Vergil in Averno

Vergil gravely told him that he would.

And so, night following night, the stench no less than by day, the forges resounding to the hammers’ blows at midnight as at noon, for sundry nights the two went, master and man, from blasted waste to blasted waste; Iohan carrying the baskets, Vergil the rolls and scrolls and a few other items to be used with them. Each part of each waste he had already marked upon a grid-worked chart, and given a number; some were entire squares, others were mere parts thereof, the wastelands not always accommodating themselves to clean geometrical division, but shaped as each section might be, it had its coded equivalent upon the chart. And as they passed along in the semi-lurid gloom, Iohan carefully set down, at Vergil’s word, a single small salamander in each “square”, Vergil marked off each place so “planted” with but a touch of lead upon the gridded chart, and on they went, to do it again. . and again. . and again. . and on and on. . and on…. Sometimes they required the aid of Vergil’s special lamp within its box windowed with lumps of glass like burls (though he had a better way of enhancing light, he chose not, for sundry reasons, to use it, lest, for one, he attract attentions not desired); and sometimes they did not, the light of the natural fires spurting up from far and near often being quite enough.

The wasteland was far from often smooth beneath their feet. At times it was merely uneven, at times there were small holes, other times far from small, gaping and sunken; now and then was encountered such rubble as was left when one works was abandoned, its fire having “gone sick,” died down: timbers too tired or rotten to be moved, iron too rusted for salvage, shreds of rags worn beyond reuse even to test a dye upon. . and other stuff serving only to stumble over, had they not moved cautiously. Nowhere, indeed, did he see any such line as that one said to have been engraved upon a galley slave’s oar washed ashore somewhere in Ultima Thule or akin far-off place beyond ken, Oft was I wearied when I worked at thee, though the thought came to him that such would not be amiss here.

Toward the waning hours of each night so passed and spent, they moved their own wearied bodies to some high place or hill, whence they might spy down upon the wastes. For the most parts all was dark and dim. Sometimes they saw a glowing light, sometimes they saw one argent-pale. Iohan had known the story of the salamander, who had not? Could Iohan have been trusted to select only those in their first year? Possibly not. Therefore Vergil had counseled him — and him, to counsel others: those forest herdsmen of swine — to select, and to select only, the salamanders no bigger than his, Iohan’s, index finger. The young man was stalwart, but he had not reached his full growth yet at all (almost he seemed to be growing from day to day, to have grown a bit, perceptibly, during his absence); who could know, how could Vergil have known, how large the swineherds’ hands might be, or how long their fingers? Suppose any of them to be older or larger, either way to have fingers longer than Iohan’s? If any of them should have index fingers longer than the lad’s, say, as long as Iohan’s next finger, the so-called “digit of infamy,” well, it would still not be too long. Salamanders of such a size would still be within the proper length. So Vergil mused.

For the most part, there below, all was as dark or as dim as when they had walked across those parts, stooping, marking. But as with tired eyes they peered, in other parts, not so. Now and then Iohan gave his master a slight tap on arm or shoulder; pointed. There, then, where he gestured, would be seen some spot of light, like that of a glowworm, though less intermittent, or not at all. Sometimes they saw one golden-bright, sometimes they saw one argent-pale. Sometimes a mere single spot, and this, Vergil knew, was that of a single small salamander that had sought and found some nearby bit of warmth, signaling by its now-glowing presence some fire beneath. This he would mark in the (approximate, if not better) proper space upon the grid-worked chart. This he did regardless. Many a pickle makes a mickle. But what gave him (and Iohan) the greater satisfaction was when a number of such fiery spots was seen, sometimes moving slowly, sometimes swiftly, sometimes appearing, as ‘twere, one glowing mass of fire. . yet different, clean and clear different, from the greater blazes whence were shooting forth the subterranean fires that constituted the real riches of the Very Rich City. . or, even, merely, smoldering. For such sights meant that more than a few small salamanders had found out where a greater heat lay beneath the surface, though that heat be nowhere ordinarily observed above.

And this place, too, was marked. By night, with a certain sign in dark lead. By day, when day came, refreshed with paint of bright-red minium.

Sometimes, of course, as they had known would happen, the salamanders merely found their ways (naturally, but now, to Vergil, uselessly) to some of those many fires already visible and known and worked, and there would crawl quite fast into the glowing, roaring heart of such, there themselves to glow the selfsame fire color as the flames themselves; though from above unseen.

As for others, whenas either Iohan or Vergil or both came the following day to check, it happened more than once he or they found a trail as though left by some influorescent slug or snail; and would trace and follow, only to see the shining line disappear into the tiniest of tiny holes or the slimmest of cracks or fissures. Sometimes their feeling the ground thereat was rewarded with a feeling of fire or heat: a seal upon the chart, of a different sort than the other marks. Sometimes, of course, the temperature of the ground round about such cracks told them nothing to the touch. But the trail was there, the trail of the salamander, that creature born for fire as the frog is born for water. And they would know that some sense stronger by far than any sense of man had informed the salamander, had, as it were, beckoned it, had tempted and drawn it thither and in and down: and that, though they saw this not, they would know that somewhere in caverns below, in fires so far beneath and below the surface that the surface told no man aught, in the flaming depths of hell that lay beneath Averno those creatures reveled, awaiting their own transformation into fire and flame. These deepest places they had sought as certain fish seek the deepest pools.

But it was of the utmost importance that the salamanders being used were no older than their first year, for at that age, though their inclination toward the fire was fully developed, it was an inclination that must result in every one of them being gradually subsumed into the fire; within much less than one year would each atom of flesh be replaced by an atom of fire, and so, atom by atom, these fingerlings would, glowing, vanish into fire and flame. A salamander of the third year, however, though still provided with the same instinct, would have already passed a climacteric, visible to the eye (this climacteric) chiefly only as to the salamander’s size; prior to that the salamander “chick” would be to the true salamander as the tadpole to the true frog; only after that time would it be a true salamander: And the salamander, the true salamander, its skin by now proof against the searing flames, its inner heat transformed, contrarities clean reversed, sympathies changed into antipathies — the salamander thus transformed, in contrarity to all folk belief would not start a fire; it would by its mere presence, and weight for weight, atom for atom, put the fire out. And all this he had learned in Sidon, where he had studied fire.

And now and again on such nights, was the wind in the right quarter, or was the night quieter than most, or were they in some sound-pocket, kith to an echo chamber. . or whatever and why-ever. . they might hear the tambours beat and the cymbals clash and such other sounds and cries betimes they might hear as told them that Cadmus the King, Mad Cadmus, King of Averno and King of Fools, still danced in the mule market -

— and sometimes they would learn, by the direction of the cries and sounds of song and music, that not there alone did he dance. Not only there. At all.

At length:

Another look Vergil took at the master map. All was in order as it had been when last he looked not a second or so before; why had he so suddenly looked again that he could feel his head snap? What had he so suddenly seen, which he had either not seen before, or had not noticed, or -

There was Averno, there Baiae, there the Portus Julius, Cape Misenum, the Bay, down there Naples, Cumae not far off, off there the Isle of Goats, over here …

He heard that voice now among all voices men could ever hear, echoing as from a thousand chambers forth, and, echo ceasing as swift as if it had never been, voice speaking in that awful and awesome crooning that surely no man durst stand to listen to, save his heart was at least at that moment clean; he saw the words limned upon the map: Cumae…. How had he dared not have thought to visit her before daring to think, even, of coming here? Every tiniest hair he felt distinctly rise upon his flesh, large parts and small. Had they noticed, the magnates, looking at him there, whilst from every side the hammers smote the white-hot iron upon the hundred and the thousand anvils?. . whilst he stood here, here in this sullen mockery of a council chamber, the absurd and ugly frescoes peeling from the sullen walls?

“Have you — I suppose you have — must have — have you? The Sibyl. . consulted? You have, you, of course you have.” Did they see his lips a-tremble? Hear his voice quivering? “… consulted the Cumaean Sibyl?” One who had presented her prophetic Books to Tarquin the Proud when he had been king above the Senate and the People of Rome. He who had refused to pay her price. As if he had been haggling over the cost of a lard-sow. She who had without one complaint consigned all but one of the Books into her fire. He who had presently asked her present price. She who had told him what she had done and had told him that the price was for the one sole remaining Book what it had been for all the Books. He who had started from his chair so it fell crashing back, and in utmost haste pushed forth to pay it.

Vergil asked, the magnates answered. “Oh yes. Of course. This was almost the first thing.” Almost their voices seemed to grumble, How dare thee ask, there in the dingy hall on whose walls the dingy devils of Etruscany leered at malefactors, beaks like those of raptor-birds, and lunged and threatened with the tines of hay-forks. What artist had done this? Was he free or captive? What did it matter?

How the hot and sulfur-tainted air parched his tongue and dried his mouth. With his teeth he scraped spittle enough to swallow, and swallowed that he might ask another question. Before he could, however, one magnate fixed him with a low and lingering look. “She was not cheap,” said that one. With a lowering look, and one which accused.

“Ah. And. . Magnate. . what said the Sibyl …?”

The magnate now looked at him again. All the magnates looked up. Scribes and secretaries looked up, the scribes from their scrivening, the secretaries from their secrets — all looked at him. A pause.

He ventured, “What …” He fell silent.

Then, “What said the Sibyl? You ask us, Master, what the Sibyl said? What …” Some faced some others, asked among themselves. “He asks? He asks what the Sibyl said….” They shook their heavy heads, as though in bepuzzlement, befuddlement; they rumbled a bit together, more. Then they gestured one to be their spokesman, who half-arose, sat down. His face and gurgling voice seemed more to defend than accuse.

“Did indeed Master Vergil ask. . You ask us, Master: ‘What did the Sibyl say?’ ”

“Yes.”

The gurgling voice seemed some troubled, but it answered, right then.

“Why, Master, she said to ask you.”

He heard that voice among all voices, then, as though echoing from a thousand chambers forth. Dux, Dominus, Magister, Magus.

The litter of the Legate Imperial had carried Vergil that time to the latter’s chambers; afterward it had carried him back. Now and then, not often, some magnate or other had lent him another, other, litter, litters; it had not seemed to him that they had done so ungrudgingly; furthermore, their litters smelled evil. There were times, places, he had needs go afoot. But now this day he remembered that there was the mare; he had of course never taken her to the fire-fields or slag-heaps or to any of the smoky or the stinking-steamy works; scarcely had he remembered her than he looked out his window and saw horse and horse-boy coming out into the street below.

Iohan. Mostly, as they had walked and worked together, as they visited not the wastes alone but the manufacturies, the boy had been silent, perhaps in awe, perhaps from fear. Now and then he had made some comments, some few. Once, for instance: “They be clever, mighty things, master, these arts of fire and metal. Canny things, they be.”

Absently, yet with some touch of playful scorn, Vergil had asked if the boy might like to stay and study them. There. The young face, which had lit up for a moment, sank into some show of contempt not the least bit playful. “ ‘Study them’? Mayhap, master. That might be, ser. But. . ser. . here? Were I lingered here, ‘twould be my death I’d study.”

Vergil had said nothing more of that. Now he came down, greeted his servant, looked at the mare. Still, she looked familiar — had he ever mounted her before her hiring? She looked, also, in good fettle. “They care for her well, then, boy?”

The boy flung his head back, looked at his employer eyes-to-eyes, though the eyes of one of them looked up and the other’s eyes looked down. “ ‘They’? Ser, I cares for her. ‘Well’? Didn’t I feed her, she’d go ill-fed. Didn’t I sleep in her stall, like that they’d cut her tail off to sell the hairs; belike worse they’d do to her. . though she’s a canny beast, master, ser. Seems this morning she wants to be the better for a ride about, and thus, ser, I have taked the liberty. For perhaps you, too, ser. Therefore.”

Iohan’s therefore included a good deal more than a rhetor might allow. But it was full understood. He had laced his fingers and was about to bend and help Vergil mount when suddenly he stopped. He did say nothing, but his eyes moved, and Vergil’s followed their direction. It was Cadmus they saw, and this the second day in a row that Vergil had seen him. Whether the King of Fools still danced in the muddy market or hung bright tapetties upon the black walls or flung garlands round the necks of black mules, Vergil had lately neither heard nor inquired. But yesterday he had seen him close.

Yesterday he had seen him close. The madman had walked along heavily, looking neither up nor down; his madness lay well-heavy upon him and in this burden there was no room for gaiety and abandon. His lips had moved and muttered, but the tone of voice was thick, and his very color was not as it had been before; there were no roses in his cheeks, no frenzy, fine or otherwise, played round about his eyes and mouth; but his face was the color of slate, and the instant thought in Vergil’s mind had been, This man looks as though he were already dead….

But today, today again came Cadmus, walking close next to Vergil. This was yet another Cadmus: swift his speech, pale his lips and face, but not, today, corpse-pale; the words came forth jerkily. “What will he do, what will he do, what will he — ”

Vergil had not thought to interrupt him, for to interrupt a madman was notoriously as dangerous as to interrupt a sleepwalker; no such information burdened the mind of Iohan. “What will who do, me sire?” asked he.

And Cadmus answered, without anger, without surprise, “He whose life I am obliged to live.” The stop at the end of this was the only full stop in all his speech; instantly after it he resumed his “What will he do?” and this changed to “What will be done, what will be done, what, what, what?” And then he passed out of their hearing and, rounding a corner, out of their seeing as well.

Iohan gave his head a quick shake. His hands had stayed clasped. He said, “Be pleased to mount up, ser, for if we tarry, one of them local brutes will fling an insult at or a turd at me, and I shall be obliged to fight him, ser.”

Vergil placed his ankle in the clasped hands and mounted. The mare gave what seemed to be a gratified sigh, but Vergil’s mind was not on this. “Slavery at the forge does not produce good manners,” he said. And rode.

Iohan seemed moody. “Ah, ser, the freedmen here are worse than the slaves. . and the citizens, worse than the freedmen.”

As if to prove a point, by and by someone rough-hailed them from a small upper window. Vergil did not know the house, but he knew the face; rough-skinned, warty, pop-eyed though it was, still it brought a rush of thoughts far from ugly with it; still. . “Magnate Rano,” Vergil said politely. “If you are well — ”

But Magnate Rano did not seem to desire the complimentary salutation completed; perhaps, in fact, he never had heard it completed. It was in fact not impossible (Vergil thought) that the man had never before even heard it begun. “Come up!” said Magnate Rano. His head withdrew, an order was barked, was heard repeated by a second voice, by and by the small door in the large gate opened. A surly servant appeared, gestured, said sourly, “In!” He cleared his throat, pursed his lips, seemed about to spit. Did not. Iohan unclenched his fists.

But, Vergil not dismounting, the doorkeeper, mantling his annoyance very little, repeated, “In! In!”

“Open the gates.” — Vergil.

The doorkeeper, now more astonished than sullen, and realizing that the visitor intended to ride in, exclaimed, “Nuh! Nuh! In! Down!”

Perhaps it was the rough tones of Rano (different, certainly, from his previous manner when in his own home), perhaps the presumption of yet another troll-thrall, perhaps fatigue exhibiting itself in the form of pride, perhaps all of these and more of these than he could have then and there said in words or even formed in thoughts; whatever: Vergil turned to Iohan (who had clenched his fists again, perhaps unwise, but he was still quite young), said, “As you are the servant of a wizard, you may wish to observe how one turns a man into a toad.” And lightly he struck against his leg the light stick he carried; it was not the willow wand of the Order, but perhaps the inhospitable Janus did not know that. For a second or so the man stared at the slight rod as though curious why anyone should think he feared its sting; then, as Vergil began simultaneously to make an odd sound in his chest or throat and to cause the stick to make little jumps, the doorkeeper’s eyes bulged, his mouth gaped and showed its filthy teeth; the odd sound became audible as a low, slow croaking: the man vanished.

In an instant the bolts were heard grating, and then, first one side, then the other, of the great iron-bound gates were swung open. The doorkeeper bowed so low that not alone his scurfy scalp but his scabby neck was displayed.

“You are to treat my servant well,” said Vergil, riding into the courtyard. “And my horse.”

Bows, grunts, groans.

Vergil dismounted.

A servant of quite a different sort was there to guide him to the upper story; grave, silent, composed: a Greek perhaps, or Syrian. Any nostalgia for the groves of Arcadia or the rivers of Damascus that wrenched his heart (and how could it not?) his face well concealed. This house was not Rano’s, but besides Rano there were gathered there most of the magnates Vergil had met before, and some whom he had not. Though the day was still young, preparations for what elsewhere would have been an evening’s entertainment had been made. On the side tables were set out such eatables as roasted goat-lung, boiled owls’ eggs, bitter almonds, and a huge cabbage cut in slices; also parsley and watercress: sure signs that an occasion of serious bibbling lay ahead. There were also crowns of ivy, but though meant for the same purpose, namely the avoidance of drunkenness, they were meant to be worn and not eaten. Broad gestures invited the visitor to take part, some of the gestures so broad as to indicate that participation had begun without him. Vergil set a garland on his head and he nibbled, and, for a while, said nothing.

“My lord seems pensive,” said someone strange to him, perhaps one of the outsiders who had inherited a business in Averno and returned now and then to show he was still liable to return now and then, in hopes of minimizing the inevitable peculation for which prolonged absence from business gives such excellent opportunity to those who remain present at the business scene. A flaccid fellow, this, with sense enough to be dressed neither negligently nor ostentatiously; but this was perhaps due to his valet, and his valet could not provide him with sense in conversation. . or, for that matter, much in anything else.

“Perhaps my lord is thinking of this important matter now before us.” The immediate matter now before them consisted of an enormous quantity of wine, so spiced and honeyed and fruited as to lead one to suspect the quality of the vintages whose tastes were thus disguised. “Great heat, what we might term, I ask my lord’s opinion, intense heat? Eh — not only produces great effects when produced on the surface, but performs very wonderful transformations among things below the surface, as we may see in De Natura Fossilium … in De Natura Fossilium we may see that — but surely my lord will know of all this, of course, being a Consul of Philosophy, as I do perceive.”

Vergil thought it likely that the man perceived very little, but instead he said, “Hardly. No. Nor am I to be honored as ‘lord’ ” — some old echo in this thought here; but he did not pause. “Neither am I nor was I ever a Consul in Philosophy; I was a student and sat at the feet of more than one. But I am not one.” The fellow heard him out politely. But he was clearly dubious about the disclaimer; it may be that he was dubious about anyone’s disclaiming an honor, for it was less than dubious that he would disclaim any himself. Somewhere he had picked up the title of De Natura Fossilium, and the being able to mention it and the scrap or two of something contained in it was for him a merchandise or coinage that would never wear out. A fortunate man (thought Vergil), to have so little and to be so rich.

They were saved by Lars Melanchthus from any further need to discuss any sentence in De Natura Fossilium. Lars Melanchthus shouted, “Well, you have eat enough salad and such now, Wizard, needn’t fear getting slop-slop; so, now, Wizard, drink!” Vergil did usually not require shouts in order to drink, the drink need not be “the best Falernian,” but this time it might have been that without the shout he would have done without the drink. Still, the shout had come. A single word came to his mind, and said more than a volume of elaborate Stoic philosophy. Therefore. One of the butlers came forward and dispensed for Vergil, who bowed, poured his libation-drops, and sipped. The wine was, alas, just as he feared. But dally as he would, he was from time to time summoned to drink more. The magnates needed no shouts to urge themselves on. Again Melanchthus called out, wiping his oozy chin. “We were sending to send for you, Wizard, yes! Yes! Only, being wizard, you knew, ha-ho!”

