Air and Darkness

by David Drake

  Someone gripped him by the shoulder and shook him awake. “No, Corylus,” a rasping voice said. “You’re still asleep. I have things to show you.”

  Corylus opened his eyes. A crude iron figure was bending over him: not a man in armor, but a man hammered out of iron.

  I don’t feel threatened, Corylus realized. I ought to, but I don’t.

  He sat up and saw that the world—well, the Otherworld—had vanished. The palm tree, the two sprites, and the open forest toward which Aura had been leading him were gone, replaced by a gray plain under a sky of paler gray.

  The iron figure stepped back. He was bearded, or at least waves that were probably meant for a flowing beard had been forged on to his chin and upper chest. His arms and legs were all a piece with his torso when he was still, only separating when he moved.

  “Who are you, sir?” said Corylus as he got up. The figure was no taller than he was, but it projected an enormous solidity.

  “I am the other face of Janus,” the figure said. “I say ‘the other face’ because I’m guiding Lady Alphena at present. But come.”

  He turned and began stumping across the featureless plain. Corylus took two long strides to catch up. There didn’t seem any reason to go in one direction or another in this place, but Corylus preferred company to being alone here.

  “Where is Lady Alphena, ah, Janus?” he said.

  “Not here,” said the iron man peevishly. “And that’s not what I want to talk about. This is what I want to talk about.”

  He pointed with his whole arm; the fingers were undifferentiated. A circle of the blank sky gleamed like a mirrored ball. It rotated into an image of a city of paper houses on the banks of a river. Figures were going about their business in the streets and plazas.

  “Where is this?” Corylus said. “That is, if you please.”

  “That is central Italy, as you would call it,” said Janus. “The Tyla have their own name, of course. In your world the river is the Tiber where it flows through Carce.”

  When Corylus looked at the figures instead of simply accepting them as the human residents of an unfamiliar landscape, he saw that they were two-legged animals with fox-like faces and tan fur ranging sometimes toward golden. He didn’t bother to try to keep his voice calm as he said, “Janus! Is that happening now?”

  “There is no ‘now’ where you and I are, Corylus,” said the iron man. “Look around you. If you mean, ‘Is this the reality of the Waking World from which you come?’ then that depends. Now, come along.”

  They walked farther across the gray limbo. Corylus glanced over his shoulder, but there was no longer a sign of the shining ball or the world of the Tyla he had seen through the ball.

  Janus pointed again. The air darkened, then gleamed and rotated as it had the first time. Corylus felt his gut tighten before he looked, but this scene was one of tranquil pleasure. Men and women sprawled on lush grass or ambled over hills that he recognized as those of Carce. Crops grew though no one seemed to be tending them, and everywhere dangled bunches of ripe grapes.

  “It’s the Age of Saturn,” Corylus said, quirking a smile as he looked at his guide. “The Silver Age of the poets. I prefer this one to the one you showed me first, Janus.”

  “It is the Age of Bacchus,” the iron man said. “It will be the Age of Bacchus for all time, in the place where this is happening. But come, Corylus, for there are other worlds still.”

  “How many are you going to show me?” Corylus asked, following his guide. It didn’t really matter, since Corylus had nothing else to do in this gray waste, but the iron man’s peremptory commands were becoming irritating now that the novelty of the situation had worn off.

  “One more will be enough, I think,” said Janus. He pointed, and as before the air responded with a vision.

  Corylus squinted. He thought that something had gone wrong, that the image hadn’t cleared yet. He saw only smeared black in the sphere.

  “Janus, what is this?” he said. He didn’t have his staff or dagger in this dream; he would have felt much better at this moment with the weight of either in his hands.

  “This is the Waking World as it will be after the Blight has conquered,” said Janus. “This would be the bend of the Tiber, but there are no rivers and no seas and all the world is the same.”

  “There are no…?” Corylus began. Then he said, “There is no life.”

  “The Blight is alive,” Janus said.

  The blackness moved, the way a pool of tar moves on a hot day. It isn’t alive. It can’t be alive.

