by David Drake
Corylus gripped his bench. He was in the Black-and-Gold Hall with the aisle to his left and Alphena beside him. His head buzzed with pulsing whiteness, and everybody seemed to be shouting.
He was shouting too. “Where am I? Where am I?”
OFF-DUTY SERVANTS—most of the household staff was off duty most of the time—leaped to their feet and bowed as Hedia entered the suite of small rooms leading to the exercise yard. There’d been a game of bandits in progress. An under-steward now sat awkwardly on the game board, but one of the knucklebones they’d been throwing had escaped into the middle of the terrazzo floor when the mistress unexpectedly appeared.
“Go away,” Hedia said in apparent disgust. She didn’t care that the servants were gambling illegally. She knew, though, that if her tone suggested that she was thinking of crucifying them, she would get a degree of privacy that was otherwise beyond imagining.
The twenty-odd people in the four small rooms scattered like blackbirds startled from a barley field; at least one was still tying his sash. The under-steward ducked out but paused in the doorway. One hand stretched toward the loose knucklebone but his eyes were on Hedia; he suddenly vanished after the rest.
Hedia glanced at Syra. The maid looked studiously innocent. Very likely she was more than a casual friend of one of the people routed by their mistress’s appearance.
“What’s the name of that under-steward, Syra?” Hedia asked in a conversational tone.
“Ursus, I believe, mistress,” Syra said without meeting her mistress’s eyes. She kept her voice calm, but she blushed down to the top of her tunic.
Hedia smiled, not from what she’d learned—she didn’t care about that—but because she’d learned it using observation and her mind. She nodded, silently directing Syra to open the door into the exercise yard.
Knowing that Pulto and Lenatus were comrades from the army, Hedia had expected to find them sharing a carafe of something from Saxa’s storeroom and chatting about old times. Instead she’d heard slams and grunts as she entered the rear apartments.
When the door opened, the men sprang apart and faced her. For a moment they were nothing human: they’d been sparring in full armor and now glared at her with eyes slitted between shield tops and the beetling brass brows of their helmets.
“Hercules!” the man on the right said. He threw down his fat wooden sword and straightened, sweeping off his helmet. He was Lenatus, which meant—
“Mistress, very sorry!” the trainer said. He hadn’t done anything more than marginally improper, but he obviously considered it a sign of trouble when the lady of the house visited his domain for the first time. “I, ah, needed to keep my skills up, so I asked a friend of mine to exercise with me!”
—that the other man was Pulto, whom Hedia had come to see. He set his wooden sword in the rack and took off his helmet. He stood with it in his right hand and his shield, a section of cylinder made from laminated wood, still in his left.
Pulto was politely expressionless, but his stance was wary. He was a freeman and not a member of Saxa’s household, but he obviously felt that Hedia’s lack of direct authority over him wouldn’t be much protection if she wanted his hide. She supposed soldiers got used to being in that sort of situation.
“It’s quite all right, Lenatus,” Hedia said breezily. “I was hoping to have a few words with your guest here. Master Pulto, isn’t it? That is, while your master is attending my son at the reading.” She waved a gracious hand. “If you’d like to go on, please do so,” she said. “I only need a minute or two after you’ve finished.”
Syra looked at her in shock; that made Hedia want to slap her. Of course I don’t mean it, girl, but these men aren’t stupid enough to think that I do!
“Time I quit anyhow, ma’am,” Pulto said in evident relief. “I’m so out of shape I embarrass myself. It’s a bloody good thing the Old Man wasn’t watching me waddle around just now!”
He placed his helmet on top of a post in a wall niche, then unfastened the stout leather thong stretching from the top of his shield to a hook in the armor over his right shoulder blade. That spread the shield’s considerable weight to the other side as well as taking some of it off his arm.
“Oh, you weren’t doing too bad, buddy,” said Lenatus as he disarmed also. “If you take a couple weeks to shape up, you’ll be ready for carving up Germans and all the other fun and games.”