Ha-ho, indeed, thought Vergil. What he knew was that there was enough strong spice and crushed fig in this ghastly mixture, this hideous hippocras, to physic a horse sicker than Hermus had been. Perhaps if he drank enough of it, it might numb his taste. . or distaste. So. . therefore. . he did drink more. In any civilized city the leading men would regard drunkenness with abhorrence; hence the customary precautions against it. But here, here the alexipharmic salad herbs, the roasted goat-lung, the boiled owls’ eggs, the ivy wreaths, and all of that was evidently a mere show: They did not wish to use these to prevent becoming drunk, they were determined to become drunk in spite of having used them. A mere show. As was so much in Averno. Ah, well. . His mind thought and sought another saw or wise-word or. . Ah. When in Averno …

When in Averno, what? This time the arriving of the answer was interrupted, for when one of the servants stumbled slightly and spilled somewhat more than a few libation-drops upon the costly robe of Grobi, Grobi, without even rising, struck the cupbearer such a blow below the navel that, with one sick shriek, he fell, doubling up, and crashed to the floor, where he lay, still writhing, and bleeding among the shattered shards of the mixing bowl which his fall had brought crashing down with him. Much laughter among the magnates. Grobi next performed an action closely similar to one that Vergil had already seen locally performed before: Hoisting his robe, he urinated. . not, to be sure, directly onto the floor, but onto the man who lay there. Immense laughter among the magnates.

And so the rank ritual continued. There being neither water-clock nor sandglass in sight, Vergil did not know how long it had continued, when, by the arrival of steaming goblets which, from their vile odor, did not contain hot wine however bad, he was given notice that the first stage of the gathering was coming to a close. The goblets held that horrid black brew, broth of Sparta, made of pigs’ bones, vinegar, sows’ wombs, and salt; by some account a general staple of that ever-dangerous kingdom; by other accounts merely the sole sustenance provided for the Spartan striplings during their long term of semi-secluded training. Here in Averno it was regarded as a cure for the drunkenness against which the cabbage, parsley, cress, and so on and on had been no prophylactic at all, nor even the eggs of owls, sacred to Athenian Minerva who had ever from ancient times been the adversary of Asian Dionysus and thus of all drunkenness.

“ ‘Twould have been better to have cooked the salad in the soup,” croaked Vergil. The magnates bellowed loudly at this, then — many of them — vomited into the broad basins held for them by the servants, gulped more of the black hell-broth — and on that went. And on. And on.

By and by the next stage of the session was reached. And even by the standards of stinking Averno, by that time the chamber stank.

The same silent Levantine (if Levantine he was) who had shown Vergil up to the chamber on the second story materialized with a miraculously clean table, and -

— and the case containing Vergil’s carefully made maps. Who now asked, demanded, “How came those here, Magnates?” For, certainly, he had not brought them with him.

There were a few grunts of “Uhl” of surprise, not. . it seemed. . of surprise that the maps were there as that he should ask how they came to be there. One who spoke better Latin than the others took it upon himself to answer. “You made them, Master Wizard, for us. Not so? It will be that we have bought, and so. . and so we have brought.” The still-silent Greek or Syrian, or be he whatever he was (he was or had been, surely, a slave: that was the substance. . and the essence. . of his condition), carefully removed the maps from the cylindrical case of cow’s leather; set them on the table. The man was as one who makes motions behind a sheet at a shadow-play, whilst the dialogue is pronounced by others. On the side.

There was a very curious locution in the phrase It will be that we have bought, one that the grammarians likely could not approve (for one thing, it was not found in the books of Homer or the speeches of Cato); but, no possible model for good common usage or rhetoric though it was, it was as full of reminder as an egg was of meat. By the magnates’ having commissioned the work, the work was theirs to command and to bring and fetch — rather, to have it brought and to have it fetched — but they had not yet paid for it! — and should they, for any reason, eventually decide not to pay for it, what was he to do? — Though they had used it as though they had paid for it — what was he to do? No lawyer back in the small port where he was still so new in both residence and practice would seriously engage a suit against the Very Rich City, though, to be sure, some one or two or three might not object to mulcting him for out-of-pocket expenses. . at the least. . and if he were to seek more serious counsel in, say, Naples, why, what could they advise him there save to proceed to Rome and try to interest one of the great jurisconsults at Apollo’s Court. No. He bowed, a very slight bow, one of civil acknowledgment, as though having received a civil reply. And he said nothing.

Most of the maps were transparencies: very difficult to prepare. Some were on membrane, some on parchment scraped very thin, a devilishly hard thing to achieve the right degree of thinness and yet make no hole. He had, as an experiment, made one on that cloth — translucent, pale, and strong — purchased in the foreign shop. And some few others were on that new and wonderful kind of papyrus which, made all in one piece and sheet, unlike the cross-strips of common papyrus that were glued and pressed together, offered one single complete flat surface every single part of which might be writ upon; this had come from some source unknown, far along the Great Silk Road. It was not as costly as silk but it was to Vergil’s mind incomparably more utile.

“And so now, Master Wizard. Please show. Explain. Advise.”

From somewhere in the gathering came a sole grumble. “What need? Hecatombs.” And, again, that slower, grumbling repetition of “Hec-a-tombs …”

With the belief that all the problems of the shifting, waning natural fires of Averno might be solved by sacrificing oxen in hundreds to Demogorgon, Vergil had no desire to argue. Religion could be sometimes, not often, was, a touchy subject. What else should he do now? Invite the magnates to leave their chairs or couches and come gather round the table? Had there been but a few, this is exactly what he would have done. But there were too many. And then. . too. . he felt, somewhat. . well, truthfully. . more than somewhat. . that he had been disparaged. They looked upon him, it seemed, as some mere hawker of trifles, one whose peddler’s pack might be removed from his quarters and glanced over in their own, at their leisure and their pleasure. Again he asked himself, was it for this that he had made that long, long and more than circuitous journey “from Sevilla to Averno”? Well. Let them see who else and what else he was and might be. And what he could do.

A long way from Sevilla to Averno; yes it was. And it was a long race they had run on that one certain day there, in the Second Secret School. There was no business of: present your thesis, declaim your thesis, defend your thesis, pay your fee, receive your gold ring, your hood, and all the rest of that. Vergil had done that, of course, done all of that. Later. Elsewhere. Hence, Master Vergil.

But not in Sevilla. In Sevilla, on that one certain day, they had done none of that.

Out had come the duumvirs of the School: Calimicho, the gray, the gaunt, the grim; and Putto, the obscenely fat. With voices so in unison that absolutely what was heard was in effect one voice, they two then had called, in ringing tones (literally, the tones had rung, as though two bells, one bass and one treble, had sounded with insistent, consistent precision), “Leave that which you are now doing, and leave it undone. There comes now the last lesson, now, now, now” (bell, bell, bell); “the final test, the last ordeal, and then the time of payment. You are to run now the Petrine Race.” Half, the students shuddered; half, they cast eyes about to see whence, if, they might escape, knowing every one of them at once that escape there could be none: either victory or. . not death. Certainly not. Not altogether, death. (What, they knew not. Not at all.) Calimicho flexed his rope-wire limbs; who, the gods! could hope to outrun Calimicho? Putto took a few ponderous waddling-quaking steps to one side, as though the better to position himself to see the race from vantage best, Calimicho made an odd gesture; sun-rays appeared.

“Take ten steps backward….” The students did. “At the count of four: Turn. Run. One.

“Two.”

Every eye was on Calimicho.

“Three.”

Calimicho was not there.

“Four. Turn. Run.”

It is said that inside every fat man there is a thin man, struggling to get out. Vergil had heard it said a hundred times. Suddenly he had known that, in this at least one case, it was no mere saying. Between the word Four and the word Turn, Putto had split open. That monstrous carapace of folds and fat simply fell, asunder, on the pitted floor: there stood for that one second’s fraction before their horrified eyes someone young and slim and strong and naked, oiled and dusted red as any athlete “waiting for the trumpet beneath the portico.” Who gave — once — that same inhuman scream that Vergil had heard but once before. What came instantly next was not the trumpet but the word Turn: They needed it not, they would have turned, so total was their terror, had no word come, and — Run …? Probably none of them could afterward have said if or not he had actually heard that command pronounced; of course they had run.

Ahead of them at the far end of that suddenly sunlit hall there stood Calimicho, gray and gaunt and grim. Toward him they ran, not knowing for certain sure what he would do to any of them when they reached him, but pausing in no way to wonder, they, racing, ran.

And the runner, slim, who had all this while been embodied inside of Putto — ah, how fat! and now one knew why! — this runner, racing, ran behind them.

Ran, that is, behind all but one of them.

Somehow, Vergil himself knew then not how, by what twist of his body and his mind and the light and. . or …

Vergil ran behind the one who ran who had been hidden, all this while, inside of Putto, the obscenely fat.

Vergil’s mind and matter were all intent against some sudden stop and turnabout on this runner’s part, he did not concentrate at all on what the other students were doing: who was first, who neck-and-neck, who this or who that; but half-dimly he did note one who was running quite a number ahead of last, a Thracian, thick and swart and strong; they had not called him by his half-forgotten name, but “Thrax” they had called him; it befell that Thrax made the dread mistake as Orpheus and one other: Thrax turned and looked behind. Thrax stumbled. Thrax did not fall, but Thrax had lost his place. Calimicho stepped forward as Thrax raced frantic across the slanting sunlights on the pitted floor, Calimicho snarled a single word, Calimicho stamped down his foot as one would upon a snake but it was no snake down upon which came his stamping tread, it was on Thrax’s shadow. Thrax yet ran hard panting one more second fore, the shadow parted from his frantic feet with a sound so strange and horrid Vergil hoped ne’er to hear it ever again or more.

A frightful sound.

But not so frightful, was it —? More frightful, was it —? the frightful shriek of Thrax, which he uttered even before he knew the cause of this swift-sudden and never-felt-before, never-to-be-free-from more, unknown and dreadful pain. Thrax stumbled again. Calimicho seized the severed shadow up from where it lay flopping and writhing on the floor; Calimicho, by some trick no wrestler Vergil had ever seen do, Calimicho threw the shadow up and caught the nape of it between his teeth: ah, Calimicho’s most frightful grin! And, holding it thus secure between his clenching teeth, he turned and twisted and tied it fast. Then he folded it, still asquirm, still flapping, and he placed it in his sack. And tied one knot with his thong of human skin (it had a tuft of human hair upon each end of it).

All knew, ah! that sack of gaunt Calimicho’s! Many a thing they had seen go into it, but not one had they ever seen go out.

By now even Thrax knew what had happened.

By now the nameless runner had slacked his pace, the race was done, he allowed himself a glance at Vergil as he, the unnamed runner, cantered on at an angle before finally coming to a stop. The dust was red upon his oiled and sweaty limbs, odd blue-green was the eye with which he gave Vergil a single glance. Thrax began again — for he had for one second ceased, and gasped, and began again to scream. He flung himself upon the pitted floor a-front of Calimicho, his back heaving; repeatedly he raised his head and as he gibbered and drooled repeatedly he bowed it down again and banged it before Calimicho; soon, the gibbering became words: “Ruler, Augur, Satrap, Lord. . my shadow. . shadow. . shadow …”

“It is done!” said Calimicho. He did not address Thrax. To the other students he said It is done. He flung up an arm and made an odd gesture, flinging up and forward, outward, the fingers that had been clenched. The light bedimmed. “The fee is paid. The course is finished. Go, go. Do not tarry: go.”

Thus it was. It was (thought Vergil) the entire cost and charge of six-and-sixty students — teaching and materials and lodging, food, and all, for more than twelve months and several: paid, paid in full with one single captive shadow!

And still Thrax groveled and still he wept and begged. “Basil. Turan. Magus. Rex. . my shadow. . shadow. . shadow …” He beat his head upon the floor and flung his head from side to side; his blood and snot and slaver sprayed the other students, all.

Calimicho gave one faint grin. Then he yawned. Then there stepped forward another student, a Northish one, who had early boasted (once) that his father was an earl. “Warlock,” said he, “this is not just. It was not Thrax who ran up last. It was” — his glance met Vergil’s, eyes to eyes, the Northishman’s mouth closed, opened — ”another,” said he.

Calimicho at leisure finished his yawn. Then he said, and, ah! how matter-of-factly, “It’s not a matter of who runs first or who runs last. It’s merely a matter of who gets caught.” He teetered a bit on his toes. Very quietly he said, “Begone. All.”

As Vergil passed, in his turn, down along the long, long corridors, he thought much of Thrax, and, less, of Thrax’s shadow. Never more might Thrax dare venture out on any sunlit day, save at noon, when no man casts a shadow: that therefore fearsome, fearful hour of terror sacred to Great Pan. (As for those who said, “Great Pan is dead,” had they never witnessed panic?) Thrax must henceforth even fear a moonlit night, and an even moonless one if lamps and torches might betray him. Thrax might indeed skulk, hide, dart swiftly and in pain from one dark place to another, sidling along dim walls and into dimmer corners. He might. He might try. To what avail? The man without a shadow was like a man with leprosy, save he needed neither cloak nor bell. No.

There was but one thing (Vergil realized) that Thrax could really do. He could stop on at the Second Secret School, and do the bidding of its principals. In all things. In all He might there and thus at least hope someday to get his shadow back. Or to get, perhaps. . what dread perhaps!. . another’s. And as to what might perhaps be done with Thrax’s shadow -

And Thrax’s blood and snot and slaver not yet dry -

At this point in Vergil’s thoughts he found that he had reached the beadle’s lodge. There was a vat of water, hot, and a towel. The beadle gazed at him, gazed away, as bored as he had seen him ne’er before and ne’er would see him more; and cared full not. Said the beadle, “Wash.”

Tact was wasted in Averno.

With a sweep of his arm Vergil dashed clear of everything the table nearest to him. There was more than one grunt of “uh!” But not one single one of “nuh!” And the Magnate Borsa gave another one of his enormous eructations, but as no words followed, it indicated, probably, slight surprise rather than even slight irritation. Vergil next appropriated from an adjacent table a bottle, one of the few glass vessels in the room; long-necked, round-bellied, new enough to be not even slightly iridescent; and he set it down so that a beam of sunlight passed through it, to be reflected, in refraction, on the opposite wall: a small circle. Not enough. Not by far enough.

Beams of sunlight were not so abundant there in crag-girt Averno as elsewhere on and near the Parthenopean Coast; Vergil, with an odd, quick gesture, gathered together what there were of them. The rest of the room grew darker. (“Uh!. . Uh!. . Uh!”) Into the glass vessel he poured water. . more. . a little bit more. . he wished it could have been from some special spring but there was not time for any of that. “Hold up the map marked Alpha,” he said, and snapped his fingers. It was not, perhaps, so very remarkable that the slave could read the leading letter of the Greek characters; what was rather remarkable was that he held the map up, not next to his body, that is, not in front of it, as he could hardly have been blamed for doing: he held it up, but away, to his right side, one arm quite above it and the other quite beneath it. This man knows what I mean to do! thought Vergil. But he had little time for the thought.

The small, dim, irregular circle of light on the wall now became larger, brighter, more regular, and rectangular. This produced from the magnates merely a few listless grunts. . from one, a quite audible yawn.

Vergil’s hand went to his pouch, came out with something that glittered and glimmered. It had come from a long way off, where, as sang Mimnermus,

There dwells AEtes in the farthest

east Upon the banks of Ocean Stream

here the rays of the sun are stored

In a golden chamber

In that far-distant land whence the

Sun doth rise …

This he thrust into the neck of the glass bottle. It did not fit; he clasped his hands roundabout, brought his lips close, murmured a moment, then turned the container on its side; a tendency to roll he quickly checked by sliding slices of cabbage partly underneath it to right and left. Then, there on the wall (fortunately it was a wall that contained no painting, though evidently preparations for one had once begun, for there was a whitened area surrounded by a border of Attic fret) — there, on the wall, contained within the border, there appeared, quite bright, and quite distinct, something that produced from the audience not a single, single, sound, not even “uh!” For a long moment Vergil thought that they were overpowered by what they saw. In another instant he realized that they had no notion at all of what they were seeing, for they had never seen anything of its sort before, not in any form at all. Most people, for that matter, had not.

“This,” he said, speaking somewhat slowly, “is what is called a map….” A grunt or two, or three. Then again silence.

“This is what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops, if …” His voice trailed off; from the audience had come a “nuh!” part-puzzled, part emphatic. The might had made no impression; in truth, what was displayed on the wall, the light magnified, reflected, refracted, expanded and projected along the long neck of the glass bottle and its stopper and passed through the transparent charts onto the whitened wall-space, was not “what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops.” Not without the automatic exercise of an imagination already enriched by a knowledge of, and experience with, maps or charts. Absorbed in the tasks of, first, preparing the diagrams, and, secondly, now, illuminating them upon the wall surface, Vergil had neglected, had forgotten, that neither such knowledge nor such experience was common enough to be taken for granted. Should he now try to explain? Begin to try to explain?

Almost without considering, he said, “Hippocrates, who reminds us that waters, airs, and places have their special powers, also reminds us, in his Aphorisms, that ‘Life is short, and art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and — ’ ”

But many mutters, much mumbling, and a general restiveness all informed him that quotations from learned sources, however apposite, were not what were now required. There was not time, and so he had perforce to use an easier way.

Slowly, but not so slowly as to lose the audience’s attention, the lines and marks and spots, circles, squares, triangles, grids began to change. . blur. . melt. . shift. . take shape. . shapes….

“There is on the wall a picture!” someone suddenly cried, high-voiced.

The magnates, as with one sudden motion, moved forward, stirred, gave a shuddering, muttering sigh. And one of them, and well did Vergil know which one of them, said, “See! He is a wizard!” It was not that there was, now, suddenly, a picture on the wall where a moment ago there had not been one; not this, alone. It was not that it was, now really was “what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops”; not this, alone. It was not even that the smokes rose and the fires flared (as those in common pictures did not); not this, alone. It was something else and more, something for which they, the great magnates of Averno, the city Very Rich, not in conception nor vocabulary very rich at all, had no word, for they had no conception of it: It was that the picture, with its moving smokes and flaring fires, was not drawn — if in fact they thought of it as being “drawn” — in the two dimensions of length and breadth alone. They were looking at something that had depth as well. It was as though someone or something had suddenly transported them in one body to the top of one hill, and showed them what might be seen, lying there below. As though they, feeling chairs and couches beneath them, were somehow somewhere else in a dark night. . and, looking down, saw the familiar city, Very Rich, which they so much controlled, there beneath them in what passed in Averno for brightest day.

Some of them groaned, as though, being aboard a storm-shaken ship, they felt not so much the oft-jested-of nausea but that grim seasick vertigo that may so painfully affect every atom of the body. One kept asking, in a tone both sharp and high, “What? What? What?” Others moaned. And one sole magnate, Vergil did not bother trying to discover which one (neither, it seemed, did any other one), without one spoken sound, fell with a massively heavy thud to the floor.

But the servant, the slave, he who held the map that was marked Alpha, scarcely moved a sinew.

“… and somewhat to the right of the upper left corner,” Vergil said, feeling rather like a docent in an art school, “is what was called the Old Works….”

This had an immediate and calming effect upon the magnates; a picture, suddenly visible upon a blank wall, parts of which moved, and in three dimensions, was something for which unfamiliar was a weak description. But — the Old Works? — they had all heard of the Old Works, this was something with which minds could grapple. “Torto! Torto! He was there — Torto, he been there, when they was working the Old Works! Not so, Torto Magnate?”

