by David Drake
“We’ll go on,” Varus said, starting forward again. Sigyn fell in beside him, since their goal was obvious.
The vegetation underfoot crackled slightly. Varus wondered what he was trampling besides tiny trees, but he had no choice. Carce and mankind depended on him.
The horizon was farther away than Varus had at first thought. After a time he looked over his shoulder and saw their footsteps stretching into the distance beyond where he could see. The Tree seemed little closer than it had been when they started, though now he saw that it was on an island. A strip of water separated it from the forest over which he and the woman walked.
“Sigyn?” he said. “How can we cross the water? Is it shallow?”
“Sigyn cannot answer your questions, wizard,” the woman said, looking at him with a smile that he couldn’t read. “You must cross by your own powers … but the depth of the channel will not matter to you.”
That isn’t as hopeful a statement as I might wish, Varus thought.
He met the woman’s eyes, then after a moment managed to smile. I’ve always liked puzzles. Poetry writing is just a puzzle in words, after all; at least the way I did it. I’ll figure out the puzzle of the water when we reach it; and if that means swimming, I’ll hope that I swim well enough.
Though any creatures that lived on the ground were too tiny for Varus to see without him putting his face down into the miniature trees, things like birds fluttered about the forest, lighting and pecking into the foliage. They kept at a distance from Varus and his guide, but even so he could tell that they didn’t have feathers and their tails were serpentine. When they called to one another, they shrieked like angry mice.
Varus cleared his throat. “Sigyn?” he said. “What do they eat, those birds?”
“Birds?” said the woman. He thought she sounded amused. “They eat whatever they catch, wizard. Is it any different in your world?”
“I suppose not,” Varus said. He swallowed, hoping to work the feeling of discomfort out of his throat.
But it was true. He thought of his epic, of the dragon swallowing down the soldiers of Regulus in the wastes of Libya. That was a fantasy. In the waking world, his own world, it was generally men who devoured other men. Here, perhaps, the greatest danger was dragons. For those folk whom Gaius Varus and his guide didn’t step on.
The woman stopped; they were at the edge of the water. Varus wondered how long he’d been musing. It hadn’t seemed long enough for them to have come this far, he would have said.
The water was gray and speckled with flotsam. It rose and fell heavily, like the chest of a sleeping giant. There was no current that Varus could see.
He looked at the woman. He knew that distances were deceptive here, but he was sure that the strait couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards across. At his father’s villa near Baiae, he’d swum a full mile and been sure he could have gone twice that distance if he’d had to.
Perhaps if I call her “Bride,” she’ll give me a real answer.
But Varus wouldn’t do that. That would put him in league with the barbarians who’d murdered her. He wouldn’t.
“Sigyn?” Varus said. “Should I swim across the channel?”
She had been staring into the distance. Now she turned and focused on him; and smiled again. “The Bride cannot tell a wizard of your power what to do,” she said.
She extended her finger, pointing toward a bird rising from the stunted forest thirty feet away. It squealed angrily, dropping something from its beak. The woman’s finger gave a flick; the bird snapped toward the island, tumbling over and over as its wings beat in an attempt to regain control.
A tentacle slashed from the turgid water, looped the leathery bird, and vanished below the surface again. Bubbles swirled briefly, then dissipated. The sea returned to its previous appearance of gelid calm.
Varus closed his eyes and rubbed them, trying to erase the memory of what he’d just seen. “Thank you,” he said softly.
The woman laughed. “I did nothing,” she said. “All the power is yours, wizard.”
Varus opened his eyes and stared at the water, his face going hard as he concentrated. Words swirled just beyond the boundaries of his mind, but they wouldn’t come clear. He strained and, straining, slipped into the fog of his memory again. He forced his way forward, willing himself to have a body.
Abruptly Varus stood in a cave which echoed with the sound of waves. The old woman sat on a bench carved into the stone wall, reading by the light of a single oil lamp. She lowered the palm-leaf book in her hand and smiled at Varus.
“Greetings, Lord Varus,” she said. “I didn’t think you would come back to see me again.”
“I have to,” he said uncomfortably. “I tried to cross the water without your help, but I need you. Please, help me. For the world’s sake.”
“Will you tell me about the world, wizard?” the old woman said. Her smile was a thin line within the wrinkles of her face. “But I said to you before: the power is yours to use or not use.”
Varus screwed his face into a grimace. “I would—” he said. He broke off.
The old woman’s mouth worked, but he heard the words coming up through his throat: “The heavens split! Sweeps down the great wind—”
Lightning ripped into a crown of thorns hanging in the sky. Varus was back on the edge of the strait, his hands raised and Sigyn beside him. A wind from nowhere howled over the water without ruffling the First Tree or the miniature forest.
“—and with it the frost!” quavered from Varus’s lips.
The strait rocked like a kettle coming to a boil. Varus felt a gush of unexpected warmth; the water turned dazzlingly white.
The sky cleared like moisture wiped from a sheet of silver. What had been gray water was now an ice waste lifted into hummocks by the pressure of its creation and shattered into brilliant crystals.
