by Tanith Lee
The bald priest, face like an egg, regarded him gravely.
“You may trust me.”
Then Vusca got out the amulet and put it before the priest.
“Here. She said it was Aegyptian.”
“No,” said the priest, looking at it, not touching it. “She misled you.”
“I thought that was the case.” Vusca spoke, less decidedly of the dreams. He had to fumble after them now. They had no coherence. The priest, however, listened carefully.
When Vusca finished, the priest said, “I must consult another, more widely-versed than I in these things. Do you allow me to tell him what you’ve said?”
“If you must.”
“Yes.”
“When shall I return?”
“Tomorrow night, before the third watch.” (Even this temple told time by the Fort.) “I’ve seen it, now take it away with you.”
Vusca went, dissatisfied and nervous. He had not told Lavinia the truth, only that he wished the services of a diviner, and would like to favour her own chosen temple. He thought she guessed there was some other problem.
After he had done the Night Inspection and retired to his rooms, he sat by the lamp and accepted that the presence prowled about him. Now and then, something caused the lamp to flicker, although it was a windless night. A faint aroma, like musk and blood mixed, was barely detectable. The shadow appeared plainly once, twice, against the plastered wall, where his legionary’s sword was hanging, the old infantry shield, the knives, the dented breast-plate with the gouge of the axe-man’s dying anger –
The shadow was, and then it was not.
The thing he found the hardest to bear was that it should be here that he was attacked, in this place which represented for him security, totality, reason – here –
He fell into deathly sleep at last, over the table.
The creature from the amethyst had sucked up his bad luck, and now it sucked his life. He dreamed he was with Lililla. She too sucked upon him, in that way she had taught him. He felt no pleasure but he knew he would spend his seed and she would swallow it. Her eyes were a weird dull mauve, and had no mind or soul inside them.
Three of the priests were in the chamber where he was led the second night. Lamps burned; other than a small statue of the goddess, nothing and no one else was there.
“You told me one other priest,” Vusca said.
“For this, three are necessary.”
It was pointless to practise hauteur and the Might of Rome now. He was as much at their mercy as under the surgeon’s saw.
“Very well. What will be done?”
The fattest of the priests, who had a blond skin (a barbarian in Isis’ order), approached him and said, in the beautiful Greek so many of them mastered: “Commander, the amulet the woman gave you is like this: it is, as you found, benign, but then it turns. Before the first symptom, one who knew its secret would pass on the gem to another, who must accept it willingly. That is how to be free of it, to escape the turning of the energy back upon you. The woman did this. You did not know to do it. Now the time for such passage is over. We must try another course.”
“Yes.” Vusca frowned. His hands were wet and his belly griped. “What course?”
“A casting out. A returning.”
He did not understand, but he followed their instructions. They made marks on the floor, and anointed them. One stood outside the marks, by the goddess. In an alabaster bowl he made fire. It was this priest, the one who had never addressed Vusca, who had been given the amulet.
They began to chant. Vusca did not know the words. The sounds they made, keening harmonics, droned up into the roof like mosquitoes, and set his teeth on edge.
He realised he was now more than terrified.
It was very hot in the room.
The priest who had the amulet had never touched it save through a cloth. It lay on the cloth now, before him. He spoke to it, and Vusca caught the names of Isis, and of Thot, and of Osiris. The priest sprinkled water on the cloth with the amethyst, and powders, and salt.
The ritual seemed to go on and on. All the while, Vusca felt his strength bleeding away. His head swam. It was tedious, it was horrible. He realised he had grasped already that it could not work.
Finally, bellowing something, the priest beyond the marks raised the amulet in the cloth and cast it into the fire. The other two broke from their pen and hurled things into the basin after it. An unsuitable smell of cookery rose – they had thrown in onion, and some kind of fruit.
Vusca staggered. He went down on one knee, wiping the sweat from his face. He wanted it to be over. It was useless. He would have to think of another remedy.
When the fire died in the bowl, the amulet lay there. The heat had done something to it, meddled with its colour in some way.
He must take it, they said. Go to the Fort. They tied a knot of little cords on his arm, above the elbow. They invoked the protection of Isis.
He put a sum of money by the statue. They did not acknowledge this, aware themselves that they had achieved nothing.
The Roman commander lay down on his bed, the lamp alight, the sentry at his door.
He could not keep his eyes open. He drifted.
Vusca gripped the sword he had brought to lie beside him. The creature was not corporeal, yet maybe he could smite at it. Besides, there was a power in the sword. The power of what a soldier was. His last companion, the only one who could know everything, and would not betray –
The light fluttered and went out.
At first it was so gradual, he was not sure. It was like a constriction of the breath after too much food and wine. Only like that. But the pressure grew. It became heavier, sentient. In appalling horror he lay there, and felt the weight of the demon, crouching as the woman had done, on his loins and breast. The weight grew ever more sonorous, danker, seeping through him. He could not move. He was rigid with panic fear. And then there came the glow of two eyes, like meltings from the amethyst, hanging over him, watching him, as it sucked his life from every pore and vein and hair.
