The Avram Davidson Treasury (75 page)

“‘Well, I’ve heard the expression, too. But I…we…never knew what it meant,” he said. “What
does
It—?”

She had somewhat recovered. He saw her swallow. But she did not ask for a glass of water, or even if she might sit down. She was
game
. “Well, it was an old family story. I mean,
old
. It was a…‘now you see it and now you don’t’ sort of thing. Every now and then it would turn up. By the time it would take for someone to go and tell about it, by the time someone would come back, it was…well…
gone
. As though it had some kind of a hex on it.”

Theo said, “Maybe he had cheated the pow-whaw man on a bale of furs, or something. Or maybe
his
father had. They didn’t get rich buying dear and selling cheap, that’s for sure.
Well
. Guess we’ll never know.”

She agreed that, probably, they never would. “But when I saw it and touched it myself, I knew that if there really had been a hex! on it, the hex was really off it now. Woman’s intuition; I
really
have to go.” And she really went.

Sometimes dreams come true
. Among the (few) things which TDD had brought with him in his latest move was the old toolbox, its last remembered use being the dismantling of a hen-house: “It
smells
, is ‘why,’” said Mrs. Delafont James De Brooks, nee Puckelman. The box was far more well-built than the hen-house had been, and it must have taken him an hour to get it open, his heart beating, beating, beating.
How
many years? Over three hundred years.
What
did he have to show for it? A lifetime of unrealized hopes. And many sly tricks, most of which never worked.
How
was he going to handle the matter? Some of the gold coins he would sell in Boston. Some he would sell in New York. Some in Philadelphia. Some in Baltimore. No dumping. And then he would catch a plane. Where to, a plane? Jamaica… Barbados… Curacao…and… Ella…?

He never doubted for a minute what, exactly, was inside the box.

He was right.

Mrs. Thatcher was right, too.

The story of how the traveling-chest made of cedar-wood and black bull’s-hide got packed into a snug box and how it found its way into The Great Repository and what had happened to the poor Old Patriot Patroon and why it had lain abandoned for almost two centuries would never, certainly, now be known. And as for the rich De Brookses, screw the rich De Brookses. They had had their chance. Chances.

And maybe the pow-whaw man
taught
the Patriot Patroon the hex.

The chest was easier to break into than the heavy outer box had been. The black bull’s-hide crumbled easily. The cedar was sturdy, but the builders had not built it precisely snug, and the crowbar fitted between the gaps. Theo felt a slight difficulty in breathing; there was fortunately a bottle kept in case of emergencies; as he sipped, these words came into and ran through his mind: Seventy-five silver Pieces of Eight Royals, and the rest all in gold: gold escudos, golden guineas, golden louis, gold doubloons: every one of the rightful heritage of Theodore Delafont De Brooks.

And sometimes they don’t.

The treasure chest of the Patriot Patroon contained not a brass farthing nor a pewter shilling nor two copper pence, and certainly neither silver nor gold. Witnesses had seen that it had once been packed with metal money. But Wouter Cornelius De Brooks had not been called the
Patriot
patroon for nothing; it was not in word alone that he had supported the Continental Congress: he had trusted in its currency as well; and sometime during that mysteriously missing month he had exchanged every single piece of hard money for paper money, and the fruits of this exchange filled the chest. How unpatriotic, then, how cruel, on the part of whoever it was who had first used the phrase,
Not worth a continental.

The Continental Congress had been gallant.

But it had not stuck around to pay.

The ancient, the august, the almost-noble house of De Brooks, for reasons which Theobald Delafont had never known and would never know, had smitten him, innocent as he was, more than one blow: and this one more and greatest blow, it had waited more than two hundred years to smite.

The greatest.

But the last. Had he, though, been entirely innocent? Had he not wasted his life on a dead claim to a dead name? Was there not, waiting in the chest, one message of great worth?
Lay thy burden down
, it seemed to say. It had to say
something
, didn’t it? He spent another while neatly dividing the old paper money into two equal portions, and in neatly wrapping and addressing them. One to Muskrat Sump. And one to Parkill Ridge. And in the upper left-hand corner of each he wrote,
Wouter Cornelius De Brooks
. It was morning by now, the post office would soon be open. And…then …? Mullet River was so small that he could not even find it on the map in the Atlas.

