The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series (37 page)

Terrapetra!

Vergil, it had not seen; he, remembering the wise old saw of the Second Emperor,
festina lente
, slowly hasten, with lentorous stealth picked up a large flat rock (not knowing, even, what he might encover underneath: the creature’s whelp? an alacrand, or scorpio, an asp?), and moving with deliberate haste on tipty-toes, dashed it flat down upon the monster and at once jumped upon the rock and trad with all his might and e’en daunced upon it. “It is safe to look now,” then said he.

Caniacus uncovered his eyes, saw the ugly taloned claws and stumpty tail give their last quiver. Bracing himself with hands prest flat upon the rocky walls of the clift, he rose him up, he stepped forward, he with one sweeping geste removed his mask! his face was pale, unblemished but was pale, he embraced Vergil with both his arms, and pressing close to him, kissed him on the mouth. A second’s work it was, he stepped the half-pace back, drew down his mask, and went forward into the open and gat upon his horse. A light-bodied steed it was, with slender and smooth legs; quite some different from the heavier, shag-footed horses of Europe. Vergil followed suit.

The path was almost wide enough now to be called a road, there were cart-tracks upon it, and so, somehow, they were riding side by side. Vergil turned his head: no one else. Ahead, too, all was empty. Caniacus, reading his movements and perhaps his mind, said, “We shall not see
them
again. That’s well.” Pressing with a swift and slight movement some fingers against the thin slit in his mask, he leaned a bit to one side, and spat. His voice somedel bit husky; Vergil had not heard him say so many words the whole journey long, so far. Wondered (Vergil), was his voice by nature husky? was it some emotion of the moment? and, for that matter, was his skin naturally pale? was it so by absence of the sun alone? was it pale because his natal color had fled from fear of the basilisk? One might think very much of these matters, but to what end? to what end?

There was a certain sort of person, he or she (more often she, but perhaps not very much more), who, not content to ask a question which was no concern of their’s to ask, would, getting no answer, ask it yet again. Again. Himself, he thought the red-hot bridle and the red-hot bit not too harsh for the mouth of such a one.

Himself, he would not even ask once.

Coming to a rise in the road: before them lay a small city, with a castellated wall. Pointing to it with the light stick with which he only sometimes lightly touched his horse, “The journey,” said Caniacus, “begins here.” Only
here
? thought Vergil. Up to here, then, he thought, was nil.

Vergil had paused to answer a townsman’s light comment about the clemency of the weather, and took advantage of having the man’s ear to ask the way to the yard of Bodmi the cooper. “Bodmi the cooper,” the man repeated, had begun to gesture with mouth open to say more, had stopped with the next word unsaid, and slightly enclined his head to a young man who had slowed his step. “Bodmi the cooper?” the young man repeated the words, this was (Vergil noted) the third repetition of the name in almost as many seconds. Well,
three
was, according to the mathematicians, an especially auspicious number: containing, or consisting of, as it did, the first odd plus the first even number.

“Please to come with me, me ser,” and with that the fellow started off, but still he gazed at Vergil, as one perhaps slightly hopeful of a question being answered which had, however, not been asked. This look almost at once faded away. The stripling was well set-up, and dark-eyed with emphatic dark brows and clear skin; however he did not return Vergil’s polite smile. There had been something abstracted, so it seemed, in his expression; almost intent upon waiting for something, expectant the expression as (the phrase came again to Vergil) that of
an athlete waiting under the echoing portico for the sound of the trumpet
. But, in a moment, seeing that Vergil was indeed coming along with him, the lad turned his face full forward. The trumpet had not sounded. There did not seem to be anything about Vergil in particular which was displeasing to him, and he had, after all, volunteered to be his guide, so there was likely nothing bothersome about his destination either. Of what had the youngling’s look reminded him? Memory for once was instantly obliged to reply: it was the look of a prisoner, who, hearing the sounds of footfall, turns his head, for one brief moment looks through the bars with well-controlled hope on him who walks along, free; and with that short glimpse sees that the one who walks has no message of freedom for
him,
and — still controlled — turns away his face, and looks at him no more.

