"That is good of you," Azzie said. "Perhaps you could just fill me in on what"s been going on since Caligula."
"Well, in brief, the Roman thing collapsed under barbarian invasions and lead poisoning. The barbarians are all about now. They call themselves Franks and Saxons and Visigoths. They have formed an empire which they call the Holy Roman Em-pire."
"Holy?" Azzie asked.
"That"s what they call it. I don"t know why."
"But how did the real Roman empire fall?"
"You can look it up in any history," Hermes said. "Just take my word; it fell, and that was the end of the Cla.s.sical Age. The period we are now in is called - or will be, shortly after it"s over-the Middle Ages.
You just missed the Dark Ages. We had some fun then, I promise you! But this time is good, too."
"What year is it?" Azzie asked.
"The year one thousand," Hermes said.
"The Millennium!"
"Yes."
"Then it"s almost time for the contest."
"That is correct, Azzie. It is the time when the forces of Light and the forces of Darkness hold their great contest to see who shall dictate the essence of human destiny for the next thousand years, and whether it shall be for good or for evil. What are you going to do about it?"
"Me?" Azzie said. "What canI do?"
"You can enter the contest."
Azzie shook his head. "The representative of Evil is chosen at the Grand Council by the High Evil Powers. They always play favorites, giving the making of the contest to one of their friends. I wouldn"t stand a chance."
"That is how it was in the old days," Hermes said. "But I"ve heard that h.e.l.l is reforming itself. They are being sorely pressed by the Powers of Light. Nepotism, excellent though it is, is no longer sufficient to carry their point of view. Now, as I understand it, the selecting of the contestant must be awarded on merit."
"Merit! What a novel concept! But there"s still nothing I can do."
"Don"t be a defeatist like so many other young demons," Hermes said sternly. "So many of them are lazy, content just to lie around, take drugs, swap tales, and take the easy way through eternity. You are not like that, Azzie. You"re clever, and you have principles, initiative. Do something. You may actually have a chance."
"But I don"t know what to do," Azzie said. "And even if I did, I have no money to carry it out with."
"You paid the old woman," Hermes pointed out.
"That was fairy gold. It vanishes after a day or two. If I want to make an entry in the contest, it calls for real money."
"I know where some is," Hermes said.
"Where? How many dragons do I have to slay to get it?"
"No dragons at all. You merely have to best the other players in the Founder"s Day Poker Game."
"Poker!" Azzie breathed. "My pa.s.sion! Where"s the game?"
"It is taking place three days hence in a graveyard in Rome. But you must play better this time than last, else you"ll be returned to the Pit for a few hundred more years.
"In fact," Hermes said, "you need what gamblers of a later day will call an edge."
"An edge? What is that?"
"Any device that helps you win."
"There are watchers at these games to prevent cheating."
"True enough. But there"s no law, heavenly or infernal, against a good-luck charm."
"But they"re rare indeed! If only I had one!"
"I can tell you where to get one. But you will have to inconvenience yourself to get it."
"Tell me, then, Hermes!"
"In my nocturnal wanderings around the city of Troyes and its environs," Hermes said, "I have noticed a place at the edge of the woods to the west where a small orange flower grows. The people hereabouts know it not, but it is Speculum, which grows only in the presence of felixite."
"There"s felixite around here?" Azzie said, marveling greatly.
"You must find that out for yourself," Hermes said. "But the indications are good."
Chapter 5.
Azzie thanked Hermes and took his leave. He walked through a low field, toward the woods that sur-rounded the city. He found the rare flower, which was low and inconspicuous. Azzie sniffed it (the odor of the Speculum is delicious) and then bent low and put his ear to the ground. His preternaturally alert sense of hearing brought to his senses the presence of something belowground, something "that moved and thumped, moved and thumped. It was, of course, the characteristic sound a dwarf makes as he cuts a tunnel with his pick and shovel. The dwarves are well aware that the sound of their digging gives them away, but what can they do; a dwarf needs to dig to feel alive.
Azzie stamped his foot and sank into the earth. This is a talent that most European and Arabian demons have. Living in the earth is as natural for them as living on the earth is for men. The demons experience earth as something much like water, through which they can swim, though they much prefer to walk in tunnels.
