From the Heart of Darkness

by David Drake

  The firing stopped. Curtis clenched his fists, raised his head a fraction from the ground. A single, spiteful round banged from the first bunker. The bullet ticked the rim of Curtis’ helmet, missing his flesh but snapping his head back with the force of a thrown anvil. He was out cold when the tree toppled slowly across his boots.

  * * *

  There were whispers in the darkness, but all he could see were blue and amber streaks on the inside of his mind. He tried to move, then gasped in agony as the pinioning mass shifted against his twisted ankles.

  There were whispers in the darkness, and Curtis could guess what they were. Dog Company had pulled back. Now the VC were slipping through the trees, stripping the dead of their weapons and cutting the throats of the wounded. Wherever Curtis’ rifle had been flung, it was beyond reach of his desperate fingers.

  Something slurped richly near Curtis on his right. He turned his face toward the sound, but its origin lurked in the palpable blackness. There was a slushy, ripping noise from the same direction, settling immediately into a rhythmic gulping. Curtis squinted uselessly. The moon was full, but the clouds were as solid as steel curtains.

  Two Vietnamese were approaching from his left side. The scuff of their tire-soled sandals paused momentarily in a liquid trill of speech, then resumed. A flashlight played over the ground, its narrow beam passing just short of Curtis’ left hand. The gulping noise stopped.

  “Ong vo?” whispered one of the VC, and the light flashed again. There was a snarl and a scream and the instant red burst of an AK-47 blazing like a flare. The radioman’s body had been torn open. Gobbets of lung and entrails, dropped by the feasting thing, were scattered about the corpse. But Curtis’ real terror was at what the muzzle flash caught in mid-leap—teeth glinting white against bloody crimson, the mask of a yellow-eyed beast more savage than a nightmare and utterly undeterred by the bullets punching across it. And the torso beneath the face was dressed in American jungle fatigues.

  * * *

  “Glad to have you back, Curtis,” Capt Warden said. “We’re way understrength, and replacements haven’t been coming in fast enough. Better get your gear together now, because at 1900 hours the company’s heading out on a night patrol and I want every man along.”

  Curtis shifted uneasily, transfixed by the saffron sclera of the captain’s eyes. The driver who had picked him up at the chopper pad had filled Curtis in on what had gone on during his eight weeks in the hospital. Seventeen men had died in the first ambush. The condition of the radioman’s body was blamed on the VC, of course; but that itself had contributed to rotted morale, men screaming in their sleep or squirting nervous shots off into the shadows. A month later, Warden had led another sweep. The lithe, athletic captain should have been a popular officer for his obvious willingness to share the dangers of his command; but when his second major operation ended in another disaster of bunkers and spider holes, the only emotion Dog Company could find for him was hatred. Everybody knew this area of operations was thick with VC and that it was Dog Company’s business to find them. But however successful the operations were from the division commander’s standpoint—the follow-ups had netted tons of equipment and abandoned munitions—Warden’s men knew that they had taken it on the chin twice in a row.

  It hadn’t helped that the body of Lt Schaden, killed at the captain’s side in the first exchange of fire, had been recovered the next day in eerily mutilated condition. It looked, the driver whispered, as though it had been gnawed on by something.

  * * *

  They moved out in the brief dusk, nervous squads shrunk to the size of fire teams under the poundings they had taken. The remainder of the battalion watched Dog’s departure in murmuring cliques. Curtis knew they were making bets on how many of the patrol wouldn’t walk back this time. Well, a lot of people in Dog itself were wondering the same.

  The company squirmed away from the base, avoiding known trails. Capt Warden had a destination, though; Curtis, again marching just behind the command group, could see the captain using a penlight to check compass and map at each of their frequent halts. The light was scarcely necessary. The mid-afternoon downpour had washed clean the sky for the full moon to blaze in. It made for easier movement through the tangles of trees and vines, but it would light up the GI’s like ducks in a shooting gallery if they blundered into another VC bunker complex.

