Vergil in Averno

But the man did not catch a reference one would have thought well known even to schoolboys; exclaimed, “The gods forbid, sir!”

Times had changed. For the better. For the worse.

Night. He had of course the standing invitation to dine with Claudio Murcio, but the thought of having to hear once more the standard bill of fare deprecated by the inveterate modesty of the host seemed just that much too much. Another time, then, Claudio Murcio. And there was the invariable reading from Homer at the salon the Matron Gundesilla, followed, invariably, by refreshments of high quality; again, no. Plutarco had, not two days since, suggested that Vergil might find his collection of charts interesting, and Vergil very well might. On the other hand, he would probably not find very interesting the long walk thither in the fast-fading light; and, even less, the long walk back, accompanied by a servant with a torch yawning for his bed. So, so much for that.

Home.

Someday he would be able to afford to keep his own horse or mule. Someday he would have his own litter and litter-bearers. Someday he would give his own entertainments and have other people come to him. Someday home would be so well furnished, so well supplied with books and devices, that the thought of home would never seem even faintly disappointing. Someday. . home would be. . somewhere else.

Until then, and meanwhile, then, at any rate: home.

Supper, supplied by the cookshop-tavern two doors down, was no surprise. Barley and cheese. Almost he regretted after all the table of Claudio Murcio, where, in between the eggs at the beginning and the apples at the end, there would be lettuce and snails and roast kid and — And also: The lettuce is not very crisp, I fear, Master Vergil. The oil is not, alas, the best oil; it is merely local oil, I fear, Master Vergil. The eggs are not. . I fear the kid. . I wish the apples could have been. . Ah no. Better the barley and cheese, which the cookhouse crone had not waited to deprecate, but had simply put down on the table and taken her leave. There was wine, his own wine; there was no old moss on the amphora, there was not even new moss on the amphora, it was a small amphora of what wine-snobs would call a small wine; the wine would never travel, and who the hell cared. It was not bad wine. He ate, drank, washed his hands, dried them. Considered: What next?

A woman? No wife, no concubine, no mistress kept elsewhere any more than here, and — currently — no loves, no intrigues. But there was Luvia, a few doors past the tavern, her person clean, her fee affordable, her purple gown (Averno-dyed) would look bright enough by lamplight. And then, the gown removed, a half hour in dalliance, the gown put on again; then Luvia would rattle and chatter and laugh. . and sulk if he did not laugh and chatter and rattle as well. Well, no matter if he did or did not, and tonight he did not wish to, then she would be off. And then what? Many men would then, simply, sleep. Vergil would not. At least, not after Luvia. Although old Tiresias had suffered much for frankly answering Juno’s question with Women, nine times as much as men, it was doubtful if, really, Luvia enjoyed their strokings and his delvings in any such proportion; as for the arithmetical reverse. . Enough that, though it left him in much measure satisfied in one respect, in another it left him restless. So. Then he would look to his books. . and so, all things reflected on and considered, he might as well look to them now.

Instead.

Someday he would have all the books he wanted. Theophrastus’ On Herbs, illustrated in good colors. The Pharmacon of Pseudo-Theophrastus. The Cookbook of Apicius, full of ghastly recipes for nightingales’ tongues in garum, elephant’s trunk farced with truffles, scuttlefish, and mustard sauce made with hippocras: he would need the entire Pharmacon to physic himself after such a supper. Someday he would have the complete Astronomica of Manilius, mistakes and all; Firmicus’s Liber Mathesus; the Parthian Mansions of Isidore of Charyx Spasini; Marsi’s Arts Magical (he had only the digest now); Vitruvius De Vitriae /?/. He would have the Catalogue of Ptolemy, with golden clasps and a silken cover, and a new Almagest in bright black letters (his own was faded, and half- illegible with interlineations and erasures); the Similitudes of Aristotle and the On the Formulae of Zoroaster — no! His mind had wandered: it was of course the other way around!

Meanwhile, what did he have which would bear reading tonight? He had Ctesias, that delightful liar, both the Persica and Indica. He had part of Proclus (though, someday —), and the Thrasyllicon and Sicander’s Of Mesopotamia Septentriona. Yet the one book that he took down was none of these, but the Patterns of Parthenopius, and for one full passage of the larger sandglass he went through every single one of the labyrinthine mazes there delineated. . went through them in his mind, of course; merely he checked them with those in the book when he had done.

He had done them all correctly.

He always did.

But it was well to be in practice, and besides: such splendid practice! such splendid exercises! And such splendid, splendid patterns!

After that he simply selected a scroll at random, raised the upper part of his jointed bed and fixed it fast with the rod behind and beneath, saw that the lamp was well, and retired. He folded the scroll as he unrolled it, so that each column was folded full-face clear, back-to-back with another column, so as to save the trouble of rolling (and unrolling) the scroll whilst he was reading it; began to read.

. . unexpectedly they were invited, in fact constrained, to join in a procession to the temple of Jove in Alexandria Olympia, where the Thunderer was worshiped under the Syrian name of Haddad. The procession had been organized at the first sign of bad weather by the local dyers’ guild, for, they say, the thunder affects the dyes in the great pots if the mordant has not already been — He was seized with a great start, in fact really something like a brief convulsion; the scroll shot from his hands and he sat bolt upright, the coverlet kicked off -

Asleep? Certainly he had not fallen asleep, out of habit he had turned the sandglass over as he began reading and the first few grains were just trickling through. What book was this?

He examined the label attached to the scroll’s tubular case. Seneca On the Four Cardinal Virtues? Hardly; clearly a mistake…. He got up and collected the fallen scroll, of course he had lost his place, well, well, he would find it again, and…. It was certainly not Seneca on anything, it was a fragment of, well, the gods knew what it was a fragment of, of something he had never seen before, so how came it here? Its text was not on the first wooden roller ever supplied it. Its text had been clipped and trimmed and glued and not recently, for the few marks left of the last letters on the part clipped off were quite impossible to decipher, by reason of who knew how many years of fingers — often greasy, often heavy, laboriously tracing the lines; how did it begin? It began, so the Esthish people who dwell by the Wendland Sea in a corner of the North, when they begin to winnow grain, address these words to the wind, O Wind, O Wind, O Heavenly Child. O Wind, O Wind, O Heart of Great Joy …

Vergil fairly hastily yet fairly carefully went through the rest of the scroll; it was the memoir of travel of a Roman knight who had gone north after some precious commodity, amber, perhaps, and who had recorded not only every ounce purchased, and the price, but also, seemingly, every proverb he had ever heard and every way station at which he had heard it. But as to those other lines which Vergil had read but a moment before, lo! not once did they appear …

Nor anything like them.

Nor did he find them in any other book in his cabinet nor on his shelf. And neither could he recollect ever having read them before in his life. Anywhere.

He set aside the scroll and its case with the errant label, let the bed-rod down and got into bed again, drew the cover up, blew out the light, snuffed the smoldering wick with moistened fingers, murmured a prayer, and slept without waking once, and without a single dream.

• • •

Averno was not very far as the crow flies, but it was a byword that not even a crow, scarcely the most delicate of birds, would wish to fly to or even near there; for “They be smudged black already” and “Them folk there begrudge them corby-crow a carcass, even”; and suchlike sayings, and more. But men went to Averno, and went