Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  “Your Lordship…,” Corylus said. He licked his dry lips. “I am honored by your request, but before I accept it, I need to consult with others whose opinion I trust.”

  “Yes, of course,” Saxa said, lifting his chin. “Your father, Publius Cispius. A very responsible man and an honor to the Republic.”

  “Yes, my father,” Corylus said. And your son and your wife. And your daughter, Alphena, as well, because she too has been part of this, whatever this is, which involved demons climbing from the depths of the Earth and things even more amazing than that.

  Saxa rose with Corylus. “I trust your judgment, boy,” the older man said. “And there are few enough things that I can trust in this matter.”

  Corylus opened the side door of the office. There was a scurry of half-seen motion, servants scattering like mice on the floor of a granary when a watchman enters with a lantern.

  First to the gymnasium to find Pulto, Corylus thought. After that … well, I hope then I’ll figure out what to do after that.

  * * *

  ALPHENA SCRAMBLED TO HER FEET. Dizziness made her knees buckle, but Pulto must have expected that; his hands gripped her shoulders and held her upright until the spell had passed. She wanted to throw up, but that was momentary also.

  “You all right now?” Pulto said, staring into her eyes.

  Offended by the stare, Alphena jerked her head back. “Yes, I’m all right!” she said.

  “He’s checking to see that your pupils are the same size,” said Corylus, closing the door behind him. “Did you take a knock on the head, Your Ladyship?”

  “You might say that,” said Lenatus. He’d picked up Alphena’s helmet; now he turned it so that the dent was toward Corylus. Corylus whistled.

  “I slipped and fell!” Alphena said. “I’m fine now.”

  Her skin felt prickly, but that was more or less true. At least her stomach had settled down and her eyes were focusing normally.

  “Naw, I caught her a whack on the back of the head,” Pulto said harshly. “Same as I did you, lad, when you got too big for your britches the once.”

  Corylus suddenly hardened, but after a moment he relaxed. “We’ll let it pass,” he said. “If you’d tried to do it in front of me, I’d have stopped it.”

  “Yes, master,” Pulto said.

  “He wanted you to be able to trust me,” Alphena said. The words came out as she formed them in her mind. “He said if I was closing your left side, I needed to be better. I’m glad of the lesson, and I won’t forget it.”

  Pulto stiffened. To attention, Alphena realized, and she realized also that it was a compliment to her.

  “I’m sure you won’t, Your Ladyship,” Corylus said with a broad grin. He touched his head behind his left ear. “I certainly haven’t forgotten the time he taught me the same lesson.”

  Alphena started unlatching her body armor. It was of silvered bronze, molded with a triton battling a snake-legged giant on the front panel: officers’ armor, not the mail or articulated iron bands that a common soldier would wear. She’d cramped something in her left hand during the bout and it didn’t want to bend up to get the catches.

  “Just lift your arm, missy,” Pulto said, guiding her arm out of his way. With the ease of long practice his other hand turned the catches where the front and back joined. “Your Ladyship, I mean.”

  “Were you hoping to find my brother, Master Corylus?” Alphena said.

  She winced as she heard the words come out of her mouth. I should have either shut up or just asked him directly. Mother can be arch and sound charming, but it’s just stupid from me!

  “Ah, no,” Corylus said, becoming ill at ease. “Ah, Lord Saxa requested that I visit him.”

  Corylus paused; the three others in the room were looking at him. “He, ah, has offered me a position. I … well, there are a number of things to consider. Do you know when Varus and, ah, Lady Hedia are to return from Polymartium?”

  Alphena felt Pulto lift away the armor. She spread her right arm to make it easier for him, but she didn’t take her eyes off Corylus. “I believe Mother was planning to come back today,” Alphena said. “I suppose Varus will come with her since they left together, but I don’t know that.”

  She cleared her throat and went on, “What position would that be?”

  “I’m sure your father would tell you, Your Ladyship,” Corylus said. “But I think it would be better if you asked him, especially since I’m not sure of my own plans until I’ve had time to discuss them.”