It was cool underground. The lack of light did not prevent Azzie from seeing around him very nicely, in a dim infrared sort of way. And it is rather pleasant underground. There are moles and shrews near the surface, and other creatures glide along the differing densities of the soil.
At last Azzie came out in a large underground cavern. Phosph.o.r.escent rocks gave off a dim glow, and he could see, at the far end of the cavern, a solitary dwarf of the north European variety, dressed in a well-made green and red mole-skin suit, with tiny jackboots of gecko hide and a little mouse-skin cap on his head.
"Greetings, dwarf,"Azzie said, adjusting his height up-ward as far as the rocky ceiling allowed so that he could loom over the dwarf impressively.
"Hail, demon," the dwarf said, sounding not too pleased at stumbling over one. "Out for a stroll, are you?"
"You could say so," Azzie said. "And what about you?"
"Just pa.s.sing through these parts," the dwarf said. "On my way to a reunion in Antibes."
"Is that a fact?" Azzie asked.
"Yes, it is."
"Then why were you standing here digging?"
"Me? Digging? Not really."
"Then what were you doing with that pick in your hand? "
The dwarf looked down and seemed surprised to find the pick there. "I was just tidying up." He tried to rake a few rocks together with the pick, but of course, since it was never intended for that purpose, it didn"t do a good job.
"Tidying up the earth?" Azzie said. "What"dye take me for, a moron? Who are you, anyhow?"
"I am Rognir, a member of the Rolfing Dwarveria from Uppsala. Tidying up the earth may seem absurd to you, but it comes naturally to dwarves, who like everything to remain the same."
"Frankly," Azzie said, "what you are saying makes no sense to me at all."
"That"s because I"m nervous," Rognir said. "As a rule I talk quite sensibly."
"Then do so now," Azzie said. "Relax, I mean you no mischief."
The dwarf nodded but looked unconvinced. He didn"t trust demons, and you couldn"t really blame him.
There are many rivalries in the spirit kingdom which are unknown to man, since a Homer or a Virgil wasn"t around when something was going on. The dwarves and the demons had been having quite a tense time of it recently, due to territorial disputes. Demons have always had a claim on the underground, despite their distant birth as fallen creatures of the Light. They love the underground ways of Earth, the deep caverns, bogs, and sinkholes, caves and declivities, the pa.s.sageways that present vistas of beautiful strangeness to their poetic but gloomy imaginations. The dwarves had their own claim on the underworld, considered themselves children of it, born spontaneously out of the chaotic fiery writhings of the deepermost regions of primal flame. They were romanticizing, of course; the true origin of the dwarves is interesting, but there is no time to go into it here. What is important is the power of imagination, to take an idea and cling to it stubbornly. Thus the dwarves, and their insistence on being free to wander the underground ways as they pleased, without stint or restraint. This wasn"t to the demons" way of thinking, however. They preferred territories. Demons like to stomp along alone, and other creatures tend to get out of their way. Not so the dwarves, who trooped along in their bands, white whiskers flowing, pickax and spade always ready, pounding and chanting (for they are great chanters), often pa.s.sing directly through a demon convocation: for demons are always holding meetings on crucial points of doctrine, though their discussions are rarely noted by those who really dispose the power. Be this as it may, they hate being disturbed, and the dwarves had an uncanny power of choosing just the wrong place and time to dig to disturb a demon sitting deep in thought, motionless on a block of basalt, hands to his ears, as we see in some of the family portraits done in stone on the turrets of Notre Dame.
The demons feel the dwarves are crowding them. Wars have been started on lesser issues.
"I believe," Azzie said, "our tribes are currently at a state of peace. In any event, I have come only for something which will not even interest you, since it is not a precious gem."
"What exactly are you looking for?" Rognir asked.
"Felixite," Azzie said.
In those days, charms and talismans still had great power in the world. And there were many of them about, though the dwarves hid them in secret places, to keep them from the dragons, without much luck, since dragons knew that where you find dwarves, you find gold. Dwarves and dragons go together like lox and bagels, herring and sour cream, good and bad, memory and regret. The dwarves worked hard to extract felixite luck stones from the depths of the earth. Felixite is found only in small quant.i.ties, in beds of Neptunic basalt, the very oldest and hardest kind.