Is that a tree? Varus thought when he saw the twisted lump a hundred feet away. The strands weren’t branches but tentacles like the one which had snatched the bird moments before; they had frozen as the strait itself had. They issued from an elephantine conch shell which projected just about the surface of the ice. At the base of the tentacles was an eye, huge and filled with icy hatred.
“How long …?” Varus said, but he didn’t finish the question. Even if Sigyn told him how long the strait would remain frozen—which she probably wouldn’t—the answer didn’t matter. He needed to cross to the Tree. Even if he became next to certain that the ice would give way before he started back, he had to try.
“Let’s go,” he said, stepping onto the ice with the care so slick a surface deserved. He grinned. It was liberating to be in a situation where he had to go forward to succeed. It didn’t matter if he was afraid of being hurt or even of dying: he had to go on.
He looked at the woman. “Thank you for guiding me, Sigyn,” he said.
She turned her head, but she didn’t smile as he’d thought she might. “I have the time, wizard,” she said. “I have all eternity.”
She didn’t mention the compulsion he’d used to force her from the cairn. Varus wondered if he would do that again, now that he’d, well, spent time with her. She’d saved his life when he was about to try swimming to the island. She hadn’t had to do that.
He tried to peer into the ice, but the fractured crystal was as opaque as a similar thickness of marble. How many tentacled creatures were hidden in it? Though one would have been enough.
The surface wasn’t smooth, but its irregular humps and sheared angles were slick. Varus spread his feet wide and took small steps so that his weight generally came straight down onto the surface.
Corylus must have a lot of experience walking on ice. He’d do better here.
Varus grinned. His friend lacked one necessary attribute for success in this situation: he wasn’t a poet, and Varus was. Varus was an extremely bad poet, granted; but his mind had the trick of looking at things which poetry required. It didn’t matter in this world that
he executed his understanding so poorly.
Varus had to watch where he was putting his feet; even so he almost fell several times. He risked a glance toward Sigyn. Despite being barefoot, she walked with the same poised nonchalance as she had when crossing the miniature forest.
She’s probably used to ice, Varus thought. In his heart he suspected that the fact she was dead had more to do with her aplomb, but that thought made him uncomfortable.
Varus stepped onto grass. That was so unexpected that he almost fell. They’d reached the island.
He looked up and stared in wonder at the Tree. “Oh,” he said.
It wasn’t a tree from this angle. Instead, it mounted stage by stage like a mural of an impossible landscape. Each level was perfectly clear to Varus, a mass of distinct branches merging in a curved surface which mounted to the next level.
The twigs were heavy with fruit. No bunch was the same as any other that Varus could see. Those hanging closest to him ranged from something that looked like a hairy plum the size of a man’s head, to a cluster of tiny glistening seeds which he saw as points of light instead of being distinct surfaces.
“You have reached your goal, wizard,” the woman said. “Your first goal. Take a sprig of the fruit and we will go on.”
Varus reached out, paused, and lowered his hand again. “Sigyn?” he said. “Does it matter which fruit I take? There are so many.”
She looked at him with a smile as cold as the frozen strait they had crossed. “Eventually, wizard,” she said, “you will learn that nothing at all matters. But because the Bride is under your compulsion—”
“I’m not compelling you!” Varus said. “I’m asking you a question as a friend!”
“Do the living have friends among the dead, wizard?” the woman said, her smile twisting oddly. “Nevertheless, all fruits are the same for your purpose. This is the First Tree.”
“Thank you, Sigyn,” Varus said, bowing formally. He considered for a moment, then twisted off a twig with a spray of berries. They looked like holly, but they were colored the purple-blue of juniper instead of being bright red.
Turning to her again, he said, “What do we do now, if you please?”
“Now,” said the woman, giving him the familiar cold smile, “we go to the Guardian of the Underworld. And you pass him, if you can.”
THE FOREST MARON LED HEDIA into was more open than what they’d been plunging through before the wolf attacked them. It was hard for her to keep up, even though the faun wasn’t striding along as quickly as she knew he was capable of doing. It would have been hard for her even if her groin didn’t ache.
Trotting on her own legs was still a better choice than continuing to ride the faun piggyback, putting much of her weight on the same aching groin. What had been a delightful titillation earlier in their association would now be screamingly painful. Maron was—Hedia smiled with memory—quite an enthusiastic fellow.
The faun muttered what she thought was a curse—the words were indistinct, but the tone seemed clear—and paused. He started off again, bearing to the left around a mass of broken boughs and splintered tree boles. The grapevines which had used the trees for support wove the whole into a tangle impenetrable even to someone of Maron’s strength and agility.
Hedia heard the sound of women crying. All she could see were flutterings like ghosts of the winged minims who’d flown from the thorn tree as she and the faun had passed earlier. Sometimes the movements seemed clearer in shadows than in the light which flooded the jumbled wreckage now that there was no canopy of leaves to block it.