  The trade dollar in Curtis’ pocket flopped painfully against him. The bruise it had given him during the ambush still throbbed. It was starting to hurt more than his ankles did, but nothing would have convinced him to leave it in his locker now. He’d gotten back the last time, hadn’t he? Despite the murderous crossfire, the tree, and the … other. Curtis gripped his sweaty M16 tighter. Maybe it hadn’t been Maria Theresa’s chop-scarred face that got him through, but he wasn’t missing any bets.

  Because every step he took into the jungle deepened his gut-wrenching certainty that Dog Company was about to catch it again.

  The captain grunted a brief order into the phone flexed to his RTO. The jungle whispered “halt” from each of the platoon leaders. Warden’s face was in a patch of moonlight. His left hand cradled the compass, but he paid it no attention. Instead his lean, dominant nose lifted and visibly snuffled the still air. With a nod and a secret smile that Curtis shivered to see, the captain spoke again into the radio to move the company out.

  Three minutes later, the first blast of shots raked through them.

  The bullet hit the breech of Curtis’ rifle instead of simply disemboweling him. The dented barrel cracked down across both of his thighs with sledge hammer force. His left thumb was dislocated, though his right hand, out of the path in which the .51 cal had snatched the rifle, only tingled. Curtis lay on his back amazed, listening to the thump-crack of gunfire and bullets passing overhead. He was not even screaming: the pain was yet to come.

  An American machinegun ripped a long red streak to within six inches of Curtis’ head, no less potentially deadly for not being aimed at him. The wounded soldier fumbled open his breast pocket and clutched at the lucky piece. It was the only action to which he could force his punished body. The moon glared grimly down.

  Something moved near Curtis. Capt Warden, bare headed, was snaking across the jungle floor toward him. Warden grinned. His face slumped suddenly like lead in a mold, shaping itself into a ghastly new form that Curtis had seen once before. The Warden-thing’s fangs shone as it poised, then leaped—straight into a stream of Communist fire.

  A two-ounce bullet meat-axed through the thing’s chest back to front, slapping it against a tree. Curtis giggled in relief before he realized that the creature was rising to its knees. Fluid shock had blasted a great crater in the flesh over its breastbone, and the lower half of its face was coated with blood gulped out of its own lungs. The eyes were bright yellow and horribly alive, and as Curtis stared in fascination, the gaping wound began to close. The thing took a step toward the helpless soldier, a triumphant grimace sweeping over its distorted features.

  Without conscious direction, Curtis’ thumb spun the silver dollar toward the advancing creature. The half-healed wound-lips in the thing’s chest seemed to suck the coin in. The scream that followed was that of an animal spindled on white-hot wire, but it ended quickly in a gurgle as dissolution set in.

  * * *

  The stretcher team brought Curtis out in the morning. His right hand had been dipped into the pool of foulness soaking the ground near him, and the doctors could not unclench the fist from the object it was frozen on until after the morphine had taken hold.

  DRAGONS’ TEETH

  The sound of squealing axles drifted closer on the freezing wind. The watching Roman raised his eyes an inch above the rim of his brush-screened trench. A dozen Sarmatian wagons were hulking toward him into the twilight. Their wheels of uncured oak, gapped and irregular at the fellies, rumbled complainingly as they smashed stiff grass and bushes into the unyielding soil.

  A smile of grim satisfaction
brushed Vettius’ lips as the Sarmatians approached. He did not touch the bow that lay beside him; it was still too soon.

  The enormous weight of the wagons turned every finger’s breadth of rise into a steep escarpment up which the oxen had to plod. They grunted out great plumes of breath as they threw their weight into the traces. Sexless, almost lifeless in their poses of stolid acceptance, the drivers hunched on the high wagon seats. Like the oxen, they had been at their killing work since dawn. The wind slashed and eddied about the canopies of aurochs hide which covered the boxes. Tendrils of smoke from heating fires within squirmed through the peaks. They hung for a moment in the sunset before scudding off invisibly.

  The last of the wagons was almost within the defile, Vettius noted. It would be very soon now.

