Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  “Who is Gilise?” Hedia said. Interest began to crowd frustration out of her mind. There could be something to do beyond standing here and listening to flaccid nonsense.

  “Gilise is an air spirit,” Paddock said. “Gilise visited us when we lived in the valley over the next ridge, Boest and I.”

  “Gilise is a lovely boy,” Boest said, staring at the hills across the valley. His lips quirked into a suspicion of a smile, the first expression Hedia had seen on the big man’s face. “I loved him, you know.”

  “There’s water in that valley,” Paddock said. “Gilise is still there, but he sent Boest away. I came with him because I couldn’t stay with Gilise. And I kept going, because a toad cannot live long in this place, either.”

  “Streams flow through the layers of rock from the mountains,” Boest said calmly. “But not to this valley. The one I used to live in and the one you and Paddock came from, Hedia, but not here where Boest sent me to live after he took my soul.”

  “But why don’t you go back to where the water is?” Hedia said. “And take your soul back?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Boest with the same almost smile. “I used to worry about so many things, but not now.”

  He looked up at Hedia and said, “He bent over me when I was resting, and he put his mouth on my mouth. And I smiled, and he sucked my breath out, I thought, and blew it into a phial and stoppered it.”

  “Only it wasn’t Boest’s breath,” said Paddock. “It was his soul.”

  “It was my soul,” Boest agreed without emotion.

  He paused, then almost smiled again. “Gilise said he loved me, but he was probably lying. I loved him, though that doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters.”

  “I see,” said Hedia. She did see. It had just been a matter of waiting until the facts came out. “I think I will visit Master Gilise. Are you coming with me, Paddock?”

  “You don’t need me,” the toad said. “I will stay here awhile with my friend Boest.”

  “As you please,” said Hedia. She squatted. Paddock hopped out of the sling before she placed her hand to help him.

  Hedia started across the valley, wondering if she should have asked for something to drink. She would probably do better on Gilise’s side of the ridge, and she didn’t suppose Boest had much liquid to spare.

  Twenty feet down the slope, Hedia looked back. Boest was slowly scanning the valley, as he had been when she first saw him.

  The toad was seated in Boest’s lap.

  * * *

  ALPHENA SAT BESIDE CORYLUS, facing backward ahead of the cart’s single axle. Pandareus and Pulto were on the rear bench, skewing their legs sideways so that their knees didn’t touch those of the front passengers.

  Although the mail coach forced them so close together, Alphena found she had to raise her voice considerably to be heard over the thrumm of the iron tires on the stone pavers. It was like being out in a storm. You only noticed the occasional thunderclaps, but when you tried to speak the pounding of the rain blurred your words.

  Corylus twisted to look toward the larger wagon in front in which half the escort rode. Noticing his movement, the driver leaned back and shouted in Sicilian Greek, “We’ll be stopping in two miles to change the team. The estate’s not far beyond, but if we wait till we’re coming back we may not get so good a choice of mules!”

  “We’re stopping at the changing station!” Corylus said, relaying the information to the men in back. Pulto raised a finger in silent acknowledgment; Pandareus nodded. The teacher was reading a papyrus scroll, though Alphena couldn’t imagine how he could with the ride’s vibration. The cart’s leather top was folded back, so at least Pandareus had plenty of light.

  Alphena looked at the youth beside her. Corylus had been born on the Rhine; his height and red/blond hair came from his Celtic mother. His father could not marry as a serving soldier, but he had acknowledged the son as legitimate and would have married the woman when he was discharged. She—Coryla—had died in childbirth, and Cispius had not married at all. Anna, now the wife of Corylus’ servant Marcus Pulto, had been the boy’s nurse.

  Corylus saw even less of his mother than I did of mine, Alphena thought. Though not much less.

  The Emperor Augustus had made it a point of policy that citizens should have children. His edicts were widely ignored within the nobility, and not even Augustus expected noble mothers to raise the children themselves.

