by David Drake
Is he going to stab me? Or will he rape me so that I have to stab myself like Lucretia?
Alphena choked down a hysterical giggle. I don’t have to be that proud a daughter of Carce. Though Cassius was disgustingly old; he must be sixty! Perhaps she could close her eyes and pretend that somebody younger, somebody attractive—
She blushed. She’d been thinking about a certain somebody. And it hadn’t been disgusting at all.
“This is a remarkably fine sword, my dear,” Cassius said. “Where did you get it?”
He eyed her speculatively, the way Alphena had seen her brother view a well-made book. Varus looked at books more lustfully than anything she read in this man’s expression, however.
“None of your business!” Alphena said. She was trying to be haughty, but she knew she sounded more like an ill-tempered six-year-old.
“The sheath,” Cassius said.
She looked down in puzzlement, wondering what he was talking about. There was nothing special about it, though it glittered a little more than the ordinary tin-and-enamel scabbard which it replaced.
He hadn’t been talking to her. The third wraith unfastened the belt and handed it to Cassius.
The creatures looked like men who had begun to dissolve. Their flesh was slightly translucent, and their faces had no features.
Cassius snugged the belt around his own waist and sheathed the sword with a faint ching. He grinned at her. He wasn’t a young man, but he was fitter than her father or any of Saxa’s senatorial friends. The reflexive way he slid the sword home proved that he knew how to handle weapons too.
“Now, my queen …,” Cassius said. He was of average size, but his presence dominated the scene. “We will go to our kingdom. A return on my part, while you have before you the excitement of the first view of your new domains.”
“I don’t want to be your queen,” Alphena said. She was afraid that she sounded like a pettish child about to cry. “I don’t want to be anybody’s queen!”
“No?” said Cassius with an arched eyebrow. She could feel the man’s passion, but he gave no outward sign of it. She was sure that if he pulled the limbs off flies—or broke the bones of men, one rib at a time—he would do it with an appearance of complete detachment. “I don’t really believe that, dear, but you already realize that it doesn’t matter. Now, will you come with us on your own legs, or shall my servants carry you?”
She’d put the wraiths out of her mind. Now she shuddered, feeling the clammy grip on both her arms. It was like being stuck in cold mud.
“I’ll walk,” she said to the ground. Then, trying to hide the desperation: “Make them let go of me.”
“Lady Alphena,” Cassius said, as sternly as a judge pronouncing sentence. “Look at me.”
“I said I’d walk!” Alphena said, raising her eyes to his. She caught movement in the background. At first she thought something was rustling the bushes from which sprays of white, bell-shaped flowers hung; then she realized that the bushes themselves were crawling away.
“If you give your word,” Cassius continued inexorably, “to me, in this place, you will keep it. Do you understand?”
“I will walk with you,” Alphena said, sounding each word distinctly. Voice rising she added, “Make them let me go!”
“Release her,” Cassius said mildly. The hands came off her wrists. She wasn’t sure that the creatures had distinct fingers; it had been like being wrapped with blankets soaked in sewage.
“Now, my queen,” Cassius continued, “we will go to our kingdom.”
They set off along a trail which led out the back of the clearing. Had the whole business, including the Cyclops’s apparently aimless flight, been planned to trap her?
“You made the statue of Tellus speak, didn’t you?” Alphena said. She tried hanging back; a wraith’s touch on the back of her neck made her scramble up alongside Cassius.
“I?” he said. “Not I, my dear. I have no power in the overworld, not since I was executed.” He laughed without humor. “In the courtyard of my own house,” he said. “As my colleagues of the Senate thought fitting.”
Cassius looked at her. Alphena had seen more merciful expressions on lions rending victims in the arena. He said, “I will not have colleagues now, Alphena. I will reign alone—but you will have all power under me.”
“All power over the dead!” Alphena said. She was afraid she would start crying out of anger and frustration. Not fear, not now; she was too angry to be afraid.
“All men die, my dear,” Cassius said. His voice sank into a soft rattle. For an instant she thought she saw the skull beneath the strong features of his face.
