The Phoenix and the Mirror

CHAPTER TWO

THE STREET OF the Horse-Jewelers lay in the older quarter of Naples, but was wider than many of the streets there. This may have been the reason it harbored the trade it was named after — those wanting the ornaments of which no horse or mule or ass in Naples was ever seen entirely devoid: necklaces of great blue beads to ward off Evil Eye; emblematics of brass polished to a high shine (crescents, stars, hands-of-the-Fay, horns-of-Asmodeus, sunbursts, and scores of others); woolen and even silken pompoms and tassels in a dozen dazzling colors; and those curious objects set to ride like tiny castles or attenuated towers between the animals shoulders; to say nothing of bells in all sizes and shapes and tones, and even drops of amber for the mounts of the moneyed — those having business in the street called The Horse-Jewelers required space for their mounts, their teams and wagons when they had any.

There was no place wide enough to turn more than a single horse, not even in the broad place by the Fountain of Cleo, but the street retained enough width all the way through to drive into Kings Way. A lorimer named Appolonio had his business a half flight up from the Piazza of the Fountain; and on the street side of the same building, in the basement, was the wineshop officially entitled The Phoebus and Chariot, but generally called The Sun and Wagon. When Vergil as a younger man had passed through Naples from his native Brindisi, en route to study at the Academy of Illiriodorus in Athens, the three upper stories had been let each to single sublessors who filled the rooms with what tenants they liked — journeymen, whores, astrologers, waggoners, unsuccessful fences and even less successful thieves, poor travelers (such as students), menders of old clothes. So it had been in those days, so it still was; save that now, on the roof, in a hut of rubble and rushes, a madwoman dwelt quite alone save for fifteen or twenty cats.

Up the steps of the house adjacent came the same man (older now, beard still black as tar, dark of skin, gray-green of eye, and greyhound-thin) at sunset this day. Of all the houses on the street, by this one alone no one loitered, no one rested, no one begged, or ate supper out of a handkerchief or nuzzled a street wench or crouched fanning a charcoal brazier on which cheap victuals cooked for sale. No little boys paused to piddle or scrawl things on the temptingly smooth and clean pale yellow plaster of the walls. In a niche in the wall on the left-hand side, three steps from the bottom, was a brazen head; and, as the man in his slow and painful ascent trod upon the step level with it, the eyes opened, the mouth opened, the head turned, the mouth spoke.

“Who goes?” it demanded. “Who goes? Who goes?”

“He who made you goes,” the man said. “And will enter.”

“Enter, master,” said the brazen head. The door at the top began to open.

“Guard me well,” said the man, not pausing (but a grimace twisted his face); “as ever.”

“Thus I hear and thus I tell and I will always guard you well.”

“As ever,” the brazen head replied. The heavy voice seemed to echo somewhere: ever… ever… ever… The eyes rolled — right — left — up — down — the mouth muttered a moment more. The mouth closed. The eyes shut. For a pace or two, the man staggered.

The man walked slowly down the hall. “My bath,” he directed; adding, after a moment, “My dinner.” Bells sounded… once… twice… the soft chimes died away. He pressed his palm upon a door showing, in a relief, Tbbal-Cain working in metals and handing something to an awed Hephaestus. The door opened. Somewhere, water had begun to splash. The room was lit by a glowing globe of light upon a pilaster of marble of so dark a green as to be almost black — “dragon green,” the Phrygians called it.

He moved to the first of the other pilasters which ringed around the room and lifted a helm of black enameled work which fell back on golden hinges, disclosing another glowing globe. A voice from one side; “I found that too many lights were diffusing the reflections of my inward eye, the one which lies behind my navel, so I covered them.”

After a second, the voice said, in a tone of mild surprise, “Greeting, Vergil.”

“Greeting, Clemens,” Vergil said, continuing his slow round until every light shone unhampered. He made an effort. “I know that very sensitive eye which lies behind your navel. It is not light per se which inflames it, but light which shines through the goblets in which you have captured the fifth essence of wine… before imprisoning it, for greater safety, also behind your navel.” He sighed, stepped out of his clothes and into his bath.