  “It is not life as you know it,” Janus said. “It may become all the life there is in the Waking World.”

  “May become!” Corylus said. “Will it or won’t it? Is that—”

  He pointed to the Blight.

  “—real, Janus?”

  The iron man lowered his arm; the vision became gray, then vanished. Janus made a harsh grating noise that made the hair rise on the back of Corylus’ neck.

  He’s laughing! And that was even worse.

  “All the futures you have seen are real,” Janus said, pivoting his whole body to face Corylus. “Somewhere, sometime, on some chain of events. As for which one is real in your world, that depends.”

  If Corylus had been speaking to a man, even a much bigger man, he would have hit him. The thought of hitting this crude mass of iron was absurd.

  Corylus laughed and bowed to his guide.

  You get a sense of humor on the frontier, especially with a unit like the Batavian Scouts. It isn’t everybody’s sense of humor.

  “What does it depend on, Lord Janus?” Corylus said. “What does the fate of my world depend on?”

  “You and your colleagues will determine the branch of reality which your world follows,” Janus said. “That is what I came to tell you.”

  The iron lips twisted into a smile as distorted as every other aspect of the figure. “Now you may awaken.”

  * * *

  CORYLUS FELT SOMEONE SHAKING HIM, but when his eyes opened the two sprites were chatting ten feet away. No one else was present.

  It was daylight. A pair of tiny monkeys with diaphanous wings flitted through the palm fronds. The flowers hanging from tendrils of vine had closed again.

  “He’s awake,” said Phoenix. The sprites moved to him, Aura slightly in advance of the tree nymph.

  “I slept well,” Corylus said. He thought that would be a lie—he didn’t want to discuss what he had seen—but he found that his limbs felt supple and the aches and scrapes of the previous day’s events had been smoothed away. “I want to start immediately for the cave.”

  “Did you dream?” asked Phoenix.

  “Why?” snapped Corylus. Then, realizing how defensive he sounded, he said, “I may have done, yes. But why do you ask?”

  The palm sprite shrugged. “I was just curious,” she said. “Humans who sleep under the Black Lotus usually do, I’ve found.”

  “Ah,” said Corylus as he laced his sandals. The soles of his feet were smooth and callused again. “Let’s go on then, Aura.”

  As they set off toward broken woodlands, he glanced over his shoulder. Phoenix waved hopefully, but Corylus was looking at the closed black flowers dangling from the palm crown.

  * * *

  ALPHENA STOOD AT THE BASE of the statue of Marsyas in the Forum, a location Pandareus had suggested. Her escort, which this morning included Lenatus wearing a cape, encircled her and the teacher, facing outward. There was nothing so unusual about the scene as to draw attention. Though the Forum was as crowded as usual, nobody was paying particular attention to the noble lady and her servants.

  “Later in the day, prostitutes gather here,” Pandareus said, looking up at the bronze satyr with its right hand raised. “The girls lay their wreaths on the statue’s head if they’ve had a successful night, but the attendants of the Basilica Aemilia—”

  He nodded to the two-story building behind them.

  “—usually take them away bef
ore court sessions open in the morning. I see that they missed one today, though.”

  A garland of roses lay behind the statue. Alphena suspected that the flowers had been blown before last night; Corylus would probably be able to tell, since his father used huge numbers of flowers in his perfume business.

  That’s still another reason to wish Corylus were here, she thought. That was the kind of joke he would make, but she found she couldn’t smile at it now.

  Taking a deep breath, Alphena got to the business that she wanted to discuss with the teacher in private. “Corylus, the straw doll last night I mean, said that the real Corylus was going to the Cave of Zagreus. What does that mean, please?”

  Pandareus smiled wryly. “I will try to remember that I’m not lecturing to students,” he said, “but rather advising a colleague about how to find our missing associates. Briefly, I don’t have any idea where the Cave of Zagreus might be. Zagreus in myth—or what I thought was myth—was the son of Zeus and Persephone and was born in the dragon-guarded cave where his mother was hidden to preserve her chastity. The dragons were unsuccessful in protecting that, obviously.”

