The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series (12 page)

And, now, Numa was that milepost.

The boy stepped forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This place was no flowerbed of spices. And —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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