Vergil in Averno

and then the eye went away. Dignity be damned! Thus thinking, Vergil applied his own eye to the peephole’s other side: naught he saw but some screen or buffer standing or hanging back a way. . not much farther back, he thought, than to allow a man to stand between it and the gate. No more he saw; did he hear more?. . more than the usual clamor from the nasty street at the lane’s end? He heard something like a growl from deep within what might be the chest of a rather large dog. Sign, Cave canem, there was none; who came upon the canine came without having been forewarned, such warning being evidently here at least regarded as an indulgence not the least necessary. But, by and by, Vergil, having withdrawn his eye (he had applied it very briefly), by and by there came the sound of slow and heavy steps, and the sound of slow and heavy breathing. … I should like, at least for a moment, to listen closely to those lungs (thought Vergil) and to inform their owner what said Hippocrates and what said Galen and what said such a one and such a one: and to advise him … and then an eye again looked out at him through the chink in the door.

It was not the same eye.

The heavy breathing continued a moment, the slat slid shut, the heavy footsteps departed. Vergil waited and he paced, and he paced and he waited; but there was no further response from behind the heavy dark door (it seemed, though, that perhaps the dog behind its wall paced him on his side step for step), and presently he went away. Those lungs shall not long continue to labor breathing this thick, foul air, he thought. But he thought this without malice, and without particular pleasure. And he thought, too, that if this was the way one was treated in The Very Rich City, he might another time prefer to hazard his chances in silted-up Parva Porta, so proverbial for poverty; where, it was said, pigeon soup was made by boiling pigeon feathers, and the very dogs were so weak that they had to lean against the trees to bark.

Trees! He saw none here at all.

The doors, however, of the house of Lars Melanchthus opened wide enough, and wide they must needs open if Lars Melanchthus himself had to pass through, for Lars Melanchthus was a wide man indeed. “Ho, you are a wizard!” said he. “You are a wizard. You are a wizard?”

“Yes, Magnate.” Clearly this was no time to ask if they should first define their terms. Nor, for that matter, had Socrates had to define the bowl of hemlock.

“Ho,” said Lars Melanchthus. He gazed at Vergil with large and reddened eyes. The eyes seemed respectful. But they also seemed to hold a look of what might be called shrewdness. Particularly by Lars Melanchthus. Who now looked round about his table, then picked up one of those jointed figures of a skeleton, made of ebony and ivory, which were usually passed around the banquet-board after the finger bowl as a memento of man’s mortality. First he picked it up, then he set it down, well away from the reach of Vergil’s hands. “So, Wizard. Make it dance. Make it dance, Wizard, so.”

Was it for this —?

Vergil made it dance. He made it caper, tread on its toes, he made it fling its arms up, and he made it dance the classic dance of Attic grace. Magnate Melanchthus was delighted, clapped his huge hands, summoned sundry members of his household, gestured them to look at the jiggling anatomy, and joined in their amusement. And when, after a while, the dance of death slowed and the skeleton sank down and lay at full length in repose, the magnate announced his own conclusion. “Yes,” he said. “You are a wizard. Oh yes! Yes.”

The wizard bowed. In what audience of what school of enchantment the magnate had discovered this singular, though simple, test of wizardhood, Vergil would have liked to ask, but he forbore. Melanchthus snapped his fingers, gestured. The magnate’s butler approached and handed Vergil a new robe and a single coin. A silver ducat. “Those are for you,” said Lars Melanchthus. “For you, for you. So. Thank you.”

“On the contrary, Magnate, it is really for me to thank you.”

“Yes,” said the magnate. He nodded his acknowledgment, looked all around, gathered the nods of others. Then he said, “All right to go now, Wizard.”

And the wizard went.

Was it for this —?

