Wagers of Sin

by Robert Asprin

  And there, in those silent, dusty streets where men changed history and women were held in bondage, her prayers to Athene, to Hera, to Demeter and her daughter Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, to Artemis and Aphrodite and even to Circe the Enchantress of Old, were finally answered. Pursued by an enraged husband, she ran as fast as she could force her flagging body, knowing all too well what fate awaited her if her husband caught her. Ianira's bare toes raised puffs of dust in the empty, moonlit Agora, where the columns of the gleaming white Hephestion rose on a hillock to one side and the painted Stoa where philosophers met to discourse with their disciples rose ghostlike before her in the haunted night.

  Still bent on trying to reach the shining Parthenon above her, Ianira darted into an alleyway leading up toward the Acropolis and heard a beggar man seated on the ground call out sharply, "Hey! Don't go through there!"

  A glance back showed her the figure of her husband, gaining ground. Terror sent her, sobbing, up toward Athene's great temple. She literally ran into the solid wall of a small cobbler's shop hugging the cliff face, staggered back—

  —and saw it happen.

  Inside the open doorway of the cobbler's shop, the dark air had torn asunder before her disbelieving eyes. Her gown fluttered like moth's wings as she faltered to a halt, staring at the pinpoint of light and movement through it. Dimly, she was aware of people crowding around her, her husband's curses at the back of the crowd. She hesitated only a moment. At the embittered, battered age of seventeen, Ianira Cassondra lifted her hands in thanks to whichever Goddess had listened—and shoved past startled men and women who tried to stop her. She stepped straight into the wavering hole in reality, not caring what she found on the other side, half-expecting to see the grand halls of Olympus itself, with shining Artemis waiting to avenge her defiled priestess.

  She found, instead, La-La Land and a new life. Free of many of her old terrors, she learned to trust and love again, at least one man who had learned caution from harsher masters than she had yet found. And even more precious, something she had not thought possible, she had found the miracle of a young man with brown hair and a laughing heart and dark, haunted eyes who could make her forget the brutality and terror of a man's touch. He would not marry her yet. Not because she had left a living husband, but because—in his own mind—he was not honorably free of debt. Ianira had never met this man who owned Marcus' debt, but sometimes when she went into deep trance, she could almost see his face, amidst the most unlikely surroundings she had ever witnessed.

  Whoever and wherever he was, waiting for Marcus to finish his days' labors, Ianira hated the hidden man with such a passion as Medea had known when she'd snatched up the dagger to slay her own sons, rather than let a replacement queen raise them like slaves. When—if—he returned, Ianira mused, she herself would find no barriers to taking up her own dagger and punishing the man who had treated her beloved so callously. It would not be the first time she'd offered the pieces of a sacrificial human male to ancient Artemis, she who was called by the Spartans Artamis the Butcher. She had thought herself long past the need for such bloody work; but when her family was threatened, Ianira Cassondra knew herself capable of anything. Quite a change from that time in her life when the thought of sleeping with a one-time slave would have been revolting to her—but the contrast between a year of "honorable" marriage and Marcus' tender concern for a stranger lost in a world the gods themselves would have found bewildering, had worked a magic Ianira could recognize. Sharing Marcus' bed, his fears and dreams, Ianira gave him children to ease the pain in his heart—and her own.

  To her surprise, Ianira found she not only enjoyed the humble, mundane chores she had never before been forced to do, but also she enjoyed the surprising status and acclaim her abilities and personality had earned her. Odd to be so suddenly sought after—not only by other lonely downtimer men, but by tourists, uptimer students, even professors of antiquities. In this strange land, Ianira had discovered she could make many things, beautiful things: gowns, baubles and ornaments, herbal mixes to help those in suffering. After a few of these items had sold, demand was suddenly so great, she'd asked Connie Logan if she would please teach her to use one of the new machines for sewing, to make her gowns faster.

  Connie had grinned. "Sure. Just let my computer copy down any embroidery or dress patterns you use and you've got a deal!"

  Connie was a shrewd businesswoman. So was she, Ianira remembered with a smile. "The embroidery? No. The dress patterns? Yes, and welcome."