And a voice, still deep, but with a trace of quaver, said, as though coming awake with a start, “Uh! Yuh! The Old Works …” And indeed, somewhat to the right of the upper left corner, a part of the picture now sprang into detail. It was disproportionate to the picture as a whole, but no one minded that, perspective was not one of the arts of Averno (scarcely was it one of the arts anywhere else, largely it had yet to be moved from the mage’s elaboratory to the artist’s studio and surface). And in this new and moving image one saw men at work, toiling, sweating, mixing the ore with the charcoal on the open-hearth bloomery in one place, raking the molten mass in another; elsewhere the smith holding the crude ingot with his tongs and turning it, white-hot, as the striker smote it with his hammer, not pausing to brush off the sparks that flared briefly in the thickets of their shaggy breasts…. All this. And more.

Vergil had never seen the Old Works, abandoned long before he was born. But Torto had seen it, old Magnate Torto; and it was from his memories (clear as cloudless day as to this past, though doubtless not so clear as to the events of even yesterday) alone that the scene took and kept form, shape, mingled with the light, upon the wall. As sudden as appeared, this, sudden, vanished. Torto had forgotten. Or wished no longer to remember.

If Torto had found it a strain, Vergil found it not much less of one: controlling the sunlight, concentrating it, projecting it, causing an image in three dimensions to appear — and maintaining that appearance. “Magnates,” he said, “pray pay close attention to what I am now going to tell you, for you are paying me to tell it to you….” He had them, there. In Averno, one did not pay for nothing; if one paid for something, one made use of it. As the farmer, appraising the old crone ewe, teeth so gone she can scarce eat grass, considers if he may still get one more lamb from her before she is given over to that butcher’s knife unto which every sheep is born, so in Averno every slave who labored (and every slave labored, one way or another) was closely appraised as age took toll and wearing wastage claimed its tax: Was the thrall’s labor worth another year’s victualing? For if not, out with him, out upon him, he might live by free labor — if he could — he might beg in the streets, though who, in Averno, save perhaps the occasional foreigner, would give alms?. . He might slump his way to the city gate and wait turn and chance to guide for a penny. . he might well not bother, but merely crawl and thraw his way to the common bone-pit. Thus and so reminded that they had, in effect, commissioned Master Vergil to delve and to devise answers, the magnates prepared to attend closely and to pay heed. True: They had paid him nothing yet (save for the few courtesy coins and the courtesy few robes), but, true, it was assumed that they were going to do so.

They paid, now, close heed to what he was about to tell them. Therefore.

“I will shortly change the picture back into what is called a map. On this, sirs, symbols take the place of pictures. . or, we may say, sometimes: Very small pictures take the place of very large ones; else there would not be room. For example of a symbol, on each piggett of iron forged in this very rich city is stamped the letter A, and A is in this case a symbol for Averno….” Still on its side the long-necked glass vessel, it struck him now how this vessel might be used in occamy, or alchemy, as some called it, but he did not even try to remember by what name the ampulla might be called in that other discipline. It lay, still, on its side, still a-point toward the wall, light issuing from its stoppered mouth and (it seemed) some vapors playing round about that — like, almost, steam, or fume. In a small second’s pause he became aware, again, of the incessant thump-thum-thump of the thousand forges; in a second more he had forgotten it again. He explained to the magnates how a small trident symbolized fire upon his map: One by one the fires blazing in the picture faded and were replaced by symbols of flame. He told them how a triangle symbolized a forge: See then the forges fade off the wall and the triangles take their places. Dye-vats? Before their eyes the vats changed and ebbed and for each vat a small circle appeared. The sheds which sheltered, the warehouses which stored, the houses great and hovels small one by one were dissolved and replaced by symbols; sometimes the symbol was “a very small picture.” Streets became thick lines and alleys mere thin ones; all round about the crenellated “wall” were ringed the outlined humps that were the craggy mountains. He pointed out the thin double-lines that represented the canal from the Portus Julius, and he emphasized the difference between the small tridents that were fires which could be, when expedient, stifled by dropping a wet hide upon them, and the larger tridents that blazoned fires too large for putting out….

“It is as though, Magnates, there are channels beneath the surface of your ground as there are channels beneath the surface of your skin, and some, if they bleed, will soon stop and some may be, as it were, tied off, and some are too deep to be tied….”

From time to time Vergil said Beta, he said Gamma; he asked a once or twice for Alpha again, he said Delta. In every case the correct map was produced at once and held at the correct angle. Had (Vergil thought) he been expecting this particular session, at which he had arrived early merely because his mare had wanted exercise; had he been prepared, he would have provided a sort of frame which he had had in mind: a trifle to arrange, to hold the maps and charts, even to turn them, like the so-called walking tripods that moved around the symposia of the Consuls of Philosophy, dispensing wine and water as they moved. Being mostly intent upon, for one, explaining the details of the transparencies, and, for another, on the work of concentrating the light; he gave not much further thought to the silent servitor who held the maps and charts, no more than he did to the sun itself, the sole primal source of the light; “… and thus, Magnates, I have shown you what most of you already indeed know far better than I, how over the course of the past few decades there has been both a shifting of the active fire-holes all round about, as well as a general waning of the full force of fire….”

He said Omega. He could not remember how long he had been speaking. “This final diagram, Magnates, shows that, however much the areas in which the fires spring from the earth have changed and shifted, there is nevertheless what I shall term an overlap: In longer words, there is one area, limited in comparison with the others, in which the fires have never, ever, during the periods which — ”

“The father-fire!”

Who had burst forth with this interruption? — cried out three words, and struck the table three times as though hammering an ingot on a forge? Vergil did not know, thought best to get on “… in which the fires have never, ever, during the periods which my studies cover, either shifted, changed, or waned. In this one area — which a magnate has just suggested may be called that of the Father Fire — ” But he had already lost the attention of his audience.

Were these ponderous grandees a-drunk again? — So suddenly? Why were they rolling from side to side, facing first one fellow, then another? Whence this sudden upburst of babblement? What reason for the intensely odd faces he now saw them pull? A tiny bell sounded; none attended. It grew louder, sweeter, was joined by another, by another; here and there an iron-forger or a wool-puller brushed absently or even (with some slight aware vexation) pulled at his own thick and shaggy ear: vain. The bells grew louder, they sounded from every corner of the room, and yet, still, they sounded sweet. Perhaps after all they were not bells but rare exotic birds. Perhaps after all they were not birds, birds notoriously did not live long in Averno; if a capon lived long enough to become fat enough for the spit or the pot, that was the long of it. But be they what they were, ringing and singing, eventually they overcame the sound of the magnates bellowing — a bellowing in which Vergil was able only to make out some references to the father-fire, to hecatombs, hec-a-tombs, and some few other words which, rather like the common converse of Cadmus, might be intelligible as single words but made no sensible connection to communication.

Not, at least, to Vergil.

And so at length the magnates became silent.

And so did the ringing and the singing.

“I would point out, Magnates,” Vergil went on, calmly as before, and as though these singular tintinnabulations had never occurred and as though he had had no part in them; “I would point out that the area of the overlap, that area of, if you wish, the Father Fire, is not large enough to contain all the present manufacturies of your city. But I would also wish to point out that there is one thing, which, although you know it well, perhaps do not well appreciate. And those are the malodorous breaths which escape from the clefts of your rocks, there, deep in your valley. It is well known to you, I have seen, that these stinking airs are sometimes inflammable. And I have been drawing up a scheme, one which is indeed not yet finished, whereby these bad vapors may be put to good uses. Each crack and cleft and pit from which they issue may be covered with a sort of iron helmet, and the fumes conveyed thence through pipes, much as the aqueducts for which our Empire is famous conduct water through pipes to public fountains and even sometimes to private homes. I am certain, Magnates, that it is possible for the hot waters which bubble up here and there around us to be thus conveyed as well. It should certainly be possible, Magnates, by such methods to have a source of fire at any point desired, for one need only touch a burning brand or a glowing coal to the end of the pipe from which those airs would issue — and furthermore I have the means of making devices which will extinguish such fires when desired and without the use of wet hides or anything so cumbersome — thus it would never again be necessary, that immense labor of moving forges and bloomeries, workshops and dye-shops, boiling-vats and all the rest of it, for — ”

Again the babble, the tumult, the tumultuous talk broke out; this time he made no attempt to interrupt or draw away attention from their discordant discourse to his own (he thought) well-ordered address. He merely waited. He might as well not have been there. Presently he said, in that Greek whose roughness had been first smoothed in Athens and then polished at Cumae, “Put the maps down, then.” The words must have been heard over and through the rumble-rumble-mumble, for the chart marked Omega vanished from the wall, and only there remained within the bordering of Attic fretwork a spread-out light, which, no longer even slightly dimmed by having passed through membrane, gauze, and thin-scraped parchment or that odd new papyrus from behind the far Pamir, shone just that much more brightly as perhaps to quicken at least one pair of eyes, and at least one magnate’s thoughts, for from the mass of murmuring magnates there now sounded a voice that Vergil had heard before, and saying words that Vergil had also before heard.

“All right to go now, Wizard,” it said.

With this videlicet he had gone. The vessel through which, via its long neck, the sun rays had played, indeed he did not take; it was not his; but he had once again placed his hands round about the stoppered part and with his mouth up close had murmured words: The stopple came cleanly and clean out, a moment it dazzled (as perhaps it had dazzled long ago from amidst the golden fleece), then it was back again in his pouch. The blank wall now went dimmer, though — not yet — dim. None else noticed. Once again the silent servitor was by his side, showed him down the stone stairs and was showing him through the courtyard — the “garden” one could scarcely call it, no plants grew therein. “What is your name, then? You have done me well, up there. Whose man, are you, then? …” Meanwhile he reached into his purse for a coin.

Now for the first time he heard the fellow’s voice; soft it was, as — however unusual for this roughshod hole in hell — as befit a house-servitor’s. . for surely one would find it hard to picture him shoveling slag or beating bronze, even. . perhaps, (though he hoped not), plucking the clumps of stinking wool from the blue-putrefying sheep-fells before they were dipped to pickle in the tan-tubs; and the voice said (softly), “Master Mage, it is Magnate Torto’s freedman, Aymon Blandus [“Blandus, we must talk — ”], and here, ser master, is ser master’s horse.” Saying this, he so gently guided the hand in which Vergil held the coin over to the mucky palm of the hobgoblin doorkeeper that, almost, Vergil could have believed it had been his own intent to reward the latter, instead. The troll bowed and scraped, rolling his eyes, seemed undisposed to linger, and, bowing some more, backed and was gone, hiding behind the already opened gate. Up came Vergil’s boy, holding the mare.

“Have they taken care of you well, Iohan?”

“Yes, ser. Gave me some good thick wine and thick victuals, too. And offered me the kitchenmaid, but she was so stinking damnable dirty that almost I heaved the grub up; still, I says to meself, ser, ‘Food is food and I ben’t no dog to gobble up me own vomit.’ Therefore.”

Vergil nodded at this sound philosophy, was nuzzled by the mare, absently stroked her muzzle; began to turn his head, saying the while, “Now, Blandus, we must …” His words faded away.

As had Blandus.

Iohan joined palms and stooped for Vergil’s mounting, neither yielding nor grunting as his master went up into the saddle. In Thrace, it was said (Who had said it? Thrax. O Apollo! Thrax!), the horses were trained to kneel, as he had seen the camels kneel, afar off in Sevilla, for ease of riders’ mounting. But. . But enough of “but.” Out they stepped. “Uncommon dark it be, master, even for this dim-pit, o’ the time o’day,” the boy observed.

And indeed it was. Even after leaving the extremely frustrating termination of the session behind, still Vergil felt strained; now and suddenly he knew why. He looked up. Brighter was the window of the great Magnates’ chamber than anywhere else in sight. He relaxed, dismissed control. Flung outward the fingers of his upraised arm.

“There!” exclaimed Iohan. “Speak of Phoebus, he may soon appear!”

The street was now not so dun and dim; from above, a sudden silence, then a sudden outcry. “Lights! Lamps! Torches!” Whatever they were up to, up there, they would have to be up to it in the dark for yet a small while. What were they up to, up there? Suddenly he felt too tired to care.

“The mare seems to require no further much attention,” said Vergil. “Just take her tackle off, wipe her just a bit with hay, and give her a little of grain. . and then. . and then. . if we have four groats between us, shall we go to the baths?”

Iohan said, “Therefore.”

In the warehouse of Rano.

Vergil had been in warehouses before: many and many. Some were really open courtyards roofed over with reed mats. Some were larger than the great vast halls of some palaces, and, some of those, far more secure. Some were like temples, some had been temples, and in some instances — not always the same — the resemblances had been magnified by the presence for sale of sacred images of marble people or shrines of silver. There were splendrous things in the warehouses of silk merchants, and to walk through them was like walking through gardens in which all the flowers of the world and many flowers of worlds other than this one were in bloom, in blossom, all. And flowering at one and the same time, gardens of delight to the eyes. . though to the eyes alone. Sundry times he had been led almost by the hand, at one actual time actually by both hands, someone holding his right hand and someone else his left, through warehouses of spiceries: No mere casual stroller could after all toss a bale of precious silk-weft over a shoulder or under an arm and hope to walk off with it; but it was not beyond a physical impossibility that someone might, particularly in such trading posts where things were stored in rooms like castlements and the thicky walls of which were made for defense and the windows mere slits for archers, it was not impossible in places by necessity dim-lighted for someone to reach out a hand here or steal forth a hand there and transfer a palmful of cardamoms into a pouch or slip mirobolans or cloves into a compartment of a tunic perhaps even prepared for such a purpose. In one such place he had been led through by either hand as though he’d been a child. The hands rested gently enough in his own, but there came a moment when, forgetful, he had begun to move a hand his own; instantly the other had drawn it back and down, ah so firmly! “My hosts, I would but take my pocket-cloth and touch my nose; ‘tis dusty here and I might sneeze….”

“Ah, dusty ‘tis in here, serreverence, and as you are our guest and guests are sacred, for the gods send guests, take no thought for the matter, and we shall do it for you.” And so, with the right hand of the custos on the right-hand side (for the left hand of this one held the right hand of Vergil), he had had his nose wiped for him….

… and had a strong persuasion that, had he need perform perhaps another and more urgent office, another’s hand or hands would do that for him as well….

It was odd how the flowering silk-weaves, so gorgeous to the sight, had conveyed nothing to the nose; whereas as in the bale-stores of all balms and spices, some open and some closed, though these rich-stored items were dull and dingy to the eyes — enough! what scents, what odors there came forth from them! And from the custos on his left a semicontinuous drone, as, “These be dried rose-peels, ‘petals’ they be called in common speech, and these be violets and sweet clover for weaving garlands for the Indoo-folk, and here is citron-skin and thander bales have cinnamon-rinds, as the Sarcens tell us is took from the nests of great birds which do build they nests of cinnamon-stalk, and this is zedoary of the best sort and its next is zedoary of the second sort and last is zedoary of the third sort as sells for mere silver, and in the aft row — ” And now for the first time the voice of this one ceased its automatic drone. “Drag him hence,” it said, “he swoons….”

Something odd and rough, and pungent beyond belief, was held before his face. They were outside. “Oft the visitors do swoon and faint,” said one, “for us, we be used to it. Does my serreverence be feeling some better now?” (Yet still they held his hands, yet still they held his hands! High the price of freedom. And high the price of spice.)

“Yes,” he’d said. And — ”But what is this you have here under my nose? Never such a commingling of scents have I — ”

And one looked wry and one looked solemn, and one then said, “It be a beard shorn from a goat in Spicy Araby, my ser. . snuff it up, serreverence, ‘twill clear the nase and clear the brains a-well….”

“A beard shorn from a —?” Astonishment as well as giddiness (was the weakness worse than the remedy?) held the question incomplete.

“From a goat in Spicy Araby, my ser. Foras though ‘tis death, my ser, serreverence — keep well in mind be-case ever you are there — ’tis death in Spicy Araby for an outsider, an interloper, a strange or foreigner, for to walk two paces off the stated roads in the regions where grow the precious frankincense and the rich myrrh trees. But though men may be kept off, who may wall the world against goats? The goats roam and the goats rut, and when they roam they browse upon they shrubs of frankincense and myrrh, and the gum it stick upon their beard. So the season come when the gum don’t run from tree nor shrub, and if it run not it be not gathered, then have the Arab-folk (who be first cousin to the Sarcen-folk) time and season to herd up them he-goats and they play the barber upon them and shear they beards and same send hence by the merchant ships.”

Vergil murmured that ‘twas more than merely myrrh and frankincense he smelled, and, feeling better, looked up to catch the wry smile from one. “And when the buck-goats do rut, serreverence, saving your presence, they piss upon their long-beards — ah, yes! For the she-goats seemingly like that fragrance even more than t’others. — But by and by, as even now and then, we boil the beards down and strain them off and make sic use of the residual as we know how and none other may have our leave to know. And when this is done, we do sell the mere hairs to such as weave cloth for tents; and now I see my serreverence be better, and for his pleasure.” While still speaking they led him off to a room apart, where others gave him refreshment:

And where, at last, he was suffered to use his own hands to take it.

And that warehouse was not in Averno.

But in the warehouse of Rano -

In the warehouse of Rano (whither at long and at last the magnate had summoned him) it was neither frankincense nor myrrh which lay thick as smudge clouds round about. There was the inevitable, ineffable stench of the Very Rich City itself. The top-broken amphora urinals were perched all about, lest a single drop of the substance (so useful in dying, tanning, and fulling) should go to waste if someone in haste be tempted to use the floor…. It would have been merely the thought of the waste and not the thought of there being anything foul about the use of the floor that would bring instant and loud complaint…. But the very profusion of these conveniences had resulted in many of them being far from full, though full enough to allow their rotting contents to taint the air. If “air” was indeed the right word for what one was obliged to breathe. The beards of the goats of Spicy Araby were fragrant in comparison.

It was fairly dim in the warehouses of Rano as Vergil wandered his way through. No one bothered to hold his hands here, though now and then some fellow informed enough to know that Vergil was no mere common visitor and purchaser and barely informed enough to know (or guess. . or even suspect) him for a mage. . Perhaps, it was not impossible, such a one had heard reports, had had Vergil pointed out to him here or there. . would now and then make the sign of the fig or of the horns with the fingers of his own hands, confusing cause, precaution, and effect, Vergil thought. They thought him a nigromancer, some of them, surely; not at all aware the difference — ah, that immense, that infinite difference! — for a nigromancer must use his powers, and must use them almost constantly, being either employing the dark forces or being used by the dark forces or else always in a struggle with them; knowing no more peace for long than Thrax (poor Thrax!) without his shadow; but surely no such subtle thoughts entered the minds of any here, dim for the most part. It was but that, seeing him and so imagining that something about him was otherwise, automatically they feared him. Thus, the fingers they employed to feed their mouths and pick their noses and, commonly, for fouler uses yet, they now employed to ward off possible power to which they applied the same sad word: Caca. Bad. Hence, thus, the thumb thrust between the index and the middle fingers. Fig. Summoning the power of the potent pudenda, another place that had, always, fire pent in it. Or, folding back the two middle fingers and holding them down with the folded thumb, thrusting out the index and the little fingers: Horns (the name of that sign). The upthrust weapon of the bull, the upthrust phallus of the man, each strong to gore, to bore, sometimes in either case to draw blood: power. Sometimes those who made these signs (or other signs; he did not always know these others, for those who labored in Averno as well as those who bought and sold the products of that labor so often came, had come, from far and far away) made them covertly, either fearing his resentment or thinking his awareness of what they were doing might dilute its effect. A few times it was done defiantly; not often. It was done sometimes as artlessly as an animal lifts ears or tail. Or leg.

