Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  “Be silent!” Lal said. His Greek was accented but easily understandable. “You are in my territory at the behest of Lord Govinda, but do not test my forbearance further, scum!”

  To Varus he continued, “Can you ride, foreigner?”

  Horsemanship was a common exercise for noble youths, but Varus had never found exercise interesting until he began joining Corylus in the gymnasium over the past year. Varus walked between libraries all over the city, however, as that was the easiest way to get around in Carce. Neither horses nor vehicles were allowed within the sacred boundaries until after dark.

  “Not well,” said Varus. “I’d better walk.”

  “As you please,” said Lal. He turned to the man on his left—Arpat rode on his right side—and snapped something in an Indian tongue.

  “He has ordered his aide to take a squadron and escort the officials to our lord Govinda’s palace,” Bhiku said. Varus hadn’t needed the whispered translation to understand what was happening.

  The aide nodded and raised his arm, then shouted an order. A hundred or so men rode away at a walk, which rose to a jog. The members of Govinda’s delegation went with them. The servants walked at the end of the file. Arpat turned twice in the saddle to look back with a troubled expression, but he had apparently taken Ramsa Lal’s warning seriously.

  The horseman who had taken the place at Lal’s left shouted a similar order and the remaining body of men moved off. “If you hold us up,” Lal said, “I’ll have you lashed to a saddle. Do you understand?”

  Varus nodded curtly. As he had told Bhiku, there were many of Lal’s sort in Carce. Varus didn’t like the Carce version, either.

  “With your permission, Lord Varus…,” said Bhiku, walking at Varus’ side, “I will accompany you. For my own interest, that is. I would willingly help you, but I can’t imagine how I could.”

  “I can’t imagine, either,” Varus said. Lal was holding his horse to an amble. The sage took shorter, quicker steps than Varus, but neither of them had trouble keeping up. “But I can’t imagine how I can help myself, either. I am very glad of your company.”

  It was really the only thing in this business that did please Varus, but it was a major thing.

  CHAPTER V

  Hedia had been walking with her head down to avoid stumbling on rocks sticking out of the dust. There was nothing to see in the sky, and it had a bronze tinge that made her feel hotter and even more out of place.

  The change was as sudden as if she had stepped into a pond. There was no immediate difference on the ground, but the air felt refreshing and the sky—she did look up—was a saturated blue with a few ragged-edged clouds.

  Hedia looked back. She couldn’t see the valley where she had left Boest and Paddock. Three steps farther forward and she was gazing down on to a spread of varied green, a mixture of meadow and groves. The grazing sheep had three-colored wool, irregular patches of black, brown, and white.

  A small frame house with a shingle roof stood in the shade of an oak. A spring bubbled into a pond nearby and sent a rivulet toward the creek that wobbled through the valley

  Corylus would know what kind of tree that is. Which was probably true, but there were better reasons to wish that Corylus were present.

  Hedia didn’t speed her pace, but she found herself smiling as she approached the house. Even if I don’t learn where Varus is, this is a pleasant place to spend a few days to plan my next move.

  She smiled more broadly. Perhaps Varus could find her. He was the magician, after all.

  Hedia heard flute music as she neared the house, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. A squirrel on the tree’s long horizontal branch chattered at her, then ran higher up the trunk and chattered again.

  A man walked out around the tree; he must have been seated on the other side. Instead of the double flute that Hedia was familiar with from stage presentations and dinner entertainments, he held a set of panpipes.

  He was amazingly attractive. He smiled at Hedia and said, “Hello. My name is Gilise.”

  “I’m Hedia,” she said, giving Gilise her full smile. “I’m very glad to see you. If you’ll let me drink your water and take a moment to cool off, I look forward to showing you just how glad I am.”

  Gilise laughed. “I have wine in the house,” he said. “And for the rest…” He blew a trill on his pipes that echoed the laughter.

  Hedia knelt at the pool and cupped both hands in the water, then splashed her face. She rose and loosened her sash, grinning at the young man.