Someone had told him this: that, traditionally, and where circumstance permitted, in the sundry workplaces among the fire-fields of Averno, the day’s work began with the Big Slave, be he owner or the chief workman, tossing a red coal at, seemingly, nowhere in particular; there followed a sound like a gasp (so it was described in the account), followed by a jet of fire. The Big Slave had known whereat he tossed, and his red coal had found some fumarole whose foul breath was no merely foul breath, but inflammable air, called gas.

It was not that Vergil would not have wished to see this happening (vaguely he recalled having heard that somewhere this was involved with a lump of incense: surely not here!), and see it happen he might yet: but not here, now, yet; the day’s work had long ago begun, and, by the sound, was in no way slackening. At the home (which he had next sought) of a listed magnate, they had without either civility or incivility sent him with some young house-thrall as guide through a long lane into the open area where, for the first time clear, he beheld the fire-fields being worked. He stood for a while merely looking, thinking, appraising, calculating. When he looked for his guide to ask a question, the guide was gone.

Vergil shrugged. He would ask another one, then: this one coming up with an armful of iron rods.

“Magnate Boso?” The man bobbed his polled, scarred head at an angle, said, “Two-bib”; passed along. The syllables, immediately, made no sense. Only sight made sense of them. There, following the angle of the canted head, at one of many forges: two men, one holding with tongs the white-hot bar, one the hammer. This last was naked save for his thick sandals and his leather apron; the other wore a leather apron behind, as well. The odor of body sweat and singed body hair was very strong. He who held the softened iron continually turned it, and continually said he, “Strike!. . Strike!. . Strike! …” With each command, down came the hammer: at each blow, the softened iron splayed wider; was, at the next blow -

But he who held the iron in the tongs did not call for, by and by, a next blow; instead he did not even turn the bar: merely, he looked at it. Yet the striker, catching sight of Vergil, did not catch lack of command. Down his hammer came, too late he tried to stop himself; in the process was caught off balance, fell against the fire-hot forge, swerved back, screamed, managed to bring the hammer down to the ground and to lean upon it. There would be another scar, by and by. His breath sobbed. Yet it was not at his seared flesh that he looked. He looked at the smith.

Who said, “Bugger. Punk. Son of a sow. The Big says, Strike, you strike. The Big don’t say Strike, you don’t strike. Sometime the iron got to rest, even just a little, from the taste of the fire. And sometime the fire got to rest, too, even just a little, from the taste of the iron. Sometime even the smith, Big or other, got to rest, even just a little. And sometime the striker, too. Pig’s pizzle. Whistle-brain. You want taste more fire? You want take rest with the iron up your — What you look?”

For the striker, despite dismay, despite pain, despite even fear, had let his eyes wander to the source of his miscalculation. And the eyes of the smith, first, next his head, last his entire upper body, turned, and so for the first time he saw Vergil standing there. How level was his gaze, the smith’s. How cold (in all these heats) his look. How deep, yet deeply contained, the scorn. As if to ask, “How dared you come here? Who are you? I care not.” Vergil said no word. A sudden start, a movement swift, well-trained body (well trained for this) sensing a change in temperature which no else could sense, the smith swerved back to the forge, spat upon the bar up by the forge, drew from the very steam and vapor to which the spittle had in an instance turned, the knowledge which now made him cry, “Meherc! Miscarried monstrel! Too cold, now! Too cold!”

Before the smith had finished words, Vergil had, so swift, opened his pouch and taken from it a short length of wood of the thickness (and somewhat the shape, for fully symmetrical it was not) of his index finger, and of perhaps twice that length (and still from every forge the heats and smokes arose, the air was thick and murk); he twisted it, let some small part drop back, and saying calmly, clearly, “Ash. . Ash. . Aysh. . Aysh …” he leaned forward, his other hand closing his garments tighter to his body, and blew once, twice, thrice, toward the bar in the tongs. This had been ashen, next dull red, next it whitened, next it rippled with many colors, next -

The smith’s hands tightened on the tongs, he gave them the slightest of turns.