The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series (18 page)

The house …

And behind, how far behind he had yet to learn, was, almost a low mountain, an escarpment, like some crouching half-familiar beast. A weasel. A genet. Or … a cat. And did not the word mean … was not any of the words … in what language? he knew, he
knew —

Huldah.

“Shall we set ashore on the side?” asked Plauto, quietly. “Or … there seems to be … there
is
a mole — Eh?”

“There,” equally quietly: Vergil. “I shall walk up.” Implicit: to The House. “I apprehend no danger. I shall go alone.”

“Ser. Yes, my ser. There.”

A woman’s face was looking at him from out a parting in the scented bushes (“
The entire wilderness is one vast pharmacon
”; of what were these bushes making him think? what soothing draught had long ago his mother (scarcely remembered) made for him to drink, and for what childhood illness? what matter, some tisane, some herbal, fragrant, strong intinction; was he now ill? he felt not ill.). Outward and a bit upward her dark face with its ruddy traces looked at him; she was half-bent over a pair of dogs of the old Ægyptian race, tails a-curl, thick chests, thin loins, thin legs. She wore a close-fitted cap of rust-colored leather, edges coming down almost to her magic, mantic face; her age? neither old nor young: what a richness was in her half-slight half-smile! Silver armil, a silvern bracelet, a thin silver bangle on her thin dark wrist. She saw him, she knew him; though he felt he knew her, yet he knew he knew her not. She let her hands loosen at the dogs’ collars (of scarlet-dyed leather,
they
surely came from the Lands of the Catalands) and the dogs moved towards him saunce menace and they sniffed at his hands. All the whimsy and all the wit of all the world was in her look; pretty? she was not
pretty
, that infant charm and grace was not here, was not hers; neither was she
handsome
, that more adult comeliness: no. “
See,
” said she, said to her dogs; “See, Paulo, see Narcisso, Vergil is here. He is here.”

Her look was of another world and race; a queen to queens she’d mayhap been, in long-far-sunk Atlantis. “A sign to eat and drink, Marius, a sop,” she said, she made a slight movement and the bangles sang like good sound coins upon the counter. “A sop of poppy-cake in wine,” it was no question she meant no ill, he felt no fear. He felt that he could linger near her fay face and its faint dry smile, though flotillas foundered. And “the region called Agysimbai, where the monocorns assemble,” perhaps she was from there, or near? Her slightly sere cheek. He would stoop to kiss it …

“A broth of hens’ flesh and of hares’, for you are surely weary; say: what of those who num the honey-sweet and scarlet fig, are they well? or do they waste away from doing nought?” A slight smile, her bangles clinked … one kiss … he knew her not … one …

He had commenced to sense the outlines of a very rich country, very dry, very sere; very rich in hidden riches. Wealth between the wind-basted huge sand-smoothed boulders the size of houses, wealth of hidden streams of water surfacing for a measure here and there, and in such place were trees of bearing jujube fruit, in taste half-date, half-fig. Land of secret webs of ways to mines of moonstones and porphyry. Sounds faintly at first of music in the night, tambours, seekers, lutes plucked with silver plectrum; the great red-brown castle way about her, way dry and not quite sly about her. Dry and slow. In Ostia an eating-place of three or four or five tables kept by an old eunuch who called himself King Pouf. “How will my lord be served?” the hermaphrodites would murmur to the transvestites and they to the aunties. Oracles, jewelers, gemsters, silver snakes on the anklets, bodies writhing hard to drape about some other. Was it clear she was endowed and physically possessed of these scenes and seeings and of others, say the dim great red room in that blackstone city in Asia Minore?

But in the language of metaphor she was not a locked city, no mere city was she: hints, flashes of wit, here a question, there a geste; now and then their eyes met and much passed in such moments, though he was not at all sure of all which passed. Her love was not that of youth, to pass away like the sands in the swift winds …

He had been shown to his room that first night by someone who understood no language which he did, but pointed out very civilly the jar of plain cool water for drinking and the jar of warmed and lightly scented water for washing; and who left two lamps, both alight, and a vessel of oil. Vergil took off his tunic and took up the book called
Periplus of the Coasts of Mauretayne
; how had she known his name? his
names
, well two to them … This book opened at a touch, almost. Would there be anything in it which would shed any light, more than the two lamps? Evidently a page, at least, was missing. Abruptly the succedant one began:

Various thoughts molested his mind, then one thought said,
enough of this
; he blew out one of the lamps and washed his hands and face and feet and got into bed. And then he blew out the other lamp.

