Out of the Waters

by David Drake

  He gestured rhetorically. He was in his professorial mode again and probably didn’t, Varus realized, notice the effect that his words were having on Tardus.

  “—could not be erected today or at any time after the Senatorial edict when Aemillius and Claudius were consuls.”

  One of Saxa’s footmen trotted out of the house, carrying a lighted lantern. Candidus waddled quickly behind him.

  Varus nodded approval. The deputy steward wouldn’t demean himself by actually lifting an object, but he had thought far enough ahead to get lights as soon as he saw his master would be entering a crypt.

  The footman crossed the short bridge but stopped at the gazebo and held out the lantern. Saxa started to reach for it but paused and looked at his son.

  “I think I had best go down,” Varus said, taking the lantern. “Ah, your lordship. I will return with a report.”

  At any rate, I hope to return.

  “With your permission, Lord Varus,” Pandareus said, “I’ll accompany you.”

  “Yes,” Varus said. “That might be helpful, teacher.”

  They started down into the crypt side by side. Varus held the lantern out in front of them.

  If it hadn’t been for the Sibyl’s roundabout direction, Varus would have been pleased and excited to enter a Serapeum. It was a link to Carce’s past; not so ancient as the crypt in which the Sibylline Books were stored, but old and part of a mystery cult besides.

  The Sibyl had sent him here, however. Therefore, more was involved than viewing the decoration and appointments of a secret chapel.

  “I doubt,” said Pandareus in a mild, musing tone, “that we will encounter Apis in the form of an angry bull. Though I’ll admit that I’m less confident than I once was at my ability to predict events.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of the goddess Isis loosing cobras on us,” Varus said. “Unlikely, but less unlikely than other things that have occurred recently. Or that I imagined happened.”

  They reached the bottom of the stairs: only twelve steps down. It had looked deeper. There was no door at the base of the staircase, but the archway there was too narrow for more than one person to pass at a time.

  Varus, holding the lantern high, stepped into what was clearly an anteroom. There was a doorway in the opposite wall with a niche on either side. To the left was a statuette of a male figure with a bull’s head; on the right stood a female figure with a cow’s head and a crescent moon rocking between her horns.

  “If this were an Egyptian temple,” Pandareus said, looking past Varus’ shoulder, “I would describe them as Apis and Isis. The Ptolemies were eclectic when they created the cult, however, and they may have made other choices.”

  He sighed. “My friend Priscus—” Senator Marcus Atilius Priscus “—would know that sort of thing without having to look it up, but I didn’t think it would be right to involve him in this matter.”

  “If the question becomes important,” Varus said, “we can answer it at leisure when we return. Unless we’re arrested for some political crime, as you suggest.”

  Varus would have said he was the least political of men, unless that honor was due his father. Yet here they both were, invading the house of another senator under consular authority, an action that could easily be described as rebellion or insult to the emperor as head of state.

  “I don’t think Tardus will be reporting this intrusion to the authorities,” Varus said.

  “Probably true,” Pandareus said. “In that case, we have only a monster capable of wrecking a city to worry about.”

  Varus chuckled.

  They entered the second chamber, twice the size of the first. Stone benches were built into three walls, intended for diners who were sitting upright instead of reclining as was the custom for men in Carce. Servants would set tables of food and wine in the hollow within the three benches.

  In place of a fourth wall, passages to either side flanked an alabaster slab carved in relief. Varus raised the lantern again to view the carving, a man with a full beard seated in a high-backed chair and glaring outward.

  “Sarapis joining his worshippers for the sacred meal,” Pandareus said. Then, looking upward, “The frieze is interesting.”

  Varus moved the lantern. The reliefs were of very high quality: a bearded man flanked by a youth and a young woman in flowing robes; in the next panel, the youth thrusting back the woman who, bare-breasted, was trying to pull him onto a couch; in the last—

  “This is Hippolytus and Phaedra,” Varus said aloud. “Hippolytus cursed by his father Theseus, who believed his wife’s false claim that her stepson had raped her.”