Hedia watched the men without expression. They were pretending that things were normal and that the lady of the house wasn’t about to make some unfathomable upper-class demand that they would have to obey. She had spoken only of Pulto, but they were friends; neither was going to leave the other alone in the soup.
With abrupt decision, she looked at her maid. “Syra,” she said, “go back to my suite and set out clothing for dinner. I’ll wear the violet synthesis, I believe, and the gold jewelry from Ephesus.”
The men had been unlacing each other’s armor; they paused. Syra blinked in surprise and didn’t move either.
“Now, girl!” Hedia said. The maid squeaked and vanished back toward the front of the house.
“You gentlemen can relax,” Hedia said, letting her voice take on a slight throatiness. She closed the door. “I need a favor and I hope you can help me, but you won’t either of you be harmed by this business whatever your answer is.”
The men looked at each other. “Ma’am?” Pulto said, carefully.
Hedia picked up the sword which Lenatus had dropped. It was startlingly heavy.
Her surprise must’ve shown. Lenatus took it from her with a grin and set it in the rack below the one Pulto had been using. “They’re wood right enough, mistress,” he said, “but there’s lead in the hilt and they’re double the weight of an issue sword.”
“You practice with these,” said Pulto, “and it’s like going on leave when it’s the real thing. Well, that’s the idea.”
“Yeah, except for the spear points coming the other way,” grunted Lenatus.
Both men chuckled. Their grins made them look both reassuring and ugly beyond words. Well, they were reassuring if they were on your side.
Hedia nodded toward the rack of swords. “Does my daughter, Alphena, practice with those swords also?” she said.
Pulto stiffened into professional blankness. Lenatus clacked the heels of his cleated sandals together and straightened to attention. “Yes, your ladyship,” he said, his gaze directed at something past her left shoulder. “She does.”
Hedia nodded. The trainer hadn’t lied or made excuses, just stated the flat truth and waited for what would happen next.
Nothing, or at least nothing bad, would happen to him, because he had proved he was a man. Therefore his friend Pulto was probably equally trustworthy.
“As her mother, I hope she’ll grow out of it,” Hedia said in a mild, conversational voice. “But I’m very much afraid that if I tried to forbid her, she’d go off to Puteoli and enroll in one of the gladiatorial schools. Not so, Master Lenatus?”
The men were smiling again. Pulto’s cheeks swelled as he suppressed a guffaw.
“Your ladyship,” said Lenatus, “I think you’re wise. She can’t get into any real trouble hacking at a post here at home.”
He nodded to the armored dummy, which could be put in the middle of the yard for solo practice.
“But if she goes outside, she’ll be sparring or worse. And that I won’t let her do here, not if the master come down and ordered me to.”
“I do not believe my lord and master will give you such an order, lenatus,” Hedia said, speaking carefully. Nothing in her tone could be read as mockery of her husband, but neither did the words allow any doubt that she meant them.
She made a moue. She was here to deal with her domestic problems, but not by discussing them with a pair of commoners. Switching the topic slightly to lower the emotional temperature before she got to the real question at issue, Hedia said, “Does anyone else practice here, Lenatus?”
“
Well, the young master does sometimes,” the trainer said, just as careful in choosing his words as Hedia had been a moment before. “And—”
His eyes flicked left to his friend, but the men didn’t exactly exchange glances.
“—sometimes he brings his friends here. Master Corylus, for one.”
Pulto nodded with stolid enthusiasm. Corylus was the only friend Varus brought here, of course: the only one interested in military-style exercise, and probably the only friend Varus had.
“The boy’s bloody good,” said Lenatus, lifting both fists to display his thumbs.
“Which the Old Man’s son bloody ought to be,” said Pulto. “And you know, the other kid—sorry, ma’am, Lord Varus …”
He shook his head, angry with himself to have referred to the son of the house in a patronizing manner. “Sorry!” he repeated, twisting the toe of his right sandal against the sand floor.
“Lord Varus gets a lot more exercise because of his friend,” said Lenatus with forced calm. “He says he knows he ought to, and having Corylus here helps him do the basics.”
