HOME (The Portal Series, Book 3)

by Bowker, Richard;

  “I never cared about the Gallians. Larry and I just wanted to get back to Via so he could return to his own world. Now I have seen what Feslund and his mother are doing to the empire. They need to be stopped.”

  Decius nodded. “They do need to be stopped. Would you kindly put that weapon away, please?”

  Palta put the gant back in the pocket of her robe.

  “Thank you. You say you come from the world where the priests obtained these weapons. How much do you know about them?”

  Palta shrugged. “I don’t know how to make them, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “No, no. Of course not. I’m told that the weapons lose their power eventually. Do you know how long this takes?”

  “It depends on how often you use them.”

  “What if you don’t use them?” Decius asked. “What if they are sitting in the armamentarium in Urbis?”

  Palta recalled talking about this with Gratius. “The world where I lived is called Gaia,” she said. “Viators would have to return to Gaia every couple of years to restore the power of the gants in Urbis. And those gants weren’t being used at all.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “The Gallians can’t find any viators, can they?” Palta said. “They’ve all disappeared.”

  “That was the situation when I left Roma. I doubt that it has changed.”

  “Without any viators to bring the gants back to Gaia, the weapons will lose their power, and the Gallians will no longer be able to use them. So that’s good news for the rebels. The Gallians can’t rule by lies and fear forever,” she said. “Eventually they can be beaten.”

  “I hope you are right.” Decius sighed. He stood up abruptly. “It is too hot in here,” he said. “Let’s go outside.”

  They went down into the streets of Misenum. People hurried by. Women carried woven baskets on their heads. Couples held hands. Children skipped and laughed. A cloud passed over the sun. They walked along the waterfront. Finally they stopped and looked out at the dozen or more ships moored in the harbor.

  “You have a lot of ships,” Palta remarked.

  “We do,” Decius agreed.

  “I hear that you may attack Roma before long.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “I’m a serving girl at a tavern. The soldiers talk.”

  “The soldiers know nothing.”

  “So you’re not going to attack Roma?”

  “Would you?” Decius asked.

  Palta considered, and then shook her head. “Not while the gants still have their power. It would be like King Harald all over again.”

  She was a smart girl, Decius thought, although the answer should have been obvious to anyone with a brain.

  “But you probably can’t maintain an army for a couple of years while you wait for the gants to run out of power,” she went on. “And there is always the chance the Gallians will find a viator who will help them.”

  Yes, she was certainly a smart girl. “Soldiers need purpose,” he said. “And they need to be paid. Otherwise they’ll just drift away.”

  “So what will you do?”

  Decius shrugged. He wasn’t going to tell her their plans—such as they were.

  They fell silent. The girl looked worried. “Can my gant help you?” she asked.

  Decius found himself liking her. And believing that she wanted to help. “Perhaps,” he said. “But do not tell anyone you have this weapon. Or that you are from another world. Or that you helped the Gallians defeat the priests. But I expect that you understand these things.”

  “Of course I do. But how can I help? I won’t just hand my gant over to you. And I don’t expect that I’ll be made a legionary.”

  He considered. “Join my staff,” he proposed. “It may be boring, but it will surely be better than working in a tavern. We will find a way for you to help us.”

  “What is your role, my lord?”

  “That is to be determined, along with much else. Our military leaders understand that they will need civilian administrators at some point if they are successful. I am the best they have.”

  “Larry spoke highly of you.”

  Decius tried to remember him. He recalled being doused with water in that room beneath the Circus Maximus, but little about the boy who had doused him. “I am grateful for his praise,” he said. “So, will you join me?”

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “What will I do? I know nothing of civilian administration.”

  Decius nodded. “Now would be a good time to learn. Come, let’s find Corscius and get started.”

  Thirty-One

  Larry

  Larry probed the invisible field with his hands, with his mind. It pushed back against him, but not completely. It felt as though he and the field were two magnets with the wrong ends aimed at each other. If only he could get the ends lined up right, he and the field would snap together.

