Vergil in Averno

often, even if not all men; and some came thence, too. It was but a short time after finishing the house of Aurelio (the mortar, made specially after Vergil’s own new-formed formula, might indeed prove better than the one commonly made; it would certainly prove as good, he would check it from time to time. . decade to decade. . for he had, he hoped, built the house to last forever: and so it might: barring quakes of the instable earth or some immense great overblast of Old Vesuvio. . or the Death of Rome come flying down upon it) — it was but a short time after finishing the house that Vergil had encountered a certain street scene of a morning. It was in between the old and the new wharf sections of the town port that he saw the man with a string of pack animals, laden down with, no doubt, madder and carmine and saffron and woad, indigom and hyacinth. Some fool of a lean-shanked fellow with stubbly cheeks had given a hoot, and, “Averno! Pho!” had cried. And held his nose. The crowd guffawed.

The Avernian merchant or dye-master (they were often the same) might have passed for a caricature of himself and his class in an open-air burlesque at a festival: fleshy, in travel-stained clothes he had not bothered to get washed, and mounted on a dark and dingy mule. He showed no anger, but, pressing his knees against the beast’s flanks, he had raised his massive rump a trifle from the saddle, and, having said the while, “Since you hold your nose at me, here is something to hold it for,” broke wind with a great noise.

The crowd’s mood changed in an instant; they were all (for once) on the Avernian’s side, roared their approval loud, and hooted the holder of the nose, who growled and sneered, but all the same took care to slink away at once. As it all pleased the populace and had certainly hurt him not, Vergil would no more than have shrugged, had this not brought the matter into his mind yet one time more. The prospect of Averno did not attract him, had never attracted him, and even now (he thought) very much did not attract him. But many things were not attractive that nevertheless needed to be done; it seemed to him, fairly of a sudden, that he might as well go to Averno, for, as witness this last incident, Averno seemed prepared to come to him.

And this prospect pleased him even less.

Much, much less.

“A horse? For sure a horse,” said Fulgence the liveryman. “For how long, a horse, the master?”

Vergil considered. “Surely not more than a fortnight.” He hoped.

The liveryman’s face, all expectation at his answer, whatever his answer might be, now changed. Brows flew up, eyes bulged, mouth flew open, hands flew out. “Ah, then the master will not want …” He paused, he licked his lips. Again scanned his customer, decided that perhaps after all he would not try to impress by a guess. “So. Is it that the master may want a nice bright filly for ambling up and down the streets? Or maybe the master wants something. . for show, not. . not a filly; a good sturdy mare, mayhap? or a gelding? For, maybe, the mud and dirt, the roads to trudge, the farms to see?”

“I am going to Averno.”

One more slow lick the liveryman gave his lips, the while he looked from side to side as though for witnesses to this incredible statement; but witnesses there were at the moment none, for the swipes and hostlers were gathered round a handsome stallion in a corner of the yard. The man took a breath. He held it. Let it out. Looked about once more. Shrugged. Gazed up as though the god-actor, descending from the hoist-machine in the amphitheater, would yet come down to save him. But — as he himself might have put it — a god from the machine there was not.

“Well, what is it, Fulgence, man, what is it?” Vergil was becoming impatient at this play.

“What is it? What it is? Heh-hem! Is going to Averno, says the master, says, and wants to know” — here control began to slip and voice to rise — ”Jove, Apollo, and Poseidon! ‘What is it?’ asks he! Is this: For one, for Averno, not a horse would be, but a mule. Is this, for another, so here are no mules, none. Mules, here, are not. Childs of whoring mares are mules, and in my stable have, I wouldn’t.” Several of the children of the whoring mares lifted their heads in adjoining stalls just then, displaying their characteristic ears, as though astonished to hear the morals of their mothers impugned and indeed their own very presence denied. Vergil grinned. The liveryman cursed. “The mules (some hangman stable boy brought in against my willing) — the mules I curse.” He broke off to explain and to excuse, and stooped as though for a stone to sling at them, a search somewhat handicapped by the fact that his hands, being both clenched into the position called the fig, with each thumb thrust between the next two adjacent fingers — a gesture sovereign and remedial against the evil eye in general, as well as specific spells and cantrips — his hands thus arranged were hardly capable of picking up stones to cast at mules, existent or otherwise. And at this moment when he was realizing this himself, and his dismay at the position becoming fast impossible to conceal, and the position itself already impossible to conceal — at this moment, concealed in yet another stall nearby, an ass began to bray: perhaps an epithalamion. The liveryman danced up and down in a hysterical ecstasy of helplessness and rage.

