Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  “No, Your Ladyship,” Candidus said. He bowed to Alphena and began organizing the operation with crisp orders. The members of the escort had been chosen for their skills as well as for brawn. Along with the personnel, the wagons carried pry bars, grabs, ropes, and even a shear legs.

  Corylus had never warmed to Candidus, but the understeward had always shown himself to be competent. He had ridden in the second wagon instead of in the coach, as he had believed his dignity justified. He might have argued the matter with Pandareus, but Corylus had suggested that Candidus not do so.

  Candidus had known better than to have raised the matter with Pulto. On the frontier Pulto had formed his views of the rights of a slave flunky against those of a freeborn citizen and veteran. He was likely to put his opinion to the understeward with more force than delicacy.

  Twenty feet to the other side of the disused well was a massive oak tree. A semicircular wicker bench curved around half the trunk. The master—or now the farm manager—would sit on it while judging disputes among tenants, moving with the shade or sun as the season dictated; the parties and spectators squatted on the ground before him.

  It was the ancient way of life in rural Italy. Corylus wished Varus were here to discuss it with him.

  He grinned. I wish Varus were here, period. And Hedia too.

  The farm manager was talking to Alphena, who for the most part maintained a cool silence. It was possible that despite preparation they would need something the estate could provide, so Andromedus’ goodwill could be useful.

  Pandareus examined a flagstone in front of the door, running his index finger over the surface. From the stone’s shape Corylus guessed it might have begun life as a memorial tablet.

  Under other circumstances Corylus would have joined his teacher, but there was a more useful witness for him to chat with. He walked to the oak tree and sat on the bench, resting his right palm on the trunk. As he expected, after a few moments his mind entered the green silence of the tree’s soul.

  Corylus’ mother and grandmother had managed a hazel coppice that provided spear and arrow shafts for the army. Most of the local residents were Helvetian: Germans from across the Rhine.

  The settlers hated and feared the local women, claiming that they were witches and tree spirits. During the terrible storm the night Corylus was born, the settlers had invaded the coppice and cut down the two full-grown hazel trees that grew above the hundreds that were stunted from repeated clipping.

  Corylus’ mother and her mother had died that night. The next day, all the settlers had died except for the very few who had managed to flee across the Rhine before the men of Cispius’ battalion could catch them.

  There might have been an investigation if the massacre hadn’t been so thorough, but from what Pulto had said, Cispius was as well liked by his noble superiors as he was by the men he commanded. The basic job of the army on the Rhine was to kill Germans, after all.

  Officially, Corylus told people that his mother was a Celtic woman whom his father had met while on active service. In Corylus’ heart of hearts, he knew that the Helvetians had been right about his mother’s race.

  They should have remembered that the Army of Carce didn’t need witchcraft to handle barbarian murderers, though.

  A figure slowly coalesced from the green translucence: a majestic woman, as tall and broad as a statue of Armed Athena. She reached up and combed the fingers of both hands through her long hair; it was blond with a greenish tinge.

  “Greetings, Dryas,” Corylus said. “If I’m disturbing you, I’ll leave.”

  The nymph gave a throaty laugh. “Do the women you’re disturbing often ask you to leave, young man?” she said. “I’m not exactly a woman, of course, but then, you’re not exactly a man.”

  She touched her shoulders with her hands; her breasts bobbled. “In any case,” she said, “your visit is welcome. Why are you here?”

  “A magical amulet may have been buried in the well here,” Corylus said. “That was long ago, during the Proscriptions.”

  He saw either the nymph or the courtyard of the estate where his body sat; the images flickered back and forth as his interest changed. For a moment he watched Candidus directing a crew with hatchets and pry bars as they cleared the brush growing on the pile of rubble. Pulto and Lenatus watched with professional interest, but the two veterans didn’t intervene in a job that was being competently handled.

  “Not so very long ago, dear boy,” the nymph said. “But perhaps for you, yes.”