Vergil did not admit to noticing. Always, he walked on.

On one side as he walked he saw all manner of iron-work stacked.

On one side as he walked he saw, not all manner of dyed goods, for the delicate stuff was not worked in Averno, but much. Strong sunlight would not affect the iron, but would certainly do no good to the cheap cloth and its equally cheap colors. Here a “Sarcen” muttered as he turned over iron bangles and iron knife- and hatchet-blanks certainly destined for some lone sandbank where the immemorial mute- or dumb- or silent-trade still flourished: Equally the buyers and the sellers had to trust each other, for equally the sellers and the buyers feared each other. Merchandise was set out on a mat and signals made by smoke or drum (why, as he thought of this, did some other drumbeats come full-sudden and full-strong into his mind: and which?), or both; then see the merchants retire to their ships offshore, and well offshore, well out of spear- and arrow-range. Presently the autochthons would come forth from their forest. . desert. . bog. . examine the ware, then set down beside it what they thought its worth in what they themselves had to barter: grains of gold; pearls, perhaps; tortoiseshell. An elephant’s tooth. Then come again the merchants and they assess the proffered goods. If they are content, they take and depart. If not, they return awhile to their ship, and another while they wait, then once return more. Sometimes more has been placed beside the trade goods. Sometimes not.

It would be possible, of course, for one side to cheat the other, simply to take all, and speed away.

But if so, then there is never again that trade on that beach. Only the waiting arrow, the poised spear, and the silent, poisoned point.

Was it the incessant thumping of hammer on forge that brought Vergil to a full stop? Why now? The beat of the pounding mingled in his mind with the, imagined but a moment ago, beat of drums on a distant shore. What? Which? He shook his head impatiently, the image would not come; deep it lay, and it would not rise. With one short sigh he walked on. And up a rough ramp. And up a few rough steps. And up a short, very short wooden ladder. And then in, or on, the platform before the room that was the countinghouse of Rano. Even as he came up he heard the professional mumble from within, such as, with copious variation according to circumstance and situation, he might hear in any countinghouse:

“… fifth day of the month. . of the year of the Reign. . second indiction …”

“… such-and-such a quantity of packing-straw and so many and so many canvas packing-cases …”

“… to hire of six mules for two days at thus-and-so a rate per mule per day, and thus much more for fodder per mule …”

“… and three score plus one-half one score of lance-head blanks made after the fashion of Florence, per accompt of a Saracen merchant of Malaga …”

“… this ink is too thick, my ser …”

“… piss in it, then …”

“… ten sheets of tin from Beritinia, alike beknownst as Tinland, of the quality costing 12 florins per quintal …”

“Where is the bill for the accompt of Mahound? Not yet ready? Why always tell they me, ‘Not yet ready?’ A score I have me, clerks, yet, always, always, ‘Not yet ready: Ready? Not.’ Me Herc! Me Herd!”

“If you would listen, Frog. To me, Frog, if you would listen. The system of numbers and of algorithm, new, new, new! A tithe of the time ‘twould take, O Frog Thy Herd! Thy Herd!”

“Clerks can no learn your new numbers. Talk me not of such. — Who? Is coming, who?”

And there within was Rano.

Vergil entered. “Get out,” Rano said at once. The command was not meant for the visitor, for at once the clerks arose, and left tablet and stylus, abacus and record-rolls, talley-sticks and ledger-books; thus, three men left in that space, not closed but closable. The third remained with pen poised over papyrus as though he had not heard his master speak; any moment Vergil expected the command to be repeated; it did not come. But when this sole servant raised his head and looked, all was clear. All was clear from the deep-seamed skin and hairless cheeks and chin and indeed from the very folds about the very eyes. It was death to make eunuchs in the Empire. But it was not death to buy and own those already made. As such had no families and could have none, they were deemed safest of servants, not alone in regard to women, but in regard to money as well. . and did not both temptations go so often together? This one looked a moment at Vergil and for that moment in that look Vergil had some strong intimation that he was seeing and being seen by something not entirely human; the face and gaze, perhaps, of some ancient and immensely sapient being, but one whose sapience was of a clean different order than those of men and women. Then the eunuch’s look went back to his book, and the pen descended and the voice began again to mutter, voice as high as a woman’s yet as strong as a man’s.

One thousand florins per annum per physician Adserovio, payable quarterly and due the third day instant, videlicet 250 florins plus monies laid out for medications by said physician as follows: for zedoary. . aloes. . liquid of myrrh…. And the voice became as low as the buzzing of bees and perhaps no longer represented so much individual words as a mere sound ancillary to the process of calculation and thought.

Rano was on his feet, facing Vergil, facing him close, “Master Mage,” said Rano, “if you will do something for me that you will don’t do for any other, then I will give you golds.” He made an odd, abrupt gesture. Vergil followed its direction. And indeed he did see “golds,” scores and scores he saw of them; they lay upon the worn and checkered cloth surface of the table where the eunuch sat and wrote, and now and then, with his humming rising to an odd and singular singsong mutter, the eunuch swept some into one column and some into another, swept to one side, one, and to another side, another; he paid them no more especial attention than had they been counters in a game. And why should he? Perhaps they were. What else were they to him? What, for that, was anything? Eunuchs were said to love arithmetic, and it was well they did and could: for what else could they love which asked no more of them than that it be put and kept in order?

“What one thing had you in mind to have done, Magnate — ”

This far had Vergil gotten, and time had had to savor some different scent and odor (fainter, though) than the smoke and stench and the sweet airs, to realize, if only half-realize, it was the papyrus and the parchment and the ink (not, certainly, the golds anymore than the silvers and the coppers; suddenly he understood that pecunia non olet, “money’s got no smell,” was not merely an expression of an economic attitude, it was a statement of physical fact). Thus far had he gotten with question and with thought, when the magnate broke in on both. Rano grimaced, but it was not with anger, not even so much as impatience, as of simple earnestness. “It is not some one thing I have in mind, in my mind, no! Master Mage! Wizard! You see, seen, will see …” Was the man reciting some paradigm or declension? No, he was trying, striving, he was struggling, to bring his own thoughts into order, and an order that would cover all possibilities. “… things I don’t. Can’t. See. I cannot know. You can. Know. And when you will be knowing, if you don’t tell some others, if you tell only me, if you will do this for me, for me: I will, I will give you golds. Not a coin and a robe. Not two coins, two robes. But many, master. Man-y. Many golds — ”

And the eunuch said, sans even looking up, in his strange and rich and, yes, even so: his sweet voice (now one had time and chance to think on it, strong and sweet): “There are many. Oh yes. There are many. Frog has many. Many many. Many manies of manies. Many golds, has Frog.” And his pen dipped and scratched.

“You see,” said Rano. Toad or frog, there was certainly something batrachian about him; were there a family Rano, what a chorus they might croak, creek, crack; but he had no children, only the one wife. Suddenly thinking of Rano’s wife, a rictus took hold of Vergil’s mouth; he swallowed, felt his throat dry, could not stop the movement. Visible, audible. Rano saw and heard.

“Eh? Sir?” The magnate moved, ugly face eager. “Agreed? On account? A purse of twenty? A purse of sixty? Make up a purse!” He turned to. . turned upon, almost. . the eunuch. Who did so with not so much as a struggle or a shrug, merely a gesture, neither whose beginning nor end did Vergil clearly follow; somewhere the man’s hand had moved, suddenly it was not moving: The palm sat open on the table with its checkered cloth on which gold coins moved from square to square, and in the palm sat one of those purses (contents already arranged) used in high commerce, long and narrow and sealed with sundry seals, one of them surely Imperial. “Weigh,” urged Rano. “Put it in your hand. Or — trust me not, break seals and count and then weigh — ” If this was not passion, it was something so very close to it that it would serve its place.

Vergil stepped back one step and one step away, held up his own hand, palm facing out and up, and one hand he thrust behind his back: without thought his fingers writhed, making, first, the fig; and then: the horns. Could Rano see either? Rano saw something, for Rano stopped.

“Magnate, Magnate.” Vergil ceased. Why was he so affected? He could hear his pulses beating in his ears, he had been offered bribes before, though not here — was this a bribe? “The Very Rich City of Averno has engaged me to give an answer to a certain problem. The answer to this problem would be the best thing I could do for all of you, and so, for any of you. Details await further discovery, and application requires much work. But every thing which I see, have seen, if not indeed all that I may yet see, either I have presented to all of you of the Magnatery, or, having in the future come to see it, must present to the Magnatery. To all of you. You offer me much gold, and I hope to receive much gold. I have already deserved that. But whatever I may find and see about how best to cap and to pipe and to conduct the fires and heats and fireable gasses, the hot spring waters, from wherever they may be or may come to be, to every magnate’s works. . why. . ser. . Magnate Rano. . there is no way that this, or any of this, could be told to you alone. And not to others.”

If there had been some thought, had there been some thought, very likely there had been some thought in Rano’s mind at first that Vergil was willing to bargain: that Vergil would not accept the first set of iron bangles, knives and hatchets, ruddy cloth, set down upon the sand. But as Vergil went on speaking, he saw that Rano realized this was not the case. Rano had not understood Vergil. Vergil had not understood Rano. “Ah, that. That. No.” His warty, webby hand swept it away behind him. “Some other thing. Some thing, other. Some new. Different, a different thing. A thing, else. You, Wizard, but not one thing only, to see. You will, you will.” He struggled with his wide mouth, his eyes bulged more, he paddled his hands; he looked for help; he looked at the eunuch.

“ — discover — ” the eunuch said.

Not even looking up, nor stopping the scritch-scrotch of his pen (what was the pen writing? — what odd signs?), the moving of the golden coins across the checkered table.

The word was accepted without further examination; Rano swept on, “And this when you discover, you will not tell an, you will tell not others. Only me you will tell, you will tell me. . me. . me …”

Thoughts moved dimly at that moment in Vergil’s mind, but they moved swiftly. It was far from impossible that he might indeed make some discovery aside and apart from the one central thrust of his intent so far. Something not covered by his engagement to the Very Rich City. Something else. In which case — What came to his mind, in which case, was something that almost swept him off his feet; literally, off his feet — almost. For a thought moved him, and as he moved he set a foot forward and the foot somehow stumbled and he stumbled. Rano at once moved forward and reached and took hold of him; they came together in an instant, hand in hand and body against body. Rano’s face moved, too, something glittered in his eyes, his mouth changed, something was moving the outlines of the mouth and reshaping the outlines of the eyes; Rano was about to move mouth closer to ear, and to offer. What, to offer?

The eunuch began to rise. He rose and rose and still he was rising, he was on his feet, hands pushing away from desk as he began to straighten up, and still it was not over. The eunuch was not eunuch-fat, that was mostly myth; the man was eunuch-tall, it was no myth, he was far closer to seven feet tall than to merely six. And as he stretched to his full height he said, in a rich and ringing voice, “The King!” All about, the tambours beat, and Cadmus entered with a train of state. The gaze was steady and the color clear. He was not mad today. He was not mad at all.

The robes and the chains of linked medallions worn by some of those who had come in with Cadmus would have led Vergil at once to assume, had this all been elsewhere, that such men were members of a greater or a lesser Grand Council of some municipium, or leaders of guilds, if not both. But in Averno there was no Grand Council, lesser or greater, there were only the magnates; there were not even any guilds. The power of the magnates covered the ground, and they and it allowed no room for anything else. . not even for the Lousepickers’ Guild as mentioned in the graffito at the tiny tavern in the port town where Vergil had first met Armin. Thought before thinking caused Vergil’s eyes to scan the group: yes. Armin was there. And very grave and dignified he looked, too. And he too wore a robe and chain. . as though holding office, though there was, in Averno, no such office he could hold. And then, Vergil and Rano standing side by side, still, though no longer face to face, Cadmus came close up to them. His clear eyes considered Vergil, but he did not change expression. What he had to say was to be said to another.

“Rano. Magnate. Man Hear Our Royal will. We have consulted. We have advised and been advised. Very soon We intend to speak with Our Liege, the Emperor; meanwhile, thus it is: All born here, and all held to service or labor here for the space of twenty year, are to be citizens of here. The benefits, and all the benefits, of Citizens of Rome, Rano, are to be holden. . here. . by such citizens of Averno. And all those thus worn by labor are to receive bread, Rano, for they are men, Rano. And when you and all your fellow-magnates have assented, Rano. . magnate. . man. . then we shall speak again and further, Rano. Meanwhile, and at once, Rano: Let it be done.”

He turned and he went down the ladder, the steps, and the ramp, and along the long passageway that led to the warehouse’s outer door.

Meanwhile all the trumpets sounded and all the tambours beat.

Rano looked, after some long bemusement, once again at Vergil. Whatever had been in his eyes and in his mouth before was not there. His face moved, though. His mouth moved. His manner showed neither secret confidence nor anger, not even scorn. It did not even show amazement. “You see?” he said. “You hear? You …” Words failed him. One word, next, did not. “Mad,” he said, shaking his head. “Mad, mad, mad, mad, mad …”

Although it might seem that Averno was inhabited chiefly by masters and slaves, with many of the masters themselves once-slaves; as well as a surly rabble depending perhaps less on their daily dole of rather bad bread (with SPQR roughly indented on it just before baking). . and this only if, rabble or not, they were Roman citizens. . than on either employment of a sort small different from outright theft, or on outright theft itself. — Still, in Averno, there were other sorts of people, of the sorts found elsewhere, almost every elsewhere. There were merchants, physicians, astrologers, superior craftsmen who produced detailed work (jewelers, blind or sighted, for example) such as the workshops of Averno’s magnates did not know. If there were no architects, if there were but a few who might be termed engineers in that they worked in such crude engines as the regular work of Averno need must have: presses, stamps, drills, looms, or what; if there were no painters, hardly, not counting those who spread white lime on walls with vast brushes or, often, merely mops; still, still, from the world outside Averno — how! was there still a world outside Averno? more than once, thus, Vergil bethought himself — came some small and unsteady influx of such arts as, principally, aliens denizened in Averno might desire.

So one day, he having chosen to go alone some short way on what proved to be a bootless errand, strolling idly (idle was his stroll, but not his mind) back to his apartments, he heard the familiar sounds of a trio of music sounding the sort of strains which advertise that a troop of traveling players is about to begin its show; to listen was to look, and so, rounding a corner — a process that occupied all his attentions, lest he slip on the stepping-stones and bemire himself in the filth and sludge — at last he lifted his eyes. Flute and lute and cymbals ceased almost at that moment, and prepared to go within whatever rented room was to be their theater. . and where, no doubt, they would also play. . one of them sounding a last call to the “citizens and residents and visitors in the Very Rich City who are very welcome to pay the most modest of prices and enter here to attend at The Great Play of Troy. …” A woman, one of two, cast an eye at him ere she and her companion and the musics, all, turned and went in. He followed.

Such cheap and popular theater, if it did not take too long, often amused him, if (as often) for no other reason than the immense difference between the classical readings from Homer and the bawdy buffoonery, half-improvised at the best, usually interlarded with such popular allusions as had most lately been thrust into the script. Several considerations worked at his mind; one was that his mind might well be the better for some little rest from the restless chores with which he had been so deeply engaged; other considerations? For some reason, and he could just then say no more than some, the woman who had looked at him reminded him of a very curious story being told about Simon Magus and the woman whom he called (was said to call) Helen of Tyre. . or of Troy. Third and last of the considerations was that there had been that something in this one’s look at him, before she turned and went inside, which had more in it than the mere automatic look at any man as any man has had more than once from any such a woman, half a strolling player and half a whore. Or did he flatter himself? Did he or did he not, in he went, the price was indeed very modest and he paid for three seats in order that he might be free of perhaps unwanted, say unpleasant, company in the seats to right or left.

The play itself was nothing. Mingled with lines from Homer such as not alone every schoolboy knew but many who had never been inside a schoolroom, and lines introduced now and then rather less because the play required them as to allow those who knew them to show they knew by reciting them half-aloud along with the actors; mingled with those were abridgments of entire scenes compressed into a paragraph; now and then touches for the popular taste, if “taste” was quite the word, such as an obsequious actor, if actor was quite the word, declaiming, “O Hail Great King Priam! Great and glorious art thou, O King! I tell that thou art indeed a god!” At which time see “King Priam” make his eyes grow large, rise from his throne, extract from beneath it a vessel of an obvious utility, scan it closely, and respond, “That’s not what me night-pot tells me!”

Raucous laughter from the cheapest seats, chuckles from the others, though ancient (and, indeed, rather honorable) the jest. . jest now repeated with appreciation. . many people could not at all appreciate a jest in silence (most, Vergil recalled, with an inner sigh, could not even read in silence; his own, to some, arcane, ability to do so had more than once been remarked upon).

However. Nothing new. Half, Vergil was minded to leave and get on with things, half he waited in hopes he would by and by hear from the musicians a song, either old or new…. Vergil dearly loved a good song, or any good music e’en sans singing…. Quickly the action shifted, Priam lumbered offstage; enter his son Prince Paris, and with the Prince the Lady Helen of Troy; she was the woman who had so lightly, briefly, looked at him outside. A fine, full figure of a woman.

Paris: Come now, my Lady Helen! Why are you so bored? I know! It must have been the damned dull life you led, wedded to that oaf Menelaus! But come with me, and I shall show you that despite the fatigues of battle I am a better man than he — et cetera, et cetera, several bawdy declarations introduced as evidence to back his claim; chuckles from almost all the seats.

Helen: (Faces audience as she is tugged along, bedchamberward, by Paris, who, presumably deafened by passion, of course hears not one syllable) Helen: O Gods! These Trojan trolls! At least when as a chastely wedded, bedded wife I was from time to time assuaged and solaced of my boredom now and then by some good man. . not always Menelaus, to be sure…. She rolls her eyes, laughter from below; Paris, to emphasize the efforts he is making to drag her offstage, lifts his knees high and plants his feet down exactly where they were before; more laughter; cries of “Get a move on, Prince!” and “Want some help up there?”. . but at least there, across the wine-dark, the dolphin-torn, the gong-tormented sea. . a full half of the audience, catching on quickly to its cue, echoes: “… dolphin-torn …” And so on with the rest of it “… one heard at least, however cloaked in darkness, now and then some words in decent Greek!” Many laughters, doubtless for many different reasons. And Paris triumphed at last, off the two went, leering and winking, and then the music began to play an epithalamion, and not at all a bad one, with muffled amorous noises and now and then a small shriek from offstage-right.

She who played Helen, was it her full form that affected Vergil? — for affected he was — her face, fair enough? Or merely some deep and primal response to the little-or-no-nonsense, despite the nonsense, sexuality of the stage business? When had he last been in a woman’s arms? Since how long? Too long. Too long. In whose arms, in which woman’s arms would he now wish to be? Poppaea’s, came the true reply. Of beauty as determined by fashion and as delineated by the sculptor’s wedge or painter’s brush, of such Poppaea had near none. Her skin was unblemished and her large gray eyes were fine: what more? Her face was nothing memorable, not even could he entirely have said as he had heard one veteran legionary say of an eastern queen, “She was so uncommon ugly it fair hurt your teeth at first to look upon her, but my Here, boy! after one week of but standing a-guard inside her door, I’d have sold meself to sit by her feet.” Ugly, Rano’s wife was not, for all that she had a figure like an undernourished boy’s; would Vergil have sold himself to sit by her feet? One Vergil, a Citizen of Rome, no more: yes. But as P. Vergilius Marius, Master in Philosophy, and all the rest of it, who had made long journeys and endured hard studies in order to attain mastery over many things, the first of which class of things had been his own self and soul and pride and patience and over them, well … no. Much would he give, but he would not give himself to be in further thrall.