But he could look for it, on or off the main-traveled roads. There was lots of time.

I
NTRODUCTION BY
D
ARRELL
S
CHWEITZER

“Yellow Rome,” at first merely a pervasive image, suggesting the sunbaked brick, the searing sky, the soap-shy vulgus with their stained tunics, a condemned convict uncontrollably urinating; but in the hands of Avram Davidson it becomes something else, a resonant incantation. Yellow Rome! Teeming, filthy, and magnificent, where even a magus might lose himself.

In the hands of Avram Davidson, everything becomes something else. The Yellow Rome of Emperor Julius I is
not
that of history. Julius Caesar wasn’t an emperor, for one thing. Every citizen most certainly did not carry knives as described here. In fact, the
Julian law
forbade them to. (This law coming to the attention of most readers—and most Romans—when repealed some four centuries later, as the center could not hold, mere anarchy was loosed upon the world, and the government told the provincials, “We cannot protect you. Go ahead and carry knives. Good luck!”)

What we have here is ancient Rome seen through the filter of medieval remembrance, the setting of two exemplary Davidson novels
, The Phoenix and the Mirror and Vergil in Averno,
based on the curious legend that Vergil, the author of the Aeneid, was also a sorcerer. Davidson, the most playfully erudite of fantasy writers, brought the exploits of Vergil Magus irresistibly to life.

“Yellow Rome” is the opening chapter of the unpublished third Vergil Magus novel,
The Scarlet Fig.
It is Avram at his atmospheric and arcane best. Read it for the pleasure of Avram’s presence and Avram’s unique voice.

YELLOW ROME; OR, VERGIL AND THE VESTAL VIRGIN

I
N ROME—YELLOW ROME
! Yellow Rome!—a man was being led to public execution. Aristocrats might be quietly done-in in dungeons; this was no aristocrat. Some common thug, a street-robber by night, or a house-breaker; thick and shambling, ill-made and ill-looking, he had killed a cobbler’s apprentice for a stiver—the smallest coin. The lictor went first, carrying the bundle of rods which might be used to flog the criminal (but wouldn’t) wrapped around the single-edged axe which might be used to cut off his head (but wouldn’t). It was a symbol only, and the lictor looked bored and disdainful. Then, arms bound behind him at the elbows, legs hobbled with ropes, the felon followed between two files of soldiers. Grasping him fast by a noose round his neck came the common hangman: one might have had them change clothes and places and scarcely told them apart.

“Well, ‘one Vergil, a natural of Rome, and no mere denizen,’ do they have anything to do with this in Naples… I say nothing of the Bail of Brundisy…?” The wauling in my ear was Quint’s, to be heard above the clamor of the throng. There was in his voice some light and affectionate taunt that I had not been born in the City itself but in a fœderate town in the Italies’ south, well within the Empery, but nearer to where I now lived by the great Voe of Naples than to Yellow Rome itself. The so-well-paved Appian Way went straight and strait between Yellow Rome and Brundisy, but there branched off a branch of it for Naples. A young mage, not yet very well-established in his profession (or in public fame) did well to travel now and then to the Imperial capital, and gently press the thought that there was one (myself) useful to be friend of a friend (Quint) with a friend (the rich Etruscan) to the Court Imperial, to the Oliphaunt Throne…not to be lightly named: whosoever sate upon it.

I pressed my bearded lips to Quint’s smooth ear-hole, said loud and sharp, that we had throngs and thugs, all right: but neither one was anything to this particular display.

The throng howled, as the throng always would.

“Chin up, cock! Brave it out!”

“They’ll stretch that short neck!”

“Hang the hangman! A louse for the hangman!”

“You’ll scrag no more widdies nor prentices!”

“Up tails all!”

“Die! For a lousy stiver?
Die!
”

The wretch’s face changed expression, but it changed slowly: now he had the sly look of a pig who had broken into a pea-patch, now he was pleased at the attention, now he scowled as some thick and gross insult struck home, now he looked desperately from side to side; always the hangy forced him on, as close to him as the butcher to the ox. All this passed before me and before Quint, and we stood and looked on; I was his guest, and he was the guest of Someone Important in Yellow Rome. Even a wizard, even if he did not want wealth, was willing to draw near to wealth, if he were young and new and scarcely known. And near to power, even if that sort of power he did not much want. Soon enough this procession would pass by, and then we would cross, cross safely on foot, for in Rome (and in Rome alone) no wheeled vehicle might pass through the streets in the day time.

