The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  And when it had washed away once more, hours later—retreating in dirty white waves, like some phantom tide—

  —he’d found that a good third of “his” cohort had gone, along with it.

  * * *

  “Where are we now, Lucian?”

  “Doubtful, magistere—the hills are tricksy, here-a-ways, and I’ve no dealings with these tribes, me.”

  “Do you think she leads us truly?”

  “Truly as she might, that one.”

  Nearby, the seer-girl slept with her usual slack opacity, nails furrowing her palms. Arcturus had “forgotten” to hobble her, a more and more frequent occurrence; she showed no signs of running any longer, slinking instead at Arcturus’ elbow, that inevitable smile crimping her lips with secret—humor? Anticipation? Longtime proximity had failed to render him any more able to decipher her accent, let alone read her moods.

  She had ceased to bleed, however, he had finally noticed. Unless one counted her rock-cut feet, printing snow and soil alike where she stepped in fresh, savage rust.

  “The men seem quiet.” At one of those unreadable shrugs: “Morale? They talk to you, still; you must have formed some opinion, by now . . . ”

  Lucian gave him a sidelong glance, considering. Then answered, reluctantly—

  “They think, magistere . . . that we are moving into the land of the dead.”

  (With the unspoken coda, so obvious it needed no voicing: Their land of the dead, of course. Not yours.)

  For even in this topsy-turvy country, Hades—and Tartarus, and the rest—remained safely down, not up.

  That next morning, he woke hearing traces of conversation on the wind, quickly cut off as though they’d been talking about him while he slept. The cohort avoided his eyes, almost to a man. The girl caught his gaze, and winked.

  To Lucian: “It won’t be long now.”

  “Aye, magistere. Na long, surely.”

  “And they’ll be pleased enough to have those stones, after all.”

  “Oh, certain.”

  Up, and up, and up yet once more into the gathering fog, by faint and winding no-paths: Tracks carved from chalk likewise, spiralling widdershins, which crumbled precariously away beneath their sandals while the girl just skipped ahead, fleet and sure as any mountain-goat. Then a pause to rest by some uncharted lake’s eddying side, where a sudden fall of sunlight more surprising than thunder or lightning dazzled them all with its brilliance—grey turned silver with reflected fire, illuminating water-droplets on the weeds and bracken, his own breastplate and greaves, the company’s rapt faces all upturned as one towards the girl where she squatted in the icy shallows . . .

  White circlet of light erupting from her head, transforming her. Blurring her blue-cheeked profile into a luminous, featureless oval, like she was some—

  (Goddess)

  —made manifest, flesh-bound yet transcendent, here on the soggy earth beside him.

  And: Who can tell how the Gods appear? His mater‘s long-lost voice, cooing at his mind’s ear. They are Gods, after all—capricious, spiteful, quick to tempt and judge. As we might be as well, in their position.

  Blank, featureless. And yet, somewhere—somehow—he knew that smile was still there.

  It was this last which touched him, hard and sharp, to the very quick. And thus he found himself bolt upright in mid-swing, his fist connecting hard with her jaw; saw her fall and his kick blend, the girl doubling into herself with a hurt little gasp, like any assaulted animal. Stopped only when his heel found the pulse of her neck and balanced there, panting—a precarious perch, what with his movement clumsily arrested mid-consummation—while his sole itched like ants in a wound to bear down hard and end this whole abortion of a “campaign” outright, the best and most controllable way he knew how . . .

  “Calm thee, magistere!” Lucian cried, hand on Arcturus’s elbow. But Arcturus shook him off, snapping:

  “You’ve led us astray, slut—there’s no cache here, just sheep and rain. And what did I promise if you betrayed us, do you recall it? Do you?”

  Quiet: “A, Roman.”

  “How I’d cut your cords, that’s right, and snap your neck for you too, if you’ve dared to play me false—do you understand me now, you Latin-less whore, or should I spell it out yet clearer? Barbarian!”

  “A, she hears tha, a-true. She knows—”

  Arcturus snorted. “Oh yes, so I’ve heard—far too many times to count, let alone believe. Then let Her tell me if you can’t, and quickly, before I leave you no tongue to tell Her tales with: Where is what we’re seeking?”