Besides (one voice said within him now, calm as a sage in the stoa), you have your duties to those who have engaged them. Besides (one voice said, cold, and with a touch of contemptuous surprise), it would be madness even to think of an intrigue with the wife of a magnate of Averno.

Would it?

— what voice was that? And yet another voice said but one word. And said it often.

Poppaea. Poppaea. Poppaea …

And there was, at last as at first, another voice yet, which had a more simple and a more accessible message, and in the end it was to this one that he hearkened.

The play concluded to Helen’s ringing screams as she watched, Homeric canonical text or no Homeric canonical text, Paris being slain in combat beside the reedy river of the Trojan shore — located, conveniently, offstage-right — curtain. A moment for the audience to taste the aftertaste. And then followed what critics were fond of calling, it being after all an easy call and one that required little resort to Aristotle or others, “a knockabout farce”; this subsided into a song and dance and a collection taken up in hopes that at least a few patrons would have forgotten having paid on their way in.

By then Vergil was backstage, “backstage” having the geographical reality of the Plain of Troy. A man, perhaps the manager, who had been leaning against the wall, whence he could see the “stage,” turned his head and looked at Vergil with the same look of contained sardonic amusement with which he had been watching the scene; merely raised his eyebrows in inquiry. “I thought,” said Vergil, “that I might be allowed to have a few words in private with the Lady Helen. . and I should try to put them all in decent Greek.”

The man said, briefly, “Haw!” managing to get into the one syllable all the emotions of his look; then, “I am sure she would be very pleased.” The tone was civil, even sincere; some slight glance he let show which indicated that he himself would, would some slight circumstance be different, be pleased to have a visit in private with the visitor, be this with what tongue might be; but this was as brief as the single syllable. A coin changed hands, discreetly, politely, with no change of expression on either face. Vergil found himself in a curtained cubicle. He had been in such before. Presently, in came the actress, gave him a pleasant-enough look, if a slightly appraising one.

“You seem decent,” she said, “but you are not Greek.”

“Neither, I trust, am I a Trojan troll.”

The woman chuckled. Clapped her hands. In came an older one with a basin of hot water, sponge, soft and scented soap, and a few cloth-pieces worn and washed till they were soft enough to serve as towels. “Let me get this muck off,” and, proceeding to remove her stage-paint, asked, “Well, what did you think of the play?”

Barely he hesitated. “Evocative,” he said.

This time she laughed outright. Then she murmured to the other woman, who put upon a tray most of the items which she had brought in, and went out. The woman “Helen” placed both hands upon his shoulders. “Are you going to give me a nice present?” she asked.

“More than one, I hope.”

She did not laugh now. “I believe you. I trust you. We won’t haggle. We will …” A moment she paused. “We will play our own play. This time I shall really be Helen. You will really be Paris. And now we are really together.” And added, “And alone.” It had grown dark. He did not ask nor linger thinking why, but moved closer to her. And what happened next between them was nothing, really, like anything that had ever happened between him and any courtesan or trull before. What he felt was no mere assuagement of need or indigency in satisfying a simple, essential lust; what he received with her was certainly none of the imitation passion, be it perfunctory or most highly skilled, that anyone may obtain for pay; however pay be made. He had rapted her away, in what guise he could not recall, from her kingly husband’s court, though not far off the martial camp-fires gleamed; she had been briefly fearful and fear at once gave way to relief and relief to wonder and to quiet joy; now and then the scented forest breathed for them and the faint smoke ebbed away.

He scarcely gave thought, presently, to the heated scented water and the soap and the soft cloth and the ministrations performed with them. He was hardly aware of dressing or of being dressed. He was faintly sensible that there was more light, and, this being so, he moved again toward her and bent to place a parting kiss; slightly she turned her head, one of her eyes only could he clearly see, and there was that in the corner of that eye which was not her, which was not “Helen,” whoever “Helen” really was; who was someone else: in that sole gray glint, gone as fast as it appeared, was that which told him all, yet told him nothing.

“Poppaea,” he said, faintly. The scene somehow shifted. The stage was bare. He stood alone. The door was open, he saw the street outside. “Poppaea,” he said. He moved his lips. No sound came forth. His legs trembled, yet they held him up, as he moved. He would have turned, he could not have turned, he no longer wished to turn.

And in his silent heart his voice said, as his heart beat, beat, beat: Poppaea. Poppaea. Poppaea. Poppaea.

• • •

Rain in Averno. It came down in drops as hot, almost, as the waters of the bath, though much less cleanly. It came down slowly, as if it had paused to embrace the smokes and stinks and to absorb a measure of the “sweet airs,” it refreshed no one and nothing, it left soot streaks and stench of sulfur. It oozed down the pitted sides of the buildings like oil and, it may be, left them even more pitted than before. It thickened the filth in the streets and turned it into a sort of paste, a black paste perhaps fit, very fit, to use upon the binding of some evil and feculent grimoire. Rain in Averno.

Although the entire city stank notoriously, except in limited spaces for limited times, when someone had a room sprinkled with an attar from the rose-red vales beyond Ragusa, or burned opobal-samum or some similar gum in a brazier; notorious though it was that all the city stank, this area through which he now picked his way was notorious even within the city for its own evil odors: its name, Canales, offered perhaps explanation enough, though none was offered for the plural form when there was but one canal. And that one for the most part hidden from sight by the moidering, bulking sides of warehouses. An ancient jest was much told by the magnates: “An’ he says, ‘Torto, why you don’t shore ‘em up, the sides o’ your warehouses, be bulging out already, you don’t see?’ An’ he say — ” Here the heavy face of the teller would play a series of grimaces intended to imitate that of “Old Torto,” and these alone always brought heavy chuckles. “ — he say, ‘Why shore ‘em up? It ain’t failled down, yet.’ ” Great laughter; the point of which, it was often explained, being that if Torto (or anyone) had shored up the tottering walls, it would need have been at his own expense, whereas were they actually to fall, and thus constitute an obstacle, the cost of repairs by reason of some ancient legal quibble grown to the status of a municipal privilege would be paid for out of the taxes levied on the property of such aliens whom a particularly hard fate decreed should die in the Very Rich City. This too-often tale was, Vergil by and by realized, not intended merely to indicate commercial acumen as it was to delineate certain aspects of the character of “Old Torto.”

But the warehouses, however nasty, belonged to the magnates (however nasty), and thus were under the protection of their city’s “stern and meritorious laws” — laws intended largely to protect the trade and commerce, not all the city as such, as of the magnates in particular, whereas these streets (so-called), these lean lanes and mean alleyways and passages: into these would no great magnate venture. Much danger, little reason. The only legitimate trade carried on seemed to be that in the dung-locks shorn from around the scuts of sheep, a trade considerably less lucrative than that in goat’s-beards from Spicy Araby; now and then from some dusty doorway came evidence that anyway one heap of filth-clots was deemed dry enough to be beaten under some pliant substance with cudgels, to loose the dung from the locks, or partly so — else the process of washing such “wool” would be even more tedious. And more costly. Perhaps the rain, slow and sullen, had driven this trade indoors. Nasty as it was — some sight quickly glimpsed of thralls with heads wrapped up in cloth beating and thrashing piles from which arose a thick dust — the trade was legitimate. It was, presumably, even useful. Probably the stuff of which coarse carpets, floor-druggets, donkey-pads were woven had their sources there. He coughed as the dust reached his nose and throat, walked more quickly on.

Did not slow down nor answer the swift-flung taunt, “Hey, Gypa! Like the ‘sweet’?”

Not long before that morning, in a rare unguarded moment, he, allowing his thoughts to come aloud, had murmured, “Wisdom, guidance, vision, truth …”

And Iohan, who had been engaged in some small task or other there, up in Vergil’s rented rooms, promptly said, “Why, ser, you might try scrying for them things: pour ink-squid in my palm and sleepify me, ask me what I see. If you like.”

Briefly Vergil considered; briefly he said, “Such could only be of use, I believe, with some lad younger than you, pure of life by reason of youthful innocence.”

His servant, sans so much as a boastful smirk, a look of abashment, shame, even a wry smile not, had said, simply, “Ah, I has forgotten that. To be sure, ser, them hands has held things other than master’s foot. Well. Therefore.” And to his tasks returned.

It was after, later that day, day having descended into night, serious considerations as to which form of divination might be best, and no conclusion reached, that Vergil had with a sigh or so retired for sleep. The fierce fat flies of Averno, so tormentful of mornings, had by night flitted themselves into corners and so were silent, all. All, that is, all save one, so absolutely enormous that Vergil exclaimed, almost dismayed, “This fly is big enough to have a name!” He heard the voice a-close to him mutter, “It have a name, bold boy,” in a throaty, Saracen accent; “it have a name: and it name be Baalzebub. And it be lord of flies.” Vergil gave a scornful snort, considered that some would surely try to kill said fly. He captured it instead, placed it in a bottle, and stuffed the neck with cloth. Only then did he turn to see what Saracen this was: saw no one, Saracen or other. Shrugged. Would have made urgent effort to kill it (some would) — there in the bottle, still, might it not die? He did not arise from bed; it did not die, from time to time it buzzed and thrumbled. He bethought him of its proper name, not that other name, he conceded that it had another name indeed, another sex indeed, he did not care to call the matter into clarity. He slept, he woke, he woke, he slept. Later that night, as he watched by the flickering wick he’d thought best to keep burning, he saw an equally enormous spider come spinning down from the ceiling on invisible thread; fly bumbled and buzzed and flung itself about. The spider, finding no way in, had determined to set snares if ever the fly found its way out; had spun and spun and spun. Something exceedingly odd about the lay of the net had called Vergil’s attention. There seemed some pattern in it more than mere reticulation, there seemed some thing in it, in it or about it, of which he was meant to be sensible.

Of which he was.

But what?

And, indeed, as the wick smoked and flickered its tiny flame and the shadows danced their fitful measures, it did seem to him as he lay between his own clean sheets on the horsehair bed-pad, sheets for the moment at least cool against his flesh, that there was something not merely slightly familiar in the pattern of the spinning: but something which he absolutely knew.

This being so, it was not bafflement he felt, but some odd sort of satisfying comfort and contentment. Intermittently the massy fly thrumbled the night through. But Vergil did not hear it. Vergil slept.

Now as he walked through this the wretched-most section of the wretched and Rich City, slowly Vergil became aware, first, that something was bothering him, and, second, that something had been bothering him. He was not sure if it was or was not the certain uncertainty of his position here in hell. . or its suburbs. He had been through something like this the night before. He had slept, yes, but he had not slept well. There had been, so it seemed, some weight upon him. He turned, it shifted; he relaxed, disposed himself, it returned. What was bothering him and had been a while bothering him as he walked now through this dirty district which lay the other side of “the fiftieth gate of corruption” was much the same. It was not sharp. It was …

“The black weasel sits upon his shoulder,” a voice said nearby.

And another voice added, “Aye, and squats upon his breast.” Even as he turned to look, Vergil realized that both voices spoke the truth. And then, so slowly that he seemed to himself to be miming, as though an actor deliberately prolonging some stylized motion, he did turn, and wondered how, even, how he could. . how he would even pick up one foot now and set it down in front of the other. . how he was with effort turning his body to look: he knew that the black bile, it was — he thought, suddenly, for the first time, sharply, of the lute’s strings — which had been rising and spreading through his body the morning long, of all the four humors perhaps most to be feared. It was indeed the black weasel which squatted on his breast, though he was not lying down, that sadly familiar weight upon his heart, the woefully well-known sucking-away of his very breath: he knew it now, but knowing did not help, it did not help at all; it may have been in some measure the result of being in this hideous section of this hideous city, but it had been the same elsewhere: The gods be thanked, though often, not always. It was as though he were drowning, and yet if the one hand which could save were to have been stretched out direct in front of him and in the easiest reach. . in respect to physical distance, easiest. . yet he could not have lifted his own hand to take hold. Was it perhaps not the black bile, the humor now overbalanced and overbalancing, but was it the black choler, that evil humor, that other string upon the lute which was man’s body: the melancholia of which the old country Greeks spoke? They who still called the cat the weasel?

It seemed as though all was useless, all futile: his having come, his having tried, his being here now; and in the name of all: why here?. . all for no purpose.

And still he, slowly, slowly, turned.

There was no one there.

From another corner came a laugh.

It was not a laughter bursting forth, neither was it some evil scorn. Merely. . what it was. And so, with immense effort, now, here in this empty place of filth and rubble between other places of rubble and filth in the form of buildings crumbling into further filth, and yet more rubble, and further rubble; once again he began that difficult and painful turning. Was it some curse, sudden or slow? The weight of all the world lay upon him; still he turned.

And then he saw him. Him. Not them. A figure filthy even for this rat’s nest of filth, robed in rags ragged even for this ragged quarter. The face was so besmeared, the mask had even a sort of sheen or gloss upon it, and this cracked as the laughter lines responded to the chuckle. If this may find some folly at which to smile and sport, why may I not as well? he thought. And the thought welled up and out into a sound more like a snort of someone clearing a throat than into any sane man’s laugh.

And Vergil’s slow turning ceased. And he looked full into the face of someone he had certainly seen before. And so in that second he recognized him. Said the outcast clad in outcast clouts, “It is your turn now to say it. And why say it not?” And, as Vergil, amazed, stood silent, the creature said it. “Wash.”

• • •

“O Apollo! Beadle! What brings you. . here. . so low?”

As he had cried the word Beadle the one who sat before him in the muck formed by rain and dust and grime did not precisely spit but his dry lips opened along some thin, thin line of slime, and a sound he made, perhaps a word, “Peh!” And again chuckled. His face seemed to gleam with glee at the fools and follies of all mankind, the sons and daughters of Deucalion’s stones; and no more than stones, sticks: or things worse than useless. What upheavals in the schemes of things spun and woven, cut, by the Sister Fates — what wars, riots, what commotions, conspiracies, tyrannies, scandals, plots or ship-wrack, barratries of masters or of mates, decretals of exile, times toiling perhaps in quarries or in mines, what collapses outward or inward — what had brought him here?

Said the beadle, “I am here that you be here. I saw it clear when first I saw you. . there. Inescapable decrees, inscrutable, inexorable: and such, such piss-worth words. Had my pipe not droned you had not danced. Had I not fifed for you.” The lips now closed.

Vergil murmured. . something. He could not a half second later have repeated what he said, presumably it was a question. From behind he heard one of the voices of a moment before; it said, “Sissie summoned thee. And cruel Erichtho.” Again Vergil murmured. And now the other voice: “She our sister who asked either one favor too many or one too few.” And there sounded in that narrow space a far-distant echo of that voice among all voices, of she who had become but voice alone. As sounding from a thousand caverns.

Or from within a bottle, stoppered, closed.

“ ‘Wheels within wheels.’ ”

“What?”

“Some Hebrew seer. . or was it ‘a wheel within a wheel …’? Of no import.”

“Is that a sieve?”

“Is that a question for the Pythonissa at Delphi? Quaere. What sort of sieve? Responsum. Not the sort in which the suspected Vestal Virgin carries water for to prove her chastity….” The fellow took a handful of dirt, and, though the gods of hell knew there was dirt aplenty there, he had seemed just a bit selective, for his hand had hesitated, then moved on, before in a moment more dipping to scoop. The handful was sifted, dropped upon a heap in which dirty chicken feathers, bits of broken shells, twigs, and wisps and clots and pot-shards lay mingled. From out of nowhere the scarecrow figure produced three reeds, thrust them in between the fingers of Vergil’s right hand: “Close eyes,” said he. Vergil did, felt himself being turned around withershins once and twice and thrice (in his ears again, sight being sundered, the thum-thump-thum of the eternal anvils wearing out the hammers which beat beat beat) — “Bend a bit. Ah. Enough. Thrust your paw down. Open.”

Vergil had but felt the reeds encounter the slightly resistant surface when the word Open came. Did this mean open hands or open eyes? — He opened both. The once-beadle of the Second Secret School in Sevilla was scanning the imprints, the three shallow piercings of the dirt atop the rubble-tip. There was no smile upon his face, no scowl, either; face expressionless as when he had held that middling office so far away, lower than the proctors, higher than the porters. “Fire, wind, and water,” he said; the same slight sound as his cracked lips parted.

“What?”

“Water, wind, and fire. No demand here in the web for the sovereign science of astrology, they none of them know when they were born. But dirt! the gods save us! how they know dirt! Geomancy, the doctrine of dirt! Ah, what fees it fetch me here!”

Was the mummy-ragtatter japing again. “What do you do with the fees? Hoard them in a pot? — No, forgive me, I — ”

“Wind, fire, and water. Thrice have I said so, once for each vatic hole. Follow.” The man moved off stiff-legged, lurching yet spry, the stinking winds seemed to bear some distinctive taint from him in addition. Follow? Why not? “ ‘Hoard them in a pot’? Ha-ha. In a pot, yes. Hoard? No. Hast ever heard of the fifth essence, the quintessential, of wine? of the art of estillation? of a pot-still? No. Not likely. Follow.”

Things had changed. The weight, immense, was off Vergil’s chest and off his shoulders. Joy? Certain not. Things were merely as before. . as far as his own inner self was, that was. But. . somehow, other. . things had changed. The lines were different. There was no longer, as he followed the figure (he had seen corpses exhumed that looked better), the nightmare figure which had once indeed extruded a nightmare as a snake extrudes its tongues, and done it simply (simply!) as a test; this sticklike stalking horror teetered along down lanes which had some semblance to geometry, from which the general scramble of the unclean canals district could not have been farther removed. Were they still in Averno? Had the way been gathered up, were they somewhere else? If so: where?

“Ser Beadle — ” (“Peh!”) “Elder one, what mean you, ‘here in the — ’ ”

They scrambled along angles strange and yet not without logic. He had not known and never would have suspected such a place as this in Averno. . or, for that matter, anywhere else. . and yet. . and yet. . was there not something familiar here? It nagged at his mind, but with no clamorous nagging.

Suddenly they were somewhere else. Somewhere inside. Somewhere inside of something which was itself inside of something. Very suddenly this had happened. It was clean underfoot. It was neither dim-dank-dark nor bright-dry-light. Then they came to a wall and in the wall, not flush with the floor nor reaching to the ceiling, was a door; the door was made of bronze and the bronze was devoid of ornament and its surface was polished. It seemed to catch even the once-beadle by surprise, for he stopped short. He looked and peered. Squinted. A slight sound broke through his cracked lips. He said, but this time low and quiet, “Wash.”

And this time he seemed to speak, indeed, to himself alone.

The door opened, they entered, the door closed. There was a source of light high up, the air was cloudy — no. The air was steamy. They were in a small bath. Vergil was as suddenly glad there was space for them to bathe apart; and sluiced and soaped and sluiced and scraped and sank into his own small pool without lifting his eyes to watch the other. But in his mind he saw the filth coming off under the strigil like some roll of. . no simile was supplied. But of a sudden, seeing the fresh clothing (he had not noticed it before) neat-folded in their recesses, and thinking shame to himself for (perhaps) having felt too much shame. . and too little sympathy. . for his former superior, in the man’s decay; so, abruptly, Vergil said, “Well does Homer speak well of the pleasures of the warm bath and the clean garment — ” And then he could have bitten his tongue.