  Or something.

  So he needed to turn his mind backwards, or inside out. Make it positive instead of negative, or vice versa. Maybe the metaphor didn’t make any sense. He didn’t know how to turn his mind inside out.

  Here was another metaphor. This was a portal, except it was locked. To open it, you needed a key, a combination, a password.

  Yes, that was better. A password.

  After a while it came to him. Well, something came to him.

  He placed his hands on the field, and he filled his mind with thoughts of home. Earth-home. Arguing with Cassie. Playing video games with Matthew in their room. Riding his bike with Kevin. Making Christmas cookies in the kitchen with his Mom, listening to carols on the radio. Tossing a football to his Dad in the backyard. Oh, and wait: there he was playing the piano for Professor Gardner in Carmody’s version of Earth; there he was with that world’s version of his father and mother, a simple farmer and his wife who had buried their son once and then saw him magically returned to them. Oh, how could he have left them?

  And there was Palta, gazing at him in the colonnade after the chariot race in Roma, as the rain poured down and his dream of returning to Earth had been destroyed.

  Home.

  He felt the field give way.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Affron. He held out his hand. “Take it,” he said.

  Affron grasped his hand, and they walked inside.

  They were in a garden. A rose garden—roses of every type and color, lining a narrow dirt path. His mother had a couple of rose bushes in their back yard, but they barely managed to bloom every summer, despite all her efforts.

  “Looks like we’re in another world,” Affron murmured.

  “It’s a beautiful one,” Larry replied.

  They set out along the path. It wound through the garden, and eventually the roses gave way to other flowers, most of which Larry didn’t recognize. Not that he had ever spent much time studying flowers.

  Eventually he saw someone up ahead—an old black man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, baggy green pants, and a loose gray tunic. He was on his knees, weeding. They approached him. He looked up, squinting against the sun. “Salve!” he said in oddly accented Latin. Welcome!

  “Salve!” Larry and Affron replied.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “Um, we just arrived,” Larry said.

  “But there are two of you,” the man pointed out, looking perplexed.

  “That’s right.”

  The man appeared to ponder this, and then he stood up. “Well, it makes no difference, of course. You are still welcome. My name is M’Nasi.”

  Larry and Affron introduced themselves.

  “Where did you come from?” M’Nasi asked.

  Affron explained.

  “Very good,” M’Nasi said. “Very good. You have no idea how you got here, but here you are. That’s as it should be. Let’s take a walk.”

  He led them further along the path. They passed a vegetable garden: Larry didn’t recognize most of the vegetables. Then they went through a patch of w
oods. In among the trees they saw a brown-haired woman sitting on the grass, her legs crossed, her eyes closed.

  Her hands were making motions in the air.

  “Well, that looks familiar,” Affron murmured.

  “I expect that it does,” M’Nasi replied.

  “Does this world have a name?” Larry asked.

  “It has many names,” M’Nasi said. “So many that I can’t remember them all. Some of us call it Elysium.”

  The word was familiar to Larry, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  “Have we died?” Affron asked.

  M’Nasi smiled. “You are very much alive, my friends. And you are young. That is good.”

  Once they came out of the woods, Larry saw two- and three-story stone buildings in the distance. “Almost there,” M’Nasi said. “Many people to meet.”

  They walked into what seemed to be a small town. The streets were made of cobblestone, but there was no traffic. The first person they saw was an old man sitting on a bench, staring straight ahead and trembling slightly. “This is Jubal,” M’Nasi said. “He doesn’t speak, alas.”

  “Why not?” Affron asked.

  “Ah, there is much to learn, much to explain,” M’Nasi replied.

  Which explained nothing. On the bench next to Jubal sat a bearded man wearing a ragged olive-colored Grateful Dead t-shirt. Larry found this very strange. The bearded man was reading a book; Larry didn’t understand the title on its cover. The man lowered the book as they approached and smiled at them..

