The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror

by Darrell Schweitzer

  They talked through the night. They shared a modest meal of smoked meat, dried fruit, bread, and quite good wine, which Anicius Probus poured himself, for all he was a great nobleman, a patrician’s patrician, because his sense of manners included the impeccable execution of the role of host. That he kept few servants in his rustic retreat, and that all of them had fled before the arrival of the soldiers didn’t matter, any more that it mattered that in the course of things he managed to get Servio more than a little drunk. The slate was still blank. It could be written on later. Great trees from small acorns grow. He wasn’t sure he could explain to Servio anything about mustard seeds.

  He could not give this unprepared boy the riches of the treasure-house, but he could provide him with the key. Three words. These he impressed upon him. A secret code. The password. Begotten, not made.

  “Don’t say it aloud. Just remember it. When you hear that phrase from another, then you will begin to understand. You will know what to do next.”

  “Begot—” Servio began to repeat.

  “Don’t say it. Just remember.”

  As the sky began to get light, all talk of vast movements of history, the fall of empires, the workings of God and of destiny, predetermination versus free will, plots, conspiracies, the wickedness of Count Udo and the docile stupidity of the new Western emperor came to an end. The two of them stood before a wide, open window at the top of the tower, looking out over the beautiful Tuscan countryside, now all in a soft haze as the morning sun pierced slowly through a morning fog, and Probus quoted, with a subtle, magnificent delivery, a particularly beautiful passage from the Odes of Horace, then paused, and smiled gently when the boy was able to finish the verse.

  Maybe he had half a brain and some sensitivity after all.

  All there was left to do was hope.

  Probus took two codex books from his desk, put them in a leather satchel, and gave them to Servio, saying only, “Don’t lose these. Look at them when you have the time.” The satchel had a strap. Servio slid it over his head and shoulder.

  Then Probus wrapped his toga around himself with greatest dignity—he was actually wearing a toga, archaic and eccentric as that might have been in the Year of the Created Savior Six Hundred and Twenty-Two—and said, “The last lesson I can ever hope to impart to you, my boy, is that for all Destiny may stretch before us like a road, for all the deeds of our lives might be predetermined in the mind of God from the beginning of time like the lines of a poem, there is still a place in the scheme of things for the occasional surprise.”

  “A surprise, Sir?”

  “Yes. Like this.”

  Then Anicius Probus leapt through the window to his death, his toga unwinding behind him like a long tail.

  Servio could only scream. An instant later the soldiers below shouted and cursed, and less than a minute after that Captain Bauto hand raced up the stairs, grabbed hold of the sobbing Servio, shook him hard, demanding, “What the fuck was that all about?” and then hauled him down the stairs and outside, to where the old man’s body had landed with a splat on a narrow stretch of pavement below the window.

  Probus’s teeth were scattered over the stones like carelessly thrown dice. Blood pooled around his face.

  Bauto shoved Servio toward the corpse.

  “Now cut off his head!”

  But Servio only dropped to all fours and lost his supper.

  The captain gave him a kick in the ribs, then muttered the Gotho-Latin equivalent of “Oh, crap,” and did the job himself.

  Later, when all of them rode back toward Rome, Bauto with the head in his saddle bag, Servio still wearing the satchel containing the two books Probus had given him, it was clear that, for all a centurion of the papal guard might theoretically outrank a captain and common soldiers of the Urban Cohort, Bauto was in charge, and Servio was his prisoner in all but form.

  Thus they traveled, and came to a posting station a day’s ride from Rome. As they were refreshing themselves, as new horses were being made ready, one of Servio’s household slaves came racing up and told him, breathlessly, in terror, that the proscription against the entire family had already been put into effect, and that his young wife, his infant child, and most of his servants were already dead, and if he returned to Rome he too would surely be slain.

  That was the beginning of the young man’s awakening. The slave had blurted this out in the presence of everybody, and as they all stood around, astonished, Servio used the sword he’d worn for some years effectively for the first time in his life, and rammed it through Captain Bauto’s mail shirt, between his ribs and into his heart.

