From the Heart of Darkness

by David Drake

  “By which road?” the other growled.

  Vettius touched the pommel of his spatha so that the long straight blade rattled against the bench. “By the shortest way,” he said testily.

  “You have to…” the stationmaster began, then paused. He seemed to consider the matter carefully before he started again. “The shortest way, you say. Well, there’s a road just past the station. If you turn north on it, it’s only about twenty miles. But you’ll have to look well, because nobody’s been over that road for fifty years and the beginning is all grown over with trees.”

  The serving woman suddenly chattered something in her own language. The man snarled back at her and she fell silent.

  “Could you catch any of that?” Vettius asked Dama under his breath.

  The little Cappadocian shrugged. “She said something about bandits. He told her to be quiet. But I don’t really know the language, you know.”

  “Bandits we can take care of,” Harpago muttered, one finger tracing a dent in the helmet he had rested on the table.

  “How else can we get to Aurelia?” Vettius questioned, half squinting as if to measure the stationmaster for a cross.

  “You can keep on into Pasini, then turn back west on the Salvium road,” the other replied without meeting the officer’s eyes. “It’s several times as long.”

  “Then we go by the straight route?” Vettius said, looking at his companions questioningly.

  Harpago rose and reslung his shield.

  “Why not?” Dama agreed.

  The stationmaster watched them mount and ride off. His gnarled face writhed in terrible glee.

  * * *

  “What did they do, tear the whole road up?” Harpago asked. Even with the stationmaster’s warning they had almost ridden past the junction. The surfacing flags and concrete certainly had been taken up. Seeds had lodged in the road metal beneath. They had grown to sizable trees by now, so that the only sign of the narrow road was a relative absence of undergrowth.

  “The locals must have torn up this branch because it wasn’t used much and they were tired of the labor taxes to repair it,” Vettius surmised. “They probably used the stone to fill holes on one of the main roads.”

  “But if this leads to the district market town, it should have gotten quite a lot of use,” Dama argued.

  “At least it’ll guide us to where we’re going,” Harpago put in, plunging into the trees.

  The pines grew close together and their branches frequently interlocked; riding through them was difficult. Vettius began to wonder if they should stop and turn back, but after a hundred yards or so the torn up section gave way to regular road.

  Dama paused, looking back in puzzlement as his fingers combed pine straw out of his hair. “You know,” he said, “I think they planted those trees on the road-bed when they tore up the surface.”

  “Why should they do that?” Vettius snorted.

  “Well, look around,” his friend pointed out. “The road is cracked here, too, but there aren’t any trees growing in it. Besides, the trees don’t grow as thickly anywhere else around here as they do on that patch of road. Somebody planted them to block it off completely.”

  The soldier snorted again, but he turned in his saddle. Dama had a point, he realized. In fact, the pines might even be growing in crude rows. “Odd,” he admitted at last.

  “Sir!” called Harpago, who had ridden far ahead. “Are you coming?”

  Vettius raised an eyebrow. Dama laughed and slapped his horse’s flank. “He’s young; he’ll learn.”

  “Sorry if I seem to push,” the adjutant apologized as they trotted onward, “but I don’t like wasting time on this stretch of road. It’s too dark for me.”

  “Dark?” Vettius echoed in amazement. For the first time he took more than cursory notice of their surroundings. The swampy gully to the left of the road had once been a drainage ditch. Long abandonment had left it choked with reeds, while occasional willows sprouted languidly from its edge. On the right, ragged forest climbed the slope of the valley. Scrub pine struggled through densely interwoven underbrush to form a stark, desolate landscape.

  But dark? The moonlight washed the broken pavement into a metal serpent twisting through the forest. The trees were too stunted to overshadow the road, and the paving stones gleamed against the contrast of frequent cracks and potholes. Even the scabbed boles of the pines showed silver scales where the moon touched them.

  “I wouldn’t call it dark,” Vettius concluded aloud, “though you could hide a regiment in those thickets.”

  “No, he’s right,” Dama disagreed unexpectedly. “It does seem dark, and I can’t figure out why.”

