Vergil in Averno: Book Two of the Vergil Magus Series (17 page)

This he thrust into the neck of the glass bottle. It did not fit; he clasped his hands roundabout, brought his lips close, murmured a moment, then turned the container on its side; a tendency to roll he quickly checked by sliding slices of cabbage partly underneath it to right and left. Then, there on the wall (fortunately it was a wall that contained no painting, though evidently preparations for one had once begun, for there was a whitened area surrounded by a border of Attic fret) — there, on the wall, contained within the border, there appeared, quite bright, and quite distinct, something that produced from the audience not a single, single, sound, not even
“uh!”
For a long moment Vergil thought that they were overpowered by what they saw. In another instant he realized that they had no notion at all of what they were seeing, for they had never seen anything of its sort before, not in any form at all. Most people, for that matter, had not.

“This,” he said, speaking somewhat slowly, “is what is called a
map
….” A grunt or two, or three. Then again silence.

“This is what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops, if …” His voice trailed off; from the audience had come a “
nuh!”
part-puzzled, part emphatic. The
might
had made no impression; in truth, what was displayed on the wall, the light magnified, reflected, refracted, expanded and projected along the long neck of the glass bottle and its stopper and passed through the transparent charts onto the whitened wall-space, was
not
“what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops.” Not without the automatic exercise of an imagination already enriched by a knowledge of, and experience with, maps or charts. Absorbed in the tasks of, first, preparing the diagrams, and, secondly, now, illuminating them upon the wall surface, Vergil had neglected, had forgotten, that neither such knowledge nor such experience was common enough to be taken for granted. Should he now try to explain? Begin to try to explain?

Almost without considering, he said, “Hippocrates, who reminds us that waters, airs, and places have their special powers, also reminds us, in his
Aphorisms,
that
‘Life is short, and art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and — ’ ”

But many mutters, much mumbling, and a general restiveness all informed him that quotations from learned sources, however apposite, were not what were now required. There was not time, and so he had perforce to use an easier way.

Slowly, but not so slowly as to lose the audience’s attention, the lines and marks and spots, circles, squares, triangles, grids began to change . . . blur . . . melt . . . shift . . . take shape . . . shapes….

“There is on the wall a picture!” someone suddenly cried, high-voiced.

The magnates, as with one sudden motion, moved forward, stirred, gave a shuddering, muttering sigh. And one of them, and well did Vergil know which one of them, said,
“See! He is a wizard!”
It was not that there was, now, suddenly, a picture on the wall where a moment ago there had not been one; not this, alone. It was not that it was, now really was “what Averno might look like from one of the hilltops”; not this, alone. It was not even that the smokes rose and the fires flared (as those in common pictures did not); not this, alone. It was something else and more, something for which they, the great magnates of Averno, the city
Very Rich,
not in conception nor vocabulary very rich at all, had no word, for they had no conception of it: It was that the picture, with its moving smokes and flaring fires, was not drawn — if in fact they thought of it as being “drawn” — in the two dimensions of length and breadth alone. They were looking at something that had depth as well. It was as though someone or something had suddenly transported them in one body to the top of one hill, and showed them what might be seen, lying there below. As though they, feeling chairs and couches beneath them, were somehow somewhere else in a dark night . . . and, looking down, saw the familiar city,
Very Rich,
which they so much controlled, there beneath them in what passed in Averno for brightest day.

Some of them groaned, as though, being aboard a storm-shaken ship, they felt not so much the oft-jested-of nausea but that grim seasick vertigo that may so painfully affect every atom of the body. One kept asking, in a tone both sharp and high,
“What? What? What
?
”
Others moaned. And one sole magnate, Vergil did not bother trying to discover which one (neither, it seemed, did any other one), without one spoken sound, fell with a massively heavy thud to the floor.

But the servant, the slave, he who held the map that was marked Alpha, scarcely moved a sinew.

“… and somewhat to the right of the upper left corner,” Vergil said, feeling rather like a docent in an art school, “is what was called the Old Works….”

This had an immediate and calming effect upon the magnates; a picture, suddenly visible upon a blank wall, parts of which moved, and in three dimensions, was something for which
unfamiliar
was a weak description. But —
the Old Works?
— they had all heard of the Old Works, this was something with which minds could grapple. “Torto! Torto! He was there — Torto, he been there, when they was working the Old Works! Not so, Torto Magnate?”

And a voice, still deep, but with a trace of quaver, said, as though coming awake with a start, “Uh! Yuh! The Old Works …” And indeed, somewhat to the right of the upper left corner, a part of the picture now sprang into detail. It was disproportionate to the picture as a whole, but no one minded that, perspective was not one of the arts of Averno (scarcely was it one of the arts anywhere else, largely it had yet to be moved from the mage’s elaboratory to the artist’s studio and surface). And in this new and moving image one saw men at work, toiling, sweating, mixing the ore with the charcoal on the open-hearth bloomery in one place, raking the molten mass in another; elsewhere the smith holding the crude ingot with his tongs and turning it, white-hot, as the striker smote it with his hammer, not pausing to brush off the sparks that flared briefly in the thickets of their shaggy breasts…. All this. And more.

Vergil had never seen the Old Works, abandoned long before he was born. But Torto had seen it, old Magnate Torto; and it was from his memories (clear as cloudless day as to this past, though doubtless not so clear as to the events of even yesterday) alone that the scene took and kept form, shape, mingled with the light, upon the wall. As sudden as appeared, this, sudden, vanished. Torto had forgotten. Or wished no longer to remember.

