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

“Ho, you are a wizard!” said he. “You are a wizard. You are a wizard?”
    “Yes, Magnate.” Clearly this was no time to ask if they should first define their terms. Nor, for that matter, had Socrates had to define the bowl of hemlock.
    “Ho,” said Lars Melanchthus. He gazed at Vergil with large and reddened eyes. The eyes seemed respectful. But they also seemed to hold a look of what might be called shrewdness. Particularly by Lars Melanchthus. Who now looked round about his table, then picked up one of those jointed figures of a skeleton, made of ebony and ivory, which were usually passed around the banquet-board after the finger bowl as a memento of man’s mortality. First he picked it up, then he set it down, well away from the reach of Vergil’s hands. “So, Wizard. Make it dance. Make it dance, Wizard, so.”
    Was it for
this — ?
    Vergil made it dance. He made it caper, tread on its toes, he made it fling its arms up, and he made it dance the classic dance of Attic grace. Magnate Melanchthus was delighted, clapped his huge hands, summoned sundry members of his household, gestured them to look at the jiggling anatomy, and joined in their amusement. And when, after a while, the dance of death slowed and the skeleton sank down and lay at full length in repose, the magnate announced his own conclusion. “Yes,” he said. “You are a wizard. Oh yes! Yes.”
    The wizard bowed. In what audience of what school of enchantment the magnate had discovered this singular, though simple, test of wizardhood, Vergil would have liked to ask, but he forbore. Melanchthus snapped his fingers, gestured. The magnate’s butler approached and handed Vergil a new robe and a single coin. A silver ducat. “Those are for you,” said Lars Melanchthus. “For
you,
for
you.
So. Thank you.”
    “On the contrary, Magnate, it is really for me to thank
you.”
    “Yes,” said the magnate. He nodded his acknowledgment, looked all around, gathered the nods of others. Then he said, “All right to go now, Wizard.”
    And the wizard went.
    Was it for this — ?
    • • •
    Someone had told him this: that, traditionally, and where circumstance permitted, in the sundry workplaces among the fire-fields of Averno, the day’s work began with the Big Slave, be he owner or the chief workman, tossing a red coal at, seemingly, nowhere in particular; there followed a sound like a gasp (so it was described in the account), followed by a jet of fire. The Big Slave had known whereat he tossed, and his red coal had found some fumarole whose foul breath was no merely foul breath, but inflammable air, called
gas.
    It was not that Vergil would not have wished to see this happening (vaguely he recalled having heard that somewhere this was involved with a lump of incense: surely not here!), and see it happen he might yet: but not here, now, yet; the day’s work had long ago begun, and, by the sound, was in no way slackening. At the home (which he had next sought) of a listed magnate, they had without either civility or incivility sent him with some young house-thrall as guide through a long lane into the open area where, for the first time clear, he beheld the fire-fields being worked. He stood for a while merely looking, thinking, appraising, calculating. When he looked for his guide to ask a question, the guide was gone.
    Vergil shrugged. He would ask another one, then: this one coming up with an armful of iron rods.
    “Magnate Boso?” The man bobbed his polled, scarred head at an angle, said, “Two-bib”; passed along. The syllables, immediately, made no sense. Only sight made sense of them. There, following the angle of the canted head, at one of many forges: two men, one holding with tongs the white-hot bar, one the hammer. This last was naked save for his thick sandals and his leather apron; the other wore a leather apron behind, as well. The odor of body sweat and singed body hair was very strong. He who held the softened iron continually