The Ardath Mayhar MEGAPACK®

by John Maclay

There—it was at last in the open, the thing that made him shake when he thought of Artistic Control. Those broken hands, Carelia’s face, astonished, then agonized, then shattered, like her hands. Their interrupted duet could never be resumed, and he had hidden that agony through all the years of his confinement. Now he opened the floodgates and the old wrath returned.

  Sverdla swallowed hard, her official face almost showing expression. She suppressed it with iron control. “It...will be done.” Her voice rasped in her throat. “You will come with us. Your house will be closed. Anything you need must come now.”

  “I need very little,” he said truthfully. Perhaps other fugitives would find his cabin, even the instrument beneath the deck. Someone might find sanity here, as he had done.

  * * * *

  The transit passed in practice, as well as in working to bring Carelia’s hands back to usefulness and her mind out of the depths to which it had retreated. He massaged her fingers, worked them with his own, flexing, stretching. When she realized what had been done, she looked at him at last, past years of blocks and guards she had set inside herself.

  That happened on the fourth day, and on the ninth she held the mini in her lap and tapped out a little tune. On the tenth she knew him completely, and it almost sent him into tears as she began to play, somewhat stiffly but with improving flexibility in her fingers.

  Holding those battered fingers, he said, “We are going to a safe place, Carelia. Free to make music! I brought all they could find in the files, as well as all I have memorized. You know as much as I, and between us we will satisfy our audiences. While the people we play for may look strange, their spirits, I believe, will be matches for ours.”

  Her wide brown eyes regarded him doubtfully. The coppery halo of her hair was soft beneath his hand as he stroked it. “We must go. The Agaricans are waiting. Take heart, Love. We are free.”

  A reception committee was waiting. Sverdla, Sissingham, and the silent aide went with the musicians to the staging area, their clunking steps following as Lerovik approached the waiting beings.

  The Agaricans were watching, and for a moment he felt like some beast, inspected for sale. Then the tallest of the wispy people drifted to his side and took his hand.

  “So most grateful, revered musician. None have we of your sort. You being of most beneficial to us. Be welcome.” The voice was musical and soft.

  Lerovik bowed. “My wife and I are happy to be here. We have music for people of discernment and will make it for you with much joy. But my wife is ill and must go to a place where you treat the sick.”

  The slender creature waved a filmy hand. Another offered an arm to Carelia, who took it, looked searchingly at Lerovik, and was reassured. The Agarican led her to a waiting vehicle. Now, Lerovik thought, she was entirely safe.

  Sverdla grasped Lerovik’s elbow firmly. Staring suspiciously at the remaining Agaricans, she said, “Before you take possession, we must have the formula for your agricultural product. That is the price of this musician!”

  The Agarican to whom she spoke fluttered as if caught in a breeze, evidently its gesture of agreement. “Of most certain, Lady Monitor. Yet to we is necessary to hear. Must be certain is needful for we. You agree?”

  Lerovik grinned. These shrewd people were buying no pig in a poke, and he didn’t blame them. Sverdla did not inspire confidence.

  She nodded. They went into a nearby building, which had been converted to a concert hall. The Steinway, glowing with antique power, stood in the center of the room on a circular platform. Lerovik touched the keys, finding the instrument perfectly tuned.

  He looked up at the Agarican spokesman. “You have heard only Mozart? Do you want that or something different?”

  “There is other?” the being asked. “Other, indeed!”

  Lerovik moved his hands on the keys, and Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” stole into the room. Then he played the Grieg A-Minor Sonata, a movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata, and climaxed it with Mozart. His audience was almost reeling with delight.

  “Yes,” fluted the Agarican. “Most precious! Will trade, indeed!”

  Lerovik said, “My wife will be able to play those and more, once she is well. Protect her from all harm.” Then, using all the control he had learned in the cell, he said, “But you must not give my kind your formula. They will use it to enslave our own people.”

  Something burned down his veins. The light dimmed. As darkness swept him away, he rejoiced aloud, “Carelia is safe!”

  Blackness shattered into a million golden notes, and he traveled with them, outward into timeless space.

  THE CHILDREN BENEATH THE STONES

  Driving to a writer’s conference once I was delayed by the resurfacing of a highway. By the time I could proceed a small furry animal had been laminated into the asphalt by a passing car—the sacrifice had been made!

  The first was purest accident. Flavius was as shocked as the slaves, who were in the process of dropping the stone into place, when the child lost her footing and slid, screaming, into the leveled roadbed. The wet crunch of the falling pavestone was echoed in his own belly, as he signaled a halt to the work.

  The other children lowered their water bags and cups, their pale faces and their gray eyes blank, as they stared at the spot where their companion had died. That look—it still made Flavius uneasy as he thought about it. The men and women who had been inching forward, one stadium at a time, building this road in the gods-forgotten north of Britannia, looked the same, their eyes going blank, their bodies freezing into position. Even the whips had been hard put to get them into motion again—leveling roadbed, cutting and hauling stones, setting them into place according to the specifications of the engineer.