  Then he turned to the soldiers, told them there had been a change in orders, leapt onto a horse, and galloped off, while they, completely uninformed as to the political shift, the purge of the Anicii, malleability of the emperor Alaricus VI (who was about Servio’s age and even less clever), much less the implications of the Created or Uncreated Christ, stood around leaderless, wondering what to do next.

  II

  That was the beginning. That is how this same Servio—to use the low-Latin or proto-Italian form of his name—was awakened, through bitterness and loss. The story, from indeterminate sources, continues a little obscurely beyond this point. He got away. Doubtless he wept and raged, not only for the loss of his comfortable life back in Rome, but for—however much he had loved them, or even known he could harbor such feelings—his dead wife and daughter. Perhaps other people, even they, had been no more than toys to him before. Perhaps he had been no more than a child himself, but now he found himself firmly and cruelly booted out into the world.

  No doubt he cursed at the sky. No doubt he raged against wind and storms. No doubt he called on God to justify all this.

  No doubt God remained silent.

  But, more to the point, Servio escaped, stripping off his centurion’s uniform, discarding even his sword, which would serve more to betray him than protect him, so little skilled was he in its actual use. For a time, he lived under an assumed name in Milan, making a living as an instructor of Latin poetry to children of the rich, but when even that became too dangerous, he fell in with a band of wandering holy men and dwelt with them in a cave somewhere in the foothills of the Alps, for the hills were as thick with anchorites in those days as they were with rabbits and wood fowl.

  He lost track of the turnings of destiny, the affairs of emperors and popes. He never knew that Count Udo’s head ended up on a spike, shortly after the murder of Alaricus VI. Even when the great Avar invasions began, he was unaware of them.

  He had time to study the two books Anicius Probus had given him. For a time he kept them strictly to himself, only later sharing them with his fellow hermits.

  The first was a treatise by the two centuries dead and just as long discredited heresiarch Athanasius, who had once been bishop of Alexandria and several times removed from that post before finally going down in defeat before the overwhelming eloquence of St. Arius, not to mention the military muscle of the saint’s sponsor, Emperor Constantius II, son of the first Constantine. Athanasius, in his text, argued forcefully, but with no logic Servio could follow, for the necessity of the Uncreated Christ, who existed from the beginning of time, who was therefore “one in being” with God the Creator of the universe but had somehow been born of a Virgin, even though he already existed, and died on the Cross and been resurrected, even though he was reigning in Heaven at the same time—all of which made no sense, and the significance of such arguments was lost on Servio, who, for the time being, put the book aside, though he still treasured it, being as it was a gift from the great and mysterious (and dead) Anicius Probus, who seemed to have thought it was very important.

  Nevertheless, Servio was willing to accept that one day he might understand. He was willing to wait. There in his cave, clad in skins, living off wild fruits, game, and the occasional stray sheep from a farm in the lowlands, he had plenty of time to wait.

  The other codex contained several books of t
he Roman History of the 4th century Latin writer, Ammianus Marcellinus, roughly the last half of the total work. Ammianus was, like Constantius II and St. Arius, not to mention Athanasius, about two hundred and fifty years dead. He had been their contemporary. Servio had read some of his work before. He was not a total ignoramus, though he read history more for the stories than out of any serious, philosophical interest.

  There was something strange in this version. It didn’t match what he remembered, or anything he’d ever been taught. This history did not tell how Emperor Constantius the Second, the last surviving son of Constantine the Great, brushed aside the revolt of his over-ambitious cousin Julian Caesar in the early 361, then went on the sponsor St. Arius, whack off a couple uncooperative papal heads, and convert the German barbarians to Arian Christianity even as he forced it on the Romans, finally dying at the ripe old age of seventy-five, at the height of his power, his dynasty firmly continued by his son, Constantine the Third, his grandson Constantius the Third, his great-grandson Theodosius, and so on all the way into the early Fifth Century. When the line of the Constantinians finally ran out, it fell to a thoroughly Romanized Visigoth, the first Alaric, to make himself emperor by a combination of force, papal blessing, and adoption into the imperial family. Since by this time the pope, the Romans, and the Germans were all in agreement on matters of religion, the West had come out of the troubled Fifth Century stronger than ever, even able to send aid to the faltering East, which had barely survived the tumultuous reign of its own first “foreign” emperor, the Isaurian Zeno.

