Free Vergil in Averno: Book Two of the Vergil Magus Series by Avram Davidson

you saw, you heard! — there in the open place where the black mules spilled their black piss and passed their black dung, he danced! Me Here, me Hercules! how he danced! What will you tell them when you go to Rome?”
    The swift transition did not catch Vergil unprepared. He stroked his short beard, and, as it, too, was black, he wondered (passing-swift and wry the thought!) how it would look offset with flowers. “I? I do not go to Rome,” he said.
    Armin looked at him, head a-cant, eye a-slant. “Ah? No? But, you know, you know . . . Rome may come to you,” said he.
    • • •
    But though long later men were to speak both of what they called, fearfully and darkly,
The Death of Rome
(some said, one man; some said, three men; none could agree on the names of any), and to speak, brightly and cheerfully
(some
men, at any rate) of what they called
The Salvation of Rome
, describing this as a series of mirrors in or through which the Emperor might see, and in good time, the advance of any army of rebels or of alien invaders — that morning, that is, the morning next, Vergil for one saw in no mirror any sign or signs of Rome advancing toward him.
    So he looked into his tablets to see what names the secretary of Haddadius had at his master’s whisper engraved therein.
    The first name on the list was that of M. Cnaeus Grobi, and at that magnate’s gate the door was not even opened for Vergil at all, merely a slat slid back to disclose a peephole behind it (Grobi, it seemed, was even less trusting than the nephew of the blind jeweler!), and through this an eye looked at him. Vergil stated his purpose, the eye did not blink and the door did not move; he showed his tablets with their inscribed list, the eye moved a bit, and then the eye went away. Dignity be damned! Thus thinking, Vergil applied his own eye to the peephole’s other side: naught he saw but some screen or buffer standing or hanging back a way . . . not much farther back, he thought, than to allow a man to stand between it and the gate. No more he saw; did he hear more? . . . more than the usual clamor from the nasty street at the lane’s end? He heard something like a growl from deep within what might be the chest of a rather large dog. Sign,
Cave canem,
there was none; who came upon the canine came without having been forewarned, such warning being evidently here at least regarded as an indulgence not the least necessary. But, by and by, Vergil, having withdrawn his eye (he had applied it very briefly), by and by there came the sound of slow and heavy steps, and the sound of slow and heavy breathing.
… I should like, at least for a moment, to listen closely to those lungs
(thought Vergil)
and to inform their owner what said Hippocrates and what said Galen and what said such a one and such a one: and to advise him …
and then an eye again looked out at him through the chink in the door.
    It was not the same eye.
    The heavy breathing continued a moment, the slat slid shut, the heavy footsteps departed. Vergil waited and he paced, and he paced and he waited; but there was no further response from behind the heavy dark door (it seemed, though, that perhaps the dog behind its wall paced him on his side step for step), and presently he went away.
Those lungs shall not long continue to labor breathing this thick, foul air,
he thought. But he thought this without malice, and without particular pleasure. And he thought, too, that if this was the way one was treated in The Very Rich City, he might another time prefer to hazard his chances in silted-up Parva Porta, so proverbial for poverty; where, it was said, pigeon soup was made by boiling pigeon feathers, and the very dogs were so weak that they had to lean against the trees to bark.
    Trees! He saw none here at all.
    The doors, however, of the house of Lars Melanchthus opened wide enough, and wide they must needs open if Lars Melanchthus himself had to pass through, for Lars Melanchthus was a wide man indeed.