But Turpin had said the boy’s world was like ours in almost every detail if set a few years back along the wave. And yet they didn’t have the balance. The idea that they could get along without it, that their great powers had, presumably through mere accident, in his world still preserved the status quo enough for consciousness and society … well, there was a subversive tidbit. No wonder Turpin felt a little vulnerable at having opened that door. No wonder he himself seemed to be leaning less and less on the balance.
Hamilton chided himself. These musings were not appropriate when in the field. He found his bearings in the forest as it stood, if anything could be said to stand on its own now. He quartered it, and moving as silently as he could, explored the territory down to the river, all the angles of the estate. He found nobody.
He used the covers in his eyes to move to the next nearest option after the servants’ world. This would be one of those chosen for His Majesty’s sport.
The house was much the same, with a few minor architectural differences. A flag with some sort of meaningless symbol flew over it. Hamilton didn’t want to know what it meant. He quartered the ground again, and found only some old men in a uniform he didn’t recognize and some young women in entertainingly little. Presumably that situation would get more extraordinary as the season arrived. He wondered if ladies would be brought here, or if they would be offered their own options of tea and mazes.
He changed his eyes again, and this time when he searched he found Columbians walking the paths, that quaint accent that reminded him of watching Shakespeare. These people, as he crouched nearby and listened to them pass, spoke with a horrid lack of care, as if there was nobody to judge them, no enemy opposing them. Some of them would know of the interest of a King in their world, some would surely not. For His Majesty to venture into any of even these carefully chosen worlds should be for him to go on safari, into territory that was not his own. And yet the choice was everything, wasn’t it? These worlds must be utterly safe. Unless one of them had the boy in it.
He searched through several worlds. He kept all their meanings at bay. He considered where he would go if he were in the boy’s shoes, and in so considering realized there must be something he was missing … because he couldn’t imagine coming here at all. He finally found, among the dozen or so options, somewhere empty. There was no house visible through the trees, the river was in a different place, the height of where he stood above sea level was different, and yet, according to the bare information about where he was on the globe that his covers insisted upon, he was in the same place. He looked around slowly, made sure he was hidden from all angles. Not only was the house gone, there were no houses on the plain, as far as he could see. And there was something … something extraordinary about—
“So they did send you.” The voice was his own. It came from up the hillside.
Hamilton couldn’t see its source. He stepped to put the trunk of a tree between it and himself. He took the Webley Collapsar from its holster.
“Where’s the Herald?” he called.
“You won’t find her—”
That told Hamilton she wasn’t right there beside him. He dropped to his knee as he swung out from the tree, his left hand on his pistol wrist, and fired at the voice. The report and the whump of the round going off made one sound. And then there was another, a crash of branches as the boy broke cover. Hamilton leapt out and fired twice more at the sound, foliage and undergrowth compacting in instants, momentary pulses of gravity sucking at his clothes, newly focused light dazzling him like a line of new stars blossoming and then gone in a moment.
Without looking for a result, he swung back behind the tree. Then he listened.
The movement had stopped. Of course it had. He wouldn’t have kept moving. He’d have lain there for a few moments, then lain there a bit longer.
He heard small movements from up the hill. With these rounds, it was likely that if the boy was still alive, he was also unwounded. He began to slowly make his way through the trees, making sure he also wasn’t going to be where the boy had last placed him. As he walked, he started to wonder about his surroundings. There was indeed something very strange about this empty world. He’d sometimes heard, at parties, at Court, back when he’d been invited, the sort of people who had nothing better to do talking about the glories of nature, about some mysterious poetic energy that looking at the simplicity of it could inspire in them. Hamilton thought, and had once ill-advisedly said, that nature wasn’t simple at all, that the billions of edges and details and angled surfaces in any view of it were the essence of complexity, much more so than any of the artifacts of civilization. To him, nature was cover, and all the better for its detail. Liz … her Royal Highness … had made some joke on that occasion to cover the fact that he’d just bluntly contradicted the French ambassador.
But here was some strange feeling of glory. The trees all around him, the undergrowth he was paying such attention to as he stepped through it, it all seemed to be shouting at him. The colors seemed too bright. Was this some flaw in his covers? No. This was too complete. But it wasn’t about simplicity. The objects he saw nearby, even the river glimpsed down there, they were all … there was more detail than he was used to. He recalled a time when he’d injured one of his corneas, the fuzziness of view in one eye, until they’d grown and fitted a new one. It was like he’d suffered from something like that all his life, and now he could see better. God, it would be good to be able to stay here. Such relief and rest would be his.
No. These were dangerous thoughts.
There was a noise ahead of him and he brought the gun up. But he swiftly saw what it was. A fox was staring at him from between two bushes. Of course, he’d been downwind of it, and it had turned to face him in that instant. Better luck than he’d ever had on the hunt. But the eyes on this thing, the sheen of its fur, the intensity of every strand, that he could see from here …
The fox broke the instant and ran.