  The courtyard appeared behind her as though carved in full color on the green ambiance. Unfamiliar servants were bringing objects from the house and dropping them into the well. The facade was in its original glory. The reclining figures were indeed Mars and Venus, each reaching out to touch the other’s fingers.

  The bench around the oak was stone and the well had a stone curb, but Corylus couldn’t see a difference between the trunk of the tree in this image and the one he sat beside. As Dryas had implied, time was relative to the life span of the person making the determination.

  “Are you a magician?” the nymph said. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not,” she said. “I can see that. I know the amulet you mean. I thought perhaps the soldiers had meant to leave it. If you’re not a magician, you’re better off without it. And even if you were, I think.”

  She pursed her lips and said, “It came from the Blight. No magic would protect you against the Blight. Let it be.”

  The imagery of servants hiding valuables blurred into imagery of the courtyard not long after that. The fat steward who had been giving orders was spread-eagled to the ground. The dirt around his head and shoulders was wet. His torso was bloated, and the leather funnel and bucket that had been used to fill him lay nearby.

  Another servant with his arms tied behind his back hung by his wrists from a strappado; the rope lifting him to an oak limb had been slacked. If the fellow hadn’t fainted, he would have been able to stand upright.

  The ground was wet beneath the woman lying beside the steward also, but in her case it was blood dripping from her groin. Her injuries might not have been torture but simply rape by men who saw an opportunity in the present chaos.

  It probably didn’t matter to the victim. From the way the blood continued to spread, it might be that nothing would matter to her in a few hours.

  Soldiers wearing their sword belts but not armor were clearing the well of the rubble that had been dumped into it. The well curb itself had been levered into the shaft, and the stone bench beside the tree had followed it in broken fragments.

  “The amulet is still here?” Corylus said. “I don’t want it for myself, but another man does. He may hold friends of ours. He’d release them if we gave him the amulet. The Ear of the Satyr.”

  The nymph shrugged. “You’re a short-lived race,” she said. “But if you bring the Blight, you will die with all peoples and all things. But all things will die sometime, so that doesn’t matter, either.”

  The image of the Proscriptions blurred again. The soldiers and some of the servants who hadn’t been tortured had finished clearing the well.

  An outbuilding—it was probably the estate’s kitchen—had been demolished for the timbers that provided a frame over the hole. A roped basket was beginning to bring up items placed in it by a man within the shaft. Corylus saw an enameled gold casket that must be the one Atilius said contained the magical papyrus, now illegible.

  “The well was such an obvious place,” Corylus whispered. He was speaking to himself rather than to Dryas, though she probably heard him. “I don’t know why they bothered.”

  But Herennius and his servants no doubt expected more time before the troops arrived to execute their orders. Not for any factual reason, but just because it couldn’t already be over for them. Corylus had seen the same despairing wonder on the faces of mortally wounded men. This can’t be happening!

  But of course it was. It always did.

  Everything changed again, but
Corylus was observing almost the same scene in the bright white light of the present. Pulto and Lenatus had been leaning over the shaft; now they straightened.

  “That’s got it!” Pulto called. Corylus heard his voice as if through inches of green water.

  The grave-faced nymph faded from Corylus’ mind. He got up from the bench and walked over to Pulto. Alphena had now joined the soldiers.

  “It’s time for me to go down and find the Ear of the Satyr,” Corylus said cheerfully.

  He hoped that no one could tell that he was thinking about the nymph’s warning. He didn’t know what the Blight was, any more than a Scout crossing the Danube knew what the Sarmatians might have waiting on the East Bank. That’s why the Scouts were crossing, after all.

  But he knew that if he found anything it would be trouble.

  * * *

  VARUS STEPPED INTO BRIGHT SUNLIGHT and tripped on a tilted paver. He managed to stay upright by lurching forward, which almost made him bump Lord Arpat. Fortunately, the nobleman was too intent on the men outside the building to pay any attention to what was going on behind him.

  Varus took in his surroundings. They were in a round temple. Eight columns of coarse black stone supported a domed roof twenty feet across; there were no connecting walls between the pillars.

