Vergil in Averno: Book Two of the Vergil Magus Series (11 page)

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

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

However.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But, Poppaea, if it was you who — ”

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

Half, he rose. “Shall I not go then?”

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

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

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

And
the spelt.

Master very rich.

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

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

And one that now seemed sure to hold him fast.

To hold him fast indeed.

• • •

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