  “Yes,” said Pandareus. “Those three, and the monster which executed Theseus’ curse.”

  On the third panel, a tentacled, many-legged monster climbed out of the sea in the background. Hippolytus’ chariot raced through brush, dragging behind it the youth whose reins remained wrapped around his wrists when he was thrown out.

  “Do you suppose this is what we were meant to see?” Varus said.

  Pandareus shrugged. “There must be another room,” he said.

  They walked to right and left of the carving of Serapis. On the other side, Varus found a tunnel stretching farther into the distance than his lantern could even hint. “This seems to slope downward,” he said, turning toward Pandareus.

  The teacher was not there. Varus was alone in a tunnel. Behind him was a faint rectangular glow, the sort of light that he might have seen creeping past the edges of the slab from the trap door in the distant gazebo.

  Varus took a deep breath, then walked forward at the measured pace of a philosopher and a citizen of Carce. He wondered what he would find at the other end of the tunnel, but it was pointless to speculate. If Typhon waited for him, so be it.

  The floor of the chapel had been of simple mosaic design, black frames each crossed by an internal X, on a white ground. Now Varus was walking on seamless sandstone: the tunnel had been drilled through living rock.

  There was something ahead: at first just a texture on the sidewalls. Then, as Varus proceeded with the lantern, he saw that the walls had been cut back at knee height to make shelves. On them were terra-cotta urns, similar to ordinary wine jars. Instead of ordinary stoppers, these jars were closed with the stylized heads of birds with long curved beaks.

  One of the jars had fallen and shattered some distance down the long corridor. Varus paused and knelt to bring the lantern closer: there would be nothing at the other end of this passage that wouldn’t wait for him to arrive. Given that his goal might be death, he wasn’t going to have the regret that he’d hastened past his last opportunity for learning.

  He smiled, but he meant it. Pandareus would understand; and perhaps Corylus would as well.

  The jar had enclosed the corpse of a bird. It had been mummified—the smell of natron and cedar resin was noticeable even after what might have been ages—but the skull was bare beneath rotted linen wrappings.

  It had been an ibis. There were thousands or tens of thousands of ibises in this necropolis.

  Varus rose to his feet and walked on. He had to restrain himself from counting paces under his breath. He wasn’t sure that he was really moving physically anyway. It would be unworthy of a philosopher to carry out a meaningless ritual to trick his mind into the belief that he was imposing control over his immediate surroundings.

  I think I see light. But Varus knew that he could see flashes even when his eyes were closed; and he had to admit that his present state of mind wasn’t wholly that of a dispassionate philosopher.

  He wondered if Socrates had really been that calm when he prepared to drink the poison. Plato had not been a disinterested witness, now that Varus thought about it; given that Plato’s stature as a teacher was directly dependent on the stature of the master whom he portrayed as showing godlike wisdom and fortitude.

  Varus chuckled. He would have described himself as an Epicurean; but perhaps the teachings of Diogenes the Cynic be
tter suited his present mental state.

  “Greetings, Lord Varus,” called the man standing at the end of the corridor. The pool of light surrounding him did not come from any source Varus could see. “I am Menre.”

  Varus stepped to within arm’s length of the stranger who wore a woolen tunic, a semicircular cloak that hung to his waist, and a low-crowned, flat-brimmed leather hat. He would have passed for an ordinary traveller anywhere in Greece or the southern portions of Italy.

  “Sir, you’re Menre the Egyptian?” Varus said in puzzlement. The stranger—Menre—held a bulky papyrus scroll in his left hand.

  Menre laughed. “Sarapis is more Greek than Egyptian,” he said, “and perhaps the same is true of me. Regardless, the chapel was a useful connection between you and the place I am.”

  Varus found his lips dry; he licked them. He said, “Sir, I would have expected you to visit my teacher Pandareus, as you have in the past. Rather than me.”

  Menre looked him up and down as though he were a slave—or a couch—he was considering buying. Smiling faintly, he said, “Pandareus is a great scholar, worthy of a place in any learned academy. But he is not a magician, so this—”

  He offered the scroll in his left hand.