  With Hedia and my brother. Or maybe just with Hedia!

  “Pulto,” Corylus said, “I want to get back to the apartment. I have some thinking to do, and I’m scheduled tomorrow morning to deliver a set argument in class.”

  “Thanks for the wine, buddy,” said Pulto, nodding to the trainer. He opened the door as servants vanished from the corridor into the house. He and Corylus walked toward the front and the street beyond.

  Florina, Alphena’s chief maid, had stayed in the corridor because she had a reason to be there. She squeezed against the wall to be out of the guests’ way, then bowed toward Alphena. She didn’t speak or enter the gymnasium.

  “I think,” Alphena said aloud, “that I’ll bathe here in the house. Is the bath ready, Florina?”

  “Yes, Your Ladyship,” Florina said. “I saw to it myself!”

  The furnace in the bathing annex was always kept burning. Saxa’s wealth made this practical, but most people, even the very wealthy, preferred to walk a few blocks to the public bath where there was more space and the surroundings were more impressive.

  The original builder of this house had included a gymnasium and private bath. They hadn’t gotten much use until Alphena decided to train to become a gladiator. They were used even more often since Varus and Corylus had become friends. That also meant that Varus was getting more physical exercise than he otherwise would.

  Varus wasn’t a social youth, but he valued Corylus as a friend—probably his only friend. Though Corylus didn’t actively encourage Varus to train, his friend’s presence and example caused Varus to show interest in things he had never before considered.

  Florina called a sharp order down the hall. Two junior maids scurried into the gym and unlaced Alphena’s heavy sandals. When Alphena lifted each foot, they slipped on wooden bath clogs.

  Florina’s giving herself airs with the other staff.… But that was what people did. You could punish them for it, but why? It would be like punishing the sky for raining.

  “Your Ladyship?” said Lenatus with a worried expression. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, not at all, Master Lenatus,” Alphena said as she walked from the gymnasium. “I was just realizing that because of the time I’ve spent talking to my brother and his teacher, I’ve begun to think about things that I didn’t used to.”

  Talking to Varus and Pandareus, and also to Corylus.

  Alphena took off her tunic in the steam room and sat on the stone bench while the two attendants dropped furnace-heated blocks of pumice into a bronze basin of water. Steam billowed through the room. The basin’s handles were cast in the form of the heads of broad-mouthed catfish. The head nearer the bench appeared and vanished again in the steam like glimpses of a monster.

  What will it mean to have Corylus in Father’s entourage? He’d be here every morning. Will he join Father for dinner?

  Alphena didn’t ordinarily dine with the family, but she had done so and could do so again if she wanted to. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, though women weren’t usually part of the sort of decorous dinners that Saxa gave.

  “Are you ready for your rubdown, Your Ladyship?” Florina asked. Though the bath had full sets of male and female servants, she had entered the steam room with Alphena.

  How long have I been sitting here? Alphena thought. Sitting and thinking about things she shouldn’t have been thinking about.

  “Yes, all right,” she said, getting up and walking to the massage bench. Florina
isn’t showing her power, Alphena saw in a flash of clarity. She’s afraid that if she isn’t with me all the time, other servants will arrange that she be demoted back to kitchen staff, where she’d been before she was assigned to Lady Alphena as punishment.

  Alphena had been angry at everything, all the time. She screamed abuse at her father and brother, and she struck servants—even the free ones—with whatever was in her hand.

  And then Saxa remarried.

  Hedia had never threatened her stepdaughter, but Alphena had spent a great deal of time observing gladiators and the scarcely less brutal sport of chariot racing. The first time Alphena threw a tantrum at her new stepmother, she saw Hedia’s face change. The utter ruthlessness in Hedia’s expression had shocked Alphena to silence.

  The two women hadn’t become friends immediately. Alphena would have hated any stepmother, even if Saxa had married a former Vestal Virgin for his third wife. Hedia’s reputation had been about as far the other way as a woman could go, and for once rumor had understated the truth.