He woke but once in the night; very distantly he heard the hunting cry of the yænas, Flesh
-flesh!
Flesh
-flesh!
Merely to hear that frightful cry was to make attempt to flee: attempt usually more fatal than to stay. But it was far off and by soft sounds he perceived it was the hour when the ox lows in its stall: if the oxen were not sore afraid, no more, then, was he. He gave a slight tug to his sheet and let his limbs go loose.

“Ah,” she said, by and by, “you note the armils. Silver and gold are fairly cheap, but craftsmanship is costlier … unless, of course, one is a Barbar chieftess,” her hands made gesture of immense and rolling fat, and for a moment her face assumed a look of cowlike imbecility mingled with a haughtiness not learned in any school of high manners; he laughed. “… and who counts wealth only by weight and mass, and to whom the niceness of work well-done is nothing. Shall you see my armils more closely?” He made as if to lean over and examine them; for a second she pulled her hands away, she hid one behind her back, one she rested on her chest just below the collar-bone as though it might relieve some silly feigned insult. And in another second, Vergil almost helpless with laughter, she brought them both forth and down. “To get them off there requires a certain trick of moving my wrists and hands,” she moved them, not with instant effect —

“Do not bother,” he said: impulsively.

Lightly, “Tut,” she said: in another second had them off, held them in her palms, the armils, then forth to him.

“These are very curious and odd,” he murmured, for indeed they made any polite sham and perfunctory praise out of the question … if, indeed, it had ever been in the question.

“Yes, very curious …”

“They are very old, I think.”

“Yes, very old, I think …”

“And not made from entirely pure silver.”

Almost eagerly she moved even closer to him and nodded her head entirely eagerly. “I think so, too. But I don’t know what else for sure may have been molten in with the silver … or even if it came from the dark matrix already mixed with, well, whatever it is mixed with: if only one single other metal, and perhaps there are several. It doesn’t tarnish quickly, as other silvers do …”

He lay his fingers here and there upon them. “And perhaps if we learned how to refine and part them, it might be that we would find them to be not just impurities to be discarded, but purities to be discovered; not alone different names, but different uses as well …” His fingers ceased to move. “The signs,” he said.

“Yes, the signs.” She chuckled. “I gave them all names, you see, when I was young, still so young that these would slip off my wrists unless they were padded — and of course I didn’t want them to be padded, so I walked around like
this
—” then Vergil laughed — “as though my hands had been painted with henna and were still wet, and —”

“And what did you name the signs, then?”

In a beam of silvered sunlight he observed the motes dancing.

“Oh, childish nonsense!”

“A boon! Tell me!”

She made no more demur. “I think that this one is the white ewe for the sun and this one the black ram for the earth, see with what pains it is stippled there? — and these others, I am
not
sure what they are, or even if they were made at the same time or by the same artist; sometimes one sees strange creatures pictured, are they real creatures from so far ago far that one does not know them? or did someone dream them, perhaps after gluttoning too much thick food too soon before sleep? These others, they
are
odd. As though one might picture a crayfish or a scorpion who had never really seen a —”

The fragrance as of some fragrant wood fairly freshly sawn, was most pervasive; did he know that wood? he did: what was its name or nature? he did not know. He feigned a scowl. “Their names! The Court insists to know their names!”

She feigned fright. “Mercy, the Court! Oh, well, if I must (I Must!), well, the ewe, I suppose it is a ewe, I called ‘
Pony-lamb
’ and the ram, if it’s not meant to be a black ram, what then, O Court? But
these
, these others … I don’t really think that I entirely … what? oh, I called the ram, simply, ‘
Spots’
… I hadn’t yet reasoned that it was meant to be black …”

He lifted his eyes and looked at her. “And the others? whom you are not entirely sure you like?”

She gave him a swift look, not astonished, but indeed surprised, for she had not finished that phrase, and he had guessed how she meant to, and he was right. “Well … there is no
simply
to these others. This one I called
Arristamurrista
. And this one I called
Arretagoretta
. And this one I called
Arrantoparanto.
But I never told their names to anyone after the first time, when they laughed at me. My Father said, ‘This is neither Punic nor Latin.’ And my Mother said, ‘Nor Berbar nor Etruscan.’ They were laughing fondly, of course, but I — So now you know all, O Court.”

Musingly, he said, “That is certainly a singular sort of ‘childish nonsense’. Where —”