  Marcia, Saxa’s first wife, had borne two children and had died of fever a week after the second. Her sister—also Marcia; women did not have names of their own, only the feminine form of their father’s family—was married to Saxa for a few years, but Varus and Alphena saw almost as little of her before the divorce as they did afterward.

  Saxa had been kindly enough, but he was no more interested in his children than he was in the crops being planted on his Lucanian estates … or, for that matter, in the fact that he had estates in Lucania. Hedia, Saxa’s third wife, was the first person to really act as a parent to Varus and Alphena.

  Alphena smiled faintly. Hedia had come as a real surprise to Saxa’s tomboy daughter.

  “Corylus?” she said, confident that the noise of the ride would keep their discussion confidential. “What do you think we should do?”

  Corylus’ eyes narrowed as he returned her gaze. “I think we should go to the estate of Curtianus Major near Aricia…,” he said carefully. “And retrieve if possible the amulet which the former owner Herennius may have hidden there seventy years ago. As we planned yesterday.”

  “Yes,” said Alphena. She didn’t snap at the answer the way she might have done six months before. “But what should we do then? How will the amulet help us find Mother and Varus?”

  The driver shouted to his pair of mules, and the coach swayed. Both Alphena and Corylus turned to look forward. There had been some sort of obstacle on the road ahead, but the escorts in the leading wagon had cleared the way. They were clambering back aboard as their vehicle rolled on.

  Alphena’s own driver clucked his team forward. A cartload of cheap pottery coming into Carce had tipped when a wheel came off, spilling the cargo across the width of the roadway. The escorts had cut the reins of the single ox and manhandled the cart into the ditch. The ox was cropping grass from the shoulder. Earthenware crunched under the wheels of Alphena’s mail coach.

  The angry carter picked up a large potsherd as if to shy it after the escorts. He dropped it again quickly when he noticed that a similar wagon brought up the rear.

  Pulto laughed as their coach rolled on. “That boyo better be well away from the road before the guys behind come up with him,” he said. “They’re jealous about not having anything to do. They might make something outa him picking up a rock.”

  “They’ll get to lead on the way back,” Corylus said, raising his voice as the roar of the wheels increased.

  Alphena suddenly thought about her escort as people. They had simply been for most of her life, like maids and gardeners and soldiers … but soldiers were on the frontier, so she thought about them even less than she did about her servants.

  Until she met Publius Corylus. He hadn’t formally been a soldier, but he had been raised with them and by them, and he had crossed the Danube with the Scout company of his father’s squadron. Had crossed it frequently, from the stories that Pulto’s wife told and Florina had relayed to her mistress.

  Corylus must have been thinking about Alphena’s question while she thought about him. He said, “I don’t have enough information to say anything useful. If we find the ear, when we find it, we’ll see what it does.”

  He met her eyes, smiled, and shrugged. He had an engaging smile. “If the amulet doesn’t do anything,” he said, “or maybe even if it does, we might be able to trade it to Sentius to get Her Ladyship and Gaius back.”

  Corylus shrugged again. “But who knows?” he said. “I don’t think that any gang of Sentius’ could’ve snatched Her Ladyship away from her escort anyway. M
aybe after we learn more I’ll change my mind.”

  But how are we going to learn more? Alphena thought. But Corylus had already answered that, by saying that he didn’t know.

  “There has to be a better answer than that!” Alphena said.

  “Sometimes there isn’t,” Corylus said, though he couldn’t have known that she was responding to the words in her own mind rather than to what he had actually said. “You learn that on the frontier. Sometimes there’s nothing but hoping that your buddies find your body and you get a proper funeral.”

  His face hardened and his laughter clicked like rocks rattling together.

  “And sometimes your buddies are there with you,” he said. “I helped bury a whole platoon once after their barge tipped over in the Danube and they got swept under ice.”

  I’ve seen hundreds of people die in the arena, Alphena thought. Maybe thousands. But they weren’t people to me, any more than my servants were people. Corylus cared about those soldiers.