  The floor was paved with slabs of the same black rock as the pillars. Wooden beams formed the rafters, but the roof itself was of bronze sheets. Varus had never seen a building constructed in this fashion, but the design was familiar.

  “This is a tholos,” Varus said, gesturing to the building. Domed temples were not particularly common, but the Temple of Vesta in the Forum and the Temple of Aesculapius at the healing god’s original shrine in Epidaurus were merely two of the more familiar examples. “Was it built by Greeks?”

  The rest of the Indian delegation had stepped outside. The nearby land in three directions was being farmed. Varus saw bent figures hoeing in the knee-high grain. At a little distance, a plow drawn by a pair of scrawny oxen raised a plume of yellow dust.

  “The founder of King Govinda’s line built the shrine,” Bhiku said. “Traditionally that was ten thousand years ago, but I believe a better translation of ‘ten thousand’ in Greek would be ‘a very large number.’ It was built a long time ago, certainly.”

  He turned and gestured in the fourth direction, toward a mound of vine-covered trees. The mount was not particularly high, but it spread for a considerable distance. “That, however, is very much older. It is called Dreaming Hill, but it was a city. It is said to be haunted.”

  Bhiku grinned sheepishly up at Varus. “I say it is haunted,” he said. “I do not believe all the things that others say they have seen among the ruins, but what I have seen myself is enough to convince me.”

  A squad of troops stood outside the temple. They were dressed much the same as Bhiku himself—loose cotton vests and pantaloons, without caps. A few wore straw sandals, but most were barefoot. Their weapons were spears and longbows, both made of bamboo. The spear and arrow points were stone.

  Arpat was talking with—mostly at—one of the soldiers. The soldier’s responses were short and mumbled; his eyes were fixed on the ground as the noble harangued him. Arpat had sheathed his sword after returning from the Otherworld, but his hand returned to the hilt.

  Varus moved with Bhiku to the edge of the building, but he stopped when the sage did. Bhiku cocked his head as he listened to the one-sided discussion.

  “Arpat wonders why the escort from Ramsa Lal is not waiting for us here,” Bhiku said in low-voiced Greek. “The peasant says that they’ve sent a messenger to their lord, who is nearby. The main body of the escort is at a distance in case something other than the emissaries came through the portal.”

  Varus thought about the Otherworld. On their way to the stupa, the party had met a bird that stood ten feet high. Its wings were curly stubs, but its hooked beak was shaped like that of an eagle.

  “I wouldn’t want to meet the bird we saw with only a bamboo spear,” Varus said. “I was glad that it decided to go off in another direction when it saw us.”

  “I was glad of your presence, Lord Varus,” Bhiku said. “But the bird could not have opened the portal as I did, let alone broken the barrier between the Otherworld and our world the way a very powerful wizard might.”

  He cocked an eye at Varus. Varus grimaced in embarrassment and shook his head. “Not me,” he muttered. “I know nothing of magic. I accept evidence that it exists the way I accept that lightning exists.”

  Bhiku believes that I am the lightning, he thought. And he may be right.

  A squadron of brightly dressed horsemen rode toward the shrine. There was a path between fields, but the horsemen spread widely to either side of it, trampling the grain and raising a pall of dust that hid the total numbers of the party. There were twenty or more in the leading rank.

  Arpat and his two companions strode to meet the newcomers. Bhiku turned instead toward the jungle-covered ruins in the other direction.

  “The ancestor who built this shrine,” he said, “was a great wizard, and his descendents were still greater wizards. Govinda is the greatest of all. But…”

  He looked at Varus and said with a wry smile, “The inhabitants of Dreaming Hill, when it was a city and not a ruin, must have been great wizards also, because feel the magic which still emanates from this place. I think the ancestor built his shrine here so that it could tap the power of the ancient city.”

  “But for all the inhabitants’ power,” Varus said, finishing Bhiku’s thought, “the city is in ruins.”

  He smiled slightly and shrugged. “Perhaps,” he went on, “because your King Govinda taps only the residue of the power of Dreaming Hill, he won’t fly high enough to fall so far. If there is a fall.”

