“What is it?” asked Julie.
Hans pointed. Vultures, circling a spot not far ahead.
“This is not wise,” Emile said.
“If he says another word, hit him,” was France’s answer. Leigh agreed.
The paved road out of Eternus abruptly ended. Ahead was a rutted dirt track that wound between a pair of steep, grass-covered hills. Grass in the center of the path had been crushed recently by the passage of wheeled vehicles.
The horses balked, snorting and rearing their harness. Hans smelled it, too—the odor of death.
Leigh, Julie, and France piled out. Hans got down, too, tying the reins to a ring on the driver’s box. Julie gave him the second sword they’d hidden in the wagon.
“Should we bring weirdo, too?” Julie said. Leigh doubled back and ordered Emile out. No longer grinning, he preceded Leigh up the road.
They heard voices. Someone was alive up there. With no plan but to save their friends, they walked straight up the road as it twisted around the hill. It truly smelled like its name—the Hill of Skulls.
France passed Hans. He reached the top a few steps ahead of the others. What he saw at the top of the hill made a sick taste rise in his throat.
There were bones all around. Not just human bones, though there were plenty of those, but cow and horse remains, too. The stench clung to France’s face like a coat of paint.
At the center of the flattened hilltop rose a trio of marble columns. Atop these were statues—a man in Roman armor, presumably the First Citizen, a god wearing a winged helmet and carrying an oddly shaped rod, and a big, stylized perching eagle. Inside the triangle formed by the columns several men stood, stripped to the waist with shovels in their hands. A man in a toga stood by, watching, as did a woman in a long white gown with a veil over her head. Everyone was looking into a hole. The workmen were throwing shovelfuls of dirt into it.
France began yelling and running. The people by the hole looked up, startled. He ran right at the man in the toga, who had the smug look of a petty bureaucrat. Before he could protest or dodge, France slammed into him, hurling him into the deep hole he’d been standing beside.
The priestess screamed. One of the workmen swung his shovel at France, but he was parried by the timely arrival of Leigh, sword in hand. Leigh cut at the fellow, who dropped his tool and ran away, holding bloody fingers. The other three diggers offered no fight and fled.
France leaped into the hole. Standing close together in the pit were Jenny, Eleanor, and Linh. Dirt came up to Jenny’s waist, Linh’s chest, and Eleanor’s armpits. They were gagged. Their hands were tied behind their backs.
France knelt in the dirt and tugged at Linh’s gag. She was weeping with relief.
“We were going to die!” she gasped. “They were burying us alive!”
“I know, I know.” He smoothed her hair and brushed the tears from her cheeks. On Linh’s right, Jenny made annoyed grunts against her gag.
“Sorry.” He worked the knot loose while Hans jumped down to free Eleanor.
They all began babbling at once.
“Kill us, the savages—”
“—no trial, just a sentence!”
“I thought I was dead!”
From above, Leigh threw down a pair of abandoned shovels. Hans and France dug the girls out. The man in the toga lay face down in the dirt. He groaned a little. France yanked the sword from Hans’s belt and stood over him, blade held high.
“Don’t!” Leigh called down.
“Bastard! Burying people alive!”
“It’s the law,” Emile remarked. “As it was in ancient times.”
Disgusted, France threw the sword away. “This is not ancient times!”
They boosted the freed girls out of the pit. Julie and Leigh were guarding the priestess. Jenny identified her as Scipina, from the temple of Ceres.
“You have committed great blasphemies!” she said, nostrils flaring. “The gods will curse you forever!”
“Like I’m scared of stone mannequins,” Julie said. When Scipina went on about curses and doom, Julie gave her a swift kick in the backside. Jenny offered to tie her up and gag her, as she had been. Julie happily helped her.
Linh had nothing to say. She had her arms around France’s neck, and when they drew apart just enough, she kissed him.
Their friends found other things to look at. All except Emile. He watched them closely, finally remarking, “This is interesting.”
“Get a life,” Julie said, turning him away with force.
Chapter 23
With Scipina and the Latin official tied up and heaved into the pit, it was time to go. Out of earshot of the priestesses, they took stock of their meager assets: money, none. Weapons, a couple of swords. Food and water, none.
“It doesn’t matter what we have or don’t have, we’ve got to get out of here,” Hans said. “The whole of the Republic will be on us like—like—” His Latin failed him for a metaphor.
“Niveus in oryza?” Leigh suggested. “Like white on rice?”
There was no argument. Julie said, “Which way do we go?”
“We know the barbarians of Ys live west of the Republic,” France said. “Southeast is said to be an impassable desert.”
“That’s the way to go,” Jenny said, arms folded. Leigh asked why.
“That’s the way things work around here. People are told to do something, or not do something, and they just obey. If these Latin idiots say southeast is impossible, then let’s go that way. Either it isn’t really impassable, or else they won’t chase us, because they think it is.”
Her logic was unbeatable. Everyone looked ready to get going, but Julie pointed out an obvious problem.