  “—would be of no use to him or to the world.”

  Varus took the scroll. He started to fumble with it, then set the lantern on the floor so that he had both hands free. There was as much light as there would be outside at midday in Carce, even if he couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  He unrolled a few pages of the book; Menre watched him, continuing to smile. The text was in pictographs; chapters were headed—he unrolled more of the scroll to be sure—by paintings in the Egyptian style, full frontal or full profile; gods of terrible aspect confronted humans.

  Still holding the book open, Varus met the other man’s eyes. “Sir,” he said, “this is written in Egyptian holy symbols. I can’t read it.”

  “Can you not, Magician?” Menre said. To Varus, his words were an eerie echo of those the Sybil sometimes directed at him. “Try.”

  Scowling, Varus looked down at the page, as meaningless to him as bird tracks in the dust. He said, “All hail to Ra, the Sun, as he rises in the eastern quadrant of heaven!” He stopped, amazed.

  “You will need the book,” Menre said, smiling more broadly. “Give my regards to your teacher, whose scholarship I respect.”

  The light began to fade; Menre faded with it, as though he had been only a mirage. Just before he vanished completely, his faint voice added, “You will need more than the book, Lord Varus. Perhaps more than your world holds. Good luck to you, but I am not hopeful.”

  Varus swallowed. For a moment, his surroundings seemed as dark as the tomb; then his eyes adjusted to the oil flame wavering in the lantern which sat on the ground beside him. He picked it up again. The large scroll had vanished, as though it never was.

  He and Pandareus were in the service area of the chapel. Food couldn’t be prepared here, but prepared dishes would be brought in ahead of time and then served in sequence to the diners.

  “Lord Varus?” Pandareus said. “Are you all right?”

  “I—” Varus said. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his free hand. “Did I disappear, master?”

  “No,” said Pandareus, “but you stopped where you were and put the lantern down. You didn’t appear to hear me when I spoke to you.”

  “Ah,” said Varus. “Was I, that is, was this for long?”

  “Not long,” said Pandareus. “Not much longer than it took you to pick up the lantern again. Did something happen to you?”

  “We may as well go back,” Varus said, turning. He felt queasy, as though he had grasped for a handhold while falling and felt his fingers slip off it. All that remained now was to hit the ground. “I thought I met Menre and that he gave me a book that he said I would need. That we would need. But I don’t have it now.”

  “Can you remember any of it?” Pandareus said, leading through the central room of the chapel. The light from above was enough for him to avoid the benches now that they had been underground for long enough.

  “I didn’t read it,” Varus said, feeling an edge of irritation. “I just glanced at the opening columns. And even if I had—”

  Suddenly, unbidden, the phrase, “Let not the Destroyer be allowed to prevail over him!” leaped into his mind. He shouted the words aloud.

  Pandareus glanced back at him and nodded in satisfaction. “It appears to me, Lord Varus,” he said, “that you have what we need. What all the world needs.”

  They walked up the stairs together, as they had gone down.

  * * *

  “DO YOU THINK it should have kept the boy with us?” Corylus said. Pulto stared at a sunken place on the hillside, but he hadn’t said anything for the long moments while his master waited politely for him to speak.

  “It’s where Anna showed me this morning,” Pulto said in a dull voice. He turned to face Corylus. They carried a lighted lantern, but there was moon enough to show their features clearly.

  “Master,” Pulto said, “we shouldn’t be doing this. I’m not a god-botherer, you know that, but it’d be better to lose than to win by the kind of magic that you find in graveyards. Though it was my own Anna as sent us here.”

  Corylus thought about the vision of Typhon, wrecking the world it crawled across. “No, old friend,” he said. “Losing would be worse, for the Earth, at any rate. For me personally—”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what it means for me personally. It doesn’t matter. But Pulto? You can wait for me back where we crossed the old wall. I won’t think the less of you if you’re unwilling to be involved in this sort of thing.”