  “Publius Corylus…,” Alphena said. The world changed when you thought about what people were doing, instead of what they were doing for you or to you. “Are you going to go to Lusitania for my father?”

  Corylus laced his fingers backward, then watched them as he stretched his arms out in front of him. He wasn’t so much looking away from her as looking toward a neutral point while he gathered his thoughts. He lowered his arms and smiled at Alphena again.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, letting the smile widen. “For the same reason. I don’t know enough yet to judge. It may be that Sentius is behind both problems, the rumors about Lusitania and whatever happened to Hedia and Gaius. Ah—”

  “Calling them Hedia and Gaius is fine,” Alphena said. She felt suddenly warm; she looked away. “You and I don’t have to stand on ceremony anymore.”

  “I don’t guess we do,” said Corylus, looking away. After a moment he said, “This shouldn’t be my job. I’m like my dad. He’s about as good a tactician as you’re going to meet, but he never commanded anything bigger than a squadron of cavalry. He’d have been a terrible army commander. I’m not saying that Carce hasn’t had other bad generals, but Dad would have known how bad he was.”

  “You’re not your father,” Alphena said, watching Corylus in profile.

  He turned and met her eyes, smiling again. “No,” he said, “but I’d be even worse. I don’t have Dad’s experience, and I’ve got the same focus on what I can see right in front of me.”

  Corylus shook his head ruefully, though he didn’t lose his grin. “If somebody figures out where our friends are, I’ll plan the rescue about as well as anybody else could. Maybe even as well as Dad—I spent more time with the Scouts than he did. But as soon as we’ve got them loose, I’ll ask Varus and your mother to take over the planning.”

  “But you’re smart,” Alphena said, trying to get her mind around what Corylus was telling her. “I’ve seen you in class. And I’ve seen you fight.”

  “Yeah, you have,” Corylus said, his grin lopsided now. “And I’d rather have you on my left side than lots of veterans. Pulto—”

  Corylus lowered his voice slightly, though there was no chance that the men facing them would overhear the discussion over the rumble of coach wheels.

  “—has enough guts for a legion, but he’d freeze if a demon came at him. That’s true of most soldiers, most people. But—”

  Corylus moved his hands in frustration, as if trying to grasp a beam of sunlight.

  “—I don’t think the way a general has to. Your mother, now, she’d be Hell’s own general. I wouldn’t exactly feel comfortable serving under her, but I’d know that if she sent me out to be killed there’d be a bloody good reason for it. Even though she wouldn’t think twice before she did it.”

  “I thought my father was a fool,” Alphena said. She was speaking almost to herself. She met Corylus’ eyes and said more clearly, “I grew up believing he was a fool, and when he married Hedia I wondered if he’d gone mad. But I see now that he was right about H-he … about Mother. And I think maybe he was less of a fool before than I thought he was too.”

  Corylus nodded agreement. His eyes were far away for the moment, and a slow grin spread across his face. Alphena felt herself blush.

  “I wish Hedia was here to tell us what to do,” he said quietly. “And I wish even more that Gaius Varus was here. Because he’s got the kind of mind that you need to appoint generals.…”

  The driver shouted to his team; the coach began to slow again. Alphena gripped the frame of the bench so that she wouldn’t rock forward too badly when they stopped.

  Corylus doesn’t use the word because it would mean an unpleasant death for Corylus and Varus both if anyone heard him and reported that he’d said my brother would be a good emperor. But that’s what he means.

  That was something more for Alphena to think about. There was so much to consider about people, if you just thought of them as people.

  * * *

  CORYLUS HOPPED DOWN AND OFFERED Alphena a hand. She took it instead of slapping him away, as she might have done not so very long ago.

  He hid his smile. Many wonderful things had happened in the months since his friend Varus had given a public reading and loosed demons from the Underworld. In some ways the change in Alphena’s attitude was the most remarkable of all, as well as being more positive than most of the others.