  Leaning close, almost close enough to taste her gamy breath, while the toe of his sandal shifted to dig in hard just below her voicebox. Close enough to see her pale eyes flicker to him with one last wet flash, the tail-end spark of her earlier accidental deification: Blank, cold, silver. Impenetrable as mercury.

  (Unnatural creature!)

  “Look behind tha, Roman.”

  Behind, where the fog was already rolling away to disclose a cave’s open mouth: Cracked chalk lips set in lichen-clad stone, bracketted by the same blue spirals as either pair of her own. And inside, a dropping off, a falling away; gentle but fatal, downwards into darkness.

  A slope whose tilt struck the same angle—exactly—as the seer-girl’s bloodied grin.

  Lucian, always prepared, had already lit his lamp. Now he stepped forward, lifting it, to show the others where best to make their entrance. They slipped inside one by one, leaving he, Arcturus and the girl alone together.

  And: One must keep to one’s fides, Arcturus found himself thinking, automatic as drill. When a cohort steps so bravely into the very inmost heart of their former error, the very least their commander may do is to not hang back—not to show fear or hesitance, but discipline and consistency. To set an example.

  To be Roman, without dispute, even in the face of all that is not—can never be—Roma. Not even if it wants to.

  (If it does, indeed.)

  Behind them—forgotten, for the moment—the girl was levering herself, shakily, to her feet again; Lucian handed his lamp on to the last man in and turned back, frowning, to see why his magistere was so slow in joining them.

  “Wilt come?” he asked, finally. “’Tis an old-folk stopping-place, that’s what; where they as chasing we kennel their goods under Goddess’s protection, so can’t stay out here, no-wise, with suchlike out to track us. But down-a-ways, in cave-heart, that’s where we’ll doubtless find what waits thee—”

  The man meant his words to be comforting, Arcturus supposed, though their construction was anything but. For all his fine sentiments, however, he found himself locked fast right where he was: Eyes on the cave, unable to pry them free long enough to answer. Frozen core-deep in the knowledge that places such as this, legendarily, had always been what the route to his Land of the Dead was supposed to look like.

  With more confidence than he felt: “Yes. Of course.”

  Lucian gave an odd little mouth-twist at that, neither happy nor disappointed—took the girl’s dirty hand in his own equally filthy paw, with quite unnecessary delicacy, then moved aside to let her through.

  “Lead on,” he told her, rather than ordered; the girl just nodded, face set, impassive as ever.

  But oh, Arcturus knew, that was never the way to deal with her, or any of her kind—closer to Lucian than he would ever be, in the final, most depressing analysis. Her with her bent head, her empty face, her lying, broke-toothed mouth: The least trustworthy guide he ever could possibly have picked to put his faith in, here beyond Wall and camp alike, not to mention that straight-sketched road-to-be which had taken him—along with those he led—away from it . . .

  But this place had no roads at all, not that such as he or his former masters could travel. And when no place is paved, then everywhere is road—a mapless marsh of
false turf over cold, wasting depths, where anything can happen.

  The girl looked back at him, once, over Lucian’s shoulder—an obvious challenge, albeit unspoken: See how your tamed dog comes to my whistle? Much like you, sniffing up under my skirt at all hours; you, always grinding my face into the dirt even while you dig grave-deep between my legs, so as not to risk catching your own fear reflected there.

  A-true, Roman?

  Not her voice, surely, so clear and plausible, another mocking echo within the confines of his increasingly-haunted head. But, perhaps—

  —Hers?

  Impossible to deny, either way, leaving him only two potential courses of action to pursue or discard; Arcturus tapped gladius-hilt to steady himself, and found it unyielding as ever. For though the Gods might be silent, yet his blade stayed sharp, his resolve firm—he would not be beaten, not now. Not even here.

  So he followed her in, and down.

  * * *

  And now, down here in the deep, the dark . . . here in the Place of Skulls, the Goddess’s own Grove, where meat hangs headless to ripen for her hogs, and the fruit of her worshippers’ efforts lies everywhere in irregular, dun-glint, empty-socketted piles . . .

