Vergil had studied fire in Sidon, for the sage Sidonians, zealots to learn, had learned it of Haephæstus himself, whom the Ebrew-folk call Tuval-cain, and the Romans, Vulcan; first and greatest of the limping smiths (hence the saying, All smiths are lame,[4] so to say, though a man be greatly-skilled, yet he must have a fault).
Roaring, the man who fled, fled onward across the field; the men roared after him; Vergil did not roar, but Vergil ran, too; and he ran towards the fire.
There was something wrong with the fire, with the flames. The sound they made was familiar enough, but Vergil had not studied fire at Sidon without learning that fire could have many colors: but not this color. It was wrong, it was all wrong.
When all the hosts of Græcia sacked Prima’s topless castle-town and burned his lofty towers, well-peopled Sidon, that Punic city mart of many merchants, became famous for the arts of fire. By the Art of fire did Sidon molt glass and smelt copper, bronze, and brass. Nought was known anywhere of fire, its creation, composition, and application, which was not known in Sidon: and known better. Did the Punes of Cartha Gedasha have that coin? Vergil would now turn it over, and pay them with its other side.
He could hear the voices of the pursers now, “Thief! Stealer of teeth! you would steal the teeth? Die, bugger of swine!” But these words only entered into the antechamber of his mind, his mind was intent upon his running, scarcely he noticed the fleeing man and his very largely unlovely face, blood seeping down the seams of it, a rope of snot swinging from one nostril — why did it not detach and fall? — He noticed that the running men had stopped running and were watching him, mouths still agape but silent now; and very vaguely he was aware that the steps of the running man had slowed and perhaps the man himself was watching him.
Vergil ran into the fire.
Behind him, someone groaned. Someone behind him sucked in a great breath. Both, as if that other had felt great pain. But he himself felt no pain as the tongues of flame licked around him; as the tongues of flame licked around him he made only a sound of faint disgust … they felt faintly loathsome, as if — for example — he had touched that ropy plug of mucus hanging and swinging from the fugitive’s nare; there was something wrong with the fire: there was no slightest trace of heat. The fire was false. So — therefor — was the maker of it. Videlixet Hamdibal the Pune.
Behind, Vergil heard … probably too faint to be heard by the men pursuing … a faint gasp or sigh, slithering noises, a faint fall of gravel and soiclass="underline" which seemed to tell him that the fugitive was taking advantage of the situation and making his escape via some sunken path or gulley. Slowly the “fire” sank down, ebbed, vanished. The Punes seemed to gather a moment together, to … swell … there was not other word for it … to gather themselves as water gathers itself upon a brim or berm or brink … about to pour themselves forward in an attack upon him. He felt for his own knife: no harb, he used it chiefly to cut his food: well aware how useless a weapon it was. Swiftly he bethought himself, scarce thinking of it thought by thought, should he employ the employment of the squid, send a pseudo-Vergil scuttling across the field at an angle, to be pursued whilst the real Vergil swiftly turned and ran? or should he concentrate all his innermost zeal to make himself “dark” and then vanish? no: as to this last, it could only be employed, if at all, during the “dark” of the moon; and if employed at all would leave him exhausted for far too long a time to come. Or should he —
There had appeared from nowhere a line of people who, looking neither to right nor left, interposed themselves as they walked, between Vergil and the Punes. There seemed something almost hieratical about them, something of the procession in the temple, and some one of them, clearly he could not see who, was holding up a Something: and it was the mysterious piece of parchment (who had parched it?) which Vergil had earlier found atween the pages of Aristotle Was the Pupil of Plato in the half-emptied establishment of Sergius: Books only that morning. He felt an absolute presentiment (or, merely, sentiment) that these were “The They who plan things in the dark;” it was not dark.
But it was darkening.
“You do well to turn back to town, Master,” someone said to him. He, Vergil, knew that he had certainly not turned at all. He knew also that he had seen the man before. The fellow was of no particularly outstanding appearance early in middle-age, figure already slackening, thickening: it was the one he had already twice that day seen by the open-air cook-stalclass="underline" once he had commented that “it didn’t take much to make them angry there in Corsica,” and once he had joined in the mocking laughter over the crude jape of the bitter boxwood honey; Vergil had had enough of that matter. “You do well to turn back to town, Master. The day darkens, and this Isle Corsica is nay place, you ken, for strange travellers when the sun goeth down, and in the null of the moon.” Out of the corner of his own eye Vergil observed the very last of The They, who had come out of nowhere, going back into nowhere. It was all very strange. Why should a dried streak of blood upon a dessicated page be at all of interest to any? let alone of such value as to prompt such an intervention? It was all most mysterious.
Casually he turned to the man, himself now turning aside and hitching up his clothing as one who gins to go, and casually asked, “Are there many Punes in Corsica?”
“More and more all the time, Master.” Then the man was going.
But Vergil was not going with him.
Neither were the Punes going “back to town”. With — from one, and well he knew which one — a last furious cry and curse of, “Turd-eating Rumani dog! May your buboes swell!” they melted into the melting spreading shadows of the long-concluding day: and were themselves gone. Quite.
A name sprang up in his mind, where it had for some while been hovering and capering and gesturing for his attention: Sindibaldo of Sicilia. Sindibaldo of Sicilia, a much-travelled merchant, with a beard streaked in grey, always fond of sea-faring stories and of traveller’s tales; never a warehouse of precious bales of broidered cloth or gemstones which he preferred to any tale of any island in the desert of the sea, wherein said island was found no son of Deucalion and no blower of fire with his hollow tube, nay fanner of flame from the smoking ember, and such an unknow island hospitting unknow beasts and birds and plants of strange fruits bearing likenesses of creature and carl, such a place far ago in the heart of the hollow of the Erythraean or of the Indoo Sea did Sindibaldo of Sicilia once love keenly more than any palace full of mansions rich. — But what of this?
Of this: one such tale he told and retold was of an isle hidden by the booming breakers whereunto (the isle) came an huge bird which fed its young upon the young of oliphaunts; was the Isle Corsica such a one? Absurd. Corsica was in the main familiar Inland Sea, mediate between the terrains of Europe and Africa and East of Hither Asia. There were no oliphaunts in Corsica, and had never been. In which case —
In which case … but did not the word teeth in the Punic tongues mean, commercially, the teeth of oliphaunts? in common speech: elephant? And was not the talk in the Punic tongues usually of commerce? was not the mere thought of a Punic philosophy risible in the extreme? a Punic physician? if one had a toothache would one go to a Pune? who lived in a house designed by a Punic architect? or slept in a Punic bed? set up a marble sculptured by a Punic sculptor? or a painting by a Punic painter? In which case…. But was Isle Corsica in any way such an island told in such tales as those of Sindibaldo? tales of the Brachmans, tales of Thule, such tales as the grandam tells as she wipes the milk off her moustache? certes the matter of the blower of fire as seen in the scented field of lavendar and broom this afternoon — even so: No.
4
Whether lamed men, who can neither farm nor fight, became smiths instead; or if formerly smiths were made lame so as to keep their mantic metal art safe at home and not run away abroad unto an enemy: The Matter sayeth not.