With a weary gesture, the Viceroy said he sometimes thought the very birds brought words; and Vergil bethought him of the harpy-birds: had they witnessed the scene at sea? were they perhaps grateful to those who provided carrion? if indeed it was carrion-flesh they ate? or were they eager to provoke combat to the death between any groups of men? Fire burns, water drowns, Carthage hates Rome, Harpies are no friend to man …
“The same rumors say he aswore vengeance on, what’s his name, Polycarpu, his ship and crew. Therefore. I have told Polycarpu to take his ship up the coast where there are a few shipwrights and their ways and have his barco repainted, taking not even time to scrape or caulk or make repairs, to fit himself for sea in haste, with new masts and new shrouds and new sails bent on, and to make his way west with all speed. I’ve also told all men with beards to shave them and all men who have no beards to let them grow. Mayhaps these deceipts will bring them safe to Sardland; and further my advice to them is to avoid the western seas for long and long. Until this matter and this menace be cleared up.”
Here the man stopped and ordered by gesture that a tassy be filled for him out of a jug; he drank, he began again to speak.
While it was, of course, treason for a subject to assume a royal or imperial title, still, lawyers might have pretty sport and long make delay over such matters as: was Josaias indeed effectively assuming the title of a kingdom which no longer existed? “I can see the advocates there, prancing and preening in Apollo’s Court; knowing that no Roman judges will now accept that there is such a res as a Kingdom of Carthage … Ah, my Herc and my Merc, it’s all futile! Is there still a Roman fleet, swift to punish violations of the Pax Romana? There must still be, where is it now? — all round about the Italian boot, keeping guard against enemies out of the east. Against a rabble of scum and barbarous dogs in bumboats called Sea Huns! And what of the west, eh? what of the —”
Nothing but the need to swallow the spittle which filled his mouth made the Viceroy stop a moment, and in the silence while the muscles worked in the man’s face and throat, quietly, Vergil asked, “My Lord Ser, regardless of legal status, where is Carthage now?”
A helpless but eloquent gesture, such as the ruffian caitiff Junius had given at the funeral of one whose name differed from his own by a letter: murderer, assassin, blood fresh-washed from his hands; and then a cried, What title had Casar to the Empery? and for the matter of a title delivered Rome over to something worse than an Emperor: to war, to civil war, over to two-faced Janus, with red mouth straining and with teeth all bare … “It, or whatever place these Punic brutes use as base, it must be somewhere, must it not? Even pirates require a base, an armada however hostile can’t subsist on fish alone, can’t draw bread and oil and weaponry in with a net. Tartis …!”
Vergil leaned, the better to hear. Tartis from its ruined and ruinous city near Gades, next trade entrepot north of … of … of Gades! sands of time! yet another name for that pass between the seas: the Great Gates of Gades! … Tartis, that once-great league of kingly sea-traders, established not only before Rome and before Carthage and even before Tyre and Sidon and before the spread-out lands of Greece; Tartis was now like some great sea-orme, its head a-stricken off, yet its coils still twitched … some of them still had life, here and there a trading-post, there and here a castello. Tartis …
“Tartis reports, in that antique and oblique way of Tartis, ceremony interminable; come reports, if one may call them so, that black ships, not our small Midland Sea barco-boats daubed black: but ships of burthen as large as any ships of war, flying, shamelessly, bold as brothel-bawds, some banner we here know is the old Punic banner …” The man paused as though summoning strength to staunch his own rhetoric; went on, more slowly, slowly, on. “One hears that of late these ships do great trade in many far-apart marts: buying wheat which they have some way of boiling and drying out so it neither rots nor rusts nor moulders: buying iron, buying steel, buying old copper, copper, tin, buying timber, tar, and flax, buying leather, buying hide.” He had given name to just about all materiel of war. “I hear of such trade, much, but see no such cargo coming past my Tingitayne, to pause and pay the export-tax. With what do they pay? Why, they pay with purple, and I hear that sometimes they pay with gold, and tales incredible I hear: such as, they pay with silk —
“Silk. I believe it not. Nor do I believe other reports, that they pay with yet something else of value, which it seems folk be shy and coy to name … But of this, enough. So men say. As for you, if these ships be bold enough to enter our Roman sea and swear reprisal on you, it is time that you get gone. Right soon. Now. You are, it seems, wanted at Rome, the August House has want of you, it wants you hard, I wot not why. I do wot that Himself, that Wolf, will have my head if he gets you not. And since you cannot go by sea, by this sea of water, you must go by land, across the sea of stone, the stony land, the Terra Petra: and so even if that Pune or some Pune or other or any posse comitatus all of Punes; if then they swoop down and burn my Tingitayne, stinking sullen sulky Tingitayne, burn it like an hut in a cucumber field: at least word will be gat out that you have gone safe from here and so that wolf will not burn my own brothers’ lands and fields and houses, holding them at guilt by right of frankpledge. Horses are being saddled for you and guide, leave by the black lane at fall of night. These Berbar horsemen can guide themselves by faintest starshine so don’t bother and bootless stand, begging for delay. If you have prayers to pray, go quick to the temple in the courtyard. Dusk falls, it gins and commences to fall right swift, there is time to take neither a woman nor a bath: here is the double purse of gold. I shall offer for you, let us be hopeful. Tell them at home that the Viceroy Caspar at Tingitayne filled his orders full. Go.”
XIII
The Terrapetra
The black lane. Every walled city had its black lane, some going under the wall by tunnelled work of sappery. The black lane! used by such traveling on official business whose departure was not desired by public way in public sight to go … The Emperor wanted him? This was to be the first sign that the Emperor, Lupus, “that Wolf,” had ever heard of him. A sudden tremor: was it the matter of, How didst thou dare to touch the Virgin’s flesh? — No No: it could not be. Else they had either thrown him in fetter and gyve and … Well. If he had now to cross the Land of Stone; time to make a start was best at Night. Onward.
The “black lane” was of course not black, it was of a variety of colors, depending on the colors of the brick or stone of which the backs of buildings were made, through which the lane … winding, winding … passed; and none of them were made of that black, deadly, deathly black stone of which had been builded (so he had heard: much care had he taken to go there never) the capital city of Cappadoce. The principal hue here was of the same tawny lion-color, really quite different from that of Yellow Rome, as were the fronts of most of the buildings of Tingitayne, Tingis, Tingitana: and now, even as the small group of horsemen cantered along, the colors in the setting sun changed the stones to rose, then to a deeper red, then began to take on a purple tone. One might only guess at the nature and function of those buildings: warehouses, whorehouses, temples, homes? Some had never had windows, in some the windows had been carefully blocked up either with brick or with stone, no attempts made to match the tints of the buildings themselves. That a lane should be winding, away from the formal center of the city, was no surprise; but in this winding lane were no shop-fronts, no crowds of buyers or sellers, no loungers or loafers, no odors of edibles, no smoke or smell of combustibles; here was not even one single toddling child, half-naked and half about to cry, such as one encountered so very, very often elsewhere in such a wynd. No one sat hunched, fanning a charcoal brazier on which the evening meal cooked; no one begged with various tales of beggary or even merely whined and held out a dirty palm or showed a possibly interesting sore or a perhaps intriguing deformity.