They walked down an avenue of trees whose huge purple leaves had magenta veins. They arched overhead, coloring the light of the pale sky. Alphena saw the shadow of a huge caterpillar through a leaf. When they were past, she glanced over her shoulder. The worm was looking back at her. The segments of its body were mottled blue on yellow, but its head was that of a dark-skinned woman.
They were now among trees that looked like pines except that their bark was the bright green of verdigris. A squirrel ran up one just ahead of them. Each time it curled out of sight on the other side of the trunk, Alphena saw something other than the flick of a bushy gray tail, but the creature was always a squirrel when it reappeared.
Cassius looked up at the squirrel. It ran out on a branch and called, “Dead man! You don’t belong here! You shouldn’t have come!”
“Silence, animal!” Cassius shouted, anger blazing out for the first time. “Silence!”
“You’re going to regret it, dead man,” said the squirrel. He gave a chattering laugh.
Cassius whipped out the sword and rushed toward the pine. The squirrel made a standing leap of at least twenty feet to the next tree, then leaped again deeper into the forest. Alphena heard its laughter long after the flag of its tail had disappeared.
She had frozen where she was; the wraiths had stopped also. Cassius returned, his face blotched with rage. They walked on, for some way in silence.
“I bought you from the wizard Nemastes, dear lady,” Cassius said suddenly. “Do you know him?”
“What?” said Alphena. “Bought me?”
“When I was in the waking world,” Cassius said instead of answering directly, “I had a talisman of great power—a flute of bone made by Odd the wizard. If I could have learned to use Odd’s flute, I would rule the world from Carce to this day. The whole world!”
He’s insane, Alphena realized. But that didn’t mean that what he said wasn’t true.
“But before I could learn,” Cassius said, “they united against me and cut off my head. In the courtyard of my own house. And at last Nemastes came to me in the darkness where my soul dwelt. He offered me kingship in the Underworld, while he would rule forever in the waking world. Nemastes brought me out of the darkness, my queen!”
“He couldn’t sell me,” Alphena whispered. “He doesn’t own me.”
“I gave Nemastes the secret of where I hid the flute,” Cassius said. “In the Temple of Jupiter but not of it. And Nemastes has given you to me, to be my queen forever. He will rule the waking world, but with you at my side I shall be king of the Underworld!”
Once I’m there, I’m there forever, Alphena thought. Not even in myth did anyone return from the Underworld. Forever.
They stepped onto a plain unlike anything Alphena had seen in this world. Cassius stopped and looked around with a dumbfounded expression.
Alphena followed the sweep of his eyes. The forest behind them was gone also. Instead they stood in tawny grass no higher than their ankles. The wraiths shifted uneasily, looking more than ever like statues of pink aspic.
Cassius drew his sword. “How did you do this?” he snarled.
Alphena felt her lips quiver. “I?” she said. “I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t!”
A trio of pillars appeared around them. They were of golden light so vivid that Alphena slitted her eyes and looked
between two. There may have been shapes within their brilliance, but she couldn’t tell.
“You do not belong here, Spurius Cassius,” said a voice in Alphena’s mind.
“I don’t want trouble with you!” Cassius said, speaking toward one of the figures in light. “Let us pass and you’ll never see us again!”
His head moved slightly, back and forth; just enough to keep the other two creatures alternately at the corners of his eyes. The sword in his right hand pointed out at waist height, as though he were ready to stab up from around the shield he would have carried in battle.
“Our prince is missing, Spurius Cassius,” the voice said. Alphena heard/ felt/thought a slight tremolo; perhaps it was three voices, or many. “You have his sword.”
Then, staggering Alphena with its intensity, “Where is our prince, Spurius Cassius?”
“I don’t know your prince!” Cassius said. His left hand fumbled with the buckle of the sword belt. “I’ve never seen him. Here”—he sheathed the sword with a quick motion, then held it with its accouterments out at arm’s length—“take the sword. We’ll go our separate ways!”