The alchemist shrugged, scratched his vast and tangled beard, made rude and visceral noises. “The quint’ essentia of wine, taken judiciously by a man of superior physique and intelligence, such as myself, can only aid reflection. I must show you some notes pertinent to this point in the commentary which I’m making on the works of Galen. Also — fascinating! — my invaluable discoveries anent his prescription of flute-playing as a cure for the gout — the Mixo-Lydian mode, tonally…”

Vergil continued to bathe, all absence of his usual zest in this seeming to escape the alchemist, who, having demolished to his own satisfaction all recent galenical research (particularly that of the Arab Algibronius), suddenly bethought himself of something else; smote the conical felt cap atop his mass of curly hair.

“Vergil! Have you ever heard of a metal with a melting point lower than lead?”

Vergil, pausing briefly in his ablutions, said, “No.”

“Oh…” Clemens seemed disappointed. He said, “Then it must be an exceptionally pure form of lead, sophically treated to remove the dross. I’ve seen only a few beads of it, but it melts in the heat of a lamp wick, and if a drop falls on the skin it doesn’t burn… remarkable.…”

He fell into deep thought. Vergil emerged from his bath, wrapped himself in a huge square of soft white linen, and (quickly suppressing a shudder) crossed over to a table and seated himself. The top rolled back, the inside rose slowly, lifting a covered tray. Vergil made a start at eating, but his hands began suddenly to tremble and he clenched them upon a quaff of strong, sweet, black beer, and bent his head to sip from it.

Clemens gazed at him for a while, a slight frown passing over his face. “I take it, then, that you met the manticores… and escaped from them.”

“No thanks to you.” Yes, he had escaped them… the brief and bitter thought came to him, Perhaps it would have been better if he had not! He muttered again, “No thanks to you…”

Clemens thrust out his lower lip. “You wanted information about the manticores. I gave you the best information available, namely, that they are best left alone. Anything else would only embroil you more deeply, more dangerously.”

Vergil pondered. The time was passing as if this were any ordinary night succeeding any ordinary day. Yet, what else was there to do? Reveal all to Clemens, entreat his immediate aid? He shrank, with all his nature, from the former; the latter could be, for many reasons, productive of nothing. He recalled his own words to Cornelia; You do not know the problems involved… it might well take a year… And, echoing louder and louder in his mind: I have not the year to spare!

A year. A Year! — And yet, God knows, if the year were to have been spent with her — !

“Well, never mind for now,” he said. “Someday you’ll want something from me. I’ll go back down below and get what I know is there. It has to be there. And I have to have it, for the Great Science. But I’ll wait, if I have to.” And he did have to! “Meanwhile, Clemens, here’s a conundrum for you.”

“Who is it that has a villa in the suburbs, speaks our tongue like a Neapolitan, dresses like a foreigner — but with a strip of purple on the border of the robe?”

Again, Clemens snorted. “Is that your idea of a conundrum? Cornelia, of course, the daughter of the old Doge, Amadeo. She married Vindelician of Carsus — good-looking boy, not very much else, who was making the rounds of the minor courts, playing the exiled claimant and all that.

“Doge Amadeo didn’t think much of him, but Cornelia did, so they were married and the old man gave him a villa in the suburbs, plus a few Oscan and Umbrian villages to lord it over. Then the actual King of Carsus died of a hunting accident — ‘accident,’ huh! — and his twin sons soon had a nice little civil war going for the succession. Mind if I just taste one of these squabs? You don’t seem to care for them.”

Vergil left the table to consult his map of the Economium. Clemens continued the story and the squab. The claimants so ravaged the country that the Great Council of Carsus met in secret and appealed to the Emperor, who, suddenly reminded of Vindelician, supplied him with three cohorts, and a councillor called Tullio and sent them off to “restore peace and commerce, suppress brigandry, and allow the smoke from the altars to rise unvexed.”