  “Maybe I don’t need a need a drink so much as I thought,” Hedia said, handing one end of the sash to Gilise. A leather sheath sewn into the other end held her little knife.

  “What am I to do with this?” he said. He tossed his pipes to the ground.

  “Just hold it, silly,” Hedia said, grinning even more broadly.

  She raised her arms, touching the fingertips together, and pirouetted on her toes. Around her waist the silk was its natural pastel green. When the sash wound out, the fabric was so gauzy fine that the single layer seemed colorless.

  Gilise watched, transfixed. These overlength sashes were twenty feet, end to end. Hedia owned several in various colors so that they would go with whichever dress she chose for a special dinner. She had worn the long sash to Polymartium on a whim, but she did many things on whim. Often, as now, she was glad of it.

  The hem of Hedia’s tunic swelled out with the motion, drifting over her hips. She slowed and halted to face Gilise again.

  “Generally I do that on the serving table after the dishes have been cleared,” Hedia said. “A hard surface is better, but I don’t mind grass.”

  She reached up and released the lion-headed pins on both shoulder straps. Her tunic fluttered down. “Do you mind grass?” Hedia said.

  Gilise reached for her. His smile had become a rictus.

  Hedia raised her lips to his, then twisted away with no more contact than a wisp of gossamer brushing his face in the morning. “Lie down, you lovely man,” she said. “I want to do the work the first time. You’re such a sweet man.”

  Gilise was half-unwilling, but Hedia shifted one of her hands from his shoulders to reach under the hem of his short lambskin tunic. After an instant’s further hesitation, Gilise thumbed the straps aside and stepped out of the garment. He allowed Hedia to guide him onto his back with her tunic beneath his shoulders.

  “So sweet…,” she whispered.

  Hedia squatted for a moment above him, then lowered herself with a sudden rush. She cried out with delight as she impaled herself on his member.

  Anyone watching Hedia’s gasps and excited moans would assume that she was completely lost in the moment. Certainly she was having fun—

  The thought brought a peal of laughter from Hedia’s lips.

  —but she had realized when she was quite young that the muscular, passionate men she found interesting could be very dangerous to a woman if things got out of her control. Hedia was never quite as abandoned as she seemed to be, and at this moment she was as cold as an Egyptian cobra.

  But her partner did not and would not realize that—until she wanted him to.

  Gilise began to gasp as he climaxed. Hedia ground herself against him and rotated halfway around. She grasped Gilise’s ankles and forced her hips even farther down onto him.

  “There!” she cried. “There! There! There!”

  Gilise shouted also, then sank back.

  Hedia rotated another half turn to face him again. “Shall I kiss you, now?” she said.

  Gilise murmured. Hedia leaned forward. Instead of bending down to kiss him, she stood and tossed one end of her sash over the branch above them. The weighted end carried it true.

  “What?” said Gilise, rising to his elbows.

  “Just lie back, darling,” Hedia whispered. “This will be something you’ve never had before.”

  She gripped the dangling end of the sash with both hands and strode forward, using her full weight
and strength. The other end of the sash was noosed around Gilise’s right ankle. His leg and torso swung off the ground; his flailing arms only eased Hedia’s task.

  Hedia tied her end of the sash around the moss-covered plaque at the back of the spring. On it a nymph reclined in low relief on her right elbow and held a horn of plenty in her left hand. Hedia knelt against the stone, letting the cool water dribble over her hands and forearms. She was flushed and breathing hard.

  Hedia grinned. For various reasons this time, and all of them good.

  She rose, touching the plaque with her fingertips but not putting any weight on her arms. Dragging Gilise into the air had used all the strength she had.

  Hedia turned to face Gilise for the first time since … Her smile widened. Since well before they had finished their session, though in that final passage she had been more concerned with noosing his right ankle than with recreation.

  “Why are you laughing!” Gilise cried. His face was very red. He could reach the ground with his left hand, but he wasn’t strong enough to push off so hard that he could grab the branch from which he hung. “Let me go, you bitch! Let me go or it’ll be the worse for you!”