  Pandareus glanced at the statue again. “Followers of the Orphic Cult believe that Zagreus was a prefiguration of Bacchus,” he said. “I suppose that’s why I thought of coming here for privacy, since Marsyas was the steward of Bacchus.”

  Pandareus smiled wryly. “I can’t help but be a pedant, I fear.”

  “It was a good location, for whatever reason,” Alphena said. Listening to the teacher reminded her of her brother’s similar twists of mind through all sorts of literary thickets.

  She frowned when she saw what Pandareus was holding. He’d had it the whole morning, but she had been too lost in her own thoughts—her fears—to notice it.

  “Master Pandareus,” Alphena said. “What is the rod that you have there?”

  “Ah!” said the teacher, holding the object out in both hands for Alphena to take. “It was a bed marker in the garden. The others were wooden palings with carved tops, but this was iron and I took it when Rupa and her companions appeared.”

  He smiled faintly. “I suppose I was thinking of it as a weapon,” he said. “When I got a better look at it, I found it more interesting. It seems to be the head of Janus.”

  The rod was the length of her forearm and hand with the fingers extended. Except for the knob on one end, it was about the thickness of her thumb. The single piece of iron was forged rather than being drawn or turned: the marks of the hammer were visible along its full length. The knob was a double face, chiseled into the metal.

  “It was stuck in the ground?” Alphena said. She took the rod. “There’s some rust, but not as much as I’d expect of iron left out in the weather.”

  “I’m not pure iron,” said one of the miniature faces. It turned toward Pandareus. “Any more than those bronze coins in your purse are pure copper, Teacher. The wizard Mamurcus made me from a fragment of the same meteor that he used for the locket you’re wearing, Lady Alphena.”

  “This?” said Alphena, pulling the amulet out from beneath her tunics. “The man who made this is named Mamurcus?”

  “Well, he was,” said Janus. “He’s been dead a thousand years, near enough. He made me in Anti-Thule. He took a piece of the meteor back to Italy with him when he fled and forged it into a case for the Godspeaker’s ear.”

  “The Godspeaker was a Tylon!” Pandareus said in obvious delight. “The ears of the Tyla accompanying Rupa were pointed and furry, so of course someone hearing the description would think of satyrs. Even if Mamurcus himself didn’t call them that.”

  He sounds as pleased to have figured that out as he would have been to learn that our friends had all returned to us, Alphena thought. Then she realized that her brother would have been equally thrilled.

  “I suppose,” said Janus. “Mamurcus knew they weren’t satyrs, anyway. I didn’t think any Tyla had survived, because the ice started coming down on Anti-Thule as soon as the Godspeaker died. Maybe the Indian wizard came back for them, but they weren’t with him when he ran.”

  Janus shook his little iron head. “That Indian was powerful, let me tell you,” he said sadly. “And Mamurcus and me were even better. I was his wand, you see; the Indian had an ivory one. But the Godspeaker was greater yet with the tablet which the Eternals had left under the northern ice, and we all together weren’t enough to stop the Blight. After the Godspeaker died, we and the Indian ran. Mamurcus took the ear with him; that was all that was left of the Godspeaker. That locket you’ve got, that’s really powerful if you can handle it.”

  “It appears to me that Lady Alphena handled it, so to speak, last night,” Pandareus said. “Otherwise Rupa would not have let us go.”

  Janus turned to look at him; the other face was as still as Alphena normally expected a lump of iron to be. “You’ve got a point there, Teacher,” he said. “You wouldn’t think it to look at her, would you?”

  “I scarcely know what to think, these past few months,” said Pandareus. “I have learned not to discount Lady Alphena’s resources, however.”

  Alphena held the amulet firmly in her left hand, though it had seemed to work the same when it was lying between her breasts. She thought in silence, then said, “Janus, do you know how to find Master Corylus?”

  I should have said Mother or Varus! I keep thinking about Corylus!

  “Of course,” said Janus. “I’m the god of openings. I can open the way to your Corylus, if that’s what you want.”