The twins met under a truce to discuss joint efforts to put down the invaders; but Tullio, in the name of Cornelia (according to Clemens), sent each of them a confidential message urging him to slay his brother — after which Cornelia would betray Vindelician, marry “the rightful king,” and, presenting the Emperor with an accomplished fact, obtain his support and favor. The scheme worked out perfectly. The twins fell upon one another, inflicted fatal wounds, and their leaderless armies capitulated to Vindelician, who had reigned without opposition, Tullio doing the actual ruling, for the rest of his life.

Vergil turned from his map. A dull tale of a dull country, and one which told more of Tullio than Cornelia. Carsus was a landlocked and mountainous country of no great extent, no great resources, and no great interest to him.

It mattered little, after all, where she had learned the cunning of the evil art practiced by her upon him. That she had learned it, used it, was all-sufficient. He did his best to throw off a painful weariness which no sleep could assuage while he stayed in his present, deprived condition. He had heard of men continuing to feel pain in an amputated limb; now he knew how it must be. And yet, what had passed just before had been so glorious, so indescribably beautiful.… So indescribably false. Everything is Cornelia, and forever. Always more, always more.…

“Why,” he asked, “is she back at her villa here?”

Clemens, having finished his story and the squabs, belched, wiped his fingers on his tunic. “She’s a widow, that’s why. And by the law of Carsus, no royal widow, unless she’s a queen regnant — which Cornelia, of course, isn’t — can remain in the country for fear of her engaging in intrigue. Damned sensible of the Carsians, say I. Tullio, of course, was retired on pension. Bides his time, I have no doubt.”

Vergil listened without comment, gray-green eyes expressionless in dark, dark-bearded face. His hands wandered, as if independently, to the case of books set into his great table. The table was circular and revolved at the touch of a hand, from right to left. At its center, three tiers high, was a cabinet which revolved with equal facility from left to right. Thus the immediate necessities of several current projects, as well as standard needs such as the map, were always at his fingers’ ends.

The case of books formed part of the inset cabinet. There were scrolls of one staff, scrolls of two staves, scrolls made of a single long sheet of parchment and requiring no staff at all; there were codices — books made up of single sheets of papyrus and bound in covers — books written in curious tongues of the Nether Orient and upon a curious material unknown to the Economium, pressed together between ornately inscribed boards; and “books” which were so only for lack of any better name to call them: scratched upon dried leaves, incised on split twigs, painted upon bark and carved into thin slabs of wood… and, of course, the notebooks of ivory and ebony and beech, insides inlaid with wax for the scratchings of his stylus, in haste or with deliberate slowness.

His hands rested on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and lay inert.

Vergil said, “No… it isn’t here. I shall have to go to my library.” But he did not move. A numbness so cold and deep that it almost stilled the insistent pain of loss (of Cornelia — of manhood — of Cornelia) came upon him as he realized how nigh to impossible was the task he was bound to perform. He repeated, mechanically, “I shall have to go to my library.”

Clemens raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Why bother? I am here.”

The faintest of faint smiles touched his host’s lips. The numbness began to fade. “I suffer your boundless arrogance,” Vergil said, “only because it is so often justified. Yes, my Clemens. I see that you are here. The question is, why?”

On its pedestal a smaller replica of the brazen head in the niche in the outer stairway now opened its lips. A sound, repetitive, and hollow as a drumbeat, came from somewhere inside it. Dull, insistent, it would eventually force itself upon Vergil even in his deepest revery; and it was designed to do so.

“Speak,” he said now. “What?” As though he cared.

“Master, a woman great with child. She would have a nostrum for a good delivery.”

Ignoring a snort from Clemens, Vergil said, wearily, “I have none. Tell her if she wants a nostrum to go to Antonina the Wise-Woman. Tell her, too, that if she wants a good delivery she should go neither to Antonina nor any other wise-woman. Have you heard?”

“I have heard and I will tell and I will ever guard you well…” The voice died away.

Clemens said, scornfully, “Now that instead of being recognized as a piece of minor common sense of which any properly educated child should be capable — will be spoken of in every house and hovel in the Dogery as if it were a paradox as heavy with wisdom as that imbecile slut is with child.”