Something in the world broke with it and Hamilton hit the ground hard, realizing in that moment that his eardrums were resounding and being glad they were resounding because that meant he was still alive, and he threw himself aside as the soil and leaves still fell around him and were sucked suddenly sideways, and he was rolling down the hill, crashing into cover and grabbing the soil to stop himself before the noise had died.
The boy had nearly had him. The boy had the same gun. Of course he had.
He lay there, panting. Then he lay there some more. The boy couldn’t be sure he was here or he’d have fired by now. He wondered, ridiculously, for a moment, about the life of the fox. He killed the thought and started to push himself forward on his elbows. He realized, as he did so, that he wasn’t injured. This might come down to a lucky shot. It was a contest of blunderbusses and balloons.
He felt, oddly, that it was apt his life should come to this. Then he killed that thought too. It would be more bloody apt if his life came to this then continued after the death of the other fellow.
“You could just stay here.” That was the boy again, hard to trace where it was coming from beyond the general direction. He’d placed himself somewhere that the sound was broken, some trees close together, a rock wall.
Hamilton kept looking. “Why do you say that?”
“Don’t you know where you are?”
“An optional Britain.”
“Hardly, old man.” The affectations he’d lost along the way. “It’s not a country at all if there’s nobody in it.”
“I presume His Majesty has been in it. And probably found good hunting.”
“As well he might. In heaven.”
Hamilton grinned at the oddness of that. “How do you make that out?” It felt like the boy wanted to debate with his father. Wanted to test the bars of his cage. Perhaps he’d felt like that, at that age, but his own father’s failure had meant he never felt able to, or perhaps had never felt the need. A place where there was no identity for him and no reason to do
anything? More like the hell with no balance that the boy came from.
“It’s more … real … than where either of us are from. And I say it’s obviously heaven, because nobody got here.”
Hamilton had heard the smile in his voice. “Except us. Are you sure it’s not the other place?” A curious thought came to him. “Is that why you want me to stay?”
“I mean that if I went back, they wouldn’t search in here. You could wait a few days, go anywhere you want.”
Hamilton grimaced at that lack of meaning in the boy’s life. “You think I’d abandon my duty?” He had a vision for a moment of being replaced in his life by the younger man. It felt like an invasion of himself. But also there was the frightening feel of temptation to it.
“I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that, old man.” He meant it, too. “I mean you could take advantage of this game. They need one of us to die, so …”
Where had he got that idea? Turpin would have liked to see the boy hauled back as a trophy, but the Palace was decidedly lukewarm on the matter, and Hamilton couldn’t see any way in which any of the interested parties would be satisfied with the boy, rather than himself, emerging from the forest. “Who told you that?”
A pause. “Are you trying to lie to me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it … old man. I’m just here to bring you back.” The boy might assume that Hamilton had been given covers he had not, lies that could fool ears that could detect lies. Or he might know that whatever he had in his head was in advance of anything Hamilton had as standard issue. But they knew each other’s voices too well.
There was a sound from a direction Hamilton didn’t expect. He turned, but he made himself do it with his gun lowered. There stood the boy. He had his gun lowered too. Hamilton stepped towards him. He allowed himself to make the first honest eye contact he’d had with his younger self. To see that face looking open to him was truly extraordinary, a joy that needed to be held down, a kindness worth crossing the waves that held worlds apart. He took a deep breath of an air that was indeed better than any he’d tasted. Whether or not this was heaven, he could imagine His Majesty walking in it and its giving him ideas of what should belong to him, of hunting endlessly here, with new youth for himself whenever he wished, and younger versions of every courtier and courtesan at his command. There would be, thanks to this boy, if some sort of misunderstanding could be proved, new manners forever. But that was hardly the boy’s fault. And in that moment, Hamilton decided to lead him back to the clearing, and to another thing often denied to their kind: explanations.
“I was told,” began the boy, “that I could only secure my place in society, in your world, by killing you. That that was why we had been brought together in … different contests.”
Hamilton realized that this was exactly what he had once himself imagined. “Who—?”
A shot exactly like his or the boy’s rang out across the absolute clarity of the sky. The boy’s face bloated, in a moment, his body deformed by the impact, blood and the elements of a name bursting from his mouth. The collapsar shell sucked in again and the body dropped to the ground, emptied.
She stepped forward, lowering her gun. At least she had the grace to look sad. “Miss Nothing,” she said.
She was still wearing that bloody dress. She slipped her gun back inside it, hiding it again. She and Hamilton stood looking at each other for a while, until Hamilton understood that if he wanted to shoot her, she was going to let him, and angrily holstered his gun.
She immediately started back towards the house. He considered the idea of burying the boy. The absurdity of it made something catch in his throat. He marched after her and caught up. “Damn you. Damn both of us for not seeing you coming.” He grabbed her by the arm to stop her. “I take it you were never truly out of favor with the College?”