“We will have our prince, Spurius Cassius,” said the voices, “or we will have you.”
“Destroy them!” Cassius said.
The wraiths started to move. The light brightened. Alphena threw her arm across her eyes and felt the skin on the underside prickle.
There was a noise like hogs being gripped by the snouts for slaughter—a drove of hogs. She fell to her knees, sick with the horror of the sound.
The prickling stopped. Alphena eased a careful glance, then lowered her arm. Where the wraiths had stood, scraps of gelatin soaked into the loam. The grass glistened, but it was already drying.
The pillars of light drifted toward Cassius. Effort made his muscles swell like hawsers, but he could not move. The lights merged with him. There was a golden flash and a scream, then nothing.
Alphena sprawled on her face in the forest. A bird that might have been a long-tailed hawk screamed at her, then glided from its high branch. It disappeared through a screen of yellow irises as tall as cherry trees.
Hedia came toward her at the side of a tall, nude man with hairy legs—and hooves.
Hedia’s with a faun!
“I HAVE SOME TROUT,” CORYLUS SAID, squatting beside the doorway to offer Sith his basket. The basket she had woven. “It’s, ah … I caught them after I built the cairn.”
“You don’t have a line or net,” the woman said, making a fireset with wood from a bundle and tinder from one of her two packs. She’d brought them over from where the reindeer had been unharnessed before the stranger appeared on the horizon. “Did you catch them with your hands?”
Ten feet away, an arc of children sat on their haunches and stared at Corylus. The adult members of the tribe were more circumspect, but he was clearly a matter of interest to all. The tribe must not meet many strangers, and a man in a linen tunic was probably unique to the experience of even the oldest.
“Ah, yes,” said Corylus. There had been plenty of time for the woman to inventory his belongings, most of which had been Odd’s to begin with; but he was impressed that she’d done so and had drawn the correct conclusion from what she learned. “I suppose your people do that too? Tickle fish, I mean?”
“Odd did,” the woman said, lighting the fire with embers she carried in a gourd. She blew the smolder to full life, then met his eyes with her own clear gaze; her irises were brown, in keeping with her dark complexion. “No other man of the tribe could, except perhaps by chance. Many tried, though.”
Sith rose and lifted a leather bottle off a rack on which several similar skins hung. She handed it to Corylus. “It’s kvass,” she said. “You must be thirsty.”
He worked the wooden stopper out and sucked a careful taste from the bottle. It was sour—rancid, even—but the sting of alcohol was sharp on his tongue. He held his breath, swallowed, and then took another swallow.
Blinking, he closed the skin and handed it back. “What is it made from?” he asked.
“Reindeer milk,” Sith said, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Don’t your own people make kvass?”
“We don’t have reindeer,” Corylus said truthfully. His stomach growled, brought to life by the drink and ready for more. He didn’t think filling it with fermented milk was a good idea right now, though.
“We’ll have reindeer sausage,” Sith said. “Pemmican, that is, dried and chopped with myrtle berries.” Frowning, she said, “Are all your people hunters, that you don’t keep reindeer? You don’t look like a hunter.”
“We have sheep, though I’m not a shepherd,” Corylus said. “And I’m not a hunter either, though I’ve hunted some.” He grinned. “And fished,” he added.
By being honest but not dwelling on the differences, Corylus hoped to keep off the subject of where he came from. He wasn’t sure how he could explain that, honestly or otherwise.
Sith set three pieces of stream-smoothed quartz on the edges of the fire, then ran a sausage onto a hornbeam skewer. She dug the bottom of the skewer into the ground so that the sausage wobbled over the flames. A bucket of leather stiffened with willow withies stood nearby. It was half full of water and bruised grain.
Most of the children were still watching, but the tribe’s adults were largely about their own business. Many of the women were fixing meals. The two older women who shared a fire in front of a double-sized hut occasionally turned a flat glance toward Corylus and his hostess.
“Frothi’s other wives,” Sith said, looking at them. She smiled faintly. “They’re angry at me for his choice. Nerthus knows that it was no choice of mine, and they know it too; but they don’t dare blame Frothi.”