“For one who is in so little practice among women as you are, you have a remarkably poor opinion of them.”

The alchemist picked up a stylus and thrust it into his poseidon-heavy poll of curls. “That is why I am in so little practice among them, perhaps,” he suggested, scratching. “However… as to why I am here. I came thinking you might know something of antimony. I remained to meditate. I remain, still, because I am full of food — as well as knowledge — and hence, for now, inert.”

Vergil stood up abruptly, dropped the toga-long piece of linen and walked over to his dressing table. Into a basin of water he poured out of habit a very few drops of a preparation of balm, nard, and seed of quince; bathed his hands in it. He paused in the act of drying and said, “What was that word? Anti…”

“Antimony. The supposed metal softer than lead.” He yawned, picked up a lyre, touched the chords with a tortoise-shell plectrum. “But I am tired of philosophy.… Shall I play you something from my Elegy on the Death of Socrates? Oh, very well!”

He put down the lyre. “I will say what I know you want me to say. I came also because I was somewhat concerned about you. And now tell me — what does Cornelia want of you?”

Vergil paused, immobile. Then he tucked his long shirt into his tights and adjusted the codpiece. He fastened his tunic and sat down to pull on the soft, form-fitting, calf-length boots. “Not very much,” he said. “She wants me to make a major speculum.”

The alchemist pursed his lips and cocked his head. “I see… nothing simple, such as going to the Mountains of the Moon to gather moonstones, or bringing one or two of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides for her supper. No mere piece of easily obtained trivia such as a unicorn’s horn, or the Peacock in the Vase of Hermes. Oh, no — the Dowager Queen of Carsus only wants a virgin speculum, such as Mary of Egypt herself made but one of in her entire life. By Nox and by Numa! Why?”

“She has a daughter on the Great High Road, coming here from Carsus, and is concerned for the girl’s safety… wants to know where she is… The girl is late.”

Clemens rolled up his eyes and blew out his lips. “Oh, for some of that essence of wine, distilled five times in my alembic! Only therein, more spirit than solid, could I find refuge from this woman’s incredible… incredible… I lack the word. What next? Will she burn Naples to warm the soles of her feet? Oh well. A filly, a fool. And I daresay you told her as much.”

The magus held up his hand. In the silence of the room there was only the ringing in their ears to hear, at first. Then there was a soft, steady hissing sound. And then the tiny drip… drip… drip of falling water. Vergil pointed his hand to the right. Clemens followed the gesture. There stood a statue of Niobe, surrounded by several of her children. As they watched a single drop of water welled up slowly in one of Niobe’s eyes, then in the other. First one tear and then a second welled, swelled, strained at the meniscus, broke, and fell into the pool at her feet.

As the last ripple died away the pool became agitated. Bubbles arose and broke at the surface… one… two… three… five… seven of them. The pool emptied. And one of the children sank from sight into the pedestal.

It seemed that they could hear a faint cry, as if from grief.

Vergil’s hand moved slowly in the air, pointed to the left. A tall column, enchased with figures emblematic of the hours, stood where his finger indicated. A mask of Boreas was set into the top; above and facing it, one of Zephyr. And, as they gazed, a puff of steam emerged from the mouth of the face below, grew into a spume. A metal ball shot up in the steam, struck the face above and rang out like the silvery note of a small gong, and did so again and again and — “What is all this miming and mumming?” Clemens demanded, staring. “Either the water clock is faster than the steam horlogue, or the other way around. Easy enough to determine which is correct when the sun’s at high meridian. Why the posturing and posing?”

Vergil’s countenance remained grave and set, his hand with its outstretched finger stayed still; then once again described its arc and came to rest pointing at Clemens. The alchemist made rude noises, originating around that eye said to lie behind his navel; tutted and tittered, then grew uneasy, fidgeting in his chair of Mauretanian leather; finally started convulsively and twisted to look behind him.

Where there was nothing.

