by David Drake
“I’ll count to five!” Corylus said, standing arms-akimbo. His molded body armor, silvered and then parcel-gilt, was dazzling in the rising sun. “Then we’re coming in whether you open the door or not!”
Bolts rattled inside. Pulto muttered what sounded like a curse. He must have been looking forward to a chance to break the door down, Varus realized. For an instant he was appalled; then he grinned. He thought, I hope that looks like a sinister smile.
The door creaked outward, pushed by the doorman. Lenatus and a “soldier” slammed it the rest of the way into the outside wall as soon as a crack wide enough for their fingers had opened. The doorman jumped inside and flattened himself against the back of his alcove.
Inside stood the majordomo Varus had seen the previous day. He looked, if anything, more frightened than he had been when Saxa arrived.
“Here, read this!” Corylus ordered, holding out the petition—supposedly from the urban praetor, countersigned in vermillion by the emperor and sealed with the imperial signet.
“Master, that won’t be necessary,” the majordomo said, bowing low. He was an Oriental of some sort, Mesopotamian or from even farther east than that. For a moment Varus thought he was going to genuflect. “Please, master, allow me to take you and your friends to Lord Tardus. Lord Tardus will explain.”
Varus tried not to react, but he supposed the way his face suddenly became blank was a reaction in itself. He had expected protests or blank denials, but what was there to explain? All the servants looked terrified, which was understandable in the face of armed men entering with the threat of the emperor’s displeasure; but there was something more going on here.
A pity that the majordomo hadn’t bothered to read the petition, though. The calligraphy was the work of two of the finest scribes in Saxa’s household—one acting as the praetor, the other for the emperor’s secretary. The librarian, Alexandros, had not only provided a document with the imperial seal but had also made a mold of it in mastic, then duplicated the markings in wax on the false petition. Artistry like that forgery deserved an audience.
Corylus motioned Varus forward. Varus stepped through the doorway directly behind his friend and Lenatus, realizing that he hadn’t gotten this far the other day. I was talking with the Sibyl while my body apparently walked through Tardus’ house and found the Serapeum below his garden.
And as Varus thought that, he felt the mist close in on him again.
* * *
CORYLUS JUMPED AS VARUS SQUEALED, “Oh, grant thou to me a path!” in the voice of an old woman. He’d heard his friend do that often enough now that he supposed he should be used to it. Having someone shout it from behind when he was already as tense as if Germans might burst out of the thickets, though.… He decided to allow himself to have been startled.
“What, your lordship?” the majordomo said, his eyes opening wider. “Ah, Lord Tardus is in the office, where he’ll, ah, he’ll be glad to explain the situation to you.”
Corylus glanced back at Varus, whose face was as stern as that of a father sitting in judgment. That could have been acting—Corylus himself was trying to look like a military officer on a grim errand when in fact he felt like a schoolboy in the midst of a dangerous practical joke—but his friend’s eyes were focused on something in the far distance. It gave him an uncanny expression, more disturbing than fury would have been.
When Varus didn’t speak or press ahead, Corylus nodded curtly. “Take us to Lord Tardus,” he said, shaking the forged judicial order toward the majordomo’s chest.
The man stepped back, bowed again, and turned, pattering into the office where Tardus sat on his senatorial chair. He bowed again and while still bent over said, “Your lordship, the, ah … this officer wishes to speak with you about Pandareus of Athens.”
The servant sidled from the room as quickly as a startled crab. Tardus raised his eyes. There was a direct line from his ivory seat and through the anteroom to the front door. The master of the house should have been as aware of the soldiers as Corylus was of him, but instead he looked as puzzled as if he found himself addressing the Senate in the nude.
“I am Marcus Sempronius Tardus, Senator and Commissioner for the Sacred Rites,” he said. His voice was reedy but seemed calm. “Why are you here, Tribune?”
Have we made a mistake? Corylus thought. He held out the document and said, “We’re here to release one Pandareus of Athens. This is our authority.”
