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

the door. Where do I bring it?”
    “Wherever you like. Back the way you came. Or any other way as pleases you. But not in. Out. Now. So, go.” Soft the voice. But firm.
    A pause. Eyes clearer now, Vergil saw his fellow stare bepuzzled, then grow angry as well. “Say, Ser Beadle. What you mean? He was the coward. I stuck brave. Didn’t I? So — ”
    With, it seemed, no more than one finger, the beadle turned the boy around. “When you reach the exit gate you will find a caravan about to start. Say to its master, ‘There is a beast reserved for me,’ and he will point it out. Your charge and victuals are paid at no cost to you. And when you reach the port, there you will hear the drummers announcing the departure of a ship for Africa. Its voyage purpose is to find, capture, and bring back wild beasts for the arena. You need not join, though I expect you will. Do not tarry. Go.” The finger prodded, the Apulian moved. He moved unwillingly, still he questioned.
    “You say ‘one of us failed the first and second test’ — how come it’s
me?”
    By this time they had passed from Vergil’s sight, he lying on the straw, sick with shame. The beadle’s voice drifted back.
    “The first lesson is to know fear. The second lesson is to feel humility. It may be that you will learn them both. Not, I believe, very soonly. Meanwhile my finger grows weary, so I adjure: Begone.”
    When the beadle returned, Vergil was on his knees, watching the vapor arising from a tub of water that had certainly not been there a moment before. Said the beadle, “Wash.”
    Gladly would the young Vergil have drowned in it; “I have soiled myself.”
    Something not even faintly like compassion, something faintly like impatience, tinged the beadle’s voice. “Another good reason, then, to wash.
Wash
.
”
And, when Vergil had done so, he was shown a certain door, one of several. “Go through that one. That one. Mark it well. It won’t be pointed out again. Now . . . go …”
    That young aspirant also had a question, but he asked it as he went.
    “What of my baggage?”
    “It will follow,” said the beadle.
    And so it did; whenever the lad’s feet lingered, lagging along that long corridor, longer than any he had ever walked before, he could hear it following; once he looked behind. Only once.
    But as to how it had been made to follow, this was not the third lesson. It was not even the thirty-third.
    It was twelve months and several before he saw the beadle once again.
    The Apulian boy, though whenever (seldom) Vergil went to the arena he looked for him, he never saw more.
    • • •
    Armin had come to visit Vergil again. He seemed tired, had little to say as they sat by the slatted window-shutters, though Vergil tried to play the casually cheerful host. “Hecatombs,” the host repeated, taking up the note on which, more or less, the meeting with the magnates had closed. “Hecatombs can only help, for, after all — ” He paused to pour drink. “This is called beer,” he said. “Curious. It is much drunk in Egypt, so far south and east of here; and it is much drunk past the Alps, so far north of here. But it is not drunk much here. Is it that our grapes are better? Our barley not as good? What is that dreadful noise?”
    They peered through the slats. Some throng had turned a corner. “It is nothing,” Armin said, dispiritedly. “A coiner. A false-coiner.” Below, a man was being dragged along behind a cart to which he was bound. At every fourth step, the local beadle gave his whip a flourish and lashed the malefactor across his naked back. Someone, perhaps a friend, had stepped forward and thrust a piece of wood between the condemned man’s teeth. It could only have been a last gesture of friendship, pity would not be encountered at such a scene. For one single stroke more the counterfeiter bit deep into the wood to muffle his own cry. But the effort was not to be made more. The gag dropped at the next stroke of the whip,