  “You’re new here,” he said. He, too, spoke Latin with an odd accent, though different from M’Nasi’s.

  Larry and Affron nodded.

  “And two of you!” he pointed out, just like M’Nasi. “That is excellent.”

  “This is Rigol,” M’Nasi said, and he introduced them.

  “Nice t-shirt,” Larry said, in English.

  Rigol laughed. “You are the first person who has ever said such a thing,” he replied, also in English.

  “Are you from Earth?”

  The man shook his head. “I am not. But some art transcends the world on which it was created, don’t you think?”

  Larry considered. “You’re joking, right?”

  Rigol laughed again. “I think we’ll get along well. Come, let’s visit Amelia. She is probably indulging in some sort of healthful exercise. Amelia is very irritating that way. In her favor, she likes to make people feel at home here in Elysium.”

  “I will sit with Jubal,” M’Nasi said. “Best not to leave him alone.”

  Rigol rose and led them across the street to a stone building with a black door.

  They went inside and found themselves in a large, high-ceilinged room, with a fireplace to their left and open windows ahead of them looking out into yet another garden. A woman was doing pushups in front of the windows.

  “Salve, Amelia,” Rigol called out. “We have new arrivals. Two of them.”

  She smiled and leapt to her feet. “Wonderful!” she said. She grabbed a small towel from a chair. She was tall and, Larry thought, beautiful, with dark eyes and long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Although she spoke Latin, she was wearing Earth-like exercise clothes—black workout pants, a blue tank top, and running shoes. She wiped her face and arms with the towel as she walked over to them. She held out her hand.

  Larry shook her hand and introduced himself. She had the gaze of a viator. The combination of her beauty with that gaze was a bit overwhelming. He glanced at Affron as she turned his gaze on him and shook his hand; yes, he felt it too.

  “I expect they’re tired and hungry if they came to us through the world of the Tulf,” Rigol said. “Also curious and perhaps frightened, although how they could be afraid of you or me or M’Nasi is beyond me. Why don’t you bring them to Lucia’s café, feed them, and start the explanations? I will find them lodgings. There are empty rooms in the building next to mine. They should do while we sort things out.”

  “And Jubal?”

  “M’Nasi is sitting with Jubal. His roses can wait.”

  Amelia smiled. “Come then, Larry and Affron. Let’s get started.”

  She led them back outside, and the three of them walked through the streets of the town. They met more people. All spoke some form of Latin; all were surprised that there were two of them; all of them made Larry feel at home. “Has everyone here—you know—built a portal?” he asked Amelia.

  “Via. Portal. Gateway. Mystical connection to all that is,” she replied. “Yes, we are all quite different, but this is what we have in common.”

  “And you used your portal to come here?”

  “Through the world of the Tulf, yes. We don’t make it easy to get here, I grant you. But we have our reasons for that.”

  “It seems very peaceful,” Affron noted.

  “If you don’t like peace, you don’t stay in Elysium.”

  Eventually they reached an open-air café, with small tables scattered around a brick patio. Two women sat at one of the tables. One of them stood up as they approached. “New arrivals, Lucia!” Amelia called out.

  Lucia was a stout middle-aged woman with frizzy black hair turning gray. She wore a flowing blue suit covered by an apron. “How delightful!” Lucia exclaimed. And she gave them each a hug.

  The woman next to her didn’t rise, didn’t look at them. She was younger than Jubal, but like him she stared straight ahead; her hands didn’t tremble, but her eyes were watery, as if she were on the verge of crying. “This is Veronique,” Lucia said, gesturing to her. “She doesn’t speak, but she is glad you’re here as well. I’m sure.”

  “I expect our guests need to be fed,” Amelia said to Lucia.

  “Of course! That’s why I’m here. Where are you from? Perhaps I have foods you will enjoy.”