Vusca howled. By a galvanic effort, seemingly irresistible as the action of birth or death, he flung himself upward, dislodging the half-existent thing upon his chest. And as it dropped away, with the sword he cleaved it through and through, felt the blade go into it. But with no likeness to muscle or flesh, and not the jarring of a single bone.
When the sword ceased to penetrate anything at all, he stood panting in the darkness.
The sentry had not rushed in on him. It appeared Vusca had not even cried out as he thought he had. That was strange. Strange …
He held the sword, hugging it to him. Here was the last solution, after all. One way to cheat.
He sat down by the table, in the dark, with his only ally. He propped the hilt against the table’s edge, the tip against his abdomen, the crucial spot, under the ribs and heart. He leaned, fractionally, on the sword’s sharpness, and felt its bite like sweet consolation. “If you’re there,” he said aloud into the dark, “I have my friend here. My friend will take me from you, if you come close tonight. Then you lose. Be warned.”
He fainted, propped there over the blade.
Barbarus came to the Fort with some display, two of his sons, and three servants.
In the room above the Praetorium, Vusca said to him, “You had no need to be anxious. Did you think I meant to admonish you for something?”
Barbarus said smoothly, “It is the Commander’s privilege.”
“Why, have you been doing something wrong?”
Barbarus said, “Never knowingly, Commander.”
Vusca forced a chuckle. As he had forced the coy opening gambit. Then he said, “What have you been hearing about me in the town?”
Barbarus raised his brows. His horse-boned Gallic face was bland, moving on oiled hinges worthy of a Greek.
“Nothing?” prompted Vusca.
“Merely that we prosper under your hand.”
“And how do I loo
k to you?”
Barbarus considered, and decided on a fact.
“Not well, Commander. There’s been a lot of fever this spring.”
“It isn’t fever.”
“No, Commander?”
“Do you recall, Barbarus, last summer there was a woman in the town. She had a house behind the Julian Baths.”
Barbarus paused, to let the Commander see he had forgotten all that, could only remember if reminded.
Vusca reminded him.
“I thought nothing of it, when she left,” he continued, rather archly he felt, but could not summon the requisite irritation. “But the amulet she gave me – it’s begun to work me ill.”
Barbarus had now altered. He looked like a man listening for a distant, expected shout.
Vusca added details, as many as he thought were needful. When he stopped, Barbarus, with great deference, asked a couple of questions. Vusca replied.
Barbarus said slowly, “The Commander knows I am his slave.”
“Barbarus knows, I’m never ungrateful.”
“This is so. What may I do?”
“Is there anyone I can see who can – rid me – of this – thing –”
To his horror, Vusca found his voice was shaking, cracking like a boy’s.
Barbarus ignored the cracking voice. It had not happened. He said, “There’s a man in the hills. About a day’s journey in good weather –”
“He must come to me, here.”
“That may be more difficult.”
“The problem is,” said Vusca humbly, “I find I haven’t the strength, any more, to ride. Even to walk across this room is – a test.”
It was impossible to tell what Barbarus thought. You never knew. Doubtless, at any stumble they rejoiced. But they must still pretend to be sorry, try to assist, for as long as the idea of Rome remained.
“On the table,” said Vusca, “that box. Count the coins if you like.” Barbarus bowed, tapped the box with his fingers, did not count, since Rome was also perfect. “Pay the man – this healer, magician, whatever he is – pay him as you think fit. For you, I promise you now, if – if I survive, a talent of silver. There’s a letter in with the coins to that effect, having my seal.”
Barbarus lifted the box.
“I shall naturally destroy the letter, Commander. The Commander’s word is all that I require.”
Somehow, he lived, and did not go mad, for three more days, two more nights. By day he oversaw the machinery of the Fort, the drills, a parade under a burning white sun, carried out to it in a chair. He did such sedentary work as he could, even went through an interminable itemisation of stores with the quartermaster. Elsewhere he delegated via his capable Centurion Secundo and various other officers. (Was the dead Pilum sneering at him?) The men put up with it all cheerily, and the rank and file even asked after him, it seemed, their Old Man, laid up with the bloody fever, too bad, and it was nice hunting weather, too.
Sometimes in the afternoons he slept. The steady diurnal rhythms of the Fort seemed to protect him then.
The nights he was alone, alone but in company. The three of them, himself, the demon, and the sword.
The sounds of the trumpets marking the watches were his sanity. They were the voice of human strength and human reason.
But he realised he did not have far to go. Barbarus’ man from the hills was the final throw of his dice. Then it would be the sword. By the Light, he almost longed for it, now.
At sunset, on the third evening, they were sounding gates and he was writing a letter to Lavinia, telling her a crippling sickness had taken him, that he preferred the cleaner exit. It was awkward, this letter. He had wanted to put in some friendly, perhaps loving thing, to reward her for changing. But he did not like the written word other than in an itinerary or report, emotionless and exact. And the letter read just like a report, of course. He put it aside, and then they brought in the man.
He had been awarded a pass, through Barbarus, and would be taken for some roving spy in the pay of the Fort. There were genuine examples of such beings, several as tattered and matted as this one, few with such crazy and wilful eyes. Vusca thought: When they leave him with me, he may fly at my throat. Let him. Only another way out.