  The coach and escorting wagons had drawn up in the yard of bare dirt in front of the buildings. The main structure had been built as a manor house, but it couldn’t have functioned as one in decades, probably not since Herennius was proscribed. It wasn’t run-down, exactly, but the repairs had been functional rather than decorative.

  As built, the facade had mimicked that of a temple, though it had pilasters instead of columns and the triangular pediment over the doorway was painted instead of being carven stone. The building was now a factory and warehouse for the estate’s olive oil production.

  The plaster that had flaked away from the pediment over the years had been replaced to waterproof the core of wattle and daub, but there had been no attempt to keep up the decoration. In the corners, fragments of the original showed the feet of reclining figures—white for a woman, reddish for a man. They were probably Venus and Mars, but that didn’t matter.

  Nothing at all mattered to Herennius, executed seventy years ago. He had died either because he was an enemy of one of the Triumvirs or because he was wealthy and the Triumvirs needed money for their war against the murderers of Julius Caesar.

  He’d be dead now anyway, Corylus thought. Perhaps that was all you could really say about any human being: once he was alive, and now he is dead.

  Corylus had spotted half a dozen members of the estate staff as the convoy of vehicles drove into the yard; there were at least that many youngsters playing in the yard. More people appeared, most of them heads peering out of windows on both levels of the main building, but moments later a man bustled out the front door. He wore a clean tunic over the undertunic that was probably his sole garb when he wasn’t receiving visitors.

  He was a big fellow, probably in his early forties. His arms were knotted with muscle, and his hands were callused.

  His eyes scanned the new arrivals and focused on Corylus. Pulto had helped Pandareus out the back. Both had come to join Corylus, but they didn’t look as though they might be in charge.

  “Gentlemen!” the fellow said. “I am Gaius Julius Andromedus, the manager here. How may I help you?”

  Corylus opened his mouth to reply. Before he got the words out, Alphena stepped in front of him and said, “Andromedus, I am Lady Alphena, daughter and representative of my father, Alphenus Saxa, the former consul.”

  She snapped her fingers and held her hand out. “Master Corylus?” she said.

  Corylus, startled, put the document he was holding into her hand. She had not bothered to look back at him.

  “Here is our authority,” Alphena said, holding the rolled parchment ou
t toward Andromedus. It was tied with red silk and sealed. Seleucus, Saxa’s chief librarian, had supervised the creation. It included a copy of the signet of Gnaeus Curtianus Major, the estate’s present owner, who had written Saxa eighteen months before to borrow a set of Corinthian bronze vessels for a formal dinner party.

  Despite the rush nature of the job, the forgery was a much more impressive document than anything Curtianus himself would have sent. Saxa’s staff had been delighted to show their skill.

  Corylus didn’t let his amusement reach his lips. Saxa, a pleasant and generous man, had lent the bronze vessels, so you might say that Curtianus had already been paid for this brief intrusion on his property.

  “The senator directed us to pay particular attention to the well that was in use when Marcus Herennius owned the property,” Alphena said. Her tone throughout had been one of cool boredom that she must have learned from her mother.

  Andromedus took the document from Alphena, but he didn’t bother to open it. He might not have been able to read it anyway—it was written in Latin, not Greek—but it would distress Seleucus to learn that his effort hadn’t been appreciated.

  “Your Ladyship?” Andromedus said in obvious concern. “The owner here is Curtianus and the steward I report to is Phileas. Or do you mean the fellow before Phileas? I was just a foreman then and I don’t recall his name.”

  I won’t tell Seleucus, Corylus thought. And I’ll warn Pandareus not to say anything, either.

  Aloud Corylus said, “I believe that’s the well, Your Ladyship.” He pointed toward a bramble-covered mound; the leading wagon was parked almost in front of it.

  “A well?” said Andromedus, turning to follow Corylus’ gesture. “Oh, right, but it’s been all filled in, Your Ladyship. We’ve got a pipe from Lake of the Woods if you need water.”

  “Candidus?” Alphena said to the understeward whom she had brought along. “That well needs to be reopened. Will you need additional resources?”