This stone of good omen, felixite, was much in use back when everything was happier, better, dearer, truer, the Golden Age, which ended just before true humans came on the scene. Some say that the deposits were laid down by the ancient G.o.ds who ruled the earth in the distant long-ago time before things had names. Even then felixite was the rarest mineral in the world. A tiny amount of it could transmit its own inherent joyous and buoyant karma to the holder thereof, thus predis-posing a favorable outcome to whatever enterprise he was en-gaged in. That was why men killed for it.
One thing is sure. If you want a magic good-luck charm, you must either steal one (which is difficult, since a real good-luck charm preserves itself for its owner, and thus tends to be more than a little theft-resistant), or you must find a lode of felixite in the bowels of the earth and fashion one for yourself.
You might think that all the natural felixite would be gone by now, since dwarves have been looking for it (among other things) under the earth for as long as mankind has been on the face of it; but you would be wrong; felixite is so lucky that even the earth feels blessed by it and tends to produce more of the stuff from time to time, ecstatically, as it were, but always in small amounts.
"Felixite!" Rognir gave a small, unconvincing laugh. "What makes you think there"s any around here?"
"A little mouse told me," Azzie said, making a clever al-lusion to Hermes" former occupation as Mouse G.o.d, before he was abolished or transformed along with the rest of the Olym-pians. This was completely lost on Rognir.
"There"s no felixite around here," Rognir said. "The place was mined out long ago."
"That hardly explains what you are doing here."
"Me? I was just taking a shortcut," Rognir said. "This place happens to be on the underground great circle route from Baghdad to London."
"If that"s the way it is," Azzie said, "you won"t mind if I look around?"
"Why should I mind? Dirt"s free for everybody."
"Well put," Azzie said, and started nosing around. His keen fox"s nose soon picked up the faintest strand of a smell that once, not long ago, might have been a.s.sociated with some-thing else, itself a.s.sociated, perhaps only fleetingly, with felixite. (Demons have great powers of smell in order to render their time of service in the Pit all the more onerous.) Sniffing like a fox, Azzie followed this elusive scent around the cavern and directly to the lemur-skin bag that rested at Rognir"s feet.
"You don"t mind if I take a look in this, do you?" Azzie asked.
Rognir minded very much, but since dwarves are no match for demons in equal contest, he decided to let discretion reign and to h.e.l.l with valor.
"Help yourself."
Azzie emptied out the bag. He kicked aside the rubies which Rognir had garnered in Burma, ignored the Colombian emeralds, pushed aside the southern African diamonds with their sinister future connotations, and picked up a small piece of pink-colored stone, shaped in a cylinder.
"Looks like felixite to me," he said. "Would you mind if I borrowed this for a while?"
Rognir shrugged since there was nothing he could do about it. "Just be sure to give it back."
"Don"t worry," Azzie said, and turned to leave. Then he looked again at the precious stones scattered underfoot. He said, "Look here, Rognir, you seem a good sort for a dwarf. How about if you and I strike a bargain?"
"What did you have in mind?"
"I have a certain enterprise afoot. I can"t say much about it now, but it has to do with the upcoming Millennial celebra-tions. I need the felixite and your jewels, because without money a demon can do nothing. If I get the backing I expect from the High Evil Powers, I will be able to repay you tenfold."
"But I was planning to take these home and add them to my heap," Rognir said. He stooped down and began to pick up his jewels.
"You probably have a pretty big heap already, haven"t you?"
"Oh, it"s nothing to be ashamed of," Rognir said, with the complacency of a dwarf whose heap could bear comparison with the best.
"Then why not leave these stones with me? Your heap at home is plenty big already."
"That doesn"t stop me from wanting it to be bigger!"
"Of course not. But if you add them to your heap, your money won"t be working for you. Whereas if you invest this with me, it will."
"Money working for me? What a curious concept! I hadn"t known money was supposed to work."
"It is a concept from the future, and it makes very good sense. Why shouldn"t money work? Everything else has to."
"That"s a good point," Rognir said. "But what a.s.surance do I have that you will keep your word? All I"ll have is your word that your word"s good if I take this offer, whereas if I don"t take the offer, I"ll still have all my gems."
"I can make this offer irresistibly attractive to you," Azzie said. "Instead of following normal banking procedure, I am going to pay you your profit in advance."
"My profit? But I haven"t even invested with you."
"I realize that. Therefore, as an inducement, I am going to give you the interest you will make in a year"s time investing with me."