  Among the Sarmatians the whole family travelled together, even to war. The children and nursing mothers huddled inside the wagons. So did the warriors; their work, like that of the horses tethered behind each wain, was yet to come. Soon the wagons would halt and laager up in the darkness. Using night as a shroud, the reivers would mount and thunder across the frozen Danube. Laughingly they would return before dawn with booty and fresh Roman ears.

  The only picket Vettius could see from where he lay was a single rider slightly ahead and to the left of the wagons. Earlier in the day he might have been guide or outrider. Hours had passed. Wagons had bunched or straggled according to the strength of their teams and the temper of their drivers. Now, while the sun bled like an open wound in the western sky, the rider was almost a part of the jumbled line and no protection for it. Vettius smiled again, and his hand was on the bow.

  The wind that moaned around the wagons scuffed up crystals from the snow crusts lying in undulant rills among the brush. The shaggy pony’s rump and belly sparkled. The beast’s torso, like its rider’s, was hidden under armor of broad horn scales, each one painstakingly sewn onto a leather backing by the women of the family. Across his pommel rested a slender lance more than eighteen feet long. The Sarmatian fondled its grip as he nodded over his mount’s neck, neglecting to watch the bushes that clawed spiked shadows from the sun.

  A sound that trickled through the wind made him straighten; unexpected movement caught his eye. Then the Roman archer rose up from behind a bush far too small to conceal a man the way it had. The Sarmatian, spurring his horse in incredulous panic, heard the slap of the bowstring, heard the loud pop as one scale of his cuirass shattered. After the bodkin-pointed arrow ripped through his chest he heard nothing at all.

  “Let’s get’em!” Vettius shouted, nocking another arrow as his first target pitched out of the saddle. The trumpeter crouching behind him set the silver-mounted warhorn to his lips and blasted out the attack. Already the shallow hillsides were spilling soldiers down on the unprepared Sarmatians.

  The driver of the lead wagon stood up, screaming a warning. The nearest Roman thrust her through the body with his spear. With two slashes of his short-sword, the legionary cut open the canopy behind her and plunged inside with a howl of triumph.

  Sarmatians leaped out the back of the second wagon, trying to reach their horses. Three legionaries met them instead. Vettius had set fifty men in ambush, all picked veterans in full armor. None of the others had bows—the legate had feared a crossfire in the dusk—but sword and spear did the butcher’s work on the startled nomads. The Sarmatians were dressed for war in armor of boiled leather or aurochs horn, but they had no shields and their light swords were no match for the heavy Roman cut-and-thrust blades. One at a time the nomads jumped down to be stretched on the ground by a stab, a quick chop, or even the heavy smash of a shield rim. Death trebled, the legionaries stood waiting for each victim. The fading sunlight gleamed from their polished helmets and greaves and touched with fire the wheels of bronze and vermillioned leather that marked their shields.

  The legate’s practiced eye scanned the fighting. The wrack showed the Sarmatians had battled with futile desperation. A baby lay beside the fourth wagon. Its skull had been dashed in on the wagon box, but its nails were stained with Roman blood. The oxen bellowed, hamstrung in the yoke. One was spurting black jets through a heart-deep channel. This day was Rome’s vengeance; retribution for a thousand sudden raids, a thousand comrades crumpled from a chance arrow or a dagger thrust in the night.

  Only toward the rear where three wagons had bunched together was there real fighting. Vettius ran down the line of wagons though his quiver was almost emptied when he saw one of his men hurtle through the air in a lifeless somersault. The legionary crashed to the ground like a load of scrap metal. His whole chest and body armor had been caved in by an enormous blow. Measurably later the man’s sword completed its own parabola and clanked thirty feet away.

  “Get back!” Vettius shouted when he saw the wind-row of ruined bodies strewn in front of him. “Stand clear!” Before he could say more, the killer was lumbering toward him around the back of the wagon.

  The horsehair crest wobbling in the waning sunlight increased the figure’s titanic height, but even bareheaded the giant would have been half again as tall as the six-foot soldier. Worse, he was much heavier built than a man, a squat dwarf taller than the wagon. He carried no shield but his whole body shone with a covering of smooth bronze plates. Both gauntleted hands gripped the haft of an iron-headed mace. The six-foot helve was as thick as a man’s calf and the head could have served as an anvil.