  “Don’t tell me both of you are getting nervous of shadows,” jeered Vettius.

  “I just wonder why they blocked off this road,” the merchant replied vaguely. “From the look of the job it must have taken most of the district. Wonder what that stationmaster sent us into.…”

  * * *

  Miles clattered gloomily by under their horses’ hooves. It was fell, waste land, a wretched paradigm for much of the empire in these latter days. This twisting valley could never have been much different, though. The humid bottoms had never been tilled; perhaps a few hunters had taken deer among its drooping pines. For the others who had come this way—lone travellers, donkey caravans, troops in glittering armor—the valley was only an incident of passage.

  Now even the road was crumbling. Although only a short distance had been systematically destroyed, nature and time had taken a hand with the remainder. The flags had humped and split as water seepage froze in the winter, and one great section had fallen into the gully whose spring torrents had undercut it. They led their horses over the rubble while the pines drank their curses.

  The usual nightbirds were hushed or absent.

  Even Vettius began to feel uneasy. The moonlight weighed on his shoulders like a palpable force, crushing him down in his saddle. The moon was straight overhead now. Occasional streaks of light pierced the groping branches to paint the dark trunks with sword-blades.

  It was dark now. No white face would gleam from the forest edge to warn of the bandit arrow to follow in an instant. Was it fear of bandits that made him so tense? In twenty years service he had ridden point in tighter places!

  Letting his horse pick its own way over the broken road, Vettius scanned the forest. He took off his helmet and the tight leather cap that cushioned it. The air felt good, a prickly coolness that persisted even after he put the helmet back on, but there was no relief from the ominous tension. Grunting, he tried to hike his shield a little higher on his back.

  Dama chuckled in vindication. “Nervous, Lucius?” he asked.

  Vettius shrugged. “The woman at the station said there were bandits.”

  “On an abandoned piece of road like this?” Dama laughed bitterly. “I wish she were here now. I’d find out for sure what she did say. Do you suppose she knew any Greek besides ‘food’ and ‘wine’?”

  “No, she was too ugly for other refreshment,” Vettius said. His forced laughter bellowed through the trees.

  After a short silence, Harpago said, “Well, at least we should be almost to Aurelia by now.”

  “Look where the moon is, boy,” Vettius scoffed. “We’ve only been riding for two hours or so.”

  “Oh, surely it’s been longer than that,” the younger man insisted, looking at the sky in amazement.

  “Well, it hasn’t,” his commander stated flatly.

  “Shall we rest the horses for a moment?” Dama suggested. “That pool seems to be spring fed, and I’m a little thirsty.”

  “Good idea,” Vettius agreed. “I’d like to wash that foul wine out of my mouth too.”

  “Look,” Harpago put in, “Aurelia must be just around the next bend. Why don’t we ride on a little further and see—”

  “Ride yourself if you want to be a damned fool,” snapped Vettius. He didn’t like to be pushed, especially when he was right.r />
  Harpago flushed. He saluted formally. When Vettius ignored him, he wheeled and rode off.

  Vettius unstrapped his shield and looked around while the Cappadocian slurped water from his cupped hand. The adjutant was out of sight now, but the swift clinking of his horse’s hooves reached them clearly.

  “If that young jackass doesn’t learn manners, somebody’s going to break his neck before he gets much older,” Vettius grumbled. “Might even be me.”

  Dama dried his face on his sleeve and began filling the water bottles. “It’s something in the air here,” he explained. “We’re all tight.”

  The soldier began scuffing at a stump fixed beside the roadway. Decayed wood flaked away under his hobnails and the wasted remnants of a bronze nail clinked on the pavement. “They crucified somebody here,” he said.

  “Um?”

  “These posts along the road,” Vettius explained. “There were several others back a ways. They’re what’s left of crosses when the top rots away.”

  Around the bend the hoofbeats faltered and a horse neighed in terror. Vettius swore and slipped his left arm through the straps of his shield. Metal crashed on stone.

  Someone screamed horribly.

  The big soldier vaulted into his saddle. With one swift jerk Dama loosed the cloak tied to his pommel, snapped it swiftly through the air to wrap protection around his left arm. He scrambled astride his horse.