  “I don’t think you’re in a position to harm me so long as you’re where you are,” Hedia said calmly. “And you’re not going to be freed until you’ve done exactly what I tell you to do.”

  “I’ll blast you to atoms!” Gilise said, then cried out. His left arm had crumpled, and his full weight dragged again on his ankle. Soft as the silk was, Hedia knew from experience that it cut when the weave was pulled tight.

  She laughed. “I don’t think that would get you out of your present predicament, even if you were capable of it,” she said.

  Gilise was gasping. He twisted to grab his right calf just above the knee and raised his torso. That allowed him to breathe more easily, but he wouldn’t be able to hold the posture.

  “Boest said that you’re an air spirit,” Hedia said cheerfully. “Does that mean that you can’t suffocate hanging like this? I suppose it does.”

  “What do you want?” Gilise said. He lowered himself again to put his fingertips on the ground. “Just tell me!”

  “Boest says that you stole his soul,” Hedia said. “He needs it back in order to help me, so I hope you kept it.”

  “Will you let me down … if I … give it to you?” Gilise said, breathing hard between spurted words.

  “I will release you,” Hedia said, “and allow you your life.”

  She giggled and added, “Although there was nothing so exceptional about your performance that I’ll be interested in seeing you again.”

  She gripped her tunic between thumb and forefinger and tugged it toward her, careful not to bring herself within the circle in which Gilise’s body slowly oscillated. Judging by his wheezing misery, she could probably break free if he managed to grab her, but it was a risk she didn’t need to take.

  “Swear,” Gilise said. “You have to swear that you’ll let me go!”

  Hedia sniffed. She believed in her own honor; she did not believe in “the immortal gods” or whatever other form religious people chose to use.

  “I swear by Mother Matuta that I will let you go if you allow me to return Boest’s soul,” Hedia said, picking the deity whom she had been most recently worshiping. Matuta was as likely to be real as any other god.

  “In the house, then,” Gilise said. “The space at the back where the eaves continue to the ground. That’s a cupboard, and there are shelves with glass phials. The phial on the end, the right end, that’s Boest. Tell him to breathe it. Now let me go!”

  Hedia shrugged into her long tunic. It was protection for her legs against grass edges. I wonder if there’s a length of rope in the house, since I won’t be getting my sash back just now.…

  “When I come back…,” Hedia said, walking toward the dwelling, “I’ll let you go, as I’ve promised.”

  At the door she paused and turned around. “That’s if you’ve told the truth,” she said. “If you’ve lied, you’ll never see me again.”

  The hanging man continued to rotate slowly. He didn’t rouse the effort to speak.

  Hedia smiled. Gilise appeared to have understood her.

  * * *

  “HOW DEEP IS IT?” Corylus asked as he walked to the reopened well. The bench had jammed partway down the shaft, and the rubble of the coping had piled on top of it instead of dropping to the bottom.

  “Twenty-two feet down to the water,” Pulto said. “Four or five to the bottom below that.”

  Lenatus coughed and said, “You know, it’s a pretty tight fit down the shaft, kid.”

  “I’m smaller than you, Publius Corylus,” Alphena said. “I could look for the locket instead of you?”

  Corylus smiled. “I’ll be all right,” he said, speaking to all the worried faces around him. Even the men of the escort seemed affected by his friends’ concern. He would have expected them to be treating the unusual business simply as entertainment.

  “When I used to go across the river with the Scouts…,” he said. That was only a few years before; it seemed much longer, a thing that happened to someone completely different from the young scholar learning rhetoric from the great Pandareus of Athens. “Sometimes we’d find Sarmatian temples underground. They had little escape tunnels besides the main entrance. If we found an escape tunnel and not the main entrance, I’d go down it because I was small. The Scouts used to call me their little marmot.”

  “Did your father know the Scouts were using you that way?” Lenatus said with a deliberately blank expression.

