Vergil in Averno: Book Two of the Vergil Magus Series (2 page)

A cock crew. It was near to dawn. He had fallen asleep anyway, and so, with a sigh, he turned over in his bed in the wall-niche. It was some while before he remembered that night’s dream.

• • •

Away, away, the Isle of Goats in the hazy distance, it thrust upward like any mountain, save in being surrounded by waves instead of clouds. Aurelio the freedman arose and bowed as Vergil came up. Aurelio did not point, but he moved his hand to where Naples glittered on its hills, also far off, but not near so far as the Isle of Goats. “Well, sir, we have the horsehair, as you ordered. Apollo! how they wanted to charge me for it, there in the city!” He wagged his head in wonder, but it was a contented wag. And a contented wonder. They may have wanted to charge . . . whatever it was they had wanted . . . but it was clear that the price Aurelio had paid was not the one asked. “All because I insisted it should be white horsehair only. But any excuse will do them. ‘Why does it need be pure white?’ the man said. ‘Dark horsehair is stronger, anyway.’ Well, I dunno it is or
not,
but I say, ‘In that case, all the more why the white should be cheaper.’ ” He chuckled. “And so, Master Vergil, sir, we are ready to begin mixing the plaster; there is the lime, and over here is the sand, sir.”

Vergil thrust his hand into the opened bales of hair, lifted, sifted, let it drop. Then he stooped and did the same with the sand, but this time he put some on his tongue; and this he did several times. “Yes, this will do,” he said. “We won’t want more than this much horsehair, just enough to give a certain roughness so it will grip and hold the coating.”

Aurelio had evidently been about to ask the question to which Vergil, unrequested, had supplied the answer; and now seemed satisfied, pleased. But now another question came into the freedman’s mind, and, thence, across his face. And this time too, Vergil answered it first.

“I tasted it to be sure it had not been mixed with sea-sand, because the salt would, for one thing, attract and hold the moisture and you would have damp and dripping walls at times . . . at times when you would least want them, too: in wet weather . . . and, also, the plaster would be less likely to hold firm upon the walls. And then, too . . . salt . . . the principal savor of mankind, though some things it preserves, yet, some things it destroys….” Vergil waved his hands a bit and raised his brows a bit, and made . . . a bit . . . a certain gesture that Aurelio understood; repeated. Salt. Sorcery.

Aurelio’s face, which had for just a moment clouded, cleared, and he grunted with gratification. “One has to have learned many things in philosophy, sir, in order to build a house correctly, sir.”

Vergil was undoing the strings of a dark bag of rich, soft samite. He nodded. The knots were not simple, but he had tied them himself. As the last one fell slack, he said, “Yes. Principles. Proportions. Mathematics. Materials. And more. Much more. Even” — he lifted out an instrument — “how to space and set and tune the five chords of this lute.” And he ran his fingers over them all five: yellow the first, for bile; red for blood, and twice as thick the chord, white for sperm, and thrice as thick the chord; the black chord, for the black bile, was the fourth, and was one-fourth the thickness of the first and the highest in pitch. These four had long been traditional; to them Vergil had ventured to add a fifth: This was of a color between rose and purple, and it represented that aspect of man higher than any humor, and this, though his own idea, had been suggested to him by some word or other in the
Great Antiphonal
of the Saracen, Syryabus, which nicked and clicked — as it had so seemed at the time — with some lines, a few, not more, from the nameless books of the music played at the courts of Asoka and Chandragupta, the Great High Kings of Ind. Then there was Vitruvius, and before him, Amphion; excellent exempla. And again he now ran his fingers over the strings. The workmen began to rise and to look at him more closely, even, than before. He tightened pegs a trifle, here and there; considered loosening them a trifle, there and here; decided not to. The day was clean, the air was clear, he lifted his eyes, gathered the gaze of all, gave a nod of his head, and began to play.

The name of his song was “The Walls of Thebes.”

The work of building went on, as it had begun, to the sounds of, and the rhythms of, music.

After a while the music began to enter a slower phase, and, the movements of the workmen, slowly, in time with it, gradually ceased. And, after some pause, Vergil said, “Ser Aurelio — ”

“
Aurelio, Aurelio.
It is kind of you and I am not of a rank to gainsay what a learned master such as yourself is pleased to utter, but if you please, sir: plain
Aurelio.
There are others who have not your gracious nature and much they would resent hearing I suffered meself to be called
Ser
Aurelio. Me. A freedman.”