  “Wait!” Vettius said. “You aren’t dressed for trouble. Ride back and get help.”

  “I don’t think I will,” the merchant remarked, drawing the short infantry sword that was belted over his tunic. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” Vettius said. His spatha shimmered in his hand.

  They rounded the bend at a gallop. Wind caught at their garments. The Cappadocian’s tunic bulked out into a squat troll shape while Vettius’ short red officers’ cape flew straight back from his shoulders. When a man looked up at their approach, the soldier let out the terrible banshee howl he had learned from his first command, a squadron of Irish mercenaries, as they slaughtered pirates on the Saxon Shore.

  One of the men in the road howled back.

  Harpago’s horse pitched wildly as two filthy, skin-clad men sawed at its reins. Startled by Vettius’s howl, a dozen similar shapes in the middle of the road parted to disclose the adjutant himself. He lay on his back with his eyes wide open to the moon. One of the slayers was still lapping at the blood draining from Harpago’s torn throat.

  The bandits surged to meet them. A youngster with matted hair and a wool tunic too dirty to show its original color swung a club at Vettius. It boomed dully on his shield, and the bandit snarled in fury. Vettius struck back with practiced grace, felling the club wielder with an overarm chop, then stabbing another opponent over his own back as he recovered his blade. Dropping the reins, he smashed his shield down into the face of a third who was hacking at his thigh below his studded leather apron. Her rough cloak fell away from her torso as she pitched backwards.

  Dama had ridden down one of the bandits. He was trading furious strokes with a second, a purple-garbed patriarch with a sword, when a third man crawled under his horse’s belly and stabbed upward with a fire-hardened spear. The beast screamed in agony and threw the Cappadocian into the gully. He struggled upright barely in time to block the blow of a human thighbone used as a bludgeon, then thrust his assailant through the neck.

  “Get Harpago’s horse!” Vettius shouted as he cut through the melee to relieve his friend.

  Dama caught at the beast’s reins. A bandit, his mouth smeared with gore, clubbed him across the shoulders and he dropped them again. Stunned, he staggered into the horse. Before his opponent could raise his weapon for another blow, Vettius had slashed through his spine. Drops of blood sailed off the tip of the soldier’s sword as each blow arced home.

  Dama threw himself onto the saddle. As he struggled to swing a leg astride, the purple-clad swordsman who had engaged him earlier slipped behind Vettius’ horse and cut at the blond merchant’s face. Vettius wheeled expertly and lopped off the bandit’s right arm.

  The handful of surviving bandits fell back in mewling horror. Then a baby bawled from the darkness as his mother tore him from her breast and dropped him to the ground. The woodline crackled with frantic movement. Savage forms rushed from the black pines—children scarcely able to walk and feral women. In the hush their bare feet scratched on the stone. Their men, braced by their numbers, moved forward purposefully.

  All looked bestially alike.

  Vettius took the reeling bandit chief by the hair and thrust his blade against his bony throat. The ghoulish horde moaned in baffled rage, but hesitated.

  Then one of the women snarled deep in her throat and rushed at the riders alone. Dama, reeling in his saddle, slashed at her. She ducked under his sword and raked the merchant’s leg with teeth and horny nails. Dama hacked awkwardly at her back. The woman cried shrilly each time the heavy blade struck her, but only at the fourth blow did she sag to the pavement.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Dama cried, gesturing at the clot of savage forms. He could face their crude weapons, but the bloodlust in their eyes was terrifying.

  Vettius was chopping at the bandit’s neck with short strokes. At last the spine parted and the soldier howled again, flaunting his trophy as he kicked his horse into a gallop.

  As they rounded the next bend, Dama glanced over his shoulder. Harpago’s body was again covered by writhing men. Or things shaped like men.

  * * *

  A mile down the road they halted for a moment, looking to their wounds and gulping air. The merchant hung his head low to clear it. His face was still pale when he straightened.

  Vettius had dropped his trophy into a saddlebag, so that he could grip the reins again with his left hand. He continued to rest the spatha on his saddlebow instead of sheathing it.