  The giant strode toward Vettius with terrifying agility.

  Vettius arced his bow. The shaft of his arrow splintered on the monster’s breastplate. It left only a bright scar on the metal. Vettius stepped back, nocking another missile and shifting his aim to the oddly-sloped helmet. The face was completely covered except for a T-shaped slot over the eyes and nose. The light was very dim but the narrow gap stood out dead black against the helmet’s luster. As the giant started to swing his mace parallel to the ground, Vettius shot again.

  The arrow glanced off the bronze and howled away into the darkness.

  Vettius leaped upward and fell across the wagon seat as the giant’s mace hurtled toward him. The spiked head smashed into a wheel with awesome force, scattering fragments of wood and making the whole wagon shudder. As it rocked, the driver’s hacked corpse tumbled to the ground leaving the Roman alone on the seat as he sighted along his last arrow.

  The giant had reversed his grip on the mace. Now he swung his weapon upward with no more apparent effort than a man with a flywhisk. As the head came level with the giant’s hips, the mace slipped from his fingers to fly forward and burst through the side of the wagon. The titan reeled backwards. A small tuft of feathers was barely visible where the helmet slot crossed the bridge of his nose.

  The earth trembled when he fell.

  Shaking with reaction himself, Vettius dropped his now-useless bow and craned his neck to peer over the wagon’s canopy at the remaining fighting. Some of the wains were already burning. Confusion or the victors had spilled the heating fires from their earthenware pots and scattered coals into the cloth and straw of the bedding.

  “Save me a prisoner!” Vettius bellowed against the wind. “For Mithra’s sake, save me a prisoner!”

  He jumped to the ground and cautiously approached the fallen giant. The helmet came off easily when he grasped it by the crest and yanked. Beneath the bronze the face was almost human. The jaw was square and massive; death’s rictus had drawn thin lips back from leonine tushes, yellowed and stark. The nose squatted centrally like a smashed toad, and from it the face rose past high flat eyesockets to enormous ridges of bone. There was virtually no forehead so that the brows sloped shallowly to a point on the back of the skull. Only their short tight coils distinguished the eyebrows from the black strands that covered the rest of the head.

  No wonder the helmet looked odd, Vettius thought bleakly. He would believe in the face, in a man so large, because they were there for him to touch; but he would have called another man a liar for claiming the existence of something so impo
ssible. Perhaps believing in the impossible was the secret of the success of the Christians whose god, dead three hundred years, was now beginning to rule the Empire.

  The trumpeter approached from behind with his horn slung and a bloody sword in his right hand. The torque he now wore was of gold so pure and soft that he had spread it by hand to get it off a dead nomad and rebent it around his own neck.

  “Sir!” he called, “are you all right?”

  “Give me a hand here,” Vettius grunted unresponsively as he tugged at the mace. Together the men pulled the weapon from the fabric of the wagon. Vettius gave a curt order and hefted it alone as his subordinate stepped back. “Ha!” he snorted in disbelief. The mace weighed at least two talents, the weight of a small man or a fair-sized woman.

  He let it thud to the ground and walked away from it. “May the Bull bugger me if I don’t learn more about this,” he swore.

  * * *

  The doorkeeper had difficulty slamming the door against the gust of wind that followed Vettius into the anteroom. Moist air from the baths within condensed to bead the decorated tiles and rime the soldier’s cape of black bearskin. He wore the bear’s head as a cowl. The beast’s glass eyes usually glared out above Vettius’ own; now they too were frosted and the doorkeeper, turning, shuddered at the look of blank agony they gave him.

  Vettius shrugged off the cape and stamped his muddy boots on the floor. The doorkeeper sighed inwardly and picked up his twig broom. The damned man had been stomping through the muck like a common soldier instead of riding decently in a litter as befit his rank. The slave said nothing aloud as he swept, though; the legate had a reputation for violence and he already wore a dark glower this afternoon.