Vergil in Averno: Book Two of the Vergil Magus Series (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At the door. Where do I bring it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What of my baggage?”

“It will follow,” said the beadle.

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

But before that time the man would already be dead.

Stern and meritorious law.

Host and guest sipped beer in silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vergil said merely, flatly, “Ah.”

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

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

“Yes. Exactly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felt himself at rest. At rest.

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

Sleep.

He slept.

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