Once only Vergil spoke, saying, “It is kind of you to show me the way.” And the young fellow made sole answer in a level sound which was either yea or nay, or neither nay nor yea. Forward they went, the two of them, making their tread upon the uneven paving stones with here and there a spur of grass atween them, and neither spoke more word.

Presently they came to a door in a wall, rather larger than most such, and (Vergil thought) a cooper would need a larger door or gateway than might be required by someone making articles smaller or at any rate narrower than the largest vat or barrel; in they went. A pleasant smell of fresh-cut seasoned wood there was in the yard directly open to the gate, where a man somedel beyond the middle-years of life sat shaving a splint. “Uncle Bodmi, this gentleman wanted you,” the boy said, and, even as the cooper answered with a “Good for you, Rustus,” directly Rustus took his leave. As, plainly, no thanks were desired from Vergil, he offered none.

Bodmi the cooper had, clearly, been shaving splints for many years, one did not take up such a craft in middle life, and his hands continued working on, on, as he gave Vergil a look of polite enquiry. “Master Bodmi, the man Benninaly,” the cooper nodded fairly rapidly, it was clear that no explanation about “the man Benninaly,” introduced by Caniacus, was at all needed; “sent me to see you about getting ‘a couple pair barrels’ for —”

“— for a caravan, yes, me ser: they would be like those setting over there in yan corner, as I’ve yet to repair, with one side concave somewhat so as to set more conveniently again the side of a caravan-beast; but them as I indicate are for the asses to carry the wine-must from the pressing-vat to the vintner’s cellar; and you would be wanting them some size larger, of course.” Vergil nodded his agreement, and for a while they discussed the size somewhat larger, and the kind of wood, and the price to be paid, and when it was to be paid; and … and then they became silent. In such a moment, in one’s boyhood, the custom was to say
Zeus Prime,
and so, not having said it in years, one said it now. Bodmi repeated the words under his breathy looked at his work with the splint (stave, some called it), seemed satisfied, set it down on a pile, took up another and began to shave it. Without looking up at Vergil, he said, “That lad is one of my brother’s boys, Rustus you see, me ser …”

Vergil nodded, and some comment seeming indicated, said, “An obliging and a comely lad.”

The cooper gave a sound between a gasp and a sigh, and a spasm seemed to take his face for a moment. “That’s the dreaded part of it all,” said he. Almost at once he added, “It is a terrible thing, me ser, to be the Father of man-twins!”
His ser
said nothing, he knew not what to say; so after a few seconds wait, said he, in a murmur, “Tell me …”

“Ah, ser! what is there to tell? By your way of speech I observe you to be a man of much schooling, and therefore you must know, that such is the doing of immortal Jove … ‘Zeus’ you may call him, Ser … and all of it comes about a cause of that lass Leda … ”

Light, after a fashion, came to Vergil. “Castor and Pollux!” he exclaimed.

“ ‘Castor and Pollux’, just so, Ser. Different ways is the story told by unlearned people, but we here in this long land and wide, we have the right telling of it. Leda, she was taken by Jove in the form of a swan, for the gods and goddesses may semble what forms they will. Aye, and out of one egg came Elen, twice a princess and twice a queen —” There were most certainly more than merely several forms of the story, but Vergil forebore to mention that: for one he did not desire particularly that Bodmi should think him unlearned, and for another he did not wish to distract the man in his telling of his own story — and one which Vergil had never heard before — “— twice a queen,” Bodmi went on; “and from out the other egg came the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, twin brothers they were born, clasping one another in their arms; such was their affection from the moment of birth, a rare sort of birth it was: and the shells, I means the broken-open halves of them one shell, they lies a treasure somewhere in the adyt of a temple, I believes. But I doesn’t of right know where.”