“Is this going to be a problem for you?” Corylus said carefully. He began polishing the hornbeam staff with his hands, as much for the soothing feel as because the wood benefited from the exercise.
“I don’t care,” Sith said. She lifted a piece of hot quartz with birch pincers and dropped it into the bucket to warm the contents. The second and third rocks splashed in also, raising the liquid toward the rim of the bucket. That done, she broke up the remainder of the trout into the porridge.
Looking at Corylus, she said, “Tell me about Odd. Tell me what happened to him.”
“I found Odd’s boat floating upside down in the river,” Corylus said cautiously. “He was strapped into it; he’d drowned. I built a cairn with rocks from the streambed over him before I came seeking his people.”
Sith looked at the large hut, not the women cooking in front of it. “Odd wouldn’t have overturned his kayak, not even in a winter storm,” she said harshly.
She swung the bucket one-handed and placed it midway between them, offset to his right side. She handed him a spoon, of ivory rather than horn. The handle was carved into curves that reminded Corylus of the patterns of trout swimming near the surface.
“Odd’s spoon,” she said. “He made its pair for me.”
Sith took his hand in hers, dipped his spoon in the porridge, and guided it toward his mouth until he took over in embarrassment. Only when Corylus had swallowed did she begin to eat.
“What’s the porridge made of?” Corylus asked. “Ah, it’s very good.”
Which it was, though he was hungry enough that he’d have relished boiled mulehide at this point. This tribe clearly wandered with its herds, so he wondered if the grain had been bartered from more settled folk.
“Food grasses,” Sith said, gesturing toward the prairie. “Don’t your people gather them?”
“Something like that,” Corylus said. “Though we don’t travel so much, so we plant seeds in patches instead of foraging.” He smiled wryly. “Most of us don’t travel,” he added.
“The trout adds much to the soup,” Sith said, plucking the skewer from the ground and offering the sausage to Corylus for the first bite. “Odd wouldn’t have stopped to fish on his way back, so I’m eating better tonight than I expected to.”
The flavor of the pemmican sausage was like nothing Corylus had eaten before. The dried meat must have been mixed with tallow, and there were probably spices besides the myrtle berries Sith had mentioned. He chewed slowly. Once he got past the initial notion that it was musty, it was extremely good.
“Ah …,” he said. He raised his eyebrow in question. “A vision told me that Odd had a flute?”
“He left the flute with me,” Sith said, lowering the sausage and looking toward something beyond the northern horizon. “He was a wizard. This morning, Frothi came and took it. I knew then that Odd must be dead, so I didn’t care anymore. About the flute or about life.”
“I’m sorry,” Corylus said softly. He tilted the bucket so that he could spoon up the last of the porridge from around the rocks. He focused on that so that he didn’t have to look at the woman’s face.
“Frothi was always jealous of Odd,” Sith said, giving Corylus the rest of the sausage. His stomach was warm and pleasantly full. “Frothi could play at being ruler of everything—except of his brother. No one ruled Odd, but Odd didn’t want to rule anything except himself. And now he’s dead.”
“I …,” Corylus said. “A vision told me that Odd is at peace, Sith.”
“Is he?” she said with the same lack of emotion. “Perhaps I’ll be at peace one day too, Publius Corylus.”
She took the spoon from him and set it on a mat with her own. “Come,” she said. She stepped into the hut and tugged him gently with her.
“Sith?” Corylus said. “I don’t …”
He didn’t know how to finish the objection. He didn’t want to finish the objection.
“Come!” she repeated. She knelt and lifted her tunic to her waist, then gathered the bunched leather again. “Do you think I care?”
Corylus entered the hut and dropped the flap behind him.
CHAPTER XV
It was barely an hour after dawn. Four men, one of them Bearn, whom Corylus had seen at Frothi’s side, entered the camp from the south. Each of the others carried a variety of small game, largely hares and grouse, rolled into the nets they’d used to catch it.