  Connie shook her head and sighed. "You're robbing me blind, Ianira, but I like you. And if that Ionian chiton you're wearing is any example of what you can do . . . you've got a deal."

  So Ianira used Connie Logan's workshop to create the chitons she was stockpiling toward a future business of her own. She'd spent her entire pregnancy with Gelasia sewing, making up little bags to hold dried herbs, learning to make the simple but beautiful kinds of jewelry she recalled so clearly from her home—and her now-dead husband's. And finally it paid off, when she got the permit from Bull Morgan to open a booth, which Marcus made for her in his free time. They painted it prettily and set up for business.

  Which was good, if not as phenomenal as she'd once or twice hoped. But good, still, more than enough to pay for itself and leave extra for family expenses, including Marcus' debt-free fund. Theirs was an odd marriage—Ianira categorically refused to acknowledge the year of rape and abuse in Athens as a legitimate marriage, as she had not consented—but the odd marriage was filled with everything she could have wanted. Love, security, children, happiness with the kindest man she'd ever known . . . sometimes her very happiness frightened her, should the gods become jealous and strike them all down.

  Marcus reeled in from work the night the Porta Romae cycled, far gone in wine he rarely took in such quantities, and shook his head at the supper she'd kept warm for him. Ianira put it away efficiently in the miraculous refrigerator machine, then noticed silent tears sliding down his cheeks.

  "Marcus!" she gasped, rushing to him. "What is it, love?"

  He shook his head and steered her into the bedroom, not even bothering to undress either of them, then held her close, nose buried in her hair, and trembled until he could finally speak.

  "It—it is Skeeter, Ianira. Skeeter Jackson. Do you remember me laughing when he left for Romae, promising to give me a share of his bet winnings?"

  "Yes, love, of course, but—"

  He shifted a little, pressed something heavy inside a leather pouch into her hand. "He kept his promise," Marcus whispered.

  Ianira held the heavy money pouch and just listened, holding him, while he wept for the kindness of an uptimer friend who had given him the means at long last to discharge his heavy debt and finally marry her.

  "Why?" she whispered, not understanding the impulse which had driven a man universally regarded as a scoundrel to such generosity.

  Marcus looked at her through eyes still flooded with tears. "He knows, I think, a little of what we have known. If he could only find what we have found. . . ." Marcus sighed, then kissed his wife. "Let me tell you." Ianira listened, and as Marcus' tale proceeded, vowed to store in her heart the story of Skeeter Jackson, who had, in his boyhood, stumbled through an open gate into an alien land.

  "He was drunk that night," Marcus whispered to her in the darkness, so as not to waken their young daughters in the crib beside their shared bed. "Drunk and so lonely he started to talk, thinking I might understand. What he told me . . . Some of it I still do not understand completely, but I will try to tell it to you in his own words. He said it began as a game, because of his father . . ."

  The game, Skeeter had recalled through a haze of alcohol and pain, had begun in deadly earnest. "It was my father's fault, or maybe my mother's. But you know, even when you're only eight, you can figure the score, figure it 'bout as accurately as any bookie making odds in New York. Dad, he bought the whole Pee-Wee League basketball team matching uniforms. Made sure ou
r games got local TV coverage. Did the same for my Junior League baseball team. Spent a lot of money on us, he did. And you know what, Marcus? He never came to a game. Not one. Not a single, stinking, stupid game. Hell, it wasn't hard at all to figure the score. Dad didn't give a damn about me. Just cared 'bout how much prestige he could buy. How many customers his publicity would bring in, God damn him. He wassa good businessman, too. So rich it hurt your teeth just thinkin' about it."

  Marcus, only vaguely comprehending much of what Skeeter said, knew that the young man was hurting nonetheless, worse than any resident he'd ever listened to on a late, slow night at the Down Time Bar & Grill. Skeeter stared into his whiskey glass. "Fill 'er up again, would you, Marcus? That's good." He drained half the glass in a gulp. "Yeah, that's good . . . So, it's like this, I started stealing things. You know, things at the mall. Little stuff at first, not because I was poor, but because I wanted something I got by myself. I guess I just got too goddamn sick of having Dad throw some expensive toy at me like a bone to some flea-bitten dog that had wandered in, just to keep it quiet."