  “We’d better be going,” he said curtly.

  * * *

  The eastern sky was perceptibly brighter when their foam-spattered horses staggered into another stretch of dismantled roadway. The riders’ skin crawled as they forced their way between the files of trees, but the passage was without incident. Beyond lay Aurelia, a huddle of mean houses surrounded by the tents of the merchants come for the fair.

  Light bobbed as a watchman raised his lantern toward them. “You!” he called, “Where did you come from?”

  “South of here,” Vettius replied bleakly.

  “Gods,” the watchman began, “nobody’s come that way in—” The riders had come within the circle of lantern light and his startled eyes took in their torn clothes and bloody weapons. “Gods!” he blurted again, “Then the story is true.”

  “What story?” Dama croaked, his gaze fixed on the watchman. Absently, he wiped his sword on his ruined tunic.

  “There was a family of bandits—cannibals, really—living on that stretch—”

  “You knew of that and did nothing?” Vettius roared, his face reddening with fury. “By the blood of the Bull, I’ll have another head for this!”

  “No!” the watchman squealed, cringing from the upraised sword. “I tell you it’s been fifty years! For a long time they killed everybody they attacked, so it went on for years and years without anyone knowing what was happening. But when somebody got away, the governor brought in a squadron of cavalry. He crucified them all up and down the road and left them hanging there to rot.”

  Vettius shook his head in frustration. “But they’re still there!” he insisted.

  The watchman gulped. “That’s what my grandfather said. That’s why they had to close that road fifty years ago. Because they were still there—even though all of them were dead.”

  “Lucius,” the merchant said softly. He had opened his friend’s saddlebag. A moment later the severed head thumped to the ground.

  Rosy light reflected from eyes that were suddenly vacant sockets. Skin blackened, sloughed, and disappeared. The skull remained, grinning at some secret jes
t the dead might understand.

  BEST OF LUCK

  A Russian-designed .51 caliber machinegun fires bullets the size of a woman’s thumb. When a man catches a pair of those in his chest and throat the way Capt Warden’s radioman did, his luck has run out. A gout of blood sprayed back over Curtis, next man in the column. He glimpsed open air through the RTO’s middle: the hole plowed through the flailing body would have held his fist.

  But there was no time to worry about the dead, no time to do anything but dive out of the line of fire. Capt Warden’s feral leap had carried him in the opposite direction, out of Curtis’ sight into the gloom of the rubber. Muzzle flashes flickered over the silver tree-trunks as the bunkered machineguns tore up Dog Company.

  Curtis’ lucky piece bit him through the shirt fabric as he slammed into the smooth earth. The only cover in the ordered plantation came from the trees themselves, and their precise arrangement left three aisles open to any hiding place. The heavy guns ripped through the darkness in short bursts from several locations; there was no way to be safe, nor even to tell from where death would strike.

  Curtis had jerked back the cocking piece of his M16, but he had no target. Blind firing would only call down the attentions of the Communist gunners. He felt as naked as the lead in a Juarez floor show, terribly aware of what the big bullets would do if they hit him. He had picked up the lucky Maria Theresa dollar in Taiwan, half as a joke, half in unstated rememberance of men who had been saved when a coin or a Bible turned an enemy slug. But no coin was going to deflect a .51 cal from the straight line it would blast through him.

  Red-orange light bloomed a hundred yards to Curtis’ left as a gun opened up, stuttering a sheaf of lead through the trees. Curtis marked the spot. Stomach tight with fear, he swung his clumsy rifle toward the target and squeezed off a burst.

  The return fire was instantaneous and from a gun to the right, unnoticed until that moment. The tree Curtis crouched beside exploded into splinters across the base, stunning impacts that the soldier felt rather than heard. He dug his fingers into the dirt, trying to drag himself still lower and screaming mentally at the pressure of the coin which kept him that much closer to the crashing bullets. The rubber tree was sagging, its twelve-inch bole sawn through by the fire, but nothing mattered to Curtis except the raving death a bullet’s width above his head.