She looked calmly at him. “We don’t mind the idea of raiding optional worlds. We don’t mind stealing new bodies for old minds. Up to a point. But we draw the line at them replacing us. We’re the bloody College of Heralds, Major. Without family trees, we’d be out of business.’
“And by setting up the boy to look like he was capable of theft, kidnapping, and treachery, to the point of even being a threat to His Majesty—”
“We’ve proven such replacements to be unreliable. They never had the balance, you see.”
“And you’re telling me this because—?”
She looked truly sad for him in that moment. She understood him. “Because you’re going to let me get away with it.”
They emerged into the clearing. As they did so, Precious immediately became the model of a trembling, rescued victim. “He was a monster!” she cried out, supporting herself on Hamilton’s arm.
“Was?” asked the voice of Turpin from the trees.
Hamilton kept his expression calm. “The boy is dead now,” he said.
Steven Saylor
Bestselling author Steven Saylor is one of the brightest stars in the “historical mystery” subgenre, along with authors such as Lindsey Davis, John Maddox Roberts, and the late Ellis Peters. He is the author of the long-running Roma Sub Rosa series, which details the adventures of Gordianus the Finder, a detective in a vividly realized Ancient Rome, in such novels as Roman Blood, Arms of Nemesis, The Venus Throw, Catilina’s Riddle, A Murder on the Appian Way, Rubicon, Last Seen In Massilia, A Mist of Prophecies, The Judgment of Caesar, The Triumph of Caesar, and The Seven Wonders. Gordianus’s exploits at shorter lengths have been collected in The House of the Vestals: The Investigations of Gordianus the Finder and A Gladiator Dies Only Once: The Further Investigations of Gordianus the Finder. Saylor’s other books include A Twist at the End, Have You Seen Dawn?, and a huge non-Gordianus historical novel, Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome. His most recent books are the big second volume in the Roma sequence, Empire: A Novel of Ancient Rome, and a new Gordianus novel, Raiders of the Nile. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Recently, as recounted in The Seven Wonders, Saylor has introduced a whole new series of tales which take a teenaged Gordianus to visit the Seven Wonders of the World with his traveling companion, the elderly Greek poet Antipater of Sidon. Set in the fabled city of Tyre in 91 B.C., “Ill Seen in Tyre” is a previously untold episode from the journey of the young Gordianus. As Gordianus discovers, Tyre was also the location, a hundred years before his visit, of the only known earthly adventure of two of the greatest rogues in literature, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (as recounted in Fritz Leiber’s 1947 novella Adept’s Gambit, later included in the Leiber collection Swords in the Mist). This mulitdimensional crossing of paths in Tyre might seem a mere coincidence, but as Gordianus learns, on earth as in Nehwon, all stories and storytellers are subtly, even magically, connected.
ILL SEEN IN TYRE
Steven Saylor
“What are those curious pictures on the walls?” I said. The tavern’s pretty serving girl, a voluptuous blonde, had just delivered my third cup of wine, and the pictures were looking curiouser and curiouser.
Antipater, my traveling companion and erstwhile tutor, furrowed his snowy brows and gave me that withering look I had come to know all too well during our journey. Though I was nineteen, and a man by Roman law, his look made me feel closer to nine.
“Gordianus! Can it be that you do not know the stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser?”
“The gray what?”
“Mouser,” he said.
I frowned. “I know what a mouse is, but what on earth is a mouser?”
Antipater sighed. “It is a term used for the common Egyptian house cat, a creature renowned for its hunting skills, particularly as regards rodents. Thus, mouser: a hunter of mice.”
“Ah, well, we don’t have cats in Rome, you know.” I shuddered at the very thought of such a creature, with its sharp claws and vicious fangs. I had encountered a few in our travels, living on ships. Supposedly, the captains prized their ability to keep a vessel free of vermin, but I had kept my distance from these exotic cre
atures. Like most Romans, I found them vaguely repellent, if not downright menacing. I had been told that the Egyptians actually worshipped these furry beasts, allowing them to roam the streets and even to live in their homes. I had not yet been to Egypt, but the idea that the Egyptians lived with cats did not made me eager to visit.
Eventually, of course, Antipater and I would have to visit Egypt, for it was home to the Great Pyramid, the oldest and some said the grandest of the Wonders of the World, and it was our intent to visit all seven of those marvels. We had just come from Rhodes, home of the Colossus, and were on our way to Babylon, home of the fabled Walls and the Hanging Gardens.
At the moment—between Wonders, so to speak—we found ourselves in the port city of Tyre, which had its own long and fabled history. Tyre was perhaps most famous for the production of dye from the murex shell; every king in the world insisted on being robed in Tyrian purple. Tyre also happened to be the birthplace of Antipater, so our visit here was in some ways a homecoming for him.
Thus did my thoughts ramble as I sipped my third cup of wine. Antipater was actually ahead of me, on his fourth cup. It was uncommon for him to indulge in immoderate drinking. His abandonment of sobriety had something to do with being in his hometown. What could be more poignant than an elderly poet surrounded by childhood memories?
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