  That was what everybody knew. That was what Servio had been taught in school.

  But this version of Ammianus he now held in his hands told a very different story. Servio found it hard to grasp. Imagine if, just at the moment when history hung in the balance, as Constantius squared off against Julian, Constantius suddenly died of a fever at the age of forty, with his empress pregnant with their first child, a girl.

  Imagine, too, that, incredibly, Julian Caesar, now emperor, proved to be a secret pagan, who tried to restore the ancient gods of Rome. Once more sacrifices rose to Jupiter on the Capitoline while the emperor, with perfect cynicism, recalled the Athanasian exiles, hoping they would fight it out with the followers of Arius and destroy Christianity in the process.

  But even Destiny, as Anicius Probus put it, can stand for a surprise now and then. Julian, seeking to emulate the military glory of Alexander, even as he tried to realize within himself the Platonic ideal of the philosopher king, invaded Persia and got himself killed after a reign of eighteen months. Ammianus, in the version of the book Servio was now reading, seemed to have accompanied the emperor on this expedition, and, if he was not present at his death, had clearly spoken to people who were. He told the story so vividly it almost had to be true.

  Julian’s brief reign and sudden death broke the back of Arian Christianity. The Athanasians and Arians between themselves did not tear the church apart. Instead, with the backing of a different line of emperors Servio had never heard of (Jovian, two Valentinians, Gratian, Valens, and someone named Theodosius who was clearly not the familiar great-great-grandson of the first Constantine), the Athanasians won. Athanasius became the saint and Arius became the heretic. Now the world was disastrously divided. Christ remained uncreated and timeless within the Roman Empire, but created and existing only at a specific point in history among the Germans. German-Roman unity proved impossible. At the end of the book of Ammianus, who concluded his narrative shortly after the death of the emperor Valens in a catastrophic battle against the Visigoths at Adrianople in 378, someone had jotted down an outline of events thereafter. These included, even more shockingly, a paragraph about how Alaric the Visigoth, still a barbarian and never to become a Roman, had taken and sacked Rome itself in the year 410. The clear implication was that the empire itself, at least in the west, did not last much longer. An age of darkness and disorder followed.

  At the very end were written the words Begotten, not made.

  Servio did not dare read that aloud, or even move his lips when he came to it.

  III

  What was this strange narrative, this fantasy, and why had it come into his hands? Servio could not figure that out. For years he contemplated the matter in his cave. He prayed and fasted. He had visions. As his reputation for holiness grew, the other hermits gathered around him. He shared his thoughts with them, and then, to a few, he revealed his secret books. One of these, who became his chief disciple, a certain Damas, a not uneducated man, proposed that if we are all of us bound in Plato’s cave, viewing, not the real world, but shadows on the wall, what if there were more than one set of lamps, and more than one set of shadows? Couldn’t both versions of the story be true at the same time? What if history itself were like a woven rug, each strand twisting through to reach the far side, to give shape to the rug, but no two traveling by exactly the same path?

  Wouldn’t that be a fine theological puzzle? Wouldn’t learned doctors of the Church have a fine squabble over that one?

  Some of the brethren said this was crazy. Some fell to fisticuffs over it.

  Servio revealed the manuscript of Athanasius. He suggested—or perhaps Damas had put the idea in his head—that if his strange version of Ammianus Marcellinus had somehow transferred itself from one of the other threads, so too had his copy of Athanasius. Somewhere, at least, in another world, Athanasius was the saint, not Arius, and the manuscript therefore contained the words of a saint, since God is everywhere, present in all the threads of history at the same time. It might even be in the saint’s own handwriting. It might be a holy thing in itself, a relic.