“The teacher?” Tardus said. “Why ever do you think he’s here? I’ve heard him lecture in the Forum, but we have never spoken.”
You were at dinner with Pandareus two nights ago! Corylus thought. At least Varus had said that Tardus forced his way into the dinner.
He glanced at his friend. Varus, in the same ancient voice as before, said, “Oh grant thou to me a path!” and started toward the alcove at the back of the room where stairs led upward.
“I don’t understand,” Tardus said. He sounded confused and irritated, but Corylus didn’t hear any hint that he was afraid. “Why did he say that?”
Lenatus strode forward and went up the stairs ahead of his master. He didn’t draw his sword, but he cocked back the swagger stick in his right hand to use for a cudgel if the need arose.
Corylus followed Varus, wishing that he had something to fill his hand also. Only the “common soldiers” had shields. That had been the correct decision, but it increased Corylus’ sense of disquiet. It really felt as though he was going into action.
They reached the second floor landing. Lenatus paused. Varus started to push by without speaking. The trainer hopped sideways up the next two steps to take the lead again, then turned and stepped quickly to the top of the staircase. He moved on his toes, skipping up the last six steps two at a time.
If he takes a spear through the belly when he turns into the third-floor corridor, Corylus thought, I’ll have time to get Varus out of the way, even if it means tripping him and jerking him backward.
Which was probably what Lenatus was thinking also. That was a soldier’s job, after all: putting himself between possible violence and the civilians who were paying him. This just happened to be a direct example of something that was performed by hundreds of thousands of men on the frontiers.
Only the central section of Tardus’ house had a third floor; the wings, reaching back on either side, had two. Corylus expected this top level would be servant’s quarters, but the decoration all the way along the stairwell was of the same high quality: a continuous rural landscape in which winged cupids plowed, sowed, and reaped on the left side and on the right tended vines and olive trees. At the top was a harvest feast which extended around the wall behind the head of the stairs.
Corylus heard Tardus protesting from some distance back. He had apparently started up the stairs but the armed servants directly on “the tribune’s” heels prevented him from joining the leaders by. Doing that to the householder—and a senator besides—would have been insanely foolhardy under most circumstances, but every soul of them would be crucified if this went wrong anyway.
No one was in the upper corridor. Given the number of servants in Tardus’ household, that was in itself remarkable enough to arouse suspicion. As with the stairwell, the decoration was expensively complete. The corridor floor had a simple white pebble background broken into squares by lines of black pebbles, but there were mosaic cartouches in front of the stairs—in which pigmies rode cranes and battled with winged serpents—and at the far end under a skylight.
“Sir, what do we do now?” Lenatus said, speaking to Corylus. He gave his master a sidelong glance that showed a degree of concern.
“Grant thou me a path!” Varus said and started down the corridor.
“I’ll lead,” Corylus said. He drew his sword without being conscious of what he was doing; it seemed the natural thing, like taking a deep breath after surfacing from a plunge into the sea. Varus walked at a measured pace, so it was easy to get ahead of him.
The door on the l
eft side at the end of the corridor was open. That room held a profusion of books: baskets of scrolls, each tagged, and codices lying flat with their cut pages turned outward so that the titles written on the fore-edges could be read.
The doorway to the room across the hall was closed with a light panel that didn’t quite reach either the lintel or the floor. Herbal smoke drifted over and under it, tickling Corylus’ nose. Several people were speaking—droning a chant—on the other side, but he couldn’t make out the words.
He poised, starting to try the latch but deciding instead to kick the panel. Varus tried to walk past, seemingly oblivious of the naked sword. Lenatus caught his shoulder and dragged him back by main force.
Corylus smiled, though mostly in his mind. If Lenatus hadn’t had to grab his master, he’d have tried to nudge me out of the way and go through first himself—just like he’d do across the Rhine if a young tribune decided to be a hero.
When Corylus looked down at the gap at the bottom of the door, he noticed for the first time the mosaic cartouche he was standing on. It showed the priest Laocoon and his two sons wrapped in the coils of sea monsters, punishing him for trying to prevent his fellow Trojans from dragging the wooden horse within the walls of their city.