  “No,” said Corylus. He grimaced, thinking of times past. “I’d go through in the dark and open the main entrance. There was never any trouble, and I went down behind my dagger. But Father would’ve, well … I’m just glad he never learned.”

  “The Old Man knew,” Pulto said. “What kind of a CO do you think he was? We’d stay up until the Scouts came in, but we wouldn’t drink. When the platoon was back and you were back, then he’d kill a couple jars of wine before I put him to bed.”

  Corylus looked at Pulto. A bright light had just flared across the past and turned it into a completely different place.

  Instead of responding, Corylus said, “Well, the sooner I do this, the sooner I can towel off and get myself around some mulled wine.”

  “Here you go, boy,” Pulto said, handing Corylus his equipment belt. Pulto had unclipped the sword, but the long dagger hung in its scabbard. “Just like the old days, hey?”

  Corylus laughed. “Fewer horse skulls, I hope,” he said. He fastened the belt so that the scabbard hung between his legs where it wouldn’t clank against the stone lining.

  To Lenatus and Alphena he explained, “The Sarmatians pray to horses, and they’re not real careful to clean the meat off the bone before they hang them up.”

  “Hey, chieftain?” a member of the escort said; his Greek had a Spanish accent. Corylus had seen him around Saxa’s town house, but he didn’t know the fellow’s name.

  “Yes?” Corylus said. Everyone was staring at the fellow. Slaves didn’t interject themselves into the conversations of free citizens, but neither Alphena nor the veterans chose to shut the speaker down until they heard what he had to say.

  “I was the one who went down and hooked the grab each time,” the Spaniard said, nodding to the tripod and pulley that had been used to pull the stones out of the well. “I figure you know what you’re doing, I see your knife, but I want to say: there’s something down there. I’m not scared, but I was just going halfway down and I felt it. Just so you know.”

  “Thank you,” Corylus said. He knelt and looked down the well. His body would block most of what light entered the shaft, but he didn’t consider taking a lantern. Light wouldn’t help him feel for objects with his fingers—or, more likely, toes.

  “Chief?” said the Spaniard. “I’m a little guy, I fit down the shaft better’n your buddies there”—Pulto and Lenatus—“would. I�
�ll come after you if you need, you know?”

  Corylus turned again to look at the fellow. “Thank you,” he repeated. “I do know. But I don’t expect that kind of problem this time.”

  He’d taken off his heavy sandals. Now he gripped the rope with both hands and stepped into the shaft; it was easy without the coping. He lowered himself hand over hand, holding the rope lightly between one sole and the other instep as well.

  That was just in case. Corylus couldn’t imagine what sort of case would require him to hold firmly to the rope with his feet alone, but emergencies were by definition unexpected. He smiled.

  The smile faded as he felt the shadows close in.

  It wasn’t physical darkness that was weighing on him—he could twist his head to look upward and see the bright sky. Something cold and bleak and distant crowded against his consciousness and began to seep in.

  Corylus knew what the Spaniard meant, now, but it wasn’t a danger somewhere down this well shaft. Walls of ice, cliffs of ice, loomed above him.

  Corylus was familiar with ice. There were frozen mornings even in Carce, and the Rhine and northern Danube froze solidly every winter. What he saw now in his mind, however, was beyond reason.

  These were mountains of ice. They ground closer, crushing rock and rivers and farms beneath their glittering bases. Nothing could stop the ice, and it would not stop.

  Corylus continued to lower himself into the well. He forced himself to look up. Three heads peered down from the north side of the rim where their shadows fell away from the shaft rather than blocking light to the man beneath: Pulto and Lenatus and Alphena, worry gleaming from their unnaturally blank faces.

  “No problem!” Corylus called, hoping he sounded cheerful. There really wasn’t any problem here and now, but some place at some time would vanish beneath certain icy doom.

  His feet touched the water. He spread them so that if he slipped he would hit soles first instead of taking his weight on the sides of his feet. He continued to lower himself by hand until the water was up to mid-chest. Only then did his feet touch a thin layer of ooze—and below that rocks and pebbles.