Elementary

by Mercedes Lackey

  One of the nymphs darted toward the boy, evaded his grab, and hovered in front of Kyria. “Rest, Despoina. Drink! You are safe for now, but this is not a good place for humankind.”

  Kyria nodded. Below her she sensed not solid earth, but contorted caverns where Earth and Water and Fire all strove for mastery. Tartarus was close to the surface here, and clearly the Elements were still at war. She tried not to think about what might happen if those titanic powers, so much greater than the sprites she knew, should ever break free.

  But for now, there was peace in the grove. Her parents had settled with their backs against an oak tree. Empedocles lay curled on the grass. Even the boys were sitting, playing some game with pebbles and a board scratched into the soil. Surely, thought Kyria, we can stay here for a little while . . . Her eyelids closed.

  • • •

  When she opened them again, the setting sun was sending shafts of fiery light between the trees. But what had wakened her was a spray of droplets cast by a frenzied cloud of nymphs calling her name. As she sat up, she heard shouts and the neighs of horses

  Kyria lurched to her feet, heart pounding. The boys ran toward her, eyes wide, but her mother clung to her husband’s arm, weeping.

  “Our pursuers have found us. You must go,” Archilaus said quietly. “A wise man knows when it is time to make an end, and your mother and I cannot run anymore.”

  The day’s effort had worn away their flesh and left dark smudges around their eyes, but Kyria could not, would not, accept defeat now.

  “You survived a shipwreck, and you will survive this!” she cried. “If this is Hestia’s cauldron, then let her protect us. Picus, Nicolaus, help them!” She pointed toward the wasteland beyond the trees.

  Somehow, she got her parents moving. As they stumbled past the last of the trees, she heard a shout and saw the Etruscans urging their mounts down the slope.

  The shadow of the western rim lengthened swiftly across the crater floor as the sun dipped behind it. Their feet kicked up beige dust as they raced toward the tumbled rocks on the other side. The slope there was steep, but perhaps they could climb it, perhaps they could throw rocks. She only knew that she was not going to simply sit down and wait to die.

  Their pursuers had reached the flat ground. By now most of the crater floor was in shadow, but they urged their horses toward their prey. The first three riders were well into the mud pool before they realized they were not on solid ground. Horses plunged wildly as the viscous mud caught at their hooves, then fell, screaming as the searing mud sucked them down. Only one of the soldiers managed to struggle back to his companions, and Kyria did not think he would be fighting for a while.

  The boys had pushed her parents behind a formation of curdled stone. The slope around it looked half melted, stained in patches of bright yellow, ocher, and gray. Empedocles and she tumbled into place behind another. The forces that had been merely disturbing when she sensed them from the grove now beat against her awareness. The stone beneath her was warm, and a reek of rotting eggs filled the air. She stifled a shriek as vapor hissed from some nearby hole, and another at Empedocles’ chortle of delight. She fought back an impulse to slap him. If his life was going to be cut short, he might as well end it laughing.

  As the sun set, the crater became a cauldron of shadow. She could hear voices from the other end, but could not see their foes. Even on foot, the Etruscans would hesitate to cross the crater floor in darkness. The fugitives would be equally invisible. But they must do something, or they would gain no more than an uncomfortable night and capture in the morning.

  The cliff behind her was faintly visible in the afterglow. The boys and she might be able to climb it, but her parents had barely been able to get this far. Her father had the comfort of his philosophy. It was her mother for whom Kyria wept, only now recognizing how much courage she had shown.

  At the other end of the caldera, light sparked, faltered, then settled into a steady flame. In moments another torch was glowing, and then a third, and they began to move. There was a hollow rumble from beneath the earth as someone dislodged a stone. For a moment the torches paused, then came inexorably on.

  Kyria blinked back tears. It had all been for nothing, their escape, their journey, and this last desperate dash. She had scorned her mother as useless, but she herself had done no better.

  As their enemies drew closer, the torches began to swing about, poking into each hole and behind each rock formation, lest they miss the one where their prey lay hidden.