“Which way is southeast?”
Nobody had a compass. Hans could make one with a needle, some thread, and a magnet, but he had none of these.
Linh squinted at the sun. It was still morning, so the sun was still climbing in the east. Pointing forty-five degrees or so to her left, she said, “That way must be southeast.”
They set out—all but two. Eleanor stood by the pit, glancing uncertainly at the captives below. Emile actually backed away a few steps.
“What’s the matter?” Jenny said. “Come on!”
“I fear the realm we’re heading for,” Eleanor replied.
“What do you know about it?’ France asked sharply.
She sighed, still watching the rim of the pit. “It is called Heka, the Land of the Dead.”
Julie laughed. “What is it, Zombie Town?”
Eleanor did not answer. Linh came back and took her firmly by the hand.
“Remember what Jenny said? Whatever you’ve been told by the Latins may not be true. We can’t stay here—we’ll all end up buried alive, or beheaded, or something awful like that.”
Eleanor let Linh lead her away. That left Emile, slowly backing away from them.
“Come on, kid, don’t be weird,” Julie said. “We’re in this together!”
“I cannot go,” Emile insisted.
“Why?” several of them demanded.
“I-I made a bargain. A pact. I have given my senses to one who needed them to observe you newcomers up close—”
France said, “You’re not Aemilius anymore, are you? I mean, you’re in Aemilius’s body and brain, but you’re not the Belgian boy we came here with, are you?”
Emile slowly nodded in agreement. Julie gave a short, sharp snort of disbelief and signaled Leigh and Jenny to grab Emile. They approached on either side. Frowning, Emile dodged them. Leigh and Jenny closed in again.
“I cannot leave the Republic!” he cried. “Once beyond its borders, I will die!”
Jenny and Leigh froze. “Is that true?” Jenny said.
Emile insisted it was. To the others they asked if they should drag Emile alo
ng.
“No,” said France. “Leave him. He may be telling the truth.”
“He’ll tell the Latins where we’re going!” Jenny protested.
Emile didn’t deny it, so they decided to bring him along for a while, when they were nearly out of the Republic (however and whenever that occurred), they would let him go.
They fled, south by east. Keeping out of sight by day and moving fast at night, they avoided farm roads. Several times they caught sight of armed patrols hunting them. Archers armed with the fearsome thunderbolt arrows guarded wells and fountains, hoping to keep the escaping teens away from water supplies. Cavalry scoured the roads, but they didn’t stray into fields very far. Emile easily explained why.
“They think you are weak, city folk,” he said. “They don’t expect you to keep to fields and forest.”
France had a disturbing idea. “Are you communicating with anyone?”
“How could he be?” Linh said.
“I don’t know—mind reading?” That disturbed everyone, especially since Emile did not deny it.
“We could kill him and hide his body” was Julie’s surprising suggestion. No one had the nerve for such a harsh deed, so the journey continued.
Four days after the girls were freed from being buried alive, the green, fertile lands of the Republic began to fade into arid, sandy terrain. A few pines and cedars took over from the cool woodlands. They saw snakes, and signs of more snakes—big ones.
“Not far now,” Eleanor declared. “Life is leaving the land!”
They camped on sun-warmed boulders for the day. Everyone was hungry and thirsty. They’d gotten by using Hans’s old Boy Scout tricks, like licking dew off leaves early in the morning and eating dandelions and other wild greens. One night they filled their pockets with chestnuts from a grove they passed through. Not daring to build a fire to roast them, they had to eat the nuts raw. The result was neither delicious nor digestible, but they carried on.
“Who would have thought it?” Leigh said as they sat on jagged rocks, watching the rising sun.
“Thought what?” Julie muttered.
“You. For sixteen years, pretty much, you lived plugged into Your/World day and night. I remember your fourteenth birthday, you watched your own birthday party on Your/World rather than see it for real—”
“Your/World is real,” she said, annoyed.
“Not as real as this.” Leigh held out his hands to the scene appearing before them as the sun rose. Even the sparse trees were becoming rarer, yielding the land to little more than rifts of sand, scattered boulders, and the strange squiggly marks in the dirt Eleanor insisted were made by poisonous snakes.
“You escaped from a brothel, broke into a palace, faced death, and worse.” Leigh looked at his sister fondly. “I’m proud of you.”
She was proud of him, too, but Julie did not mention his killing Ramesses. It was not an easy thing to do, and she knew it would haunt him for a long time to come.
Eleanor shivered, huddled against a boulder. Hans asked her if she was cold.
“This is the borderland!” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Beyond is the Land of the Dead!”
The land unrolled before them like a vast brown sandbox. It couldn’t be compared with a beach because beaches always have water nearby. This enormous stretch of dunes looked as devoid of life as Mars. No, Mars had ice and microbes. The desert they faced looked as sterile as the moon. Heat rippled the horizon, and the sky was bleached of color by the dry air.