  He blinked slowly and gulped the rest of the whiskey, then just reached for the bottle and poured again. His eyes were a little unfocussed as he spoke, his voice a little less steady. "In fac', I was at th' mall the day it happened. After The Accident, you know, that caused the time strings, ever'body knew a gate could open up anywhere, but, hell, they usually cluster together, you know, like the TV said all my life, in one little area small enough to build a time station around 'em and let the big new time tour companies operate through 'em. But, my friend," he tipped more whiskey into his glass, "sometimes gates just open up, no warning, no nothing, in the middle of some place ain't no gate ever been seen before."

  He drank, his hand a little unsteady, and entirely without his volition, the story came pouring out. He'd been careless, that time, they'd caught him shoplifting the big Swiss Army Knife. But he was little and blubbered convincingly and was slippery enough to dodge away the minute their guard was down. He'd considered, for a few moments after the guard grabbed him, letting the scandal hit the papers and television news programs, just to get even with his father. But Skeeter didn't want the game to end that way. He wanted to perfect it—then present his Dad with a scandal big enough to wreck his life as thoroughly as he'd wrecked Skeeter's, game after missed baseball and basketball and football game, lonely night after lonely night.

  So away he dodged, into the crowded mall, with the angry guard hot on his heels and Skeeter whipping around startled shoppers, dodging into department stores and out again through different exits on upper levels, and skidding through the food court while the guard giving chase radioed for backup.

  It was all great fun—until the hole opened up in the air right in front of him. The only warning he had was an odd buzzing in the bones of his head. Then the air shimmered through a whole dazzling array of colors and Skeeter plunged through with a wild yell, face flushed, hair standing on end, T-shirt glued to his back with sweat and his sneakers skidding on nothing.

  He landed on stony ground, with a sky big as an ocean howling all around him. A man dressed in furs, face greased against a bitter wind, stared down at him. The man's expression wavered somewhere between shock, terror, and triumph, all three shining at once in his dark eyes. Skeeter, winded by the chase and badly dazed by the plunge through nothingness, just stood there panting up at him for endless moments, eye locked to eye. When the man drew a sword, Skeeter knew he had two choices: run or fight. He was used to running. Skeeter usually found it easier to run than to confront an enemy directly, particularly when running allowed him to lay neat traps in his wake.

  But he was out of breath, suddenly and shockingly frozen by the bitter wind, and confronted with something a few thieving raids at the mall had not prepared him to deal with: a man ready to actually kill him.

  So he attacked first.

  One eight-year-old boy with a stolen Swiss Army knife was no match for Yesukai the Valiant, but he did some slight damage before the grown man put him on the ground, sword at his throat.

  "Aw, hell, go on and kill me, then," Skeeter snarled. "Couldn't be worse'n being ignored."

  To his very great shock, Yesukai—Skeeter learned later just exactly who and what he was—snatched him up by his shirt, slapped his face, and threw him across the front of a high-pommelled Yakka saddle, then galloped down a precipitous mountainside that left Skeeter convinced they were all going to die: Skeeter, the horse, and the madman holding the reins. Instead, they joined a group of mounted men waiting below.

  "The gods have sent a bogda," Yesukai said (as Skeeter later learned, once he could understand Yesukai's language. He had heard the story recounted many times over the cook fires of Yesukai's yurt.) He thumped Skeeter's back with a heavy hand, knocking the breath from him. "He attacked brave as any Yakka Mongol warrior, drawing the blood of courage." The man who'd slung him over his saddle bared an arm where Skeeter had cut him slightly. "It is a sign from the spirits of the upper air, who have sent us the beginnings of a man to follow us on earth."

  A few younger warriors smiled at the ancient Mongol religious tenet; grizzled old veterans merely watched Skeeter through slatted eyes, faces so perfectly still they might have been carved of wood.

  Then Yesukai the Valiant jerked his horse's fretting head around to the north. "We ride, as I have commanded."