  “Meto, forgive me for not coming back to you. And you, my little one,” she whispered into Empedocles’ hair. “I should never have brought you here . . .”

  His eyes glinted as he turned to her, then he pointed at the torches and laughed. Kyria stifled a gasp. Being of Water, she had always found the salamanders hard to see. But she was seeing them now, dancing in the flames.

  The nearest soldier thrust his torch at a tumble of rock and recoiled as the earth emitted a burst of reddish steam. The next man swung and swore as glowing steam billowed around him, and then the third. The salamanders were dancing, and now she saw nymphs with them, manifesting somehow from the earth’s vapors at the touch of the flame.

  “Fire an’ Water,” Empedocles said clearly. “Burn! Make bad men go ’way!”

  Steam roared from every vent on the floor of the caldera as if Medea’s dragons were imprisoned below. The earth groaned, and rocks came clattering down the cliff. The sprites danced in the glowing clouds, tugging at the men’s clothing, nipping at faces and hands. The Etruscans cast away their torches and fled, but the clouds continued to grow. Screams of terror turned to cries of agony as the Elementals drove them into the sucking mud and boiling pools. It seemed a very long time before the last pleading voice fell still.

  The vapors subsided, but the salamanders returned, flickering around Empedocles in a garland of living flame. He tugged at his mother’s hand, and she let him lead her out from behind the rocks.

  “Come!” Kyria’s voice wavered only a little as she called. “It’s safe now.”

  One by one the others emerged from their hiding places and joined her. Guided by Empedocles, they made their careful way back toward the grove. When Eudocia stumbled, Kyria took her arm.

  “My son can talk . . .” she said after a while.

  “Yes,” said her mother, “but what is he going to say? Oh, my dear, you are going to have an interesting time with that child . . .”

  • • •

  Author’s Note: The story of the two women who helped bring down the tyrant Aristodemus can be found in Plutarch’s essay “The Bravery of Women.” Cumae is one of the few places in the region built on solid ground. The use of fire to cause condensation in the vapors from the fumaroles of Il Volcano Solfatara has been a tourist attraction since ancient times. The Campi Phlegrei (“Fields of Fire”) is actually an eight-mile-wide super-volcano between Cumae and Naples whose topography changes constantly. It is showing signs of activity today.

  Sails of the Armada

  Kristin Schwengel

  July 29, 1588

  “Exsurge, Domine, et Vindica Causam Tuam.” His eyes on the open seas, Rodrigo snorted under his breath, then repeated in his native Galician the phrase the capelán had used in the morning’s prayer service. “Arise, O Lord, and vindicate thy cause. A grand and glorious motto for this misbegotten ‘Enterprise,’ is it not? To make a grasp for power into a holy crusade?”

  Tareixa’s only answer to his frustrated thoughts was to flick the water with her silver-black tail, splashing the salt spray against the side of the galleas. Rodrigo grinned for a moment, watching her sinuous form through the deck rails as she rolled and turned in the waves, enjoying the beauty of a clear sky after the recent days of storms. Her mood seemed playful, as though she was urging him to join her in the water.

  It was how they had met, when he was a
young boy swimming in the ría, the deep ocean inlet near his home. She had come upon him and had swum with him, her giant body dwarfing his. As the years passed, she spent more and more time with him in the rías, away from the rest of her kind in the deeper ocean waters. When she was near, he was always aware of her presence in the back of his mind, and he had learned to interpret her moods, to communicate with her after a fashion. True language was beyond her, but she could understand the feeling or intent of his words or thoughts, and sometimes he could create pictures in his own mind that she could share.

  Sensing eyes upon him, Rodrigo pulled his attention from the sea, sorting through the pile of rigging draped over his knees and setting aside coils in need of minor repairs. A separate heap awaited those that were so worn, they could only be shredded back to hempen fibers, to be used for cleaning the ship and her canone, or mixed with pitch to fill the inevitable cracks in her hull. Glancing up under his lashes as he worked, he saw Don Ruarte, the capelán assigned to the San Lorenzo, standing near the rails at the side of the forecastle, above the deck where he sat.