The haze had burned away from off all the water. The Isle of Goats stood proud and high and blue and distant, like the haunt of a peri or of many a faun. Naples glittered brightlier than ever. “Your former master, Aurelio, then — ”

“The late and honored Aurelio Favio, Master Vergil. Whose name he was good enough to bestow when he manumitted me. And what of him, sir?”

Vergil stroked his short black beard, and then, as though stretching his fingers from their long stint at the lute, gave a stroke to each side of the short black hair that fitted his head like a cap. “Yes, just what I was going to ask. What of him? What sort of man?”

“The best sort. Worked hard, dealt honest, and I worked hard and honest with him, down there in the old wharf where we had the first warehouse.” Gestured. “He lived in a simple, frugal way, my master, and a chaste one; no boys, sir, and just the one woman, Julia by name she was, as kind as he was, and even quieter. Then she died, then he freed me, then he went to join her, sir, as they do say. And as we must hope. And left me his heir.”

Heir to no small property, or, from a small one Aurelio had by the same diligence and thrift made a large one; else he would not be building him a house of this size and on a piece of land of this value.

“And his business was — ?”

“Everything at first, you know, though in a small way. As for, we did used to go along the wharf and buy seamen’s private trade adventures, such as they was allowed to carry free aboard — not much: a sack or a box or a bale of this-and-that at a time. Then one year he chartered the fruit harvest at one of the orchards. That was good, I liked that; hard we worked in the open sun and air all day, but the fruit was sweet to smell and eat; hard we worked, the day, but at night, sir, ah, how we young people used to dance on the threshing-floor, the grain harvest not being on at the same time. Folk playing music, like as you’ve done, sir . . . the bright moon . . . A look of quiet came across the freedman’s broad and sallow face. “And the next year the people made him an offer to charter the wheat harvest, and we did so well that after that it was mostly wheat we dealt in . . . oh, yes, sometimes oil, yes, sometimes oil. But mostly wheat.”

It was almost as though Aurelio were acting the role of chanter for some mimetic play; even as he said these words the workmen were breaking into pieces the bread they had for the day’s first meal, and dipped the pieces of it into the dish of oil carefully propped on a heap of sand. Vergil was prompted to quote the old proverb of the Aegypts, “Water and the wheat plant are equal to the throne of God,” and Aurelio said, indeed. Indeed, indeed, sir, indeed. His old master, Aurelio Favio, then, he was not . . . and his freedman Aurelio was not, then . . . a dyer?

“No, sir, never. A dyer, Master Vergil? Why — ”

“But isn’t that madder, Aurelio, in the lines of your right hand?”

The freedman’s mouth opened. He turned his hand over, stared hard. Those lines of which the chiromancers make much were indeed a deeper red than anything but madder could supply. Aurelio looked. Puzzlement. Then a jerk of his head, a click of his teeth. Recollection. He nodded. “It was the other day sir, as I went indeed to the dye-house to see about the curtains for my bed. And the master workman poked his stick into the vat to show me how it was going and he hauled the cloth up and it began to slip and I, like a fool — as though he didn’t know his own craft! — I grabbed ahold of it. Well! And so the dye still stays there yet, in the lines of my palm. Sharp eyes you have, as well, Master Vergil, sir.” Respect, and perhaps just a touch of something more.

Not wanting it to be given the chance, just then, to become too much more, Vergil said, “We are making you a good house here, Aurelio. Will you live alone, just you and your servants?” No more encouragement was needed, the freedman opened his heart and spoke of his plans. He was, he felt, too old to marry. “If I need a woman for a night, I know where to find one. But what’s meet for a night is not meet for a lustrum,” he said. The vine might well be wedded to the elm, as anyone could see for himself who walked out into the countryside and saw the one, trained, draped round the other, so to speak: but old age and maidenhood, not so well. And to marry an older woman meant to marry all her family, “… some of which I might like and might like me, and some of which, well …” And had she no family, none, then to marry all her sorrow and bitterness as well.

But.