  Down here near a rock pool lined with the same stones they’ve travelled so far to find, careless wealth heaped high and calcite dripping white in folds around its rim, a cruel blind eye surrounded by stalagmites carved so that stroking their ridges produces a weird, rasping kind of music—oh, and by a veritable forest of heads on sticks, too: Three or four to a spear each, some fresh, some mummified, their jawbones left flapping by sinew in the cave’s black no-wind. Some yet recognizable, also, for all that the only light revealing them comes from Lucian’s lamp’s pitiful, guttering flame.

  Cairn-gorms and “grove-stones,” an equal treasure, equally sacred: Both taken in battle, as honor to the Goddess. Run the one through your fingers and they click wetly, soft as old bones. Raise the other to your ear and they whisper, like shells.

  Here is where she struck him down with one blow, almost as though mimicking his attack in kind: Her small, single hand like a hammer, heavy enough to crush two planks together and make a crucifixion of them. Where she turned on him in full warp-spasm, the hero-halo breaking from her head to rend the darkness around them with an awful, pallid haze, her neck-muscles puffed and rigid like ropes, veins writhing up and down her naked limbs. Where her face first took on the glare and rictus it still wears, so utterly other—that of an actor’s mask, the Oracle at Delphi, a Bacchante in full frenzy.

  Maiden become mother become crone, become all three in one, all one in three: Proserpine, Hecate, the Gorgon on the shield. She become She, at long, long last.

  As Lucian drops to his knees, gladius still in hand but drooping slack, she runs her hands together up the blade, then cups them; black blood fills the bowl of her locked palms and fingers, smoking hot. And Lucian bows his head to drink it greedily, lapping it from the source, staining his mouth and chin—then looks back down at Arcturus where he lies crushed to earth and grins for the first time ever, showing his teeth, unrecognizable. Irredeemable.

  One of them, once more . . . and happy, in a way no Roman can ever have known him, to be so.

  And: Lucian, he thinks, the hurt of it twisting inside him, worse even than the pain of her touch. Lucian, secundus, my right hand in peace and war. My friend.

  Was it nothing but a lie from the very beginning, just some pleasant trick Arcturus worked on himself, all unknowing? Convincing himself the same things he felt might be glimpsed, now and then, in the Briton’s melancholy gaze?

  . . . like as be, magistere. Like as be.

  (Or not.)

  It’s only now, with this madwoman’s grip making his eyes sweat blood, that Arcturus recalls a slander once bandied about concerning another seer-girl, the Oracle at Delphi: That she—maiden, mother or crone, whoever she might have been at the time—was nothing more than a toy for politicians’ aims or Emperors’ decrees, half-mad and mumbling under the influence, evoking only the refuse of an empty mind whenever she yawned her jaws wide to admit “the God.” That there was no God at work in Delphi at all and never had been, just whispers in the dark, murmurs in the sibyl’s smoke-drunk ear; theatre, a peep-show, a circus. All sound and fury, mere ritual entertainment, for the idiot crowd’s delight.

  Would it be better to be killed that way, in outright massacre at the behest of human lunatics? Or at the hands of zealots, in the service of their whore-carried Goddess?

  Whichever way truth lies, though, it won’t matter, soon enough. Soon he’ll be only another shade lapping at the blood-trough, another fluttering ghost on the Styx’s tide, at best. And at worst—

  In the cairns behind him—those he can glimpse, at least—the skulls are split, scooped, emptied. Which evidence suggests they mean to do the same to him, no doubt, before rising to greet the sky next morning; that cold grey sky, mist-hung, screwed down tight as any sarcophagus-lid. A tent with curtains slid and sewn shut, both, to hide a horde of red and dreadful doings.

  Lucian, back on his feet, seems to cast him a vaguely pitying glance while the others hover close to hand, their weapons at the ready. Tells him, quiet, as they watch and wait—

  “As is owed must be paid, magistere, that’s what; as She tells us, reckon, or thy own Gods tell thee. What we owe, in turnabout, for all thee owes Her.”

  So it’s as he suspects: They turned against him long ago, “his” whole cohort, perhaps before this cursed journey’s very outset. Always seeing him not as a leader, a companion, not even as a fellow soldier in the service of strange and distant lords, but as sacrifice only—a Year King to be indulged and protected, steered fate-wards, before being torn apart to irrigate this awful land with his heart’s last, waning spurts.