  Without another word of explanation, Skeeter found himself bundled onto another man's saddle, thrust into a fur jacket too big for him, a felt hat with ear flaps tied under his chin—also too big for him—and carried across the wildest, most desolate plain he had ever seen. The ride went on for hours. He fell asleep in pain, woke in pain to be offered raw meat softened by being stored between the saddle and the horse's sweating skin (he managed to choke it down, half-starved as he was), then continued for hours more until a group of black-felt tents he later learned to call yurts rose from the horizon like bumps of mold growing up from the flat, bleak ground.

  They galloped into the middle of what even Skeeter could tell was some kind of formal processional, scattering women and children as they smashed into the festive parade. Screams rose from every side. Yesukai leaned down from his saddle and snatched a terror-stricken young girl from her own pony, threw her across his pommel and shouted something. The men of the camp were running toward them, bows drawn. Arrows whizzed from Yesukai's mounted warriors. Men went down, screaming and clutching at throats, chests, perforated bellies. Deep in shock, Skeeter rode the long way back to the tall mountain where he'd fallen through the hole in the air, wondering every galloping step of the way what was to become of him, never mind the poor girl, who had finally quit screaming and struggling and had settled into murderous glares belied by occasional whimpers of terror.

  It was only much later that Skeeter learned of Yesukai's instructions to his warriors. "If the bogda brings us success, I command that he be raised in our tents as a gift from the gods, to become Yakka as best he can or die as any man would of cold, starvation, or battle. If he brings the raid bad luck and I fail to steal my bride from that flat-faced fool she is to marry, then he is no true bogda. We will leave his cut-up body for the vultures."

  There was no compassion in Yesukai for any living thing outside his immediate clan. He couldn't afford it. No Mongol could. Keeping the Yakka clan's grazing lands, herds, and yurts safe from the raids of neighbors was a full-time job which left no room in his heart for anything but cold practicality.

  Skeeter had come to live in terror of him—and to love him in a way he could never explain. Skeeter was used to having to fend for himself, so learning to fight for scraps of food like the other boys after the adults had finished eating from the communal stew pot wasn't as great a shock as it might have been. But Skeeter's father would never have troubled himself to say things like, "A Yakka Mongol does not steal from a Yakka Mongol. I rule forty-thousand yurts. We are a small tribe, weak in the sight of our neighbors, so we do not steal from th
e tents of our own. But the best in life, bogda, is to steal from one's enemy's and make what was his your own—and to leave his yurts burning in the night while his women scream. Never forget that, bogda. The property of the clan is sacred. The property of the enemy is honorable gain to be taken in battle."

  Boys, Skeeter learned, stole from one another anyway, sometimes starting blood feuds that Yesukai either ended cruelly or—on occasion—allowed to end in their own fashion, if he thought the wiser course would be to drive home a harsh lesson. Hardship Skeeter could endure. Fights with boys twice his age (although often half his size), nursing broken bones that healed slowly through the bitter, dust-filled storms every winter, learning to ride like the other boys his age, first on the backs of sheep they were set to guard, then later on yaks and even horses, these Skeeter could endure. He even learned to pay back those boys who stole from him, stealing whatever his enemies treasured most and planting the items adroitly amongst the belongings of his victim's most bitter enemies.

  If Yesukai guessed at his little bogda's game, he never spoke of it and Skeeter was never reprimanded. He desperately missed nearly everything about the uptime home he'd lost. He missed television, radio, portable CD players, roller blades, skate boards, bicycles, video games—home versions and arcade games—movies, popcorn, chocolate, colas, ice cream, and pepperoni pizza.

  But he did not miss his parents.

  To be accepted into the Yakka clan, with its banner of nine white yak tails, as though he actually were important to someone, was enough, more than enough, to make up for a father who had abdicated all pretense of caring about his family. Not even the mother who—after her son had been missing for five years only God knew where, more than likely dead, the son who had been rescued by a time scout who'd given his life rescuing Skeeter—had welcomed him home with a cursory peck on the cheek, obligatory for the multiple media cameras. She had then, in her chilly, methodical way, calmly set about making lists of the school classes he'd need to make up, the medical appointments he'd need, and the new wardrobe that would have to be obtained, all without once saying, "Honey, I missed you," or even, "How did you ever survive your adventure?" never mind, "Skeeter, I love you with all my heart and I'm so glad you're home I could cry."