  “I grew up in a world called Terra,” Affron said.

  Lucia’s eyes widened. “Terra! Ah, that is interesting. So, you know Roma? Urbis?”

  “Yes, very well. Are you from—?”

  “No, no. I know of it, you see. We know of many worlds here. Anyway, I have bread I baked this morning, cheese, olives, wine, lovely tomatoes…I’ll be right back.”

  Lucia bustled off into the café. Veronique’s gaze didn’t follow her, but she looked distraught after a moment, as if she sensed Lucia’s absence. Amelia took hold of her hand, and she calmed down. Larry wanted to ask about her, but he decided it wasn’t right to do that in front of her. There was plenty of other stuff to learn. So he asked Amelia the first question that came to mind. “How many people live here?”

  “It’s hard to say,” she replied. “A couple of hundred, perhaps. Once you have found Elysium, you can come and go as you please, without having to travel through the world of the Tulf. Some people find Elysium rather boring after a while; other feel that it is the haven they have been seeking all their lives. There are no rules or rulers here. We do what we want to do. And we support each other.” Amelia glanced at Veronique as she said this. “It is a lovely place.”

  “Is Elysium separate from the world of the Tulf?” Affron asked.

  “It is in that world, but we control Elysium—its climate, its resources. People far smarter than I am created it long ago. It is quite small, but suited to our purposes. If we wanted to make it larger, I suppose we could figure out how.”

  “We knew that we needed to go to the world of the Tulf, even though we’d never been there before,” Larry said. “And then we figured out how to enter Elysium. How did we know these things?”

  Amelia shook her head. “Some of us spend our lives pondering such questions, but I don’t think we have satisfactory answers, any more than we have an answer for why we can build portals.”

  “What is your story?” Affron asked. “How did you come to be here?”

  “Ah, my story isn’t interesting. Like most people here, I had no idea that I was building a portal. It was a compulsion that came over me in my twenties. I wasn’t spiritual; I wasn’t interested in scienc
e. I was supposed to finish my schooling, perhaps get married, have children. I had no time for sitting alone and using my mind in strange ways. But I had to make the time; it was a compulsion. I expect it was the same for you. Before long, nothing else mattered. And then, at last, it happened, the portal was there—I had spun it out of nothingness. And I walked through it, into another world. My own world hadn’t any conception of a multiple worlds, so I had no idea what had happened to me. I thought at first I had gone to heaven—are you familiar with the idea of heaven?”

  Affron and Larry both nodded.

  “But the world I ended up in was nothing like either heaven or hell,” Amelia went on. “It was just…different. It was a wildly confusing experience at first. I started exploring. And I couldn’t stop. I was so excited. I wanted to tell everyone. I wanted to bring my friends with me. I wanted to become rich and famous.”

  “But you did none of those things,” Affron said.

  “No, of course not. Those who try to use the portal to become rich and famous do not end up in Elysium. Or, they learn their lessons and change before they are destroyed. Then I thought: I will use the portal to improve my world. Bring back the wisdom and knowledge I discovered in my travels. Many of us have tried this. But it is always harder than we expect. Much, much harder. It was impossible for me. I am not especially clever. I am a woman, and that counted against me in my world. I was ignored; I was laughed at; friends left me; my family sought help for me.”

  “It made you unhappy,” Affron said.

  Amelia smiled. “It makes everyone unhappy, Affron. Each in his own way, for his own reasons.”

  “But you found this place,” Larry said.

  “I did.”

  “Do you ever return home?”

  She shook her head. “For me, Elysium is home.”

  Lucia returned then with a platter of food, a jug of wine, and cups. “Now you must eat and tell us about yourselves,” she announced, sitting down next to Veronique.

  The food was delicious. Affron and Larry then told their stories. They seemed wildly strange to Larry, but Amelia and Lucia simply nodded in sympathy. “Every story is different,” Lucia said, “and every story is the same.”