Vergil burst out into a laugh of pure good humor which ended almost at once. Sheepishly, his friend settled back again, smiling. Then his laugh followed Vergil’s, he not noticing how abruptly the latter’s humor had ceased.

“Come, now,” the magus said, a twisted smile trembling slightly on his lips. “Am I not, with you and with one other, all that remains of wisdom in this brute and bawdy age when decadence and barbarism contend for bay leaves, staff, fasces, crown and curile stool?”

Clemens considered, a short moment. “‘One other…’ Appolonus of Tyana, that would be.… True, sir. True. Then…”

“Then allow me my tiny joke. If I dared take my position seriously the whole day long, I would go mad… or agree to make Cornelia her speculum.”

The other got lazily to his feet, half-heartedly tugged at his robe to straighten it. “What did she say when you refused?”

Said Vergil, “I didn’t refuse.”

“Ingots… I mean, without even any regard to the question of making the speculum — which is a labor only somewhat less slight than making an aqueduct — there is the question of getting the materials. Very well… ingots of tin, to start with. To start our discussion with, that is. Of course you can’t start the work of the speculum with ingots.”

Book after book lay open on the long library table at which they were seated, one on each side. Clemens held his finger in the codex of the Manual of Mary of Egypt, in which the woman, the greatest alchemist of the period, had put down the observations of a long life devoted not merely to theorizing but to actual research and work. Alongside were commentaries made by her scholars. Vergil gazed into the scroll that contained the fifth book of the learned Syrian, Theopompus BinHaddad, On the Affinities and the Sympathies, a treatise devoted to the philosophy of the psyche and its multiple counterparts. His chin rested in one hand so that his index finger pushed up his lower lip.

No, one could not start the work of the speculum with ingots. Not a major speculum. The entire foundation of the work lay in the principle of creating a virgin article; the ordinary, or minor, speculum was merely a bronze mirror, fitted with a cover that opened on hinges, rather like a large locket. There were rumors, legends, that somewhere there existed — or had at one time existed — mirrors made, somehow, of glass. But in no work on the subject did anyone claim to have seen a mirror of this sort, let alone give directions for making one.

But directions of the artificing of the sort which they now sought, though not copious, were explicit enough. Mary recorded having fashioned one for the Imperial Advocate in Alexandria. The anonymous genius who was known only as the Craftsman of Cos described how he had made no fewer than three, of which two had been successful. There were further accounts in the Chalcheoticon of Theodorus and in the Text-Book of Rufo.

“We might conjecture a theory,” said Vergil — breaking his silence and announcing his descent from the clouds of thought by a slight humming sound — “to this effect. The atoms which comprise the viewing surface of a speculum are not merely passive, reflecting without receiving. To assume that is to assume that a look is completely intangible, and this we cannot assume, for we have all seen a person obliged to turn around because he has become somehow aware that he is being looked at.”

Clemens judiciously, said, “Granted.”

“If any surface,” Vergil continued, formulating his thoughts aloud, in an academic drone which numbed his emotions but left part of his mind untouched, “received an impression which was tangible, some imprint of this impression had to be left upon the surface. Hence,” he said, “a speculum which has been in use, however briefly, has become as it were clouded, however imperceptibly, with the accumulated impressions it has received. Nor will it suffice simply to fashion a new speculum. It is essential that the very atoms of the metals involved have received as little disturbance as possible. The ordinary craftsman works with scraps of old bronze. A somewhat superior craftsman uses bronze which has not been worked before — as bronze.”

But bronze itself was not a pure metal, it was a fusion of copper and tin. The smith who made bronze made it out of ingots of tin and — usually — ingots of copper; although copper was sometimes available in sheets formed in the shape of an oxhide. The smith, therefore, could not forge a virgin bronze because he was not working up virgin tin and virgin copper. Only the pure ores themselves, which had never been shaped by the hand of man, could be used to form the virgin bronze for a virgin speculum. And then…

“You annoy me with your tedious recapitulation of details known to every apprentice, let alone an adept,” Clemens interrupted testily. “Somewhere on your shelves are works on the music of the Upper Orient, by masters who arranged the compositions played at the courts of the kings Chandraguptas and Asokas — you know that I would dearly love to see them. But every time I come here — every time that I am not myself engaged in other research, that is — you distract my attention, you occupy me with matters not to my tastes, and so the time goes, and it is always later than you think. Enough.” He rose to go.