In that case, in a sudden silence, what hooves were those, and what wheels? Quint, I saw, that Roman of Romans, knew at once: and would tell me soon enough…if I did not ask. The mob broke into noise again, its inalienable right, and though it was still shouting, it seemed to be shouting the same something, though not all at the same time. Half the yammering throng faced the nice little wagonette and its nice little mule, and the woman, half-veiled, who was in it. Her small slave-girl holding the sea-silk sunshade or ombello was beginning to be inattentive a bit and a bit the sunshade slipped.

And half the vulgus faced the procession and shouted and gestured, pointing, pointing—

The lictor had strode on, eyes down; and in fact by then he had gotten ahead of the procession and seemed rather to have forgotten it: lictors, too, have their secret private thoughts.

The soldiery slogged along in its fixed rhythms, paying no attention at all to the
thing
its ranks confined; probably thinking of the evening’s rations: bread, salt, garlic, parsley, wine, perhaps a bit of dried meat or a bit of dried fish—tunny harpooned in the bloody trapping pens, for instance—and the anticipated meal with its, perhaps, treat, meant far more to them than any execution of a sentence of death (death, to an old soldier, was more boring than exciting).

The hangman, whose attention was so suddenly besought by many cries and movements, pressed on. I noticed that the hangman pressed on.

What Quint, with his pale thin face and dark thin hair, noticed, was not known to me.

Who made up the mob rabbling and howling? The meanest class of citizenry, whose leather badges with
S P Q R
stamped in gilt served to prove citizenship, made up the largest part. They had no money to buy anything and no mind to read anything, so a procession to the gibbet was an absolute gift for them.

Men, too, from all the peoples of the Empery were there: Franks with long hair and Celts with short and Ægyptians with none; pale Berbars from the Solitudes of Syrtica and of As’hara, sand as high as mountains and hills of solid stone pierced with holes where the Troglodytes live; dark Numidians who had seen the Sphynges flying in their thousands to drink of the waters at the sources of the Nile—of all other waters drink they not, of the Waters of Ægypt drink they not—and Gauls with their bearded chops, the wailing of whose dead fills the islands and the highlands of the misty great green darkling Sea of Atlantis between shore to shore of whose vasty waters might no bird fly; and Æthiops with emeraulds in their ears. Many indeed could I see (though not so many) were aliens from outside the Empery, and even the Œconomium.

I was indifferent at seeing or smelling the so-called Foul or Infamous Crafts such as the knackers and the carriers of dogs’-dung for the tanneries, for I still had the muck of the farmyards and the fernbrooks on my legs and feet, and the odor of dead beasts and dung-heaps was fresher to my nose-holes than those of ambergrise and nard.

And here and there, as so often of late (and some said, more and more often, and they darkly mumbled their gums about laws graven on the Twelve Iron Tablets about the artificial production of monsters and other omens…no one of course was ever able to find such laws) here and there through the mass went wandering a satyr or a centaur of, say, the size of a goat-kid. There were no weanling Lapiths to be seen, however; and who would know one, had there been? memory of one Cluco, a night-soil-man little wittier than a wittold, in my home-hamlet in the Bail of Brundisy, who used to stop anyone too purblind to avoid him, and confide, “My granddam, now, she seen a Laypith, she seen ‘un with a horn in the muddle o’ his forrid: which be the reason, she bein’ six months gorn wi’ child, that I has six finger on my left ’and.” What the logical, or even illogical connection between the two things were, no one was ever able to conjecture; certainly all local priests denied that ever there had been stories—“myths,” you might call them—of monoceroid Lapiths; and neither was anyone, lay or cleric, able to credit Cluco’s being able to invent such a story. But, however invented, tell it he did, decade after decade, to whoever could not trot faster than he could, and who—usually—was glad or let us say willing enough to avoid the presence of Cluco, polydactylous or not (for
rhododactylos
I assure you he wasn’t, and neither was he rosy-scented) with the dole of a very small coin or a not-quite-so-small chunk of bread: at which see Cluco become unseen; this may or may not have been more profitable than the night-soil business, but was certainly much easier.