  “Sometimes I’ve seen people walking in the ruins,” Bhiku said, as though he hadn’t been listening. “Sometimes those I saw were not people.”

  He shrugged and smiled at Varus. “I used to come here frequently,” he said. “Never coming closer than we are now. You can enter Dreaming Hill and often people do, woodcutters chopping brush from the edges of the ruins and sometimes treasure seekers. But they don’t always come back.”

  “Do you wish to see the interior of the ruins?” Varus asked, allowing no emotion to enter the question. It didn’t appear to him that Dreaming Hill was connected with Govinda and the threat that the Sibyl had warned of, but he didn’t know enough to be sure.

  “I haven’t come to this place in many years,” Bhiku said. “Until you and I returned just now from the Otherworld. I decided that while I was sure that there was a great deal to be learned from Dreaming Hill, it was not a place in which I would find wisdom. I still think that.”

  “I bow to your analysis,” Varus said, as lightly as if he were joking. “What do we do next, then?”

  Bhiku nodded in the direction of the path, where the horsemen—several hundred of them as the dust settled—had met Arpat and his fellows. The small party of footmen and the servants from Arpat’s delegation were gathered a little distance from the wealthier contingent.

  “We’ll let our betters go off to Lord Govinda,” the sage said with gentle irony. “Then you and I will go to my quarters in Raguram’s compound. If asked I will introduce you as a student from a distant country, though I doubt that will be necessary. After you’ve had a chance to view the situation, you will tell me as much of your intention as you’re willing for me to know. Then I will help you achieve your wish with such knowledge and strength as I have.”

  “You don’t know what my intent is,” Varus said. I don’t really know what my intent is.

  “I believe that you are a man who would do as I would do under that same circumstances,” Bhiku said. “Since you know the circumstances and I do not, I defer to your judgment.”

  Neatly turning my comment about Dreaming Hill on its head, Varus realized. The men smiled at each other.

  Instead of leaving as Bhiku had
predicted, the body of horsemen walked to the shrine where Varus and the sage remained. All of them were dressed in loose silks and carried curved swords. A number also carried slim lances with streamers dangling below their steel points. Arpat and his companions were mounted now also.

  The man in the center wore scarlet with a sash and turban of cloth of gold. His sword hilt and the bridle of his mount sparkled with jewels.

  Bhiku whispered to Varus, “That’s Ramsa Lal in person!”

  “You, servant of my enemy!” Lal said in Greek. “Where is the magician Rupa whom I sent with you at the command of my lord Govinda?”

  Bhiku bowed low. “Rupa told us that she had business in Carce and that I should take the delegation back, Your Lordship,” he said. “I assumed that the business was yours, but I did not enquire.”

  “That’s right, Your Lordship,” Yama said, looking less awkward on horseback than he had been during the trek through the Otherworld. “We had planted the vine as the king directed, so it was no affair of ours what your servant chose to do.”

  Ramsa Lal considered Varus. Because the floor of the shrine was raised, their eyes were on a level.

  “The fellows who traveled with you say that you’re a wizard, foreigner,” Lal said. “Is that true?”

  “Not in the way Master Bhiku here is,” Varus said. Lal seemed to be in his mid-thirties. Though he wasn’t fat, his puffy face suggested dissipation. “I may have powers, but I don’t have control of them the way a true magician would have.”

  “Never mind that,” Lal said, flicking the air with the end of his reins. “You’re coming back with me. I have a task for a wizard.”

  “Your Lordship, the stranger must come with us to our master Govinda!” Arpat said. “This business is under his auspices, and he is your master!”

  “I bow to Lord Govinda,” Lal growled. “His mission is completed, as you have already said … and while I bow to Govinda, your master and mine, I will have his flunkies dragged by the heels if you use that tone on me again, Arpat!”

  Bhiku stepped from the pavement and said, “Your Lordship, I’m afraid that our lord Govinda’s officials have misstated the situation. This young man is a noble in his own country and has come here to share his considerable wisdom—”