Vergil raised his hand. “Stay a moment,” he said.

Clemens paused, fretting and muttering, while his friend returned to his thoughts. Then Vergil smiled — a rather painful and weary smile.

“Help me with this concern,” he said, “and you will be able to consult the works of the music masters of Chandraguptas and Asokas as often and as long as you like. I will give them to you.”

Clemens drew in his breath. His vast figure seemed to swell. He cast his eyes around the book-crowded room as though looking for the words just mentioned. His face grew red, and he rested his clenched fist upon a curious globe whose surface was covered with a painted map according to the theories of that Aristarchus who taught that the world was round.

“Listen,” he said. “You have had these books as long as I have known you. We have long been friends. You knew of my desire for them. What is this Cornelia to you, that now and only now you offer me this gift to gain my help? Did she threaten you? And with what threat? Did she bribe you, cozen you, slip the gold and ivory key to her chamber into the palm of your hand? The time and the toil it will take to gratify her whim — if it can be gratified at all! — why…”

His voice died away, growled in his chest.

Vergil’s face twitched, and he pushed away the scrolls. “Time and toil… I worked two years for the Soldan of Babylone, that wise and great man,” he said, “casting two hundred and twenty-one nativities in order to find one man whose elevation alone could prevent rebellion and bloodshed, after which I devised a system of gates and sluices for the Soldan’s canals whereby one province could be saved from flood and two others from drought. At the end of those two years he took me by the hand and led me through his treasury, gold and silver and ivory and emeralds and purple, he led me in by the nearer door and let me out by the farther one. And then he said to me, ‘It is not enough.’ And he gave me as my wages those two books of the music of the Eastern Kings.…

“Do you think he did not value them, or value my time and my toil? Do you imagine that I do not value them, merely because I do not understand them? When it is time for the chick to crack the shell, no heralds are needed to blow trumpets. Time and toil.… On my way back from Babylone I traveled through Dacia and stayed one night at the same rude inn with the magnate Lupescus, who farms the revenues from the Imperial mines in that rich land. I heard him tell of the tedious and wasteful process which they used in having slaves pick over the buckets of rubble brought up from the earth. Then and there, remembering what I had done for the Soldan, I sketched for Lupescus with a piece of charcoal on a piece of board a plan whereby the same work could be done with sluices of water — cheaper, quicker, better.

“He gave me into my own hands a thousand ducats of gold, and horses to carry them, and every year he sends me a thousand more. It is useful to have, but I do not particularly value it, for I know he does not either — he must make by that process alone easily a hundred thousand a year — and besides, I earned it in a few minutes.… From time to time I ask myself, Did I really toil two years’ time for the Soldan of Baby lone, or for Lupescus? And, if for Lupescus, was it not rather for five hundred of his slaves whom my discovery freed from labor which drew blood from their fingers when they worked fast and blood from their backs when they did not?”

Clemens cleared his throat. He pursued his lips. “You’ve become quite a philosopher,” he said at last. “Well, well. Very well. You shall have my help and we shall see what chick hatches from this egg. And now, Master Vergil, allow me to point out to you that there are two requirements which must be fulfilled before anything at all can be done toward making a major speculum — and both requirements are impossible of fulfillment!”

He lifted one wing of his moustache with his stylus and leered on that one side. Then, replacing the stylus in the writing case fastened to his belt, he held up two huge and hairy fingers. He pressed down one. “You cannot get ore of tin.” He pressed down the other. “You cannot get ore of copper,” he said.

With a slight sigh Vergil leaned across and pulled the casque down over the globe on the table. He got up and stretched, his shadow gesturing grotesquely in the now dimmer light. “I know we cannot,” he said, yawning. “Nevertheless, we will.”