If Torto had found it a strain, Vergil found it not much less of one: controlling the sunlight, concentrating it, projecting it, causing an image in three dimensions to appear — and
maintaining that appearance.
“Magnates,” he said, “pray pay close attention to what I am now going to tell you, for
you are paying me to tell it to you….”
He had them, there. In Averno, one did not pay for nothing; if one paid for something, one made use of it. As the farmer, appraising the old crone ewe, teeth so gone she can scarce eat grass, considers if he may still get one more lamb from her before she is given over to that butcher’s knife unto which every sheep is born, so in Averno every slave who labored (and every slave labored, one way or another) was closely appraised as age took toll and wearing wastage claimed its tax: Was the thrall’s labor worth another year’s victualing? For if not, out with him, out upon him, he might live by free labor — if he could — he might beg in the streets, though who, in Averno, save perhaps the occasional foreigner, would give alms? . . . He might slump his way to the city gate and wait turn and chance to guide for a penny . . . he might well not bother, but merely crawl and thraw his way to the common bone-pit. Thus and so reminded that they had, in effect, commissioned Master Vergil to delve and to devise answers, the magnates prepared to attend closely and to pay heed. True: They had paid him nothing yet (save for the few courtesy coins and the courtesy few robes), but, true, it was assumed that they were going to do so.

They paid, now, close heed to what he was about to tell them.
Therefore.

“I will shortly change the picture back into what is called a
map.
On this, sirs, symbols take the place of pictures . . . or, we may say, sometimes: Very small pictures take the place of very large ones; else there would not be room. For example of a symbol, on each piggett of iron forged in this very rich city is stamped the letter
A,
and
A
is in this case a symbol for Averno….” Still on its side the long-necked glass vessel, it struck him now how this vessel might be used in occamy, or alchemy, as some called it, but he did not even try to remember by what name the ampulla might be called in that other discipline. It lay, still, on its side, still a-point toward the wall, light issuing from its stoppered mouth and (it seemed) some vapors playing round about that — like, almost, steam, or fume. In a small second’s pause he became aware, again, of the incessant
thump-thum-thump
of the thousand forges; in a second more he had forgotten it again. He explained to the magnates how a small
trident
symbolized
fire
upon his map: One by one the fires blazing in the picture faded and were replaced by symbols of flame. He told them how a
triangle
symbolized a
forge:
See then the forges fade off the wall and the triangles take their places. Dye-vats? Before their eyes the vats changed and ebbed and for each
vat
a small
circle
appeared. The sheds which sheltered, the warehouses which stored, the houses great and hovels small one by one were dissolved and replaced by symbols; sometimes the symbol
was
“a very small picture.” Streets became thick lines and alleys mere thin ones; all round about the crenellated “wall” were ringed the outlined humps that were the craggy mountains. He pointed out the thin double-lines that represented the canal from the Portus Julius, and he emphasized the difference between the small tridents that were fires which could be, when expedient, stifled by dropping a wet hide upon them, and the larger tridents that blazoned fires too large for putting out….

“It is as though, Magnates, there are channels beneath the surface of your ground as there are channels beneath the surface of your skin, and some, if they bleed, will soon stop and some may be, as it were, tied off, and some are too deep to be tied….”

From time to time Vergil said Beta, he said Gamma; he asked a once or twice for Alpha again, he said Delta. In every case the correct map was produced at once and held at the correct angle. Had (Vergil thought) he been expecting this particular session, at which he had arrived early merely because his mare had wanted exercise; had he been prepared, he would have provided a sort of frame which he had had in mind: a trifle to arrange, to hold the maps and charts, even to turn them, like the so-called walking tripods that moved around the symposia of the Consuls of Philosophy, dispensing wine and water as they moved. Being mostly intent upon, for one, explaining the details of the transparencies, and, for another, on the work of concentrating the light; he gave not much further thought to the silent servitor who held the maps and charts, no more than he did to the sun itself, the sole primal source of the light; “… and thus, Magnates, I have shown you what most of you already indeed know far better than I, how over the course of the past few decades there has been both a shifting of the active fire-holes all round about, as well as a general waning of the full force of fire….”

He said Omega. He could not remember how long he had been speaking. “This final diagram, Magnates, shows that, however much the areas in which the fires spring from the earth have changed and shifted, there is nevertheless what I shall term an overlap: In longer words, there is one area, limited in comparison with the others, in which the fires have never, ever, during the periods which — ”

“The father-fire!”

Who had burst forth with this interruption? — cried out three words, and struck the table three times as though hammering an ingot on a forge? Vergil did not know, thought best to get on “… in which the fires have never, ever, during the periods which my studies cover, either shifted, changed, or waned. In this one area — which a magnate has just suggested may be called that of the Father Fire — ” But he had already lost the attention of his audience.

Were these ponderous grandees a-drunk again? — So suddenly? Why were they rolling from side to side, facing first one fellow, then another? Whence this sudden upburst of babblement? What reason for the intensely odd faces he now saw them pull? A tiny bell sounded; none attended. It grew louder, sweeter, was joined by another, by another; here and there an iron-forger or a wool-puller brushed absently or even (with some slight aware vexation) pulled at his own thick and shaggy ear: vain. The bells grew louder, they sounded from every corner of the room, and yet, still, they sounded sweet. Perhaps after all they were not bells but rare exotic birds. Perhaps after all they were not birds, birds notoriously did not live long in Averno; if a capon lived long enough to become fat enough for the spit or the pot, that was the long of it. But be they what they were, ringing and singing, eventually they overcame the sound of the magnates bellowing — a bellowing in which Vergil was able only to make out some references to
the father-fire,
to
hecatombs, hec-a-tombs,
and some few other words which, rather like the common converse of Cadmus, might be intelligible as single words but made no sensible connection to communication.