Vergil believed that the man believed, and Vergil was willing enough to know (or, at any rate, to believe) that halves of some huge eggs indeed were lying as treasures in the inner shrine of a temple somewhere, it might be anywhere, one could not be sure: but one could for sure be sure that the huge eggs had never come from within the body of any human woman: many names had that great island where lived the great bird whence issued such great egg, greater by far than any mere estridge egg: one had to make a navigation far down “the bluffs and courses of Azania,” fragrant with frankincense, past solitary stinking Zelya-Zayla, past the courting-places of the oliphaunt, and the Region called Agysimbia where the monoceroses assemble for their balloting; and farther down and farther south than that, almost an inhuman distance for an ordinary vessel to make its way — and perhaps no ordinary vessel indeed ever had made it — Hanno’s, yes … Huldah’s, yes — several names that great red island had, such as Camaracada, Phebolia, Cernea, Meruthias and Maddergaunt, Menuthia, Ophir, and the Great Red Island of the Moon: perhaps others yet to him unknow: and Marius the Tyrian had claimed it was no mere island but a continent, and a note to the
Aristotle
reported that it roamed with huge wild dogs striped like the Horses of the Sun … which all added together might make testimony that the place existed: testimony … certainly it was not proof … great names aside: perhaps it was not even evidence …

While he had been yet thinking of this aspect of the matter, and allowing his mind a bit to wander, as one gathering off of thorn-bushes the wool of wild muttons not beherded for the fleecing; the cooper, Bodmi, had been speaking again; and so Vergil, off gathering his wool at the ends of the world, had missed something of what had been said, so was brought up short, and quite in much confusion, by what the man Bodmi was saying now: “ …
and so one of the twain must go and be a leper
… ” What!
What!

Bodmi, as much, perhaps, surprised by his customer’s surprise, broke off what he had been saying, almost droning; sate slightly leaning forward on his banc, one end of the splint he was holding atween his feet, and yet his hands went on with their work, went on, went on, the thin shavings falling upon his shoes: man must do his work though the heavens gin fall: perhaps after all the heavens will not continue falling, but man must continue working, all the same.

“Bodmi,” Vergil began.

“Bodmi: You must have patience with me, now, you won’t forget that I am a foreigner for all that we are both under the rule of Rome: I come from a far-off land …” — Bodmi nodded — “… and though you are kind enough to call me learned, still no man can have learned everything.” — Bodmi nodded — “Tell me then, though I don’t wish to cause you pain:
why
is it that ‘one of the twins must go and be a leper,’ why, Bodmi,
why
?”

And so the man began again, though this time, the current of his mind and thoughts having been interrupted, and it being necessary to accept that Vergil did
not
know everything about the matter, he went on without his previous fluency: broken, halting, slowly, as one who endeavors to explain to a child something which the grown man has known so long he has been without the habit of having to explain it.

It was because of the dishonor of, one might say, the ravage, worked on Leda, king’s daughter though she was: not that it wasn’t an honor for a mortal to serve the god, any mortal, any god; if a goddess wanted pleasure of a man, might she take it, too, as Aurora did of Tithonius. But why hadn’t immortal Jove (“Zeus” many call him) assumed, or, if it weren’t assumed, why hadn’t he appeared to Leda in his shape as a man, and courted her as any suitor? or if she needed be tooken saunce consent: again: why not as a man, why! ser! it must have been a shocking thing! forced by a swan! though folk talk of swans as lovely, graceful things, still, they be main powerful brutes, ‘tis said swan can break a man’s leg with the force of its wing! and no more to be beat off, swan, than avoid Nemesis — some say it
were
Nemesis, not Jove; some say, Jove
be
Nemesis. Eh! and so therefore thus the reason why one of all man-twins born here syne then had to go and be a leper …

… and still, all through the telling of this dire tale, the sweet scent of the cooping-wood, newly cut, newly sawn, freshly shaved, was fragrant on the air: no slow sad clamor of the leper’s bell and no noisome feculence of the leper’s olor defiled the dry still air …