of the then-emperor. “War in Parth’a, was, ‘en they move them Magnate Muso work, South Gorge!” And his vehemence died off into a cough, a trickle of some inclement ichor oozing from his protruding and pendulous lip, down upon his trembling chin; nor was it wiped away.

Whilst Vergil rapidly scrawled all this, yet a third, who till now had but stared vacantly, moving slowly round and round and gazing only at the refreshments, as though he knew not what substances they might be or what purpose to serve, this yet-a-third would crick back his head and look down his nose from wide-rolled red thick-rimmed eyes in order to add emphasis to what he had just recalled from the fragments of hell that made up his past — ”Feast! ‘Ey gived a feast! T’Big Slave ‘e comed out an’ ‘e gived us each a piece o’ meat!” (He repeated this memory of a phenomenon.) “A why?. . piece o’ meat. . big as. . big as my hand! A why?. . T’Big, ‘e say, master gived a feast wit’ Consul Livio, come from Rome. As we ‘feated t’Parth’ans! Oh, whudda ‘feat we gived ‘em! By ‘Cbatan’! So, yeah, uh. . uh …” The light of his recollection dimming fast, he turned to the stranger who had quickened it. Something else seemed now about to emerge. Vergil waited, marveling much that after — how long? twenty years? twenty-five? — the memory of a dusty battle on a distant frontier should remain in the mind of this human ruin because he had received, of the leftovers from a feast in joy of it, a piece of meat as large as his hand.

And as he waited to hear what else be forthcoming, the remembrancer said, “Master. . ‘as y’ got a nub o’ garlic witcha?”

This modest relish Vergil was obliged to disavow, but gave the yet-a-third his dole, and then scribbled a line or two more in the fragrant wax. Eventually this might emerge as Fires at Magnate Muso’s works diminished, requiring said works to remove to South Gorge; Julius was Emperor: check year of Livio’s consulate with defeat of the Parthians at Ecbatana; and, Fires in South Gorge; and, Muso’s Works — where previously?. . And so on. And so on. And as for those who might not remember the names of monarchs, consuls, wars, defeats, of foes in Asia Magna — or who, as likely, had never known — it was useful to have learned, from some scrap picked up by the dripping waterbridge, some incident that had burned like fire into even the most eroded mind; to be able, thus, to inquire, “Was this before or after Vitolio murdered his wife, his daughter, his steward, and his son?”

Presently Vergil was to take out the carefully prepared translucent sheets and to draw grids great and small upon them, to make his designations, and to make them in the heaviest and darkest of inks, that prepared from scuttlefish, fashioned after the manner of India. And when one sheet was placed upon another, what lay beneath would be (when desired to be) visible even through what lay on top. And so eventually he would have his master map prepared, and painted in sundry colors.

And he would point.

And he would show.

But before that time.

Vergil was pleased to see Iohan return well before the end of the time he had been prepared to wait without worrying. The mare (Vergil was pleased to see her, too, and she returned his pat with a nuzzling that seemed to show that she was pleased as well, had not forgotten him, and — But before he could quite recall what else it had seemed to him that she seemed, he observed her quite laden down with close-woven basketry; even they were stacked upon the saddle; and Iohan had arrived on foot, with a story as well.

“Now, master, certain you suggested that the matter might best be tooken care of by such as hunt truffies, and so it might. Might be tooken care of, that is. But I have learned wisdom from you, and — ”

They were in the yard behind their lodgings; Iohan had swept it clean even before Vergil arrived to look. Who now said, “Flattery is not always wisdom, and I hope you have not learned it from me — ”

The boy merely patted his own curly pate, and said on. “It came to me mind, ser, as truffles are rare, which same reason is one why’m they costly. Truffles are rare, and rarer are the swine as hunts ‘em. And it do follow as rarer yet, the ones as leads such swine on leash. Whereas common swineherds of common swine be. . well. . common. Numerous, as you might say. Therefore.”

Once again, that therefore! But the fellow had reasoned well.

The fellow now carefully spread out a clean and wide cloth of coarse weave on the ground of the yard, opened one of the baskets tied with wisps of straw-grass he must have braided himself and, reaching in a hand, brought out a quantity of loam and leaf mold and broken twigs and shells, which he loosely but carefully emptied. “You have been in the beechwoods, then!” — Vergil.

“Aye, ser master. And” — he gestured to a bale of baskets of a different weave — ”in the chestnut woods as well. And on t’other side of the she-beast be evidence I were in the oaks, too: Where there was mast, I went on master’s business. I hasn’t sense enough to know as there mayn’t be them small creatures in a numerouser quantity, even, in other woods and groves. All as me mind say to me was, if no swine-food on the forest floor, no swineherds, either; and so what sense nor profit for me alone to stoop and squat and pick the fallen twigs up, and leaves and such, in hopes of plucking here a salmandel and there a salmandel…. Hark!” Vergil looked up, listened — nothing unusual. Was Iohan’s hark! like Iohan’s therefore: a usage peculiar to himself? Not quite. “Hark, ser, as what a Sar’cen merchant says to me as I rides upon me way. ‘What has thee there in them baskets, oh son?’ I says, ‘Salmandels, but same is not for sale.’ — He laughs a-scorn, says he, what he wants with sammandal chicks? ‘Sammandal.’ Iohan chuckled at the Saracen’s accent. “And ‘chicks’! He says, what you mayn’t believe, ser, save I tells it you, he says the sammandal (as he calls they) be birds! A four-leg’d bird? So he claim. But he haven’t time to raise they from, as he figure, chicks, the baskets being so small; they need be bigger or their hides ben’t worth the taking for to make sandals as will cross fire. What’s he call such a skin? A bestos. Well. Iohan twisted his face and his brows into an expression of more than mere incredulity, of — almost — concern; reverted to the immense oddity of the Saracen’s notion. “But. . a bird!”

Vergil said, with a smile that slightly acknowledged the antic quality of the idea, “There is a connection, and a fearful one, between them and certain birds — or bird — but it need not concern us now.” And he looked down at the small, small, very small young salamanders, creatures rather resembling lizards in appearance, yet not lizards at all.

Iohan let him look a moment before asking, “Be they of the right sort, ser?”

Vergil assured him that the salamanders were of the right sort. “And of the right size, too. ‘Chicks,’ just so. Of the first year. If they were older and larger, they would not suit. No!” Dim in the daylight, the creatures moved but slowly in the comparative cool of the shadowed yard. “You’ve done well, Iohan. And here’s a silver piece of money for you, too.”

The curly head dipped a bit. “I thank you, ser, you’re very kind. Nor has I forgot a special something for you, neither — I coulda worked a lustrum, full, for Fulgence, nor he’d of give me no present, such — ser. Not but what laboring for him hadn’t had its comic side. But hark!” He drew out a small bell of rustic craftsmanship and rang. Sweet, no one could have called it. An odd gift, still -

“Iohan, I thank you.”

“For when you might want me, ser, as I ben’t near to call: but ring, ser.”