  To most, Don Ruarte looked like any other priest, with only the gold chain given him by the King to indicate that he was one of the most senior priests of the fleet. But when Rodrigo observed the Don, he also saw sílfide, spirits of Air, which the Don held bound to him. Don Ruarte, like several clerics Rodrigo had noticed on the decks of the other ships, was a mago dos ventos, a mage of the winds. Rodrigo had also seen at least one mago da auga, one who could command the spirits of Water, the náiade and nereidas, as Don Ruarte commanded those of Air. Though the black-clad Don now looked forward over the bowsprit, his fingers raised as he sifted through the winds that pushed the Armada onward at its ponderous pace, Rodrigo was sure that, moments before, those piercing ice-blue eyes had been turned his way.

  The Don had taken to watching Rodrigo once the fleet had begun its slow progress northward from the mouth of the Tagus, just beyond Lisbon. Rodrigo had been pressed into service that March, seized from Lisbon’s streets while taking a day away from his family’s trading ship. When he had been forced to join the Spanish forces, he’d feared becoming a buenaboya, a “volunteer” chained to the ranks of oars in the dank, poisonous hold, but the Neopolitan crewmasters had recognized the usefulness of another experienced sailor, even if he was a Galician.

  Rodrigo had become a boy-of-all-work on the flagship, assigned to odd tasks, acting in relief of both ship’s boys and apprentice mariners, but officially neither one nor the other. He obeyed every command with alacrity, knowing that one more would always be welcome among the buenaboyas, especially as illness took its toll during the Armada’s slow progress. Yet despite his determination to efface himself among more than a hundred other sailors, to be a nameless pair of hard-laboring hands aboard a ship full of crew and soldiers, Don Ruarte had taken notice of him, had picked him out as different from the rest. As Rodrigo’s eyes could see the sílfide accompanying the Don, could the capelán have seen something unusual about him?

  Daring another glance between the rails, he could just make out Tareixa’s spined body breaking in a glossy curve between the waves. Had the mago dos ventos seen her as well? Her snakelike form was nearly half as long as the ship itself, although her sinuous coils and serpentine movement made it difficult for even his practiced eye to spot her, especially if she stayed just below the surface, where her shimmering skin matched the colors of the sea. Rodrigo frowned and bit his salt-cracked lip. After all the years he had known her, after she had even followed him from Galicia to Lisbon and out to sea again, should he try to warn her to keep away?

  He looked back up at Don Ruarte. He had never heard anyone among the Spanish speak of a mago, openly or secretly. Nor did folk in his home village, but he had still grown up with an awareness that, at one time, the magos had openly communicated with and commanded the spirits of Air, Fire, Earth, and Water, and that the Inquisitors had sought out and destroyed all of the magos whom they could find, claiming them heretics. Yet here was the Don, holding the winds in his fingertips as the Spanish sought to hold all of Europe and, it seemed, the whole of the globe.

  If one could not see the sílfide, one might think that the Don simply held his hands up in supplicating prayer to Our Lord. Perhaps that was all any of the Spanish soldiers and sailors saw, or they were as silent as he if they saw more. But surely the King, or at least the Capitán-General, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, knew that what was supposed to be a forbidden heresy was being practiced aboard the ships. It could not be by chance that the flagship of each squadron carried a priest who was also a mago. And if they had been placed by design, surely these were the most powerful magos in Spain, each assigned to bend the winds or waves to do his bidding, which was the bidding of the King. This Armada was commanded to bring soldiers to join with the land armies of the Duke of Parma in Flanders, to invade England and add it to Spain’s other conquests. Rodrigo’s jaw tightened in bitter resentment at that thought before turning back to the piles of rigging, his callused hands working along another length of rope. More than a hundred years of Spanish rule had not been enough for his people to forget their heritage, nor their sympathy for others who struggled against Spain.