  The angry truce between mother and daughter didn’t change until Saxa fell under the spell of a wizard who wasn’t a charlatan. Magical disaster had boiled under Carce and the world. Alphena had seen her stepmother react to bad situations and to worse ones.

  Hedia remained poised, cool, and just as ruthless as Alphena had realized the first time she saw the older woman angry. Hedia would do her duty or die; it was much more likely that the person or thing trying to prevent her would die instead.

  Alphena’s respect had deepened into something more, but respect was enough. It was one of Alphena’s greatest sources of pride that she believed Hedia respected her as well.

  The olive oil that an attendant poured from a cruet was cool on Alphena’s skin. The masseuse began working it in with her palms more than her fingers. As she moved down Alphena’s body, another servant used a curved ivory scraper to remove the oil along with the dirt and sweat that it had floated from the girl’s steam-opened pores.

  Alphena felt herself relaxing. The bump on her head had stopped throbbing also.

  “Isn’t it thrilling that the master is sending Publius Corylus off on a secret mission, Your Ladyship?” Florina said in a delighted whisper. “And how awful it would be if he failed!”

  Alphena jerked her torso off the bench to look at Florina.

  The masseuse yelped and skipped back. “Oh, Your Ladyship!” she squeaked with an African accent. “Did I pinch you? Oh, please, don’t beat me!”

  “Be silent!” Alphena snapped. She was angry, but not at the masseuse—or even at Florina, if it came to that.

  The servant’s terror had given Alphena a chance to collect her thoughts. She had nearly blurted, What? which would have made her look like a fool.

  Of course the servants knew everything that was discussed in Saxa’s office. There were probably keen-eared servants posted at every partition to pass anything interesting on to the whole staff.

  A house in which over two hundred people lived had no privacy for any occupant. The owners and their social acquaintances were the focus of the attention of everyone, from Agrippinus, to whom all the other servants reported, to the junior potboy who came from somewhere east of the Tigris River and didn’t speak a language that anyone else understood.

  Alphena relaxed again. I should feel flattered that Florina thinks I know as much as she does. Aloud Alphena said, “I’m sure Master Corylus will be able to handle whatever task my father sets him, Florina.”

  “Oh, he’s a very fine young man, certainly,” Florina said, but her tone was doubtful. “Why, do you know where Lusitania is, Your Ladyship? It must be ever so far away.”

  Alphena jumped again, though not as badly. Corylus is going to Lusitania?

  She coughed and said, “I believe it’s close to Britain.” She hadn’t been interested in the province when her father became its governor, but she would learn shortly.

  “Well, he didn’t say he was going, did he?” said another voice. The speaker was another attendant—not the masseuse—but Alphena couldn’t tell which one without turning her head.

  The servants weren’t supposed to be talking in front of her. The Alphena of six months ago would have had them all beaten.…

  The Alphena of six months ago, however, might have had them beaten because she’d bruised her hand while fencing at the stake. It could be that the servants were becoming too familiar in their behavior with her … but Alphena was learning a great deal that she wouldn’t otherwise have known.

  For example, she had learned about the task her father had set for Corylus.

  “Oh, Master Corylus isn’t going to turn down a chance to get in close with His Lordship the Senator,” Florina said. “He’s just pretending in order to make the senator offer more for his help.”

  Her tone of flat certainty sounded convincing even to Alphena, who knew more about the background than her servant did but had no idea what Corylus would decide.

  “Well, maybe getting close is just what the senator is worried about,” said the attendant scraping Alphena’s right leg; a separate servant worked on the left leg. “This Corylus won’t be seeing much of the senator’s pretty young wife if he’s off in the back of beyond, will he?”

  “Shut up, you fool!” Florina hissed.

  “But—” said the previous speaker. She spoke Greek with a Gaullic accent and was probably one of the group from Provence that had arrived just the day before. Alphena had happened to be leaving the gymnasium when they arrived at the alley entrance.

  “Shut up!” Florina repeated, followed by a loud slap and the attendant’s yelp. “Felix!” The bath master. “Get her out of here!”