  That wasn’t really true, but Corylus knew that it should be true. He’d known a man, a centurion with scars marking every hand’s-breadth of his body—he couldn’t remember the tale of half of them—who had frozen in mumbling fear when a wolf spider ran up the inside of a leather tent and stopped directly over him. If magic disturbed Pulto in the same way, well, there was more reason for it.

  Pulto snorted. “I’m afraid,” he said, “but I’m a soldier, so what’s being afraid got to do with anything? And I’ve done plenty of things this stupid before, begging your pardon, master. Only—”

  His smile was forced, but the fact he could force a smile spoke well of his courage and his spirits both.

  “—this time I’m sober. Which is maybe the trouble, but it’s one I plan to solve right quick when we’re done with this nonsense.”

  Corylus grinned. “I’ll split at least the first jar with you,” he said. “Now let’s get to work.”

  The tombs of Carce’s wealthy ranged along all the roads out of the city. The great families had huge columbaria, dovecotes; so called because the interiors were covered with lattices to hold urns of cremated ashes.

  Lesser, more recently wealthy, households had correspondingly smaller monuments. Often there was just a slab with reliefs of the man or couple and a small altar in front to receive the offerings brought by descendents.

  But the poor died also, and even a slave might have friends and family. The slope of the Aventine outside the sacred boundary of the city received their remains. Small markers, generally wooden but occasionally scratched stones, dotted the rocky soil. Badly spelled prayers or simple names which were themselves prayers for survival, lasted briefly and were replaced by later burials and later markers, just as other wretched souls had moved into the tenements that the dead had vacated earlier.

  By day this end of the Aventine was a waste of brush which feral dogs prowled and where crows and vultures croaked and grunted. Fuel for pyres was an expense which the poor skimped on, as they skimped on food and clothing during life. At night occasional humans joined the beasts, witches who searched for herbs which had gained power through the presence of death; and who sometimes gathered bones as well, to be ground and used in darker medicine.

  No one would disturb Corylus
and his servant, but Pulto had brought swords for both of them among the other tools: the mattock and pry bar, ropes and basket. By concentrating on the thought of human enemies, Pulto could push the other dangers from his mind.

  “It’s a well, I think,” Pulto said, loosening up now that Corylus had broken the glum silence. “Under a lot of crap and full of crap, of course, but that’s what I thought by daylight.”

  “Right,” said Corylus, thrusting the blade of his mattock between two stones gripped by vines and levering upward. “People throw things down the well when they’re in a hurry to leave. We should be able to find what we’re looking for and get out before the wine shops close!”

  Among the things people threw into wells were bodies, depending on who the people were. Well, they’d deal with that if they had to.

  Corylus put on his thick cowhide mittens. He didn’t need them for the tools—he spent enough time wielding a sword in Saxa’s exercise ground that his calluses protected him—but the loosened rocks were often jagged or wrapped in brambles. He didn’t mind a few cuts and scratches, but it was easy to wear protection when throwing rubble down slope.

  He and Pulto worked together briefly, but when they had excavated the fill a few feet down, Corylus got into the shaft and filled baskets for his servant to lift and empty from the top. It was a well shaft as Pulto had guessed. The coping of volcanic tuff had mostly collapsed inward, but the remainder was cut through the hillside’s soft limestone. There was no way to tell how old it was, but it was certainly old.

  Corylus lost track of everything except the task. This was monotonous but not mindless work, much like ditching or cutting turf to wall a marching camp. He had to decide each next stroke, sometimes scooping loose dirt with the blade of the mattock, sometimes using the pry bar to separate rocks that were wedged together.

  Once he found a human jaw. There wasn’t room in the shaft to leave it, but he made sure it was on the bottom of the next basketful he sent up to Pulto.

  Corylus wasn’t sure how long he had been working—it didn’t help to think about that, since he would work until the task was finished—but his feet were by now some ten feet below the level of the coping. He bent to work more of the light fill—gravel and silt—loose with the mattock while Pulto hauled up the basket with the latest load.