“Wolfskin,” but what did wolves smell like, really? A something which he later on came to think of as common sense, told the boy that, smell like what they may, live wolves and cured wolves’ hides (well-cured or ill —) were not likely to be found together. This thought was like a streak of cool in the midst of a feeling perhaps not really hot, and yet why did his heart swell so? and why did his breath labor?
This place was no flowerbed of spices. And —
What bleary eyes the old man had! It was not sure that he blinked now for a show of seeing you, or —
At once, the invitation to shed garb and gear now having been declined, at once the old wizard’s manner changed; his very tone, too. Gone was the royal We, and gone, also the made-of-honey voice. “Marius, hail,” Numa mumbled, in an eldritch toothless voice, as though lost in the palate.
“They do call you, ‘Marius,’ and not ‘Vergil’?”
Automatic formality, “Vergilius Marius Mago,” almost he’d said “Maro,” why? “of the —”
A cracked and dirty, very dirty palm confronted him flat up and out. “I know your gens, I know your tribe. Your agnomen I know, and I know your cognomen, too. Your great-grandmother, she had six toes upon either foot, and such is the reason for the family secret, why she would never never let thy great-grandser see her barefeeted. And I know where your blacksmith uncle had the scar of the burn by which he gat his smity-art, where none accidence could cause a burn to be. Your dam smiled upon me once, twas on the Gules of August, when the ewes do oester, Canabras was Consul then, and I gave her a small and rufous stone —”
“I have it yet in my pouch, as a luck-piece, a ward-piece, but I didn’t know it came from her … or from you, Messer Numa …”
The gum-welling eyes, reddled yellow and washed-pale and almost infant blue, played upon him, half-shut. ‘Aye, I have had great wealth, affording great gifts. And have had great costs. Yet maychance I be not so poor as I seem so to thee, Vergil. Maychance I need make no show of wealth. Or that I keep it by me in a secret place for a secret purport. What brings ye here to me, my wean? If ought else than that ye’ve learned you’ve some’at ‘ithin you that other lads have not. Shall I rid you of it? Take but that part-peeled oaken-switch — Oh? I shall not? Well, well, place that switch (wand, some call it) in the corner here, a-tween my sword,” grunting a bit he stood the sheathed sword on the floor; “a-tween my sword and my stave. Now see you against where now you stand, yet another part-peeled stick — a willow. Move yand wand to me; it was cut in the catkin-drooping grove of Persephone, strewing its pollen like gold, hard upon the misty bank of River Ocean, in whose baths the Bear hath no share — and so it may be made, may be made, I say, a sovereign ward against the bruin — move it, now! Thus. Aye. It moves. It ought not, ought it? Thou hast touched it not with either hand nor foot. Ah, thou rascal wean! Nevertheless, it does move.”
Numa sat back a moment, breathing somewhat harder than before. Then he sat again forward.
“So, now ye have moved it to thy home-garth, without anyone a-sees it move, save my servant, which had come forth again, I needed it, the thrall, y’see, for some’at and such and so. Ye planted the withe well, and when it had greened thrice three times, ye’d cut an other such switch from it, and ye brought it here with thee, plus three small sorbus-fruits from the garden in the Castle of the Crown, same as is be-called Castle of the Hawk. Those things ye had done —”
Numa was saying all this with such absolute and matter-of-fact certainty as almost to take the boy’s breath away. “Sir,” said the boy, “No, sir, no I have not.”
The witchman smiled, and a vulpine smile it was, too; and like a very shabby old he-fox he seemed, too. “My wean,” he began — and very little did Vergil feel like that one’s wean, and very little did he wish to be such, either —“My wean, those of us who speak with vatic voice, sibyls and such-like, ye see, ‘prophets,’ as the Ebrews call ‘em, we sometimes describe as of the past or present that which, really, we descry in the future. D’ye see.”
In whatever space or place there was which lay behind the heavy crusted hanging cloth (and greatly dirty it was, too) thrall Caca had been muttering, muttering, and by the sodden sound and echo, stirred a something with a long stick in a large pot. A moment’s silence, the curtain moved sluggishly and the thrall stood within the room once more. Numa made moist his lips. “Thou has, Vergiliu, in a secret place about thee, a puny piece of silver. Give it to the thing. Go.”
The ancient epicene horror, Caca, all rags and stench and hate, now crept forward, its hand hunched out. The boy dropped the coin. Numa sank back into his chair, eyes closed. The fug inside was dimlight as by a sour and reeking fire. He was outside again, he stumbled a bit at the sunken threshold. Overhead gleamed the glittering stars.
Overhead gleamed the glittering stars; actually, directly overhead the stars were as yet faint and few and pale, full and bright they shone at or near the farther horizon. From the nearer horizon enough light glowed from the setted sun so as to keep, for the moment, most things clear enough. He was glad of that, and did not tarry, but made haste to get onto a main-travelled path. Words of what he had heard repeated themselves in his ears. “I can show you, Marius, a way and ways, Marius! to tell South from North and West from East, without regard to the position of the sun. And I can show you, Marius, Mariu, Vergiliu, boy: Vergil! I can show how to devise maps! arts which only twenty men and several have in all the whole world, Vergil!” and he ambled and rambled on and about the knowledges and powers he could impart, until Marius (he did think, now he thought about it, that best of all his name he liked Vergil) wondered, then, why if Numa knew all this, he chose to live, or suffered himself to live, like, almost, a beast in a lair.
He had yet to learn that great powers did not necessarily mean great prosperity.
And he wondered as well, right then and there, how came he to recall having heard those words, when well he knew, once he thought about it, that he had never actually heard them? … from Numa … or from anybody else. Was this, then, in some manner of illustration the vatic voice?
For, surely, now and before, it spoke of things he did not merely desire, it spoke of things, once glimpsed, which he lusted for to know. A direction-finding art! And how to make — not alone, for any doge might have one for money, not alone to have maps — but to know how to make maps! Compared to this, what was that some subtle something inside of him which could move willow-wands, cause pokers to roll, and could simulate the Power of the Dog? It was less … much less …
Later, of course, he realized that one thing had nothing to do with the other; rather, that one thing had much to do with the other: but that one thing did not occlude the other.
Several generations back, someone’s cousin had been married to someone’s brother-in-law, and not even then a first cousin. But although, even then, Vergil’s family had not been related to this other family, it had been thus connected. A very faint sense of this connection had shed upon a certain woman, Emma by name, the last of an earlier generation, a semblance of being some sort of twice-great-aunt. When he was small, he had thought My Emma, as he had also thought of another old woman as My Grandma; for all he knew, every small boy had an emma, too. Sometimes, not often, his own aunt, his own mother’s sister, who had taken the place of his own mother in the household; sometimes, not often, she had said, his aunt, “Take this to your Emma” … a festal cake, it might have been, a stuffed tripe, a new-enough kerchief, itself replaced by one bought more newly yet (the elder Marius had been a great one for kerchiefs, buying them for his sister-in-law whenever he’d gotten a coin more than he’d reckoned as his bottom price for a beast sold at market. Once only had he bought her a small bauble of glass and brass, immediately she had asked, “What about marriage, then?” and Father had withdrawn to muck out the byre, not returning for several hours; and after that he had confined his purchases to kerchiefs), a honeycomb in a dish deep enough to contain the drippings, a small flask of oil … such-like things.