  He shivered and rose from his blanket. The season for road building was over now. Soon the snows would join this chill rain, covering the ground. The season had freed him from this distasteful task. Battle was a thing he savored, but this slow and disgusting process of road building was not acceptable to one with his ambitions. Surely the Decurion would relent! Surely he would be returned to the maniple, where he belonged!

  He had not become a Legionary willingly, but his father had succeeded in buying a place for him suitable to his station. He had distinguished himself in battle, and it was only the worst of luck that the wrong person found him sporting in the bushes with the wench the general favored. That, of course, caused his removal to the road-building detachment and to his eventual distasteful duty as official child-catcher.

  And that was the fault of the engineer. After that first accident, the weather had miraculously turned fair. The conscripts, though they glowered and said nothing, had worked to better purpose. The gods seemed to smile on this toilsome road, and the engineer did not fail to notice that.

  When they finished some ten stadia and the weather turned foul again, Praecipius had called in Flavius. “Go and find another child. We cannot afford to use another of ours, for their parents would object, but if you can catch a wild one in the hills, that should suffice.”

  Flavius still felt the shock that burned through him, as he stared into the engineer’s small eyes. They glittered at him like bits of coal, and the ugly face wrinkled into a smile that would have shaken a Gaul. “You intend...you deliberately plan to murder a child, just to find if that will improve the weather?” he had asked, feeling a hollow space inside his spirit that told him the madman did, indeed, intend just that.

  The smile grew wider, the wrinkles forming a mask that might have been the face of one of the old gods of nastier habits and inclinations. Without another word, Flavius had turned and gone out to catch a child.

  That had been the first of many, for it had worked. Strange as it might seem to one who had polished his logical faculties upon the words of Socrates, every time a Celtic child was dropped into the roadbed and crushed flat by the next stone, matters improved dramatical
ly for something like ten stadia. After that—Flavius sighed, staring out into the gray morning—the entire thing was to do over again.

  Except, of course, for the Celts. The slaves, naturally, were watched and guarded too closely to allow any rebellion, but those wild men in the hills were another matter. There was battle enough to suit the most bloodthirsty, as the guardian Legionaries patrolled the countryside around the building site. Ambushes of the most exquisite subtlety were made, taking several of the best soldiers of the lot through wounds or death.

  Stragglers were shot from cover, arrows skewering them like hedgehogs, as they lay kicking in their blood. It became unsafe for any Roman, or even for a Celt enslaved by them, to go far from the campus, and the latrines had to be dug too near the main camp for even the least sensitive noses. Even then, a sufferer from diarrhea sometimes fell in the night, quilled like a pheasant from incredible distances.

  His work of child-catching had become not only sickening and difficult but actively dangerous. He had gone armed, with a guard of ten, just to keep him alive. Even then, he often returned with only a handful of those who went out with him, the others having disappeared, screaming, as they rummaged through bushes or down ravines.

  Some had been found, flayed and dripping. Others had never been seen again, though their voices had sung evil songs in the darkness. The parents of those sacrificed children were unhappy, he knew. He would have been unhappy himself. Their mothers and fathers were stalking the Roman builders, and he wondered where this insane adventure would end.

  Now, however, the weather had closed in for winter. The day dragged past, and the night of the bonfires was beginning, and fires were already lit on the tops of the surrounding hills; sounds of dim drumming could be felt in the bones as much as heard by the ears. He shivered.

  The thing was done. By spring, surely, he could talk the Decurion into returning him to duty fit for a soldier! He would never again have to carry a wriggling, screaming child in his arms to its death.

  As evening drew in, the drums grew louder.

  The engineer came into the tent and shook the damp from his cloak. “The barbarians are chanting up there. I can hear their voices, though not the words. We should never have let the slaves go. They have joined their brothers, or I know nothing of such animals.”

  “We could never feed them and the troops too, through the winter,” Flavius objected, his tone milder than it would have been with one who was his junior. “We have stripped the fields of grain and the hills of game. We will be on short rations ourselves before spring.”

  “We will retreat southward now,” the engineer admitted. “The winters are harsh in this place, and we will join the troops in their winter camp soon. Perhaps it is as well that we do not take those stubborn Celts with us.” He grunted, as a wail called thinly through the gathering gloom.

  Flavius went, for the hundredth time, to peer out through the door flap. Now the fires above were showing up brightly against the cloud-darkened sky. He was glad that a cohort guarded the road-building crew, for those bright-haired people on the hills were fighters to be feared. Three hundred and sixty men were not too many for the task. Even the blue-painted Picts feared the tall, fierce people of the hills.

  Even as he thought that, there came a shriek from the direction of the stream beyond the guard post. Another rose from the opposite direction, as he seized his short sword and pulled his cloak about him.

  “There is an attack!” he told the engineer, who was already addled with the wine he drank steadily from day’s end to day’s end.

  The man took a step and fell over the stool he kept beside his sleeping place. He was grinning, too drunk to know or to care that the barbarians might soon be roasting his bones over their Samhain fires.

  The watchfire at the end of his row of tents lit a scene of furious activity. Shapes moved abruptly into and out of sight, struggling, stabbing. Flavius ran to help someone in armor—but when the man turned, he saw the flash of pale eyes under the metal helmet, and before he could stop he found himself caught between three men, all taller than he, all stronger and smelling of rage.