There was something else on the man’s mind and Vergil felt some sense of what it was, and a stronger sense of not wishing to show anything of what he sensed. He nodded. Waited. “There’s a young girl, oh, maybe eleven, twelve, or so, in the new wharf part of town, whom I been looking on for a while, you see, sir. And I see she’s a good girl and as clean as they leave her be, where she was before with some family, not a slave, no, just a servant-drudge. So I spoke a word here and there and I put a few pieces of silver into a few hands and I got her in with a better family where she can do more than scrub and carry — where she can learn the ways of a good family house and a good family housewoman: buying, spinning and weaving, cooking good food as she has bought, managing servants, and to read and write and keep accounts, and all such things as I needn’t enumerate. And in a while, Master Vergil, I shall adopt her and dower her. And then, without no haste, sir, then I’ll go cautiously inquiring around in the workshops of the good crafts, of the best of the crafts, sir, of promising young men who’ve about finished their journeyman time: and then I am going to pick the best of them as don’t have family to set them up well in trade and then I’ll marry the two of them off, if so be they’ll have each other, for I don’t believe in forcing such a match if they won’t. With the dowry, then, the young man, my son-in-law as he’ll be, he’ll be able to open a good shop and we’ll all be a-living here together in this good house which you’re a-building for me, and I shall have children then, you see, and grandchildren, and I shan’t be alone no more, then, nor in my ancient age …”

Quiet joyful anticipation for a moment, then, hastily: “If such be my fate, absit omen.” He spat three times and thrice he rapped upon a balk of timber.

“Absit omen,” Vergil repeated. It was a bad thing to boast or vaunt, it would attract the envy of others . . . other people . . . others who and which were not people; it was a risk, but, being a risk which it was inevitable sooner or later at one time and another anyone would take, there was a remedy provided: one invoked the protection of the spirits of the trees, which resided, residually, at least, in any piece of wood; one spat, for spittle was deemed potent surrogate for potent semen. “Avert the omen . . . Yes. Such be your fate. It is written in your palm, the lines outlined in madder. Yes, it
will
be a good house that we are building for you. So you do not go to Averno, then, for your dye-work?”

Pleasure in this prophecy, confirmant of his own chief hopes, made the freedman almost speechless for a moment, and he was slow to take the last question into his mind. It was with a sudden movement, almost a convulsive one, that he reacted to it in a moment; and his face twisted. “That black pit? That stinking hole?
No,
master! Oh, I’ve been, more often than I’ve wanted to, for every time I’ve been there I
have
n’t wanted to, but business sometimes obliged me — why else? — for as for them hot baths supposedly good for the health, why, rather sicken at home than go
there
for a cure! However, beg the master’s pardon, whilst it
is
true that they
do
dye-work and iron-work and in fact
all
such work as involves heats and fires, which is what keeps ‘em all alive and makes ‘em rich (besides from thievery and murder or worse) — why,
no
sir! ‘Averno-Inferno’ is what we calls it. If so it be as I can possibly help it, I prefer to pay higher price and breathe cleaner air….” Some sudden thought interrupted this not-quite-tirade. “They say there is a king there now, King Kakka I suppose it must be, a king of shit.” Contempt and disgust, and something more, struggled a moment more upon the fat face with its clear, if faded, blue eyes. Then: “Begging the master’s pardon for my rough words.”

Next, with no more than a twitch, this all was gone. “So my palmlines say I’m to live here in peace as I’ve desired, master, you say …?”

Vergil reached for his lute, to take it up again; made of wood, it was, and inlaid with that mother-of-pearl fetched up from the rich ocean-mines of the Erythraean Sea. “As far as the lines say
me,
yes. And as for further information, why . . . one would not wish to go to Averno for it, would one?” He ran his fingers over the lute-strings, and then, seeing that the older man was troubled at this last remark, which (he thought) it would have been better not to have made, Vergil asked, “And how did you meet this young girl whom you plan to adopt?”

Aurelio’s face cleared once more. “How? Why, let me think. Ah. It was a hot day and I was toting a sack of good wheat to miller’s, to save the cart, it being but the one sack. And I pause to wipe my sweaty face, and she come over and offered me a cup of water, you see, sir …”

“Yes, I see. Well . . . ‘Water and the wheat plant,’ eh?”