young vergil
    and the wizard

by Avram Davidson

            part 2
This is the last unpublished short story by Avram
Davidson, one of America's great literary
fantasists. It tells of an event in the youth of the
Mage Vergil, the main character in Avram's
lifework, the Vergil Magus stories.

Several generations back, someone's cousin had
been married to someone's brother-in-law, and not
even then a first cousin. But although, even then,
Vergil's family had not been related to this other
family, it had been thus connected. A very faint
sense of this connection had shed upon a certain
woman, Emma by name, the last of an earlier
generation, a semblance of being some sort of
twice-great-aunt. When he was small, he had
thought My Emma, as he had also thought of
another old woman as My Grandma; for all he
knew, every small boy had an emma, too.
Sometimes, not often, his own aunt, his own
mother's sister, who had taken the place of his
own mother in the household; sometimes, not
often, she had said, his aunt, "Take this to your
Emma" …a festal cake, it might have been, a
stuffed tripe, a new-enough kerchief, itself
replaced by one bought more newly yet (the elder
Marius had been a great one for kerchiefs, buying
them for his sister-in-law whenever he'd gotten a
coin more than he'd reckoned as his bottom price
for a beast sold at market. Once only had he
bought her a small bauble of glass and brass,
immediately she had asked, "What about marriage,
then?" and Father had withdrawn to muck out the
byre, not returning for several hours; and after that
he had confined his purchases to kerchiefs), a
honeycomb in a dish deep enough to contain the
drippings, a small flask of oil…such-like things.

Emma lived within what was a half an hour's walk
for a small boy; it was of course less than that
now, yet he went there less often. Emma's
daughters lived in another village now, Emma's son
had married again, a termagant, and her husband
was her match. And old Emma lived on, and lived
with them, the gods save us from such a fate as
that! Aunt had paid them a visit, had not felt she'd
been made to feel welcomed; her next small gift,
carried by the boy "Mariu," had been disparaged
by the now-chief woman of old Emma's house,
and been deprecated as precisely that: small. As
"Mariu" had, in all child innocence, reported.

After that, the aunt sent things seldom, and Emma
(her humble gifts: two eggs, say, still warm in some
straw in a tiny basket she'd made herself) sent
things no more at all. Nor, evidently, was allowed