Hans and France had privately agreed that one of the strange powers of this island possessed Eleanor. She mentioned Apollo, but as with Emile’s master, Mercury, they didn’t believe Roman gods were lurking around them. Whoever the unseen masters of Hy-Brasil might be, they weren’t marble idols or operatic deities. Eleanor did not seem to be as completely dominated as Emile, but she seemed apart from her friends, and she knew and said things their friend Eleanor could not know.
Emile stood on top of a large spear-shaped rock jutting point-first at the desert ahead. While Eleanor was distressed by the prospect of leaving the Republic, he seemed rather wistful.
“Why don’t you go with us?”
France and Linh stood below him, holding hands.
“Can’t,” Emile said.
“Tell me one thing,” Linh said
Emile smiled. “Only one?”
“Why did you help us? Why were we spared?” she said, indicating the others with a sweep of her free hand. “Everyone else from the Carleton became Latins and forgot their old lives completely. Why were we eight spared that?”
Emile fingered the edge of his grubby robe. “Sometimes a harvest yields too much, and the farmer has no place to store his surplus.” He looked over his shoulder at the greener land behind them. “It is also true a herd is improved by bringing in new stock to blend with the old.”
“Your examples aren’t exactly flattering,” said France. “Are we surplus wheat or a herd of wild bulls and cows?”
“You are newcomers. Let it be just that.”
Emile twisted around suddenly. “Trouble,” he said flatly.
Filtering through the thorny scrub and random juniper trees were many men on horseback. They wore the aluminum armor and scarlet cloaks of Republic cavalry.
Linh and France broke apart, running back to their friends with shouted warnings. Leigh and Jenny, the only two of them armed (with short, inadequate swords), called for everyone to get behind them.
Hans pulled Eleanor to her feet. She gasped, “Don’t stand! Run! Go where they cannot follow!”
That didn’t make sense. The land ahead of them was more open than where they were. The Republic cavalry could ride them down in empty terrain, but something about Eleanor’s desperate state made Hans believe her. He shouted for all his friends to run, run into the desert.
Julie, Linh, and France took off. Hans followed, holding Eleanor up as he went. Jenny and Leigh kept their faces and blades facing the horsemen.
With a shout the nearest riders charged. They flowed around the big boulder where Emile stood. Leigh parried a spear thrust, and then dodged aside. Jenny—strong and tall, but not trained—swung wildly at her opponent. Her crazy cuts forced him back.
More riders fanned out to round up the fleeing teens. Linh and Julie ran ahead, sand pluming from their heels. France deliberately trailed them, hoping to fend off any horsemen who got too close. What with? He had nothing.
The sun rose higher. On open ground, it felt like fire was playing on their faces and exposed flesh. The Latin riders reined in. Given a respite, Linh, Julie, and the others ran on. They felt the heat, too, but it affected the Latins more.
Held tight against Hans, Eleanor’s knees folded. He grabbed her around the waist and dragged her on.
Jenny had an idea. She flung her gladius at the nearest cavalryman. He wasn’t expecting a missile, and toppled over his mount’s rump when the substantial blade whacked him on the nose. With a triumphant yell, Jenny snagged the horse’s loose reins. She meant to get on and ride, but the glaring sun drove the poor animal crazy. It reared and flailed its hooves until Jenny let go of the reins. Eyes rolling with terror, the horse galloped back into Republic territory.
Wincing and blinking against the sun’s glare, the tough Republic horsemen withdrew. They cantered back past Emile, still observing the brief fight from his rock.
Leigh gathered up Jenny’s thrown sword. He also found a spear dropped by the rider she had unseated. Walking slowly to his friends, bowed down by the heat, Leigh returned the sword to her.
“You’re crazy,” he said. It was a compliment.
She shoved the gladius through the sash on her priestess’s gown. “We all are,” Jenny replied. “No food, no water—how long can we last in this heat?”
“How long would we last back there?” The cavalrymen milled arou
nd among the trees and boulders, unwilling to cross the invisible border of the Republic.
Leigh saw Emile standing alone atop the boulder. He waved to the one-time weird kid in black, heir to a fortune in chocolate.
“So long!” he shouted through cupped hands.
Emile did not return the wave. He turned away and slowly descended from his perch. Leigh had the distinct feeling he would see him again someday.
Stumbling along in the deep sand, Hans suddenly lost his grip on Eleanor. She broke free of his grasp, slogged ahead a few steps, and then faced him with her hands on her head.
“You’re the German guy,” she said, her words slurred. “How did you get here? How did I get here?”
“Elianora? Is that you?”
“Who else?” she said crossly.
They others slowly converged on them. Hans held out his hand.
“Welcome back,” he said. “We have a lot to tell you.”
Sun and sand stretched to the horizon. How far did the desert go? No one knew. They made sunshades out of cloth torn from the hems of their garments and tied them around their heads. That done, there was nothing more to do but walk, putting a barrier of broiling desert between them and the strange, dangerous Republic.
In memory of my brother
Robert Wayne Thompson
1952–2014
Chi mi a-rithist thu
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