Memory of the vision of Typhon almost made him jump to the side, but there was a better way to get off the image. He lifted his hobnailed boot and kicked the latch and the panel around it into splinters. What was left of the door slapped the wall as Corylus strode into the room.
It was the mirror image of the library across the hall but fitted out with a couch and a writing desk instead of shelves and book baskets. Originally it must have been intended as a reading room to which Tardus would bring the chosen volume.
The lower two-thirds of the walls were dark red divided into panels by slender golden pillars. In the center of each panel was one of the Olympian gods, also painted in gold.
The upper register was a frieze of the wanderings of Odysseus. The Cyclops Polyphemus stood on a crag facing the door, holding a huge rock over his head to fling at the ship sailing toward the horizon with the hero in the stern. On the shore below the monster were wrecked vessels and the scattered bodies of men.
Corylus sneezed violently; there was much more smoke inside, welling from a murrhine tube like the one in Saxa’s collection. If they haven’t somehow stolen Saxa’s, Corylus thought, they already had the other one of a pair.
“They” were the three servants that Persica said were controlling Tardus. They were squatting on the floor, facing inward, but they looked up when Corylus burst through the door. The North African had his mouth to one end of a reed; the murrhine tube was cemented to the other end.
Pandareus sat opposite to the North African, his back to Corylus. He didn’t move when the door banged open.
One of the servants reached for the dagger in his sash; the hilt was fashioned from deer antler. Corylus kicked the fellow’s arm.
The North African blew a ring of smoke toward Corylus and grunted a word.
The amulet from the Etruscan tomb burned like a hot coal. Corylus plunged through darkness into bright sunlight.
He stood on top of a crag, facing a Cyclops. The creature was easily twice his height and weighed as much as an elephant.
CHAPTER XI
Corylus staggered. His feet were still planted firmly, but now they were on gritty soil with a slight downward slope instead of a flat mosaic floor. That had thrown him off balance.
The Cyclops was thirty feet away. It turned its head toward him with a bellow; the sound was like a huge wave smashing into the shore. At the same time it shuffled awkwardly to bring its body around, like a duck trying to rotate in tight quarters. Over its head, the boulder quivered.
Corylus knew from experience that stone weighed three or four times as much as flesh did, and he could see that the boulder was the size of the Cyclops’ torso. No man he knew could have lifted an equivalent mass. Even for the monster, it was a strain to be balanced rather than a whim to be toyed with. Still, the sea three hundred feet offshore—half the length of a foot race—bubbled and slapped where a similar missile must have landed.
The surface on which Corylus stood was a few hand-breadths higher than where the Cyclops’ feet were planted. It wasn’t much of a slope, but rather than turn and run uphill—
“Ears for Nerthus!” Corylus screamed as he charged the monster. It was the war cry of the Batavian Scouts; well, of the Scouts when they weren’t slitting throats silently in the darkness. It wouldn’t mean anything to the Cyclops, even if he wasn’t a beast without language, but it put Corylus in the right frame of mind.
The Scouts had their own temple grove separate from the altars of the rest of the cohort which Publius Cispius had commanded on the Danube. An oak, a broad spreading wolf tree, stood in the center. They nailed to it the right ear—salted to preserve it—of every Sarmatian they killed.
The Cyclops grunted and hesitated, repositioning the huge boulder. The creature probably hadn’t expected its victim to attack, which would have been justification for Corylus’ tactics if he’d needed one.
He hadn’t. The Batavians were a crack unit, as good as any non-citizen auxiliary cohort in the army—and better than the legions which were deployed in luxury in the eastern provinces, anybody on the Rhine or the Danube would have said. He could either have fled the monster or charged it. Neither seemed survivable, but of course you tried to cut the other guy’s throat before he finished you.
I can’t even reach his throat, Corylus realized. The thought made him grin.