“Do they spar?” said Hedia, suddenly curious.
“No, mistress,” said Lenatus, “that wouldn’t be fair. But Corylus spars with me. There’s tricks I can teach him, but I’ll never be as young as he is again. And every time we mix it, there’s less he doesn’t know.”
“Your son gets a good workout, ma’am,” Pulto said earnestly. “At the start, you don’t want to push them too hard. Then he watches some more and works on, you know, writing on tablets.”
“He asks Master Corylus words sometimes while he’s sitting there,” Lenatus said, grinning. He nodded at the stone bench built against the wall between the two dressing rooms. “Remember the time he said he needed a word for spear that he could use in a line ending in a spondee?”
Both men chuckled. They were at ease again, treating Hedia as one of them. They didn’t understand what she was about, but soldiers didn’t expect to understand things. She had known a number of them—officers, all the ones she could think of, but that was the same thing with an upper-class accent.
Soldiers learned to adapt to situations, though; and if something seemed to be good, well, they were thankful. It would change soon enough, depend on that!
“I said, ‘A bloody spear has always worked all right for me,’” said Pulto. “And Mercury bite me if the kid don’t say, ‘Yes, my bloody spear. Two spondees! Perfect.’”
“And Corylus doubled up laughing so I caught him a ripe one on the helmet,” said Lenatus. “Which hadn’t been the way the match was going before then, let me tell you.”
Hedia joined the laughter. Still smiling, she said, “The problem I have is a specialized one, Master Pulto. And of course it requires discretion—”
“I’ll get right out of here,” Lenatus said. He was still holding his corselet of steel hoops. He turned to swing it into the alcove beneath his helmet.
“No!” said Hedia. “Master Lenatus, I said discretion. If Pulto wouldn’t discuss the situation with the friend on whom his life has depended, he’d be a fool. I don’t need fools.”
She looked between the two men and said, “That’s correct, isn’t it?”
Pulto shrugged. He didn’t meet her eyes. “I guess neither of us would be standing here now if it wasn’t for the other, a time or two,” he muttered.
“Yes,” said Hedia crisply. Then, “Master Pulto, I need magical help. I understand that your wife is a witch.”
Lenatus grunted as though he’d been punched low. Pulto grimaced and said to the sand, “Your ladyship, Anna is a Marsian and they always say that about Marsians. You know that.”
“I’m in need, Master Pulto,” Hedia said. “We all in this family are in danger, as I suspect you know. I would like to speak with your wife, Anna.”
Lenatus played with the sash of his sweat-stained tunic, then looked at his friend. Pulto raised his eyes to Hedia and said, “Lady, Anna has rheumatism and can’t manage stairs very well. Even if she, you know, did know something. We’re up on the third floor, you see; not a, not a private house like this.”
“In fact I intend to visit Anna rather than bring her here,” Hedia said, which hadn’t been her plan until the words came out. It really was a better idea, though. There’d be whispers that Saxa’s wife was looking for a love charm or an abortion—but nothing nearly so dangerous as the truth. “Tomorrow, shall we say? At about midday?”
She phrased the statements as questions, but of course they weren’t.
“Ah …,” said Pulto. His friend was watching but keeping silent. “Ah, I guess all right if, you know, if the Senator is all right with it?”
“My husband does not insult me by trying to control my comings and goings, sirrah!” Hedia said. She hadn’t raised her voice but there was a whip on the end of her tongue.
The men straightened to attention. “Yes sir!” Pulto said.
There was shouting—screaming, some of it—from the front of the house. “Whatever is that?” Hedia said.
Lenatus tossed one of the practice swords to Pulto and kept the other. They went out the door together.
Hedia ran after them. Lengths of hardwood wielded by these old veterans were good things to have in front of you in trouble.
“IF THE MONSTER’S BREATH has unmanned you, I will ride on boldly and fight it alone!” Varus said. As he declaimed, he heard a distant rhythm. He supposed it was his fearful heart beating.