For the other did no more than to cite some other singer, with “ ‘Seven cities claimed blind Homer, dead, Through which blind Homer, living, begged his bread.’ ”

His once not-quite-pupil looked up. What more the older man may have meant by this perhaps too often quoted line, he wondered. But did not wonder long, for, very, very near to him he saw some others; and he was not surely certain he had seen all of them before.

As, sometimes, the sky being clouded almost over, yet the moon is seen unclouded and in the midst of a wide circle where its light meets the clouds and superimposes upon them; just so, or almost so, in the midst of the clouds of steam there was an area quite clear of them. And in the midst of this stood sundry men, Armin amongst them; they bowed to Vergil. And he, naked as when the midwife washed him first in water and next in wine, bowed back.

Said one, “We would ask the Lord Vergil if he would be kind enough, of his own mere grace and favor, to shake out the robes he wore when he entered.”

Vergil, saying, “I am not ‘the Lord Vergil,’ ” complied.

Said another, “We thank the Noble Mage, and further tax his condescendence by requesting that he raise his arms and turn round, rather slowly.”

Vergil, saying, “I am not ‘the Noble Mage,’ ” complied.

Said another, “Although we have doubtless asked of the Duke Vergil more than may be forgiven, still, we do venture to ask one thing more: Has he with him, upon him, within him, or anywhere accompanying him at present, any amulet and talisman? Or any item of wax, parchment or papyrus, metal, bone, stone, ivory, or any other substance upon which any sign, sigil, or symbol may be or might have been inscribed?”

Vergil said, “I am not ‘the Duke Vergil,’ and the answer to your question is no. — “Duke, duke,” Mount Blanco holds the rank of duke, you might as well address your questions to the mountain as to me: better, I should think.”

They bowed, and, in unison, thanked him; then, as though his last comment had not been made, then yet another asked, “Would the magister, magus, dux et dominus employ those arts and talents which are known to him and not to us, and endeavor to discover and ascertain if there might not be here along with him such things of such nature, the presence of which he may either have forgotten, or — ”

Lips continued a moment more to move, but Vergil heard not what they said; he had gathered his forces within himself, deeply so, and then he sent them outward again, but slowly, and in a certain special way. Nothing. He drew them back, considered them, sent them forth again, again returned them. Again examined. Then relaxed. “Again, sers: no. And again I tell you: those titles which — But mind that not. I had thought I was merely entering a private baths. Am I about to enter a court upon some charge of lese-majeste against the Emperor, his crown and staff, that you should seek and search after items that might harm him or the judges or unfairly provide me with some advantage against the cause of justice?”

But this time it was Armin who answered. Saying, “It is not that they suspect you, against them. It is that they suspect others. Against you.”

And Vergil — somehow, somewhat, humbled — said, “I see. I see. I see.”

He turned to speak to these men. But the vapors had closed in. And next the vapors vanished. And the air grew cold. Another door had opened. And his strange companion said, “If you will take your things, let us enter the cooling chamber.”

“This bath, then, was not that I might be refreshed, but that I might be examined,” Vergil said.

No answer to this was made. And perhaps none was required.

And after the two had cooled them, they dressed and moved on; and, though ever the way seemed to grow more narrow, they came into a broader place.

There the same men sat before him, ranged in a crescent. He said, “I am listening.”

For a moment it seemed that everyone was listening. But there was no sound, save the distant drip and tinkle of water from the frigidarium. Then one of them spoke; one who sat on the farthest right.

“Doctor,” he began.

Vergil felt an impatience which he attempted to restrain. He felt some sense of having gone through these experiences of modest denial before, and in another place, but did not try to recollect when or where. “Enough of these titles, my men. I will accept a simple courteous ‘ser.’ And no more.”

“Ser.”

Again the silence. Again, from not very close by, the drip and drop. Was it indeed water? For one single second he thought it was a water-clock, drip-dripping away the hours of his life; for another second he thought it might be the blood of a bull: They were deep down somewhere: Could the Taurobolium, the Mithraeum, be deeper?

“Ser.” A second man spoke, the second from the right. “Ser, you have come here to encompass the death of the king.”

Astonishment the most absolute swept over Vergil. And some chill fear. There came to him the account of how, every second year, the Archiflaman of Rybothe, distant even from the far-distant Pamirs, played at dice with someone chosen by lot to personate Death. The forfeit: the fate of Rybothe. And as the fate of Rybothe was far too important to be risked upon the cast of a die, the Archiflaman always played with loaded dice. “I ‘came here to — ’? What? I am on trial! What ‘king’? No, my men. Me sers, no, I assure you. What is this? It is quite false. No man’s death has — ”

Some faint savor of some other conference (if such this was) he had attended here. . but yet how different this tarrying silence (and these men gathered here) from the gross clamor of the magnates …!

Then: “Cadmus!” cried Vergil, the word bursting from his startled lips. “It is Cadmus whom you mean! No — ”

To say that their faces were calm was to understate. Their faces seemed fixed, frozen. Said the one seated third from right, “It is certainly Cadmus whom we mean. And we certainly see that you do not know. Then. . But …” He turned first one way, then the other, looked at his fellows. “How can we ask him? If he does not know?”

An endless moment passed. Then the fourth raised his eyes as though at something well above, then brought them down and, gazing straight at Vergil, said, “I do not know if my lord. . pardon. . my ser. . I do not know if he has seen the rose.”

Vergil’s eyes they were which now looked up, up. Sure enough, although the table that stood between him and them was such a small one it seemed pro forma, still: there was the form. A fifth fellow said, “My ser need not accept the constraint, the faith. The trust. He has but to say, and he will be taken, with all conceivable courtesy, to another place, whence he may find his way witherso he will. We ought,” he added, having briefly paused, “perhaps have pointed out the rose at the very first. But we have. . we have had. . much upon our minds.”

There it hung, though how it hung he could not clearly see, and how this freshly blooming rose (he thought, almost infinitely briefly, of the famous “twice-blooming roses of Paestum,” dismissed it: the bush bloomed twice, but not the rose) came even to be hanging here in this city where no flowers bloomed and no birds sang, he could not imagine. No: He could imagine, but it required some exercise of imagination. And it would have, must have, required some exercise of arts other than mere gardening. The rose hung over the table and they sat around the table and so they were sitting sub rosa, underneath the rose.

And the rose pledged secrecy. When it did not indeed pledge silence.

Silence there certainly was, it was already springing from the situation itself, from those who, caught up in the situation, sat around the. . almost. . secret, the sacred. . almost. . table. And silence it was that spun round Vergil like a web. Who at length said, “Me sers, you know I have been brought here by the Very Rich City of Averno to perform a task. A compact unwritten subsists between myself and this city, and the agentry and polity of this city are the magnates. This you must all know. But there is something I do not know, and that is how far I may bind myself to secrecy — if that secrecy may also bind me to some action — or, for that matter, some inaction — against the magnates.”

Silence. And the drip-drop of water. If water it was.

And then the last of the men sitting across from him on the other side of the table said, “He does not know.”

And, speaking once again in his turn, the first of them said, very quietly, very simply, and very tiredly, “Tell him.”

Someone who had this while been standing somewhat behind Vergil, though at a slight angle, stepped forward. The air was flat and still. But it did not stink, there was no omnipresent beat and thump. Were they really in Averno? The one who stepped forward Vergil had known from some several years before. It only now occurred to him that never had he known the man’s name. He who had once been the beadle of the Second Secret School in Sevilla, so very far away, now gently moved his hand and slowly opened it and he laid one languid finger on the edge of the so small table. “Look, then, student,” he said.

And in the polished surface of the table the student (and was he not still a student? was he not still learning? now, at this moment, even now?) saw himself running a race he had thought long forgotten by he himself and so (as so one thinks) by most of all the world: though of course most of all the world had never known of it. He recognized himself. He knew why the fear upon his face. He knew the trick whereby he had, if not indeed won the race, for there could be no one winner, had avoided being the one loser. He saw, though, that there was something different now. Deep in the polished surface of the table, deep below the table’s surface, he saw himself dodging, panting, turning here and turning there, and never ceasing to run — it had not been so, that way, at all — Wait. Was this the same race? One which he had already run? Or one which he was yet to run?

(Behind, this time, whom to hide?)

A race already run? A race yet to be run? Or one which he, though he had known it not, was already running.

The table. Look, then, student. . A man stood beneath an arch, outlined by light, though else was dim. A figure brutal, strong, and coarse, watching the approach of the runner with a steady eye. This one’s broad, blunt face had something of the look of an experienced gladiator, but there was in it no element of that caution akin to fear. And in his huge hands (huger, yet, his arms! his shoulders!) a huge hammer.

Said the once-beadle, “Borbo is his name. A butcher is what he is. He stuns the oxen. And when they stumble, then he plunges in the knife.”

And then Vergil saw the knife.

And then Vergil heard the voice. The voice never came from that butcher beneath the arch; it was toneless and dry and it was as though some clerk was reading something, one who reads a document whose contents are well known, yet need be read once more, before the signet is affixed. The voice had been speaking awhile before Vergil clearly made out words, the commencement of the line had been lost and he did not try to recover it…. one Vergil, a wizard, sorcerer, nigromant and necromant. From him the protection of the Laws and the Magnates of the Very Rich City is withdrawn, and he is proclaimed Outlaw. He may be duped, drugged, drawn, stabbed, strangled, stoned; he may be poniarded, poisoned, bludgeoned, thrust through, or cast down. It be licit that he be burned or bled or hamstrung or hanged…. And so the dreadful list, like a litany, ran on and on.

And on …

He was not aware of its stopping, but he was aware of its having stopped. And next he was wary and he was aware of someone saying to him, “But over you may be placed the power of the friends and councilors of Cadmus the King. And his and their protection may be yours. Twice sacred is he in his person and in his power; for, for one, he has been crowned a king and is thus on earth a reflection of the sacred kings of heaven and of hell; and for another, he is mad, and madness is like wisdom a gift of the gods. Averno is here. And the Roman Emperor is far away. And it may be that the Roman Emperor knows you not.”

Likely it was that the Roman Emperor knew him not. It was most unlikely that any Roman Emperor would ever know him at all. Still, still, he was a Citizen of Rome, and could Averno withdraw from him the immense protection of that Citizenship? Why did he not inquire of them an answer to this question? Why did he instead ask an entirely other question? “Why do you say that I have come here to encompass the death of Cadmus?”

“Because we have seen, as though in a vision of the night, Cadmus transfixed by an arrow. And we have seen that arrow to have been of your designing.”

Vergil felt his lips open and throat and tongue move. He perhaps heard not, but in his inward soul he felt, louder, something, than the loudest clap of thunder. The earth moved and shook, and yet it did neither shake nor move. And on the table in front of him, whose polished surface mirrored nothing now, he saw the fallen, shattered rose.

He saw the rose.

Out in the streets again, and feeling rather vertiginous, he asked, “Is there somewhere very near where I might for a moment sit?” No response coming, he looked around for his one-time beadle, saw him not. Saw no one else. No one behind him, that is. And no one at either side of the street. He saw no bench in an alcove; he saw no alcove. Neither was there so much as a doorstep or — sill. For lack of anything better, and rather than sit upon the street itself or squat upon his haunches, he leaned against the wall. It was all still so very odd — still, or, rather, again: the odd angles. The (he clearly realized this rather suddenly) absence of doorways. . could he be in some certainly peculiar street consisting only of the back-ends of properties? It was not impossible, but that there should not be even a tiny door for the servants …

For one moment more he was not even certain where the next corner was, so odd was the way the area was laid out, and then he saw some figure cross the street and vanish behind a wall; therefore behind the wall must be a corner. Suddenly his conjectures were swallowed up, as the details of that swift-passing figure came, by not quite afterthought, into his mind. It had been an armed man: What was such doing in Averno? — in any city, for that matter? — wherein, unlike the open countryside, only a soldier was, supposedly, permitted armed? It was possible that the man had some sort of license, a private watchman might obtain one — rather, his master might, on his behalf — but what was the weapon? A sword? Perhaps not. Certainly Vergil had observed a weapon. Ah, but the fellow had been helmed as well as armed! And a rather immense helmet it had been, too. This made no sense, no watchman would wear more than, at most, an iron cap. Had there not been something equally unusual about the way the man walked? — almost, stalked? Unusual, but certainly not unfamiliar. He had seen it, seen it a many times more than once, and now he recollected where.

Vergil was by choice no great frequenter of the Games, “the Games were not what they were,” everyone said so. Whatever they were now, it was not to his own taste to go to them; but sometimes situations other than his own taste obliged him. That cautious, slightly stiff-legged stance or walk, that not-quite-crouch, relentless tread: yes. At one place on the sands stood. . whichever. Toward him came prowling the other. The retiarius, perhaps, with his fisherman’s net and his trident for killing a great fish. Perhaps the gladiator was not a retiarius. Perhaps he was one of those who used the deadly short sword, Thracian-style.

His, Vergil’s, giddiness, which had seemed for a moment better, was now worse. It was of a quite different sort than that which had afflicted him at the end of the secret meeting of the friends of the king; it was something quite different and something quite worse, and it had to do with the man whom he had seen -

— was now, suddenly, seeing again: and nearer -

— and now again crossing the street, again at an angle at which no street should be -

— and nearer -

— wearing the great Thracian helmet, and yet carrying over one arm the reticulated net, a part of it in one hand ready to cast over the one he stalked -

But this was quite wrong, this was all quite wrong, it was much wronger than, merely, an armed man clearly not a soldier and within the city’s walls; it was wronger by far than a gladiator in full trappings walking in broad daylight down an open street. It was the trappings themselves were wrong, even though Vergil could still not determine the nature of the weapon, if sword, if trident.

The retiarius would not be wearing a Thracian helmet. The Thracian would not be carrying the weighted net of the retiarius. What. What?

Suddenly it became of immense, intense, of the utmost importance to know what time of day it was. If noon, all might yet be well; perhaps the man was another lunatic. Cadmus? No. Familiar. . now Vergil realized the man had, at this last crossing of the street he stood in, seemed familiar. But Cadmus, no. What time was it? What hour of morning had he, Vergil, started out? How long had he been out? He cast his eyes all round about. His heart swelled, he felt cold. It might be before noon, it might be after, noon it could not be: There were shadows in the street, short ones, but that was of no matter.

The man, armed, purposeful, seeking his intended prey, he in the Thracian helm, had of an utter certainty cast no shadow.

Thracian! Thrax!

Vergil had turned and loped away. Where he found a corner, he turned, down that way he fled. When he found another corner, he turned therein and fled down whatever street he fled. . and fled…. Much time he did not think, but he was, in some other way, engaged in something much resembling thought: he was counting. He was not at first aware that he was counting. But he had not even stopped counting when by chance he bethought him of something someone had said, someone else, who? it mattered not who, had said, “… here in the web …”

Here in the web!

Was it the name of this odd, odd area, section of the city? What else might it be? What had Thrax in hand, on arm, to cast over to entrap, before thrusting home the sword or trident (and it could not at all matter which)? A net. What was a net? A web. Those who spun, did they not often, also, weave? Weft and woof: what was weave but web? And all the while, in the back of his mind, at the bottom of his mind, he heard a thrumbling, a buzzing, a buzzing as of some gigant fly: and he saw the huge spider spinning, spinning, spinning, to entrap the fly: a web.

And all the while, above, beneath, beyond these dread, dread thoughts, he heard a voice, slow and calm and steady, saying, Third right, back one, two left, left four, back thrice…. He stopped. He did not stop the thinking voice, he did not stop — even — moving: running it was he stopped. He kept on walking, but now he walked crab-style, sidewise, so as to keep in sight both right and left. What weapons had he with him, to counter, if encountered, the Thrax face-to-face, armed with either sword or trident? He had his knife in its sheath: much good might this do him, save of course the Thrax slipped; the Thrax, the retiarius, as all and every gladiator, was trained to walk so as not to slip. It must be some other weapon, different, quite different indeed, on which he must depend. And he depended now upon his memory. And he drew it forth, as knife from sheath, as sword from scabbard. Third right, back one, two left, left four, back thrice…. There was more, of course more: but this was the key. He knew that now. It remained but to be for one full moment quite, quite calm, to act as though no one pursued him, and to reflect. And the one full moment he needed not, it became clear in less than that: Third right, back one, two left, left four, back thrice. The key opened the lock, the lock moved the door. He was in the one hundred and twelfth labyrinth, or maze, set down in the book called the Patterns of Parthenopius. He had studied them for years and years, had he not studied them a decade? Had he not, having learned them, every night gone through them all for one full passage of the larger sandglass, every single one of the labyrinthine mazes there delineated. . gone through them in his mind, of course; merely he’d checked them with those in the book when he had done.

Well. He had no book to check with now but he needed none. He followed the proper turnings. He did not run. He felt, by and by, safe enough to turn his back.

But by that time he was out of the maze. Maze, labyrinth, web. Whatever Thrax had been designated to cast over him, Vergil was now beyond such casting. He was out of the web.

As for what he was now in, why, that, though perhaps safer, was certainly something else indeed.

• • •

If he had indeed been, this last time, time just past, indeed been in Averno, he was not certain. . in a way he thought he could not have been; though if not there, where? — this he could not say. But he was, of a sudden, in Averno now, and in such a quarter of it where even the populace itself, to say nothing of strangers, was always in danger — a glance told him that — immediately it was not violent, but certainly it was criminous, and stinking of evil and rot. What was there here in this low quarter to occupy the sullen folk who filled and swarmed in it? Why, here lay the thieves’ kitchens and the thieves’ markets and the thieves’ dens. Be sure (Vergil thought) that more than not the stolen items had been stolen from the strangers who came to the Very Rich City, whether they were themselves very rich or not, to trade. Or from their servants. Here, too, were the lairs of the poorest prostitutes, though it was too early for all but one or two of them to be stirring about for custom. . if cupping a pair of sagging, withered dugs and leering from a window, as some wretched she was even now doing, could be called “stirring” — the one look at her face which he could not avoid convinced him that she was either imbecile or mad. “Syra!” she called out, crack-voiced. “Syra! Gypa! Hey!”

And then as well in the winding ways he saw often man or woman squeezing lengths of goats’ guts in wash-buckets and basins full of liquids too murk and miry to term the process “cleaning”; and as often, and often right next to this, perhaps parted only by some chopping block, were pots of rank and rancid oil where shorter chunks of this delicacy were trying and frying, yielding smells as evil as the looks he had from those who flung their heads upward, their jaws outward, a gesture ugly in intent as aspect; the very offer to sell, an insult: “Sarsa! Hot tripa, cheap enough f’you!”

Who in the names of all the gods of hell would want to buy any of the rubbish displayed. . knives with broken blades, unmatched spurs and scraps of furs, wax-caustic portraits on boards cracked along the middle, shirts ripped down the back and stained with stains not only those of mud. . and who mad enough to be tempted by hints of “Better stuff inside, boss”? Hints which, not taken, transformed themselves into filthy gestures, hoots of “Nabba! Nabba! Bugger-die!”

Surely they did not any of them, with their Syra! Gypa! Sarsa! Nabba! imply that any of them particularly thought this stranger Vergil was a Syrian, an Egyptian, a Saracen, a Neapolitan; merely cant words for outsiders, were these. And, for parting gift, the sneak-slung stone.

Vergil trod his way. Not that he was certain what it was. But there was a slight but quite discernible slant to the lane, and he believed that this, could he keep to it, would bring him eventually to the canal, whence he might surely find a way he knew, one back to a safer section of this city where little, indeed, perhaps nothing, was quite safe.