  That night, Servio dreamed that he was back in the tower with Anicius Probus, that the two of them stood by the window, admiring the sunrise, reciting poetry. Then he tried to ask the older man about the theory of the many threads, or, as Damas had dubbed it, the Coat of Many Colors. He addressed Anicius Probus as “Master,” for it seemed appropriate to do so, in the dream.

  But Anicius Probus did not answer. Instead, he smiled inscrutably, as if a sunrise had burst within his mind and all was clear, but he could not, or did not, choose to put his enlightenment into words. Instead he hurled himself out the window, not to the ground below, but into the air, where he floated, turning back toward Servio, his face alight like the sun of the new day, his face transfigured in indescribable ecstasy. He rose up through clouds and mist, his arms outstretched, his toga trailing behind him, the light of his face growing ever brighter, until Servio awoke out of his dream, dazzled by the sun as he lay at the mouth of his cave.

  Amazed, still unsure that he was not still dreaming—and he would never be sure, to the end of his days—he staggered down the hillside to a pool, where he washed his face in the morning.

  Now a stranger stared up to him from out of the pool. The face resembled his own, but it was no longer a soft, boy-man’s face. It was lined and bearded, and both the beard and the wild hair were going gray. This stranger mouthed the words to him.

  “Begotten, not made.”

  IV

  Therefore Servio gathered his disciples around himself. To his chief follower, Damas, he entrusted the precious manuscripts of Athanasius and Ammianus. He bade his followers travel north, to evangelize in the German lands of the Empire, spreading both the Athanasian doctrine and the mystery of alternative threads of history, the idea that God is everywhere, even in unreal places, which are, in their own terms, real. If God can be begotten, not made, one in being with the Father and eternal, yet also born of a virgin at a specific point in time, then all contradictions are equally true, an infinite number of possibilities existing simultaneously, and the carpet of history may be woven with as many threads as you like, all of them arriving at the same place eventually, which is the End of Time and the Eternity of God.

  This was to be the core of their new doctrine. It was the revelation which had come to Servio. Therefore, he sent his disciples forth into the world, bearing this gift.
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  Each of the brethren shook hands, and repeated to one another their secret password, “Begotten, not made,” and then they departed for the north, some going by one road, some by another.

  Servio, meanwhile, turned south, to Rome.

  It was precisely at this point that Destiny, as Anicius Probus had warned Servio it would, proved itself capable of serving up a few surprises of its own.

  Damas, the chief disciple, drowned while crossing a stream in Gaul. He had lent the book of Athanasius to another of the brothers, and that manuscript was preserved. He and the copy of Ammianus Marcellinus, however, were swept away in the torrent of a premature snowmelt from the northern slopes of the Alps. The other followers, who were less intellectually inclined and had never much understood the teaching of the co-existence of the real and the unreal, tended to discard it and concentrated on a simplified version of the Athanasian trinity, which might be summed up as “It’s a mystery. Nobody understands it. That’s how we know it’s a mystery.”

  Servio made his way through the countryside of what had once been his homeland, which now he hardly recognized. Gone were the rich and well-tended estates with their sumptuous villas typical of the early Germano-Roman period. Much history had flowed past while he was hidden away in his cave. The northern frontiers of the empire, much weakened by such inept emperors as Alaricus VI and their corrupt governments, had given way more than once, sending hordes of Lombards and later Avars into Italy, whence they had been expelled only with much loss of life and treasure. News from the East was even worse. For all the eastern emperor Heraclius had so brilliantly repelled the Persians early in the century, in his last years, old and sick, he had failed to do much against the Muslim Arabs, and the Arian empire of the East, already in agreement with Islam over the existence of a created, rather than eternal and fully divine Jesus Christ, had generally found the finer theological distinctions not worth fighting for, and had succumbed to the invaders with astonishing rapidity.