  Then something struck the back of his head, and everything went completely dark.

  * * * *

  Flavius woke abruptly, his eyelids springing wide and his body attempting to sit. That, however, was impossible, for he found himself bound securely to a complicated structure made, he thought, of tree branches.

  He could see nothing. It was still night—or another night. He could not be certain.

  In the darkness, he heard a groan, and the voice was familiar. “Praecipius?” he whispered. “Is it you, Engineer?”

  “Ummm,” came the moan in reply.

  Flavius struggled with the bindings about his hands, but the leather thongs were tight. His hands, in fact, felt swollen and numb. Even if they had been free, he was sure that he could not have untied the rest of him, without working life back into his recalcitrant fingers first.

  The drums were louder. Much louder. He realized that he must now be up on one of those forbidding hills, separated from his fellows and beyond the protection of mighty Rome. He and the engineer, it came to him in a sickening flash of understanding, were about to pay for all those Celtic children they had crushed beneath the stones of the road.

  The freed slaves had told their fellows in the wild of course. Among all the alien people down in that encampment, with its rigidly straight lines of tents and its praetorium set on a slight knoll commanding the entire complex, there could have been no way for these people to pick out so unerringly just whom to blame for the loss of their young ones.

  “Praecipius!” he said into the darkness. “They are about to serve us as we did them. What do you think of that?”

  There was the sound of rough breathing beside him, and the noise of a struggle. He laughed silently. He knew the security of those bonds, and Praecipius would no more succeed in loosing them than he had done.

  Rank smoke came to his nostrils through the openings in the rough shelter that he could now see looming about him. The light of a fire striped the wall above his head, where it trickled through the slatted sides. His skin was ridged with gooseflesh, from fear as much as from the cold.

  He would not live to see the great work completed, the road connecting the strong points, the wall holding out the wild men from the north. He would not see Lavinia again, or his father’s villa overlooking Mare Adriaticus.

  He believed in no gods, Roman or others. He certainly did not believe in the ancient and primitive deities that these people worshiped. He only believed in pleasure and pain—and death. He felt that he was about to make the acquaintance of that last, very soon.

  Praecipius groaned again. “Flavius?”

  “Yes.”

  “They have us then?”

  “They do.”

  “You were right, you know. We should never have killed the children. Some of the slaves, perhaps, might have been better.”

  Flavius almost laughed. “If you truly believe that, you are even more stupid than I thought. We are about to die, Engineer. Think about that.” He closed his eyes and listened to the chanting in that alien tongue. It mingled with the sound of wind whistling evilly between the slats and the pelting of the rain. How did the fires burn in all that rain?

  A sound at the door brought him to instant alertness. He could see faces, striped with ash and shadow. Hands seized him roughly, hauling him upright, as a cold blade cut the ties holding him to the litter.

  When they were outside, he could see the faces, pale blots amid wildly blowing hair that ranged from white-gold to almost crimson. Men and women alike, regardless of the cold, wore only loincloths and short cloaks. All carried knives, some of stone, some metal ones stolen from his own kind. His belly cramped, and he bent over and vomited in the mud at his feet.

  They tugged him to the fire, whe
re he saw a tall stone of the kind that seemed to stud this countryside. It stood with two more in a rough triangle, in the middle of which burned the fire. The stones sheltered the spot, so that when he stood near the flames he hardly felt the wind and the damp.

  A howl made him turn his head. Praecipius sagged between two Celts, a man and a woman. Both were painted with stripes of ash, and Flavius thought they might be the grieving parents of the last stolen child.

  At the back of the stone toward which he faced was a dark well of shadow, deeper than it should have been. He realized, even as the engineer was dragged to the edge of the spot, that it was a trench, dug into the muddy soil at the foot of the megalith.

  The woman worked about Praecipius for a moment, binding him fast from neck to heels. Then she and the man held him over the hole, extending their burdened arms as if he weighed nothing, and let him drop. He hit with a thump and a wail.

  As Flavius watched, his stomach heaving again, yet empty of anything more to lose, two more of the barbarians began levering the bottom of the stone beside the grave. It had, he saw now, been excavated to some depth, and the levers were making the tall shape totter already. It moved, the soft mud letting it lean slowly, then more swiftly, and at last it began to fall.

  It seemed to take forever. The angled top wavered in the fitful light as the wind moaned about it, and at last it moved downward, the foot kicking up a bit of soil as the thing fell with a thump that shook the hill. Any cry Praecipius might have made was smothered beneath the noise and the weight of the thing.

  Flavius tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry. Would he be served the same?

  Now the fire was dying, and those standing about it did not renew its fuel. Instead, they turned shining eyes toward the Roman, and he felt his bladder release its burden, wetting his legs and his tunic. What would they do to him, who had carried their weeping children away to be killed?

  The ash-striped woman approached, her hair glinting like copper in the dying firelight. Wind swirled strands of it about his face, as she pushed him against the stone at his back. With deft speed, the others wrapped bindings of leather about him, tying him securely to the enigmatic stone.