As no man’s or woman’s eye may trace the lightning whence it cometh, whither it goeth, but that the pattern of it once flashed remains before the eyes, slowly changing and slowly fading, so Vergil retained something of certain looks flashed upon him, certain glances flashed past him by sudden lifting-up of low-cast-down gazes, of certain words he not-quite heard and certain gestures near covert — he knew that there were here in these outcast wards some who meant to seize or slay him. . perhaps one first and then the other. . and he perceived the humor of the close-packed populace toward him beginning to grow worse. Some scuffle between a two or three of them of a sudden breaking out and attention drawn away from him, Vergil slipped between half-hovels into an alley scarcely wide enough for dogs to couple in; the space-way led to a rubbly courtyard with broken walls, and there on the slimy ground he saw a part of his salvation. He seized up a cloak of rags so foul and fetid that not even a common beggar would have touched it save to thrust it aside with a stick; might, nonetheless, someone — anyone — lay claim to it? if only to make trouble? He, recalling the adage festina lente, made haste to remove his own robe slowly, and left it alongside of where the other had lain crumpled. A mute trade of sorts? So be it. Who knew who even now peered at him from this worse-than-jungle? — he got him into the thousand-times-worse-than-merely-wretched garb and made to muffle his face in its filthy folds. Some silent words spoke to him; under his under-tunic, invisible, still he had his purse, from it now he took the small rough-cast bell which Iohan had given him. He did not mean to summon a servant now — yes! he did! his servant was the fear his bell would summon by its sound; this, too, would serve him.

And best it serve him well.

Peering through the harsh and clotted cloth, he set his feet to walk without stumbling (though a slight stumble now and then he could not avoid: but it fit well one in his disguise, for he had bethought him suddenly to tear loose one jagged strip and wrap it, bandage-wise, about his left foot: some further detail to add to his mask) through the narrow places and the wider: see felon throng draw swiftly and not even sullenly apart! as he made his way, ringing; and save for that, in silence — scarcely he dared breathe through the ichorous clouts. If he opened his mouth to say so much as the word Unclean, he must have died…. In fear and unashamed to show it, they fell away and let him pass: not that a single one among them there pitied him nor would shrink to end his life with a well-thrown stone, but only that his body must then be needs moved: and none would dare move to move it.

And calling to mind another fell occasion, he wondered which was worse sound? The hoarse, harsh murmur of the hippotaynes hunting, coming in their companies from the reeds, or the slow, sad clamor of the leper’s bell?

Averno.

The canal at last having been reached, and seeing not far from its slippery barm the slop-shop of some seemingly respectable — for Averno, anyway, respectable — trader in used garments, with no ado he stripped off filthy robe and false bandage, threw both into the canal; replaced his bell, now silent, in his purse and from the purse drew what he considered a coin sufficiently worth to require no haggling; tossed it in front of the slop-seller. Who, as though it were an everyday matter to be doing business with a haggard man clad in underwear, quick-picked first one robe, hefted and considered it, tossed it down and selected another: threw it easily up and over. Vergil slipped into it, shook himself like a dog, once, twice, let the garment fall into place; it seemed clean. It was a trifle too large, what did such a thing matter. He observed the trader draw the coin close with his great toe. A look not quite incurious passed between them. Value given for value. No one need know everything about anything. A distant strand, a filthy city; deeds, not words.

Walking along now almost at ease, words to say came to Vergil’s mind. His mind immediately reminded him that these were not words for him to say, but words that to him had been said. Sissie summoned thee. And cruel Erichtho. To refer to the Cumaean Sibyl as “Sissie,” unless she was indeed a sister, this spoke either immense familiarity. . or immense contempt; this last was impossible. It was unthinkable. Had the Sibyl a brother or brothers? A sister or sisters? Could the Sibyl of Lybya, the Sibyl of Sicily (this last, had he not been told had spoken to Cadmus?), be, indeed, sisters to she of Cumae? As for Erichtho. The name of this sorcerer was scarcely spoken even in “the woods,” and, even there, never but in whisper. (Oak trees by midnight. Fire, meal, salt. Diana. Moonglow Selene. Cat and hare — The Apulian fellow had known anyway some of that. He had not, though, known Thrax. . and the gods knew through what night-tangle Thrax’s shadow now slipped. . or on what errands.) Vergil strained for such scraps as he had heard. . or, if not heard, then, somehow, however, had known without hearing. . of Erichtho: some dim recollection or adumbration of a great battle…. Had there been a great battle involving, somehow, that name? Was there yet to be one? — And if him, Vergil, involving, how?

Question there had come. But answer there came none.

Some odd, odd sound seemed echoing, buzzing: He thought of the scene in his room that night. Thought absurd. As though she whose voice echoed as though from a thousand caverns forth could be confined in a bottle, like a fly! And yet, and so: suppose! Had it been so, it had been a sacrilege, or had it, would it? Had he not saved the fly’s life? A mental note he made, though sterner than as though graven on marble with iron, to take the bottle far from the spidery corner, and release whatever buzzed within…. And if so it were the Sibyl, what message? When no words spoken?

Some speak. Some spin.

Some weave.

“Iohan! I’m damned glad to see you — ”

“And I, you, Master. For — ”

“That small bell you gave me? May have saved my — ”

“Master, what I’m thinking, it’s that it’s best we consider getting back. Away from — ”

And, as often when two talk more or less at the same time, they two more or less at the same time fell silent. After a moment the boy gave a slight bow, a slight gesture. Vergil said, “If you mean it is for me to talk first, you being man and I master, then what I wish to say is that I give you leave to finish what it was which you were saying.”

Iohan nodded, swallowed, made a broader gesture. “Ser, such types has been roaming roundabout here, and such talk I hear talked by them I hasn’t asked to say so much as Salve, and it’s give me firm impression, ser, as there are them here who as you might say mean to speed the parting guest.”

Vergil grunted. “Meaning us?”

“Therefore.”

Vergil sighed. “There is so much I’ve observed of very recently myself as to make me feel I needn’t ask you to say more right now. There’s a great deal of unfinished business, but it may be that our own part in it may be finishable from elsewhere. ‘Pay, pack, proceed’ — eh?”

“Ser?”

“Traditional military order. . of some sort. Matters not finished here? Let them send after me to discuss that. More advice wanted? Let them disburse for the advice they’ve had, then ask me for more. Do you observe, my lad, what it is which I am about to do?”

He had his money in his hand, his account tablets in the other. For a second only Iohan stared, and rubbed his brown curls. Then: “Ah! You be about to pay, ser. Then I’m about to pack, ser. And then — ”

“ — then we may proceed, ser.”

Settling accounts with the lodgings-master took longer than Vergil liked, but an attempt to speed matters would have had no better result than the presentation of further demands, most of them and likely all of them for sure mythical — and then as well he wished to give no appearance of nervousness. Some accounts he paid in full with no question, some he questioned but paid in full, some he simply refused with an impassive no. And as at last the keeper of the house made some particularly preposterous demand for sundry quintals of the best barley, Vergil said, “The best barley has never even been smelled in your stables. Take the money and snap your talley-sticks in two.”

“ ‘Take the money.’ I’ll take the futtering money, sure, yes — and I’ll take the horse too, until — ”

“The horse is rented and her rent is up; if you’d like a lawsuit with her livery stableman — but perhaps you’d like me to report all this to the magnates instead?”

The man looked him full in the face and gave one silent snarl. Then, with a sullen shrug, he snapped his talley-sticks and tossed them away. Then he swept the money off the counting-board, and whither it went, Vergil cared not. The mare was saddled, the saddlebags full; he mounted. Only a step into the street and he struck his forehead. “The fly!” he said, sharply. Half-turned.

But Iohan was equal sharp. “That great fly in that great bottle, ser?”

“Yes! I must — ”

“Ser, I’ve opened it and let out. The bottle, ser, be packed. The fly — who knows. Surely Master didn’t want it? I can’t certain recollect you ordered me to do what I done, but I be almost sure of it.”

Vergil had no recollection of ordering it at all, but, it being exactly as he would have wished to have ordered, he gave his head a brisk shake. Then: “Where is the beast going?” he demanded. “Why are you leading her this way? This is not the way to the Great Gate at all; what ails you, boy?”

“Confusion ails me, ser, for it’s not me as is leading she, but it’s as she’s got her own notions, and so far,” as the mare picked up her hooves and increased her pace, “it’s all as I be able to do is hold on to her. What? Give you the reins? Aye — ”

But tug as he would, gentle her as he would, attempt to guide her as he might, the mare swerved not from her own course. “This is absurd. It is in fact so absurd that I shall let her go as she pleases. . just to see where she pleases.”

And where she pleased was to lead along the broad lane which, as every evidence of sight and smell indicated, led to the Dung Gate. To the great jollification of loungers, loiterers, and guards. The chief duty guard was vastly diverted to see the fine horse anticking and prancing through the filthy puddles despite the evident desire of her master and his man to control her. Like cleave to like, the duty guard observed. Expel nature with a pitchfork, sure she do still return, he said, chuckling, absently fiddling with his filthy book and filthier pen. Then some notion occurred to him that checked his grinning and hurrawing for a moment. “Say, by duty I bennot suppose to leave yous gann out by thic gate,” he brayed, some sudden definition of “duty” coming to his mind.

Iohan twisted his head. “The cursed trot’s a vehicle with dung inside, ben’t she?” he demanded, and trying, seemingly, to hold on to the bridle for dear life, else be tossed into the muck and steaming mud. At this the guard and lay-company laughed loud, Vergil reached for the book, had it in hand, crusty pen hasty dipped in ink which never saw India, scribbled his scrawl, tossed a coin, tossed the book, more curvetting, hoots, jeers: They were outside the walls. The chief duty guard howled that they were not to come back by the same way. “Nor by Here we shan’t!” muttered Iohan. The mare wrangled till the gate was gone from sight. Then she of a sudden settled into a perfectly steady pace.

“Hop up, Iohan, quick! She may get bored with good behavior!” The mare was no great heavy animal, but neither one she bore on her back now was of great weight. . as weight be gauged in pounds. And — sure enough! — no sooner was Iohan fixed in his place, than she was off again; she ran, she ran, she ran at a swift but holdable pace. . that is, one at which she held herself. Her mounts were content with holding on to her.

And then she cantered, and then she let herself into a quick but certainly a restful walk. And as she did she turned her head and rolled her eyes. Aside the road was an obelisk on which words and signs were carved. “What be that’n, ser, please?”

Vergil squinted to read the half-obscured words. “Ah, yes. Oh, so. That is the Proscription Stone. Anyone banished, exiled, or proscribed from the limits of the municipium the Very Rich City of Averno, let him take heed: These are the limits thereof, further he may not go, pains of death await him…. More or less that is what it says. And what say you?”

“ ‘Exiled from — ’ Well, ser. You say such, such I must believe it say. Leave them proscribe me, ser. No fear, my Here, I’ll violate them boundaries. — Ser, ser! Ben’t the air cleaner?”

The very cleanly winds, which must indeed have felt themselves proscribed from entering the municipal limits of the Very Rich City, most certainly had blown the air here clean. The path was not the one which they had taken, coming in; what of it; nothing of it. Sooner or later it would reach a road. Meanwhile they were gone from Averno, passed clean out of its unclean jurisdictions, as the path turned (sure enough! very soon they came upon a paved way: Imperial stones it was the mare’s hooves now trod; there was safety in the very sound and thought), though they could not see the city itself, yet that corner of the evening sky was fouled and smudged and seemed darklier than night: though now and then a flame, flames shot up.

Oft was I wearied when I worked at thee…. In a way, now, now being a fragment of oft, Vergil was weary. Weary, in one way, was far too weak a word. But in another way he felt as though a burden as great as any borne by mule or serf had been rolled from off his back and shoulders. It was the day’s end in more than one sense. There was, rising now, moon enough to light them: against the horizon, the moon loomed large. Some remnants of day lingered to the side. Overhead, the stars.

• • •

They had passed the night in rude comfort enough at a clean-enough inn. At the early morning there was a cup of hot wine and a bowl of chestnut-meal well cooked. Thin mists swirled through the trees, they were up high, and on a strange road, but this did not bother: It was a road that would lead them back to the small port that was — still and again — home.

Where it led them before then, however, was to a small military post with a crow’s-eye view of the surrounding country. A hare could not have come along within miles, in daylight without being observed, let alone armed men. It need have been no surprise that they themselves, then, were, so to speak, expected; the surprise was by whom they were expected.

“It be a lictor,” said Iohan, in a dismal voice. Wiggled his back, and rubbed the nape of his neck.

“It is not only a lictor,” Vergil said, by no means joyful himself; “it is the lictor. Ah, well. — Ser Lictor! Greetings!” He had hardly expected to meet him here, on the berm of a rural road, still holding his officially bundled rods and ax. There was, however, no pomander box, nor was one needed so near the sweet-smelling woods — expected by Vergil not, the lictor seemed surely to be expecting Vergil; why?

Soon answered. “Saw you coming down below at the bend of the road there,” he said. There was no grimness in his manner, neither was it quite the same as it had been at their last meeting. Almost automatically he now drew himself up. “Master Vergil, a Citizen of Rome, I greet you in the name of the Senate and the People of Rome. His Honor the Legate Imperial is within, and …” And here formalities concluded. The man was more puzzled than anything else. Iohan, ceasing to fear for his back or his neck, slipped from where he had been holding the mare’s head and clasped his hands for Vergil’s more easy dismounting, then at once returned. Once again the animal looked back, rolled her eyes; then she bent to crop a clump of grass. None of her antic moods seemed now upon her.

“Well, Lictor, what is it? What brings you here, with his Honor back in Averno?”

A shake of the head. “Oh, he’s not, my ser. He’s within. And he’s seemingly had a shock of some sort. I do want you to see him, as I’m sure he’ll be wanting to see you, but first let me tell you what’s this about. . so far as I know what it’s about. Seems that the Excise stopped some fellow ambling along on a mule and stopped him to ask for a declaration. Well, he — so they tell me, I wasn’t there — puffed and huffed, said he was a courier on official business from the Very Rich City to his Excellence” — Vergil rapidly ran titles and authorities through his mind: His Excellence, that would be the Viceroy of the South, with office at, or, rather, right outside of, Naples, whose Doge was notoriously prickly about any possible rival in power — ”and he needn’t show nor even have nor make a declaration. Which in its way is of course true. However, for one thing: why, if bound from Averno to Naples, why be on this road? Hardly the most direct one. For another, if a courier, why going so slow?”

He looked at Vergil, as if expecting, or half-expecting, him to answer on behalf of the alleged courier. Vergil not doing so, on went the lictor with his account. The unsatisfactory answer had given the excise men reason to make the fellow dismount, his baggage had been examined, they had indeed contained dispatches, but, although asked to wait till the matter were taken up with the soldiery, the courier had not done so. “Tried to cut across country, from this bend in the road to the other, foolish to think he could have gotten away with it, a mule can do it, yes; suppose he saw no bloody great cavalry horses, thought himself safe, but these wiry little hill-horses — ponies, almost — which the soldiery have got here can go most anywhere a mule can go, and go it faster. Shorten the tale: they locked him up for the night, then, having been informed that his Honor was stopped here — and also on route to see his Excellence — why, they brought all his burthen here, too. And his Honor, by authority so vested in him and his honored office by Imperial Sign and Seal, opened it. Which is what seems to have given him this shock. Please to come along, Ser Vergil.”

Shock. It would not need too great a degree of bad news to constitute a shock for Casca, considering what low state of health and spirit the Legate Imperial had been in when last seen. Not many steps brought them across the invariable moat (dry now, but sharply staked: one never knew) and into the guard-post proper, nor thence into a small room, evidently the decurion’s. The decurion was there, looking as like to every other decurion as to conjecture vision of there being somewhere, a mold to make them. And, there, too, was Casca. It was not certain to Vergil that Casca recognized exactly who this newcomer was, but the lictor having gotten as far as “You Honor, one Master Vergil, a Citizen of Rome, whom — ” when Casca broke in upon the reintroduction. Vergil had heard the older man’s voice as they had approached, wondered at its flat and high-pitched tone, but the tone turned as Casca now spoke to him.

“… yes, it’s true, it’s true, it’s true, I did fear that there might be some slackening in the reigns of state if I left at the usual time to make my usual report, but though half I hesitated to leave, more than half I felt I needed to discuss it all with the Viceroy, so leave I did at the usual time, and now I am confused about the time, and so you are here to help me.” The rambling words, part-explanation, part-appeal, stopped. Abruptly. Almost at once Casca said, “Help me, then. I say you must help.” He turned his ruined face to the decurion. Who turned his own face to Vergil.

The decurion was inclined to be brusque. “Don’t dally and stand about, citizen,” he said. “You are required to assist the Imperial Officer — to assist any Imperial Officer when called upon.”

“Decurion,” said Vergil. “I am more than mere willing. I am indeed eager. But his Honor has yet to say, though he’s asked my help, what help is it he asks of me. Ser Legate,” he addressed the man who sat, sick-faced, crouched and quivering, before him in the guardroom, “what is it, ser, which — ”

Casca said, “I am perplexed. I am confused. Badly, very badly confused. What is the date?” Vergil answered, now being able to answer a given question, though little he saw why it should be a matter of either confusion or perplexity: They were not, after all, some foraging party lost in woods for weeks. He named the month, named the number of the day, declared the relation to the ides and calends, he named the Consuls-in-Office, the Imperial reign-year, and the number of the indiction, that fifteen-year tax-cycle being just about to turn. There was a small smell of small wine and of old leather in the small room. . doubtless the leather was that of the decurion’s harness. There was also a small smell of the decurion as well.

“… confused …” said Casca. “I wish that you would not confuse me, master. . whatever your name is. Now tell me. Tell me ever so simply. The date. What the date?”

This time and before Vergil could answer, the decurion, a classically rugged-looking old legionary, face as leathery as harness, and with callouses under his chin from the helmet-straps of years; this time the decurion gestured Vergil, not to speech but silence, said, halfway between Attention and At Ease, “Ser. Beg to report. Eleventh day of September. Ser.”

At this brief answer, couched in the military report terms familiar from years, old Casca seemed to gain control. To be. . anyway. . less confused. “The eleventh day.”

“Ser. Eleventh.”

Casca limply inclined his hand. Vergil, eyes following the movement, saw that there appeared to be an entire strongbox of documents next to the folding chair in which Casca sat. Sat, and trembled. The Imperial Eagle was embossed in the upper right-hand corner; in the center was the single letter A and an insigne and under that the initials for Latin: “the Very Rich City.” In size it was something between a dispatch box and a chest for treasure; it was made of cedar wood bound in bull’s-hide; and it seemed to be not alone old but to have had a long, hard life. Though the box had been corded, tied, knotted, sealed, all this lay around it, with several clean and fresh cuts in the cordage. (Though the cordage had not been new, either: Averno had grown rich not alone from what it earned but from what it had not spent.) And toward all this gestured the Legate’s wasted, quivering hand.

“Open it, Dec,” he said. The decurion at once obeyed. A mass of documents lay within, some on parchment and some on papyrus. Some were certainly palimpsests, from which older writing had been thriftily soaked or scraped so that new texts might be inscribed thereon. Some of the number (Vergil could not guess what the number might be) had had their own seals broken; others, visibly, had remained unopened. Again Casca gestured, again the decurion obeyed an order; obeyed it correctly, though no words had passed. He picked up the first item, presented it to his superior. Who gestured that Vergil take it, that Vergil should open it; commanded, “Read …”

Not more than a few words of the commencement of a formal (and a lengthy) salutation had Vergil read when he was interrupted. “The date, man. The date? What date?”