  Well, so be it, then—what can’t be cured must be endured. Let it never be said a son of Roma could not rouse himself to die bravely, no matter the field of battle.

  And yet: May only poison grow where my blood falls, he thinks, vindictively. May my bones breed discord, like dragons’ teeth. May my death curse you all, to your sons’ sons’ sons, as much and as surely as this end you plan curses me to wander nameless, without surcease, beyond the reach of anything I’ve known, or loved, or lost . . .

  But here she is above him, her stiff hair rayed to frame a face whose own rigidity has started to blur, to soften. To settle once more towards those features he can still recall pressed to his in ecstasy, when the merest touch of her was enough to make him jolt and start in (seemingly) endless hunger.

  He remembers her palm with its red-sketched spiral, closing about him in the dusk. Remembers his own lust with the same sick wrench as a wound long-healed, but once green with infection—the kind that takes a red-hot knife to seal and aches forever-after, especially in rainy weather.

  “Divius Arcturus,” she addresses him, in perfect Latin—and hikes up her skirts, all unashamed, to show him that place he faithfully hoped never to have to see again.

  “Admire your work, Centurion: Her blood and yours have mixed. Maiden to mother, by your seed and my command. You will leave some small thing of yourself behind with us, after all.”

  “You,” he says, mouth dry, and stops; swallows spit, and tries again. “You . . . are . . . her Goddess.”

  That smile. “Oh yes.” And then, leaning close, rot-soft: “ . . . yours, too.”

  Followed by that same voice, so persuasive, inside his narrowing mind: For She is ALL in all, Roman—do you not know it for fact, truly, even now? All darkness. All mothers.

  (All Goddesses.)

  A flash, a dazzle, then a sudden plunge back to dimness and obscure, threatening motion: Lucian and his brethren stepping closer as her halo douses, blades in hand. Arcturus tries to appeal to Her, helplessly—but the Goddess is gone, leaving only the girl to cup her stomach, stroke his lips with hers. And
whisper, with her more natural, broken voice restored:

  “A, tha. Sleep tha, now. She has tha, Roman. She sends tha down. Sleep now, and wait ‘till She bid she call tha name . . . ”

  The seer-girl slips her cold hands around Arcturus’s waist. Slowly, carefully, she pronounces his name afresh—and stumbles over it, exactly as he always knew she would.

  “Arc-tu-rus, tha’rt she’s now, she—and She. Tha’rt She-own now, Roman-no-more. A-true.”

  Oh, Mars Ultor, Roma Aeterna. Roma, and all the Gods of Roma. Where have you allowed me to be taken? Where, where have you—

  —sent—

  —me?

  (For perhaps all gods are conspirators, in truth. Perhaps none of them wish us well . . . or no single one, any more so than any other.)

  The seer-girl, smiling: “Tha’rt spiral-end now, brave kill-king, trained and made to die well from tha name-day on; so She knew, when first set eye on tha. And so tha’rt here at last, such long time counting—sent here, by Her, to she. Sent . . . ”

  . . . down.

  (Down, Roman.)

  Nowhere else.

  As though, in the end, there were anywhere else to go—

  (Not here, at any rate.)

  He can feel her fingers on his, rough and gentle; feels her sleek his hair the way one calms a fearful sheep on the altar’s steps, that very same mild mixture of affection and regret. Knows himself at once a Citizen amongst savages and an animal amongst the elect, the two states of being balanced exactly, like Justice’s scales.

  And when the lamp falls, when Arcturus’s eyes shut, when her lips brush his forehead one last time—now, then, here, there, everywhere—

  —comes only darkness.

  The Kindly Ones

  IN THE BEGINNING, chaos. From this rose sky, Uranus, and earth, Gaea. And Gaea loved Uranus, giving him many children, but the eldest of them he called monsters and exiled to her deepest depths. So Gaea conspired with her youngest child, Chronos, planning revenge. One day, while Uranus slept, Chronos fell upon him with a sickle and castrated him, throwing his severed testicles into the sea. From Uranus’s spilled seed came Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love, whose beauty sowed similar discord between the children of Chronos until time’s end.