But, when the sentry left, the man did nothing, except to stand looking at Vusca.
It was unthinkable this ruffian could achieve anything. The final throw had got the Dog.
Vusca was suffused by a cold and awful relief. It was settled. He could die now.
Then the hill-man spoke, in uncouth Latin, in a scraping voice like a flint.
“See it in he. Seeing shadow. Bird thing. All the air, smelling bird thing.”
A bolt of quickening went through Vusca. It brought him back. He took hold of the table and said, “Did Barbarus tell you –”
“Tell. Now see. Amulet.” And more impatiently, as if with a stupid pupil, “Amulet! Amulet!”
Vusca took the amulet from the casket and its wrapping, and laid it on the table in front of the hill-man. The hill-man glanced at it. Then, he poked it with a black fingernail, and gave off an idiot’s squealing laugh. He was not afraid to make contact, the only one who was not.
The wild eyes came back to Vusca.
“Eats you,” said the hill-man. “Eats you.”
Vusca shivered.
“Yes.”
The hill-man grinned.
Vusca said, “How can I stop it – this eating?”
The hill-man pranced about. He said phrases in the native jargon. Vusca caught the word for eating again. He said tiredly, “Do you know?”
“Knowing,” said the hill-man, coming to a capering standstill. “Eats you. You eat.”
Vusca flinched. Some part of him understood, yet he did not.
“What are you saying?”
The hill-man ignored him. He began to remove an assortment of implements, iron sticks, pincers, little bowls made of bone or shell. They all came out of his clothes.
Vusca watched as these tools of a trade were laid on the floor. In one of the dishes the man lit a flame. Then, as if it were a bit of bread, he scooped the amulet off the table. He sat down with it on the floor as though in his hut. He put the gem into a kind of clamp, and started to work on it, holding it sometimes across the little flame.
Presently mauve dusts veered off into the shell dish.
The shadows were coming down on the rooms. Night had the window, only the torches from the Praetorium to alleviate it. On the floor, the solitary flame lit the wild man’s polecat face as he filed and ground away at the amethyst.
There was no sense of menace. The room seemed empty of anything that was not mortal. Was this feasible? Did the wild man have some wonderful power that held the demon in check even as he destroyed its totem?
Vusca had full understanding now. The jewel was to be powdered. Then, he would “eat” it, swallow the crystals. He had heard of physicians prescribing powdered stones, as for his grandfather’s rheumatism. Even Lavinia, when pregnant, had taken some resin in molasses.
The demon had eaten Vusca’s trouble, and his trouble was Vusca. Bad luck had made him into the man he was. The demon devoured that, and then it could go on, devouring him, down to the marrow of his spirit. Yes, he saw it now.
He was drowsy. Should he make the arrangement with the sword? No, unnecessary yet, besides, he did not want the wild man to see it –
He heard the trumpets of the first watch. He opened his eyes and the polecat was sidling towards him out of the shadows in its draggled fitch, with a cup in its paws.
The wild man stank, much worse than any polecat. Something had screened off the smell before. Vusca basked in the new odour, of reality. One of the paw hands clutched his head, tilted his skull backward. The cup met Vusca’s lip. “Eat,” said the wild man.
Vusca ate. He gulped the wine, greedily, and in the liquid he felt the crystals pass over his throat, gritty, sandy, some larger and smoother, like tasteless pills of salt.
The wild man took the cup away, and peered into it. He was satisfied and made a smacking noise with his own lips.
Vusca became marvellously, swimmingly drunk. There was nothing to be afraid of. He had consumed the consuming one. Father Jupiter! What had he done – could this be the proper trick?
He went over to the bed and lay on it.
The wine had formed a glorious warmth inside him. His entire body seemed to be feeding from it. He felt a content, an assurance he had not experienced since childhood.
The polecat came and stooped over him, and laughed filthy breath into his face. Vusca relished it. He knew, as if the gods spoke in his ear, that he had been saved. He fumbled to find money for the hill-man. The hill-man had skulked away, was going without recompense. Barbarus would see to it. Someone … would see to it.
The lovely night, populated only by natural things, smelling of leather, horse-hide, flowers, gently closed the Roman’s eyes.
He thought: I forgot. The sword is over there.
He thought: I shan’t need the sword.
Then his mind was a river of amethyst light and he went down into it to drink it up and be filled.
“But so many gifts,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling, she almost clapped her hands like a girl.
“I used to send you things.”
“Yes, but that was –” Lavinia flushed and turned her head, shy of him.
She was beautiful tonight.
But then everything had a gloss and gleam upon it. Every dawn was a miracle. Dusk a blessing. Two weeks now since he had been cured. Until today he had been too cautious to be happy, with all the brightness of life summoning him. Today he had gone ten rounds, buckler and short sword, with his Secundo, in the yard. Vusca had the victory. But the Secundo, a man nine years his junior, was no faker.
And Vusca had made the offerings today. He even went down to the Greek Hercules on the forum, and gave him something. Strength for strength. The blood in him was like a young man’s. Everything was better than it had been – his sight, his reach, his nerve, his brain. The accretions of the middle years were all washed off. He could begin again.