  The little head nodded toward the south. “My gate is there at the end of the Forum and the doors are open. If you’ll take me there and step through the doors, we’ll get on with it.”

  Alphena let out her breath. She was feeling relief for the first time since she had been forced to flee from the Bacchic rout at Polymartium. She had something to do!

  “Yes,” Alphena said aloud. “We’ll do that now.”

  * * *

  VARUS EXPECTED TO DISMOUNT in front of Govinda’s palace from the platform on the elephant’s back, a luxurious room with wicker walls. Instead the great beast paced through the arched gateway and into the hall beyond before stopping.

  Varus looked up. The ceiling was forty feet high, supported on pillars of colored marble. Light entered through a clerestory of thin alabaster panels cut into filigrees. Their curves, he suddenly realized, matched the swirling patterns of the tapestries on the walls.

  “You may get down, please,” said the attendant who had ridden on the platform with Varus and four Tyla, as Govinda called the bipedal creatures. The fellow had been silent except when offering water from a silver flask chilled by wet moss. He wore silk and spoke good Greek, but his eyes had been on Varus throughout the journey.

  What did Govinda expect me to do if he’d left me alone? Varus thought. Then, What does Govinda want me to do?

  Attendants had brought a ladder to the elephant’s side. There were scores of servants in the hall, easily visible despite the muted light because their white garments shone against the wall hangings. Varus climbed down carefully because his legs were stiff from having been crossed during the journey.

  It was only when he was on the carpeted floor that he really appreciated how big the elephant was. When Varus had climbed a less ornate ladder to mount, he had been too caught up in events to pay much attention to the animal. Now he saw that the animal was bigger than even the gigantic beast he had seen in Puteoli. That one had come down the Nile from the forests to the south of the Libyan desert and was ten feet high at the shoulder.

  This elephant and the similar one on that Govinda had ridden were probably two feet taller. Their tusks grew from the lower jaw and curved down, not outward.

  Wealthy men in Carce would pay enormous amounts for elephants like this, to display to the public and to kill in the arena. It would demonstrate their wealth, much as Cleopatra had dissolved a pearl in wine and drunk it.

  Varus smiled faintly. He wished Pandareus or Corylus
were here to talk with. I could make my observation to the attendant, but he wouldn’t understand and he wouldn’t care if he did.

  Mind, Hedia and Alphena wouldn’t have cared, either. It would still be good to see them back in Carce.

  King Govinda and the four Tyla with him had already dismounted from the leading elephant; their mount was being led through the archway at the far end of the hall. Govinda held not the speculum as before but rather a tablet of greenish soapstone. It was about the size of a man’s palm, but the slanting break at one end showed that it was a portion of a longer original.

  “Come with me, Westerner,” the king said. “You have seen my Tyla servants, whom I brought from Anti-Thule. I will show you what else I brought from that place and time, lest you doubt my power.”

  Varus looked at him and considered. If he were really so confident of his power, he wouldn’t have to brag about it. Aloud Varus said, “Lead, then.”

  Govinda turned and walked into the palace courtyard, flanked by the eight Tyla and probably a hundred of the dismounted horsemen who had accompanied him at Raguram’s palace. Varus followed without being prodded, as the guards beside and behind him were certainly willing to do.

  Perhaps I should change them into toads, Varus thought, smiling. He wondered where Bhiku was.

  The palace was a quadrangle. The walls were four stories high in the front through which Varus had come and three stories for the two ends. The final side, the back, was a reservoir much larger that the one standing behind Raguram’s complex.

  Instead of being open, Govinda’s tank was surrounded by a high iron fence with spikes on top and pointing inward, like the wall of saplings that soldiers in the field stacked with the sharp-cut trunks facing the enemy. At both ends were masonry platforms thirty feet above the water. Twenty or more bound prisoners—men, women, and children—stood on each platform, hedged in by the drawn sabers of an equal number of guards.

  “I sent a messenger ahead to prepare this demonstration,” Govinda said. There was something oily in his voice, like the scum floating on the surface of a swamp. “If you fail to carry out my orders, you will get a closer view yet.”