“Ser Legate.” He scanned it swiftly. “The thirteenth of September.”

“The thirteenth? The thirteenth? How comes this to be dated the thirteenth? — when you both assure me that today is the eleventh?”

Vergil. “Merely at a hazard. . a guess. . documents are sometimes dated in advance in preparation for them to be signed subsequently. . on the date designated, for — ”

Said Casca, “These are already signed.”

Vergil’s eyes went at once to the bottom of the document in his hands. Whose signature was there he could not at once make out, he had a swift impression it had been signed in stencil, that great invention to aid those who could not write even their own names; but signed it had been. Perhaps Casca had made another gesture, for the decurion, not skilled in the subtle movements of the accomplished secretary, had attempted to remove the sheet from Vergil’s hands. Vergil did not yield it over, there was a silent struggle (Iohan said later that the lictor declared the decurion had actually put his other hand to his sword), then the thing passed from the one man to the other. And Vergil cried, “O the gods, Casca!”

He had seen one line, inscribed in ink as black as black ever was, but it burned as though written in fire. — the sentence of death having been thus executed upon the traitor Cadmus, it — It had been signed, it had been sealed, it had not been as intended delivered, it spoke in the past tense as of a thing accomplished, it was dated two days hence — “ ‘O the gods,’ indeed,” said Casca.

Casca, at their first meeting (over the good wine mingled with fresh clean spring water), had said of those in power in Averno, “… 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.” But now he was saying something else, in a voice that was only intermittently firm.

“It is not the life of one lunatic that concerns me, that is not of any concern to me in the least. Those who are insane are sacred?” The question, purely rhetorical, was followed by no pause. Casca swept on, quavering voice or not. “Sacred because they have been touched by the sacred gods? ‘Let the gods avenge offenses against themselves.’ I was looking, I had been looking in the wrong place. Gazing altogether in the wrong direction — as they intended I should dol Intelligence they have none, but cunning, craft, slyness and guile — of this they have enough, enough, more than enough, they — ”

“By they your Honor means the magnates of Averno?”

A gesture. “Whom else could I mean? Look, look at those damnable documents.” Another gesture. “The magnates? Yes! But not all the magnates. I haven’t even scanned all those decrees, sentences, documents, declarations. I can’t tell you every name that is on them, because be sure that not every name has a sheet all to itself — there are lists! Ah, what lists! Listen, Master Vergil. There is a faction of the magnates that intends to make a clean sweep of every other faction. Much of what they mean, and what the reasons for meaning it, is unclear to me, it is too murk, too thick. But I can tell you that they don’t mean merely to put one man, mad or not, to death. They have down there the names of hundreds, Messer Vergil! I say hundreds. I say hundreds. Whom they mean to kill.

“Hundreds …”

And so Vergil came to know, knowledge swift and heavy and as sickening as a blow, what that dull, recurrent, and deep demand for “… Hecatombs …” had really meant. Hundreds were to be sacrificed indeed. But it was not hundreds of oxen that were meant. Hundreds of men.

“Your Honor had spoken once to me of blowing one blast of the trumpets and bringing down the legion. Has — ”

“ ‘Send one signal,’ is what I said,” Casca corrected him, almost absently. True: the trumpet-blowing had been mimed. “I was about to inform you that there must actually be three: one to the Commander of the Legion, one to the Viceroy, and one. . for one last chance we must give them to shrink back from this series of — obviously — false trials of so many Roman citizens. . and one to Averno. I — ” A new and sudden thought struck him. “Would you bear this last one? We would give you an armed escort. You are already known there, so — ”

Vergil had begun to consider the manner in which he might do this, when he was of a sudden overwhelmed by memories of why it was perhaps not the best thing in the world — for himself, for Cadmus, for Armin. He forced himself to stop thinking thus, useless catalogue of names, useless waste of time — “Ser Legate, here is what happened,” he began. Got no farther.

“You would not wish to. Very well. Tell me later why not. One moment later.” He pointed to an open set of tablets. “Take up the style, if you please, me ser, and write these words: S. Apponal Casca, Legate Imperial, to the Very Rich City of Averno, Greetings. This is the decree. All trials and all other judicial processes are to be estopped and to stay estopped and in abeyance till further notice. Utterly forbidden that You execute any sentences of capital nature. At once acknowledge obedience. Now seal it. — Decurion!”

“Ser!”

“Send this.”

“Ser!”

The decurion saluted, left the room, could be heard barking his orders. Send this! Not, take your decade and bring this, this — and, if so, Vergil tried to imagine the entire ten men on their mounts riding calmly and confidently up to the gated walls of the Very Rich (very filthy, very decadent, very bad) City: he could imagine it. He could, even, imagine a one or at most a two of the cavalrymen thus matter-of-factly delivering these orders; what he could not, in this case, imagine, was the reaction thereto. “Would the Legate Imperial not consider assigning the entire force of the soldiery here encamped to this task?”

“And leave this post unmanned? Messages must pass, must be exchanged, you know. If I were well, if you were willing — However. What. A thought. Just now. An obvious one. What, what, what …”

But someone else had had that thought, someone from whose mind it had not escaped; from nowhere, there he stood before them.

The lictor.

“Your Honor. Permission to draw a third ration.”

“Granted.”

“Your Honor. Permission to depart on duty.”

“Go.”

“Ser. Hail and farewell.”

“Hail and farewell.”

In a moment Vergil saw through the tiny window three men on horseback: two soldiers, armed as usual, one with the sealed tablets and the tablets’ purple badges, and the lictor, bearing the fasces. Naught else. Place there might be and time there might come, that so-far august emblem of order and of cogent rule and of well-tempered strictness sink, as all emblems might, and be degraded: not here and not yet. Vergil heard the hooves depart at a slow and steady pace, now almost soft upon the enclosed ground of the guard-station post, now hollow upon the bridge, then (with a single, threefold whoop of human voice) at the gallop along the stone-paved, the Imperial road.

Twice more did he, at command, indite the burthen of that message on other tablets. To the Commandant, the Legion: One cohort at once to Averno, in danger of sedition, misprision, and misrule. CASCA. (No need to add, “Have all in ready if more be needed”; it would be done. Automatically.) The Commandant would of course notify the Viceroy and this did not of course excuse the Legate from doing the same; the Legate did the same. At rather greater length, but not at much greater. One man sufficed for each message. The decurion departed, reappeared, departed; once Casca murmured something to him, the decurion responded with an official-sounding syllable; later Vergil was to learn that this ensured Iohan would receive a soldier’s meal: bread, garlic, salt, parsley, and the rough-and-ready wine of the ration; next the Legate put his hands before his face, at once removed them.

“Now there is time for you to tell me why you did not wish to return. I do not wish to return, think not this is any sort of reproach; speak on.”

Had it been only that “one moment later”? And not, say, an hour? He began to, indeed, “speak on.” Told the listening Legate how he had felt himself all but hustled off from and out of the stinking Rich City; some gifts, few, perfunctory, and an order for a money payment — and no extremely extraordinarily munificent one — cashable in either Puteoli or Naples, within a distinctly limited period of time. How, when he would further discuss his work there, came once more, at once, the familiar congee against which one felt there was no appeal: All right to go now, Wizard. How he had protested having heard no decision, no word, even, of refusal, denial, in regard to his plans for the fire-fields and how inflammable airs might be piped, and boiling water from the springs. Responsum: Master Vergil need give himself no further immediate concern in the matter. The Council of Magnates of the Very Rich City has even now already commenced giving Master Vergil’s plans the attention they so much merit, attention the most profound…. Master Vergil will wish to mount, his horse and boy even now are waiting for him….

… and so they were. . though he had given no order.

An idea had flashed and shimmered while Vergil, aware of hands poised to press as he walked toward his servant and his horse, several of the magnates walking alongside him — seeming not so much anxious to see the last of him as preoccupied with other, deeper matters. This idea formed itself into a word he had not, dared not speak. Poppaea. He had and dared speak another name, though. “I will wish to pay my respects to King Cadmus before I — ”

And one man’s emphatic “Nuh!” was not quite overspoken by another’s. “King Cadmus is at present engaged in fasting, meditation, and prayer, and — ”

And, “Therefore!” said Iohan.

Stooped, folded hands.

Vergil hesitated. Shrugged. Mounted.

“Clearly they wanted me gone directly and wanted me not to return,” he concluded his recapitulation to Casca.

Casca’s haggard face twitched. “ ‘Clearly’? Not to me, ‘clearly.’ ”

Nor, in one second, was it “clearly” to Vergil either. This, all this, which he had just described — had it happened? It had not happened! What had happened was much simpler. — Simpler? Well. . briefer. He and Iohan had decided to leave, and the mare -

Why had the mare so suddenly gone antic, gone into one of her moods, her “little ways,” taken them would they or would they not by way of the least likely exit, the straight-topped Dung Gate, whence no man of social stature entered or left? — instead of via the arched way of the Great Gate? No answer came in words, but as though in some vision, a scene of mist contained within a crystal, he saw something. . someone. . waiting beneath an arch…. His name is Borbo.

His name is — what?

Over a table hung a rose, and deep within that table’s surface a man stood beneath an arch, outlined by light, though else was dim: a figure brutal, strong, and coarse, watching the approach of a runner, of one running in a race, watching with a steady eye. This former’s broad, blunt face had something of the look of an experienced gladiator, but there was in it no element of that caution akin to fear. And in his huge hands (huger, yet, his arms! his shoulders!) a hammer, huge. Who? What?

“Borbo is his name. A butcher is what he is. With his hammer he stuns the oxen. And when they stumble, then he plunges in the knife.”

And then Vergil heard the voice — another and a different voice, not the voice that had just spoken — this voice never came from that butcher beneath the arch (where, the arch?); it was toneless and dry and — he now realized, a trifle tired — it was as though some clerk was reading something, one who reads a document read sundry times before, yet need be read once more, before the signet is affixed. . one Vergil, a wizard, sorcerer, nigromant and necromant. From him the protection of the Laws and the Magnates of the Very Rich City is withdrawn, and he is proclaimed Outlaw. He may be duped, drugged, drawn, stabbed, strangled, stoned; he may be poniarded, poisoned, bludgeoned, thrust through, or cast down. It be licit that he be burned or bled or hamstrung or hanged….

The arch, beneath which the butcher stood: where?

The arch of the Great Gate, whence, it had been thought Vergil and his servant would emerge upon their leaving the Very Rich City. . was where. They had been hurried, huddled, headed thither; and thither they would certainly have gone, had it not been for the sudden madness of the mare. It was a minor madness, but it was enough to have saved their lives; thus:

The scene of he and his servant having been hastened forth by sundry magnates to his, Vergil’s, and his, Iohan’s, doom and death — this, which one moment ago he had imagined had happened — this had indeed not happened. But it had been intended to have happened. The decree of outlawry had covered many contingencies, but it had not covered the contingency of a runaway horse. Idly, Vergil looked at his palm, thinking, I must give her some handfuls of best white barley. His hand was empty. His mouth, fallen silent, was empty, too; he fumbled for his cup, his cup was also empty; his cup, his mouth were equal dry.

To Casca: “Is there among these damnable documents one which proclaims my own outlawry?”

From Casca: “You may look. But does it matter. Averno shall not come to us, for all its documents. We shall go to Averno. Despite them.”

Again that echo in his ear, his damnable, his echo-trapping ear.

I do not go to Rome.

Ah, no? But it may be that Rome shall come to you.

To Casca: “Can we do nothing, then, but wait?”

From Casca: “We can do nothing, then, but wait.”

And, whilst they waited?

The magnates had, almost casually, proclaimed a State of Siege, as was, of course, their entire and proper right in law, and needed no pretensions that sapping operations were underway round about (and under) the walls, the black walls; it was, if one cared to call it so, a legal fiction: and the precise distinctions between a State of Siege and a State of War were no doubt of immense interest to the jurisconsults and their students in Apollo’s Court. But here, as for the most part, it was a distinction without a difference. This had entitled the magnates to close shut the three known openings of the Very Rich City: the Great Gate, the Dung Gate, and the Water Gate, and to set booms across its canal, to station guards (read “troops”) all round about the place. And so on.

Being no jurisconsults themselves, however, they had also ripped up the roads a good way through and into the mountains — roads? mere and narrow paths! At least some of the rocks ripped from the roads had been poised behind basketries and fences and heavy nets above the narrow passes, ready to be loosed at a word. At a word? Nay, at a gesture. A signal, be it weft or whistle. And loosed, of course, would be: though not as planned. So Averno had arranged to stay secret and secure, untroubled (the magnates, untroubled) during the few, very few days needed to carry out plans; after which -

But no city, not Averno with its three gates in its black walls (did the “bright tappetties” still hang there? wondered Vergil), not a city with twelve gates, nor even Thebes with its proverbial hundred, or be it Babylon the Great or be it even Rome — no city can ever entirely secure itself from anyone’s getting in. Or getting out. There is always a sewer or a tunnel, remembered by one or two. There is. . somewhere. . always some forgotten drain, some archaic watercourse, a century, centuries, dried (or, perhaps, not entirely dried). Some crack, some cranny, a fissure through the riven caverns neath the earth, ones where no fires burned, on no map known to anyone, but nevertheless known: to someone. Somewhere an underground passage and somewhere a slanting shaft, dug, past times, in time of war by who knows? Oscans, Umbrians, Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, Carthagines, Saracens; what matter?. . long ago stopped up. . and long ago rediscovered. . by whom? who knows? what matter?. . and tunneled through again. Where there are customs and excises, there are smugglers. And so on. So on.

Thus: Wherever there is a barrier to getting in, someone, given time, will find a way through or past the barrier. And whenever there is a ban on getting out, someone will know a way to slip past the ban.

And some will start to do so at the first intimation of such a ban, some for one reason and some for another, and some will need no other reason than this one: Where things have become bad, things will become worse, and why wait?

Ten people, at least ten, had scrambled, tunneled, squeezed, waded, swum, dug their way out of Averno during its brief State of Siege; ten, at least, of whom the Imperial Authorities (and so, Vergil) had got knowledge. Some had escaped one by one, others at most two by two. They had not all escaped at one same time. Semel and simul? No. Full information of what had happened in Averno, then, was lacking. But the intent of the magnates as expressed in their documents (eventually every one of them read, and in detail: detail adding unto detail, fitting mosaiclike into the picture), the deeds of the magnates, as revealed by those ten who were questioned (Cadmus? No. Poppaea? No. Armin? No.) — and it was, in this case, just that: questioned. Himself the August Caesar had issued a blanket pardon. Not all, despite this, perhaps told all which they could have told.

The purpose of all this Avernian concealment must have been alone to prevent any interference; the deeds once done (surely the magnates thought), the trials, condemnations, executions of sentences, the “fines” and escheatments, the — in fact — bribes to be paid — and, actually, paid! — why, what else would the Authorities Imperial do but shrug? And pocket the plunder. To bring the matter a step closer in conjecture, suppose, just suppose that some whisper, let alone some shout, had indeed brought the legion out from its barracks not far from Naples; could the legion have gotten there in time, there, to Averno? Despite time, despite obstructions in the way? Supposing the legion to have mustered beneath the black walls, who would dare keep the great gates still barred and a-bolt? Not the magnates of the Very Rich City, to be sure.

To be sure that not a single pebble would have been let drop from a single crag upon the soldiers of the Empery (no such supposition need obtain in regard to others, either striving to get in or to get out). And here came the cunning of Averno into play: Well could one imagine the mock alarm with which (later. . safely later) they would have replied to any demand for explanation, sure though they expected none. “What? The roads blocked? The pass ambuscaded? The path walled up? But. . and but …” See the eyes roll, the brows furrow, the hands deplore. . “But no!

“Merely that road, path, and pass, was under repair!” And the canal, should it be asked — the canal was about to be repaired as well. . drained and cleaned. . The work of repair had begun before proclamation of the State of Siege! The workmen of course called back before the blockade could be cleared away. Regret! Immense regret! And next: “Perceive, however, the tangible evidence of this regret: The Very Rich City had of its own will levied upon itself a fine! So and so many purses, many, many purses, of gold. Be pleased to count. And. . hah, the merest formalities!. . a receipt prepared. A seal, a stencil, a monograph — anything! Merely as a form …”

Averno dealt much in form, in forms, and invariably the forms were crude. Yet by means of such crude forms, Averno had grown rich.

Had grown very rich.

Sometime during the time whilst they were waiting for reply from either direction, Vergil became aware of noise within the tiny fort, went without the room to see. There was, had been, a wooden watch-tower, and, attached to this, a mast of sorts was going up: higher up. “Of sorts,” it had been made of several spars now being put together with bolts and bars. There was indeed no crow’s nest, but there was a cross-spar; and, the work of joining the parts being completed, some one of the soldiery was now being hoisted up to this. The decurion, on the instant of Vergil’s appearance, vanished; the men, though ceasing not their labor, gave the newcomer glances not the most welcoming, though it could not be said that they were hostile glances. Almost at once one of them said to the others, “He be himself a mage — hoist away!” Whatever was going on was going on without official sanction, and, for all he could see, though entirely tangible, from what he had just then heard, contained or was intended to contain, some measure of something intangible. Exactly next, the man going up, espying Vergil and having heard no doubt the comment, said, looking down, “Ser Mage, it is that I holds the rank of Raven in the Mysteries, and this gives me clear and far of seeing. — Steady on, there! Bring me up!”

The Mysteries. Of course! No military encampment however small but would have its lodge or coven devoted to the Mysteries of Mithras! Almost without thinking, Vergil raised his hands, clubbed them as though imitating paws, and gave one low and single sound: low, single, but extremely deep. The soldiers’ heads gave as it were one single nod at once. What ranks within the Mysteries the others might hold it was necessary now neither to inquire nor to display. The one slowly going hoist aloft was Raven. Vergil was Lion. Enough.

Clutching fast the cross-spar, the man peered round about. Then he ceased to move his head, looked steadily toward Averno. Then he gave a cry, lurched. “Turno!” his mates called. “Turno, what see thee?”

“I be giddy; bring me down!”

Someone murmured, near to Vergil, “Bring him down, then; slowly, steady, bring him down, so.”

On the ground, as they undid his harness, the man, pale, staggered, fell into a comrade’s arms, was gently laid upon the ground. “Turno, what thee did see, soldier? Tell us, man.”

“I saw blood and fire and someone. . more than one. . transfixed by an arrow. . I be giddy, bring me down. Bring me down, mates.” There was a brief convulsion. Turno became incontinent. There was a call for warm water, clean rags, a clean tunic. And, while one man went to get these, at once the others began to dismantle the jury-rigged mast. The soldiery was seldom idle.

One of them, the youngest it would seem, asked, as he grunted and tugged at the bolts, “If he did see ‘Verno indeed, how dids he see an one man and one arrow? For it be greatly far.” Someone, someone older, said something, low, to the lad, and the lad said nothing more.

But someone else had something more to say. “Raven. . raven. . I speak nothing of this here man and that there rank, but as merely of the bird, the raven-bird, it power of sight, it power — I say — be far, but I questions, be it clear? For this sight ‘tis due alone to the dread diet of the raven: for the raven eateth naught but dead men eyes.”

Another: “Quiet, lest thee fright the lad; he will learn them thing soon enough. In the lodge, or out.”

To Turno, he having been swiftly, gently, washed, and hastened into a clean tunic: “What else did thee see, man? Did thee see other soldier coming, mate?”

From Turno: “I be giddy. Bring me down.”