Vergil began to laugh, his head thrown back so far that his tar-black beard jutted straight out. “Bawd, pimp, and punk!” the man screamed, cursing the still-invisible though hardly inaudible jackass, kicking dust and dung toward its stall. “May devils ride your rod and may it dwindle! May your stones — ”

In a voice still weak from laughter, Vergil urged him to desist. “ — for suppose your curse came true?” he asked. “What of the jack’s stud-fees, man?”

A look of absolute horror expelled all other emotions from the face of Fulgence. “Twenty ducats cost me the beast, and me, I curse his rod!” He smote his forehead with the flat of his hand. “On me let it befall, on me, on me, and not on thee….” It was his voice that dwindled as he considered what he had just said, and his face seemed to writhe in a whirlpool of contradictory feeling, as the last bray ebbed off into silence. Very, very weakly, he said, “For Averno to go, a deposit the most immense it would be essential. A deposit — ”

The stallion gave a scream of pain, the liveryman at once forgot deposits, jackasses, mules, customer, and all; and in an instant was there with the stallion and its agony. “What!” he exclaimed. “Still he didn’t pass? Two days, what, and still no — The louse?” he cried, looking wildly and fiercely at the group of men and boys, some stroking and speaking to it, one holding it at the head, others standing carefully away from the great hooves. The beast was a bay, huge, and a beauty, and it quivered in pain.

Vergil asked, “He has a stricture?” Mostly they gaped at him, but one, the senior hostler by his looks and manner, nodded.

“Yes, master, he — ”

“The louse? The louse?” shouted Fulgence the liveryman.

“ — he hasn’t passed no water for anyway two days. Maybe two ‘n’ a half. The boss he sends out for to get a louse, you know, master — ”

“Ah. Yes, I know.” He knew, Vergil knew, the homely if uncomely remedy: If a louse was placed in the fundament of a horse afflicted with stricture, the crawling of the tiny parasite should produce a shudder that would relax the tautened or tightened orifice.

“ — but we couldn’t get no louse, boss,” a young stable boy grumbled. “Some days beggars be so thick, and everywhere you looks, a scratchin’ of theyselves, till you wants to leap away. Therefore. Dunno where they’m gotten to, today, we see only one, is all, old No Nose, but he — ”

But Fulgence would be butted no buts. “A handful of coppers, I give! Even, I told you, what do they want of me, the filthy, gold? Silver, a silver piece, even. Two hundred ducats cost Hermus, a price for a king! Oh, the gods! Jove, Apollo, Poseidon!” This mixture of the Roman and the Grecian was too common locally even to be noticed by those locally denizened. The great stallion Hermus. . and in truth he did seem a fine beast and perhaps fit for a king and perhaps too fine a beast for a livery stable; some story that one would never, likely, hear, lay behind his presence there. . the bay, Hermus, gave a moan. His master put his hands to his own head. The horse’s health was surely more worth than one piece of gold, but he could not bring himself to pay it; nor was it pure parsimony, either. “They would sneer me forever, upon may I spit; ‘Ha, ho, who, Fulgence! Who for a louse a gold piece did give!’ Hermus. Piss for me!” And no doubt they would, too.

Vergil meanwhile had himself replaced the man by the horse’s head, stroked its neck, stroked its belly, once, twice, thrice, murmured, “Hermus, Hermus, turbid with gold …” And stepped one pace back.

Had a demigod been then and there begotten, as upon Danae the daughter of the Argive king through Jove’s assuming the rather unexpected form of a golden rain to circumvent the locks upon the bronzen tower, there would have been no greater commotion.

Most of the credit at first, however, went to the horse.