  Alphena chose not to open her eyes so that she could pretend to be unaware of what had happened. A different—and more skilled—hand finished scraping her left leg. The masseuse herself had taken the scraper when the attendant was summarily ejected.

  “Is Your Ladyship ready to turn over?” Florina said.

  Instead of answering, Alphena rolled onto her back. She kept her eyes closed. The masseuse resumed rubbing the oil into her skin.

  “Marta really isn’t a bad girl, Your Ladyship,” Florina said softly. “She hasn’t been here long, is all. She has to learn our ways.”

  “Um,” Alphena said in the darkness of her closed eyelids. “I’m sure there’s no need for me to take any action.”

  She was surprised and pleased to hear Florina try to protect a fellow servant—a servant who wasn’t, judging from the recent incident, a particular friend of hers. Perhaps Lady Alphena’s effort to moderate her behavior had rubbed off on her immediate staff.

  I’ve seen too much random cruelty recently—whole villages wiped out by monsters and worse things still—to want to commit more of it myself.

  The skill of gladiators fighting one another still fascinated her, but there was no skill involved in watching prisoners mauled to death by big cats, and there was nothing for Alphena any longer in seeing animals feathered with arrows and javelins shot from behind grills.

  Mankind had real enemies. Chasing animals in circles till they coughed their blood out from punctured lungs wasn’t the way to fight those enemies.

  The attendants were scraping again. There would be soft towels to rub her down and then clean clothes to wear when she went out to the Coelian Gardens this afternoon. She wanted to think.

  Father knows that Hedia has lovers. I don’t understand, but he knows and he doesn’t care.

  Or perhaps Alphena did understand. Hedia wasn’t a wife for ancient Carce, wearing woolens that she had spun and woven herself. And yet she was just as incorruptible as those ancient heroines, and Hedia was far better suited to guide her dreamy husband through the dangers of modern Carce under a suspicious, ill-tempered emperor.

  Saxa wouldn’t send Corylus away to prevent his wife from having a discreet fling with him … but he would care if he thought there was a risk to his virgin daughter.

  Alphena felt he
r body tingle. Perhaps Corylus really does notice me!

  * * *

  VARUS MOVED TO AN OUTCROP from which he could watch the Indian delegation gathering on the slope below. The three officials in colorful silks were giving Bhiku their full attention, and the dozen or so members of Sentius’ household stood respectfully behind the Indians.

  Bhiku raised his arms toward the rising sun and began to chant. From where Varus stood, the words were only a rhythm.

  I could go closer, Varus thought. But the chant wouldn’t be in any Western language, and all Varus knew about the languages spoken in India was that there were many of them. He had picked up some Pahlavi while studying the sources of Herodotus, but he was sure even from this distance that Bhiku’s chant wasn’t Persian.

  The sun was above the horizon from this vantage point, but the air around Varus began to darken; he was slipping into a familiar trance. A slope led upward. He began to climb without consciously doing so.

  Sometimes shapes moved in the darkness, but he ignored them. The darkness was of his mind. He had come to understand that the shapes were no more real than the surface of the hillside or the skin of the hands with which he imagined he touched the gritty stone.

  He reached the top of the ridge. Above Varus was a bright sky with neither sun nor clouds. He knew from experience that if he looked back the way he had come there would be only roiling gray chaos, as featureless as the depths of the sea.

  The old woman turned toward him. Her face under the cowl of her blue cape was so wrinkled that her smile was barely visible.

  “Greetings, Lord Magician,” she said.

  “Greetings, Sibyl,” Varus replied. “Why have you called me here this time?”

  The Sibyl laughed like hens cackling. “I exist only in your mind, Varus,” she said. “How could I summon you?”

  She turned toward the scene on the other side of the seeming ridge that Varus had climbed. He walked to her side so that he could look also.

  She can’t be me. She’s told me things that I didn’t know until she spoke. But Varus knew nothing certain about the Sibyl except that when he left her seeming presence he had the power to work what seemed to be magic.