The Cyclops strode forward, preparing to throw. Corylus stepped on a human arm bone. His foot flew out from under him and the bone—it was just the upper joint; the shaft had been cracked for marrow—sailed skyward.
The Cyclops gave the stone a savage push with both hands, not so much hurling it as snapping it forward in a straight line as though the springs of a catapult were driving it. Corylus landed on his back with a clang, skidding feetfirst toward the monster. He had lost his helmet and there were certainly dents in his thin bronze back plate.
The boulder hit the edge of the crag a dozen feet beyond where Corylus fell and bounced away in a cloud of dust and shattered gravel. He had thought—had imagined, though at the back of his mind—that he could dodge the missile.
He couldn’t have. The monster’s strength was beyond anything of which flesh should be capable. Only luck and the Cyclops’ messy eating habits had gotten Corylus out of the way. The boulder would otherwise have struck him in the middle of the chest and splashed him into the ground like a fly clubbed against a brick wall.
The Cyclops bent, reaching for Corylus’ outstretched legs. Corylus kicked, trying to roll himself away. The Cyclops closed a fist the size of a boar’s ham over Corylus’ left ankle. Corylus bent forward at the waist and thrust. The point of his short sword crunched through the gristle and small bones of the monster’s wrist.
The Cyclops bellowed again—the sound felt like an avalanche of sand—and hurled Corylus inland. He wasn’t sure whether the motion was deliberate or simply a twitch in reaction to the pain of the wound.
Corylus hit hard and bounced. He was twenty feet from where the Cyclops had grabbed him. He’d lost his sword. He rolled and looked back. The monster plucked the blade from the wound with his left hand and spun it far out to sea. Blood poured from the injured wrist and ran down the creature’s dangling right hand.
The Cyclops turned toward Corylus, who drew the sturdy dagger from the scabbard on the right side of his equipment belt. The Cyclops strode forward, shaking the ground. Its eye was bloodshot and unwinking.
Corylus tried to curl his feet under in order to stand up. He wasn’t sure that would be an advantage in this fight, but it would make him feel better. White pain exploded in his groin; he screamed and fell back. He may have lost consciousness for an instant. When the monster used his left leg as a handle, it had strained or torn the ligaments joining thighbone to
pelvis.
The Cyclops seized Corylus by the shoulder and jerked him off the ground. Its body stank like a tanner’s yard from the rotting blood and flesh tangled in its shaggy pelt. It crushed him to its chest and wrapped both arms around him.
Corylus stabbed. He couldn’t see to place the point. It was like thrusting into a stack of bull hides.
The Cyclops continued to squeeze. Corylus couldn’t see anything, but in the deepening shadows of his mind flickered a nude woman and a creature which stood on two legs but was utterly inhuman. It reminded him of a serpent, despite its fine golden fur and a triangular face like a fox.
The Cyclops was roaring. Corylus couldn’t hear sound—any sound—but he felt the vibration of the chest against which he was being flattened like an olive in the press. He thought he still held the dagger, but he didn’t know. All he could feel was the fiery pain which spread from his ribs and out through the skin.
Then the blackness was complete, until the woman and the slender, terrifying beast stepped from it and joined him.
* * *
VARUS FROZE in the flood of light. He had come down from the mountain on which he had been standing with the Sibyl. Below them in the infinite distance, his body led his companions through the dwelling of Sempronius Tardus and up to the room where three magicians held Pandareus.
But even as his soul reentered his body, a flash had numbed and blinded him. He fell backward, blinking and stunned. When he shook himself alert, he found that Pulto gripped the back of his toga and was holding him upright. The sword in Pulto’s other hand searched for something to stab.
“You may loose me, Master Pulto!” Varus said, speaking sharply. He was embarrassed to have stumbled, and he knew that he had been wandering and no doubt speaking without conscious awareness.
What did I say this time? They must all think I’m crazy!
And in the back of his mind: Maybe I am crazy.
“Where’s the boy?” Pulto said on a rising note. He let go of Varus; tossed him aside, very nearly. “Lenatus, where’s Corylus? Where’s the bloody boy?”