Pandareus took notes with an odd expression. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and surely Varus was proving himself a fool like few others.
Varus’s soul had shriveled in misery. He was a clumsy wordsmith. He’d managed to conceal that from himself until now, but when he performed his work in public, his mind compared it with all the other literature he’d read or heard.
Varus had known he wasn’t Vergil, but he wasn’t even Ennius, who had the excuse of antique coarseness. His words had no soul, and because he did have a soul, he couldn’t deny his failure.
I can see you, Varus whispered to the Muse. I see you, but my tongue doesn’t have the words to describe you.
His voice sang on, empty and pointless. He wished the earth would open beneath him, but the poem continued to roll on like the Tiber in muddy spate.
Varus’s mind slipped, step by shuddering step, out of the present. The insistent rhythm was outside of him, outside of the world. Its beat filled the empty vessel which failure had left of Gaius Alphenus Varus, would-be poet. Voices were chanting.
A cone of raw, rust-colored rock lifted from the ocean. It was hard to see. A dank northern mist bathed it, but there was something wrong with the air also. It was as though Varus were watching through layers of mica.
Things moved on the narrow beach below the cone. Portentous things, but they were invisible except—
The cosmos toppled like a lap marker at the racetrack, bringing up a different face. Varus still felt the disjunction, but he was on the other side of it.
The cone was a great volcano. The sides were too steep to have a real beach where they rose from the sea, but waves had battered a notch in the coarse rock. On it, licked by spray, twelve tall men danced about the ivory image. They were nude and hairless.
Hyperboreans, Varus thought, for they were all so similar to his father’s friend Nemastes that they could have been copies of the same statue. Their expressions were cold and angry, and they looked more cruel than stoats.
As the tall men danced, they chanted. At first the sound was as raucous as crows calling in a field of stubble and seemed empty, but Varus began to understand its patterns. Similarly, the rhythms of the dance wove together into a great whole and merged with the dancers’ wild cries.
In the center of the ring was an ivory carving of a man’s head. It wore a fur cap over its ears and was no bigger than a thumb. The figurine drew Varus inward.
The dancers watched Varus as they shuffled on their round; their eyes were hungry. Flickers like the blue f
lames of sulfur began to lift from the broken rocks. The wisps waved in time with the dance, rising and keeping pace with the jerking feet of the dance.
The flames brightened and became demons of blue fire. Ribs showed beneath their tiny scales, and their very bodies were translucent. Their skulls were like those of lizards, and their lipless mouths twisted in grimaces of fury. They danced like marionettes, under the compulsion of the Hyperboreans.
The chant roared in Varus’s ears. The dancers, human and demon alike, stared at him as they paced their circle.
Varus reached out to the ivory miniature. He wasn’t sure he had a body, but he could feel the vague, slick warmth of the yellowed ivory.
Almost Varus could grasp the pattern of the dance. That pattern was that of the whole cosmos. He raised the figurine, staring into the carven eyes of someone more ancient than Varus could grasp even with his new understanding.
The Hyperboreans grinned, and the demons licked slaver from their pointed jaws. The chant was too loud for the cosmos to hold. Varus almost—
There was a crash and blinding light; the pattern burst. Varus pitched forward. He was shouting.
“FEARLESSLY WITH A WINGED ARM our Regulus hurled his spear through the air like a thunderbolt,” Varus droned.
Does that sort of thing make sense to men? Alphena wondered. Certainly the freedmen farther down the row from her looked comatose. As for Corylus, he might as easily have been carved from a tree trunk.
When Varus spoke normally he sounded, well, normal. His voice had been spiky and nervous when he started his reading, but it was lots worse now. He seemed dead, or at least like he wished he were dead.
Though at this moment, Varus’s voice sounded like blocks of stone being dragged across one another at a building site. Alphena remembered that she’d come here by her own choice when nobody would’ve forced her to come. Listening to her stepmother go on about Alphena having to get married didn’t seem like such a bad thing now.