And a voice, as though echoing, if not from a thousand caverns forth, yet echoing, echoing, he could not remember whence, nor from whom, nor whose the voice; She does not allow the teeth … teeth … teeth …
And was if for this reason that she, Huldah, desired to remain there, there, in the Region called Huldah? whence, though by many parted ways, one reached, eventually, the long road to the Pass of Gold?
Likely he would never know.
Towards the port, all along he walked, in the entering of the day, he felt himself accompanied by someone, a someone who kept out of sight A light-limbed, and a body light of weight.
It was Huldah for sure.
But which Huldah he did not know.
IX
The Scarlet Fig
Sea monsters lay rotting on the beach in shoals, where had he read that? in The Strabo, perhaps. It seemed as true now as ever. At some sound of distress, as Vergil muffled up his face (not his whole face, only that part of it below the bridge of his nose: the lower face, which the Masked Men called the thag — a part of the body which had no name among all the other people of the world), the helmsman said, “Yea, they do stink intensely bad, but I rather smell they on the beach, and they dead, than fear they, saunce smell, in the water, and they alive.”
“From what cause are they dead, helmsman?”
“That I dunno, Messer, ‘t’s a rare sight, but un sees it now and then — by Here and Merc!” and he pushed hard at the helm.
Vergil heard, or perhaps only felt, the ship shiver as it nudged a shoal; it hung for a moment, then swung loose and free. Said the seaman, “There did not use to be so many shallows … and sometimes you gets into a false channel which it’s so choked with weeds and hardly you may go through … navigation, now, that’s harder than it was, ‘longside these shores … ‘less we goes out so deep, to deep, deep sea. We do fear the deeps, and we fear the Punic sea-fleets more.”
“They say it was the Punes who first invented navigation —”
“They say. And some of them wants, beseemingly, to keep a monopole upon it.”
Vergil gave a soft sigh, and said no more. Much had he heard this voyage on the subject: Carthage had relinquished this and that: Carthage had been destroyed: and even so and even now, some New Carthage savagely still harried and pursued ships of other provenance if this could be done outside the explicit area of the Empery. And … sometimes even if it could not.
And Vergil, remembering that rage which he had seen upon that Punic face in Tingitana (and what had become of that sad, sick, hopelessly hopeful man who was called “Jugurthas VI, Titular King of Tingitana”? whom Vergil had so long ago encountered? — he did not know, and though it would be an aggrandizement of the fact to say he did not care, it would not be much of one), Vergil, recollecting what he considered the holy rage of the man who was, after all, not merely One Hemdibal, a merchant and a shroff: a Pune, but actually … or actually called … Josaias, King of Carthage! wherever Carthage now actually was: Vergil could hardly wonder that the shipmen, mere maggots though the Carthagans might consider them, shivered as they spoke of it.
… much loved by Juno, ancient Carthage, stained with purple, and heavy with gold …
It would take indeed much purple, worth its weight in gold though it was, and much, much gold, for any newer Carthage to attempt once again, after three resounding defeats and one sky-shattering destruction, to contend with Rome.
Which by no means guaranteed that this could not be once again assayed.
The ship sailed on, onward sailed the ship, sometimes it did not sail, but then see the seamen up and out with their oars; on they went. They went on. One day they raised an island he, by cert, had never seen before: out of the faint pink flushes of dawn that streaked the sky whose stars were well-nigh pallid where they lingered still at all, an island raised itself watch by watch out of the sea; mountains for surely he could discern. And at least one thin line of smoke anent the shore, so one for sure blower of fire there must be upon or by that shore, whether almost he bent himself into the fire to blow with his naked breath or whether merely he leaned over to it and blowed with a hollow tube which might be any length. Watch by watch and a half, the island showed itself to be two islands. The blue outlines became green. Mountains on the one island still half-hidden in a mist, crags upon the other island and their outlines clearer by each straining stroke of oar. And a most, then, curious thing: the line of smoke stopped, then it began again, then it was estopped again, and then at last it rose and rose upon the sleepy air.
Vergil asked aloud the question traditional to be asked of passenger to pilot, much as What thing? was asked of pilot unto pilot, were they near enough for that; Vergil asked, as he had asked a muckle times before, “What coast? What shore of people?” The pilot moved to speak to him, and turned a bit his head; the pilot turned his head again, and to him did not speak. But someone else did speak, as near as the curl of hair above his ear-hole.
“It is an outpost, or a settlement, as one might say, of the Guaramanty folk,” the shipper said, and he eyed him in his eye, so closely that Vergil might see the little man within that eye. And smell the dates, and even more, the onions, which the man had eaten and which the languid airs had not wafted away with any waft of wind. The line of smoke still rose up, straight up.
“ ‘The Guaramanty folk,’ ” Vergil repeated. “ ‘The Guaramanty folk?’ Why, that folk surely dwell a yond the desert and a yond a river of the interior in which the Herodote does relate the cockodrills copulate and crawl, the lump-lizards they are more common called; and their stunky excrements be valued much for that they fix well such perfumery as might otherwise evaporate and pass, such as your nard, radix, or that root by eminence —” and here he ceased this line of speech, for he felt that he might else in another moment gin to fall into a sing-song utterance of one who has read little but read it much, whatever the it of it, and loves to speak of it aloud. “However came the Guaramanty folk to dwell upon islands in the wide great stream of Ocean?”
The shipper of that shabby ship (and yet no dauncier vessel showed itself, nor had he seen any such for long and long) still fixed him with his eye and even bathed him in his unsweet breath. “Why, me lord ser, to be sure that great dog-holding people do indeed mostly dwell where me lord ser does wisely say; this is merely a settlement of some. And as to why they sojourne here so far from their natterai and natal home, why, leave we a go ashore and your lordshift mought ask of them whiles the rest of us do fill the barrels and the great jars a-full of frish water.”
Surely it was to see new peoples and strange peoples and stranger sights and seeings that Vergil had chose to linger on this ship and not taken his congée and waited in Tingitayne for a next vessel to return Romewards or even by reason of luck, to Naples itself: after he had assured himself that no search was being made for him, no writ of seizure ran for that passing, flashing moment of the Virgin Vestal. So he did not bother to remind the master of the craft of what Huldah had once, and he had heard her, had once assured the shipmen that the water of a certain spring she pointed out (the silvery bangles or armils tinkling on her slender wrists) would never spoil nor taint nor breed no vermin howso long it might tarry in the containers (her slender wrists, her slender hands and fingers on his flesh: enough!).