  The winds shifted slightly, and at a command from the contramaestre, the officer of the deck, he left his coils of rope and sprang to his position along the port lines of the palo de mesano, the third mast from the fore of the ship, hauling on the lines with the other men, bringing the lateen sail around to catch the dancing breeze. The triangular sail snapped once, twice, then filled as the decksmen raced to secure the ropes, the mast swaying with the pull as the flaxen sail curved outward, filled by the new wind. The timbers shuddered as the ship slowly came around, gaining every bit of speed possible from the air current that Don Ruarte had caught between his thin fingers and sent with them. The ship’s carpenters and divers had managed to repair the fragile rudder damaged by waves during the last storm, but the San Lorenzo would still be hard-pressed to catch up to the rest of the Armada before the coast of England was sighted.

  The trill of a pipe played by one of the ship’s boys marked a change in the watch, and Rodrigo hastened back to the pile of rigging, tidying the coils for Alonzo, the apprentice who came to take over the task. Free of duties for the next eight hours, he made his way across to the starboard side of the deck. Leaning against the rail in a cramped corner, he could just make out distant sails with the Burgundian cross of King Philip to the north. Rodrigo glanced up once more at the San Lorenzo’s full sails. With fortune, they would rejoin the fleet by late morning.

  His eye was caught by the movement of a small patache, a scout and messenger ship, coming from the north, tacking back across the wind to approach the San Lorenzo. The helmsman gave orders to bring in the sails so that the San Lorenzo held her position, rocking in a trough between the waves while the faster ship came to her. When the patache was near, but not so close as to risk fouling either ship’s rigging, she drew in her sail and let down a small oared boat, which drew to the side of the much larger galleas.

  “Dispatches for Don Hugo de Moncada from the Duke de Medina Sidonia!”

  At the shout from below, the alférez de mar, third in command to the ship’s capitán, nodded, and the decksmen lowered the boarding ladder. Securing the small boat to bob in the waves beside the San Lorenzo, the messenger and his oarsmen scrambled up the rope ladder to the broad deck. The alférez whisked the messenger to the camarote, the highest tier of the sterncastle, to meet with Don Moncada in one of the private cabins, while the oarsmen were offered water from the best casks left in the hold.

  Still keeping to his idle pose, partly hidden by the bundles of hammocks and sleeping partitions stowed along the rail, Rodrigo strained to hear them.

  “What news of the fleet?” one of the decksmen murmured.

  “A scouting ship sighted the coast,” replied one of the oarsmen, “but the Duke has ordered delay for r
epairs and redistribution of shot rather than striking the heretics in their port, as El Draque attacked Cadiz.”

  Rodrigo concealed a wry smile. That sailor, at least, believed in the proclaimed intent of the Armada to restore the practice of the true Catholic faith to England. And of course, to avenge the bold attack of the previous year, when the Englishman Drake had managed the destruction of some of the first ships of the Armada gathered in the port of Cadiz.

  “Surely they are not still in port!” protested another of the sailors. “They must have been out to sea long before this.”

  “The scout ship took up a fisherman, and he said that their ships were still in the harbor, there being no wind to bring them out against the tide.”

  “But are not their ships able to make use of the faintest of winds?”

  The oarsman snorted. “They still need some breeze to fill their sails, however fast their ships may be once they have it.” He gestured to the lower decks of the San Lorenzo. “They have not your oars to carry them forward despite a calm.” Those oars were what set the galleas apart—with the sails of a galleon and the oars of a galley, the San Lorenzo and her three sister ships could use either to close with the enemy’s ships.

  “Does the Duke then expect a sea battle soon? Are we not to go straight up the Channel to Flanders?” asked another decksman.

  “Perhaps. If it comes to that, I only hope those prancing soldiers with their fancy clothing and private servants prove their worth when we grapple the heretics,” the oarsman snarled. The decksmen responded in a chorus of embittered agreement, as all of them had suffered the injustice of the preferential treatment given to the soldiers and their officers. Rodrigo let his attention drift away from the complaints of the underfed and underpaid. He wondered, not for the first time, if the English were such heretics as the capelán had claimed them to be. Was not Don Ruarte himself engaged in what was said to be heresy? Or was it only heresy to be an opponent of the Spanish crown?