“Maron?” she said. They were skirting the wrack at a slight distance, avoiding the tops of trees which had been thrown to the ground. “What happened here? A windstorm?”
“Watch out!” the faun said, sweeping her behind him with his right arm. He gripped his new club in both hands and advanced slowly. He’d broken off the thin end of the sapling and all the foliage.
Hedia hunched to see forward beneath his right elbow. Ahead was a waist-high wall of polished stone or metal. It trembled as if—
It has legs! “Maron, that’s a centipede!” Hedia said. “But it’s huge!”
“It’s pinned where it is,” the faun said in a grating voice. He prodded the leaf mold with the butt of his club, then bent and came up with a fist-sized rock in his left hand.
“What are you doing?” Hedia said, trying to hide the concern in her voice. She’d been bitten by a centipede when she was a child; her little toe had turned white and lost all feeling for a week. This creature was the length of a warship ….
“Hey, Manylegs!” Maron shouted. “Want to chase me now?”
The centipede twisted, shoving a crackling mass of branches with its head in a vain effort to reach the faun. Its eye-clusters glittered like huge topazes.
Maron’s rock cracked off the headplate between them, denting the iridescent surface. A pair of scythelike pincers ripped foliage and squirted orange venom as they scissored shut.
“Maron!” Hedia said. “Why are you wasting time with this? We have to find Alphena.”
“Faugh, she could keep,” said the faun, but he started through the forest again. “It’s not often you find one of these where it can’t get at you.”
He looked back at Hedia with an angry frown. “Don’t think I’m afraid, though!” he said. “I’m not.”
“All right,” she said in a neutral tone. Of course he was afraid. Any sane person would be afraid of that creature! But that didn’t mean it was a good use of time to torture an enemy simply because you could.
“Besides,” Maron said gloatingly, “it’ll take days to die. It’ll die of thirst, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Hedia sniffed. Cruelty had always seemed a waste of effort to her. Ruthlessness was quite another thing. She could give lessons in ruthlessness.
“What smashed the forest like this?” Hedia said. She didn’t bother mentioning that she’d asked him the same question before. “Was it a windstorm?”
The faun laughed. “How could wind crush trees into the ground, woman?” he said. “No, that was someone from the waking world walking past. Your world.”
“My world?” Hedia repeated. “How could that be?”
“They were in this world but not of it the way you are,” Maron said. “As a matter of fact—”
He didn’t stop, but he raised his nose to sniff the air again. He looked back at her and said, “Does this girl of yours have a sibling, a male?”
“Yes. Varus,” Hedia said in puzzlement. “Her brother. My son, but not by blood.”
“Well, it was the brother who did that,” the faun said. “Be thankful that you weren’t there when it happened.”
“And you?” she said, letting her irritation show. “Aren’t you thankful too?”
“Aye,” Maron admitted sourly. “There wouldn’t have been time for me to save you, but I’d have been compelled to try nonetheless, no matter how pointlessly. So yes, I’m thankful.”
“Is Varus searching for Alphena also?” Hedia asked after a moment. Then, regretfully, “Though I don’t suppose you can tell that by sniffing the air.”
Maron looked at her again. She couldn’t read his expression. After a time he said, “Not by sniffing the air, no; but I don’t suppose there’s any reason you shouldn’t know the answer. There will be great disruption in your world, but”—he swept their surroundings with his right arm—“nothing here, so it doesn’t matter. Nothing but the occasional passerby like this boy you call your son.”
Maron had obviously meant the gesture figuratively, but Hedia looked to the right as she framed her question. The trees here were poles without branches; stiff leaves slanted from the tops all the way to the ground, forming cones. Nearby grew brush with stiff stems and magenta foliage.
“What sort of disruption will this be?” she said, keeping her tone mild. At least I’m no longer thinking about how much it hurts to walk.
“It doesn’t matter,” Maron repeated. �
�You can stay here.”
“But?” Hedia said, keeping her temper in check. She was by no means sure that the control her husband had given her over the faun would extend to demanding information that didn’t conduce to finding Alphena.
“There was the Band,” Maron said equably. “Then there were the Twelve and one, who was Nemastes. The fire god of the Hyperboreans will shortly loose his legions on the waking world. Nemastes and the Twelve who were his siblings are battling over whether the fire will burst through at the Horn or at Vesuvius.”
He looked at Hedia, grinning with a cruelty that seemed as natural to his face as lust was.
“Your son acts for the Twelve, woman,” he said. “He will succeed, so all your world save the Horn will end in fire. And the Horn is no longer of your world.”
Hedia licked her dry lips. Maron continued to pace forward, using his hooves to break off stems that would otherwise snap back at her. He was an excellent escort, but she was coming to understand the degree to which he wasn’t human.
“The lava will reach Carce?” she said, forcing the words out.
“Are you deaf, woman?” the faun snapped. “Your world, your whole world, will die because the Twelve wish it. They’ll be safe then, from Nemastes and from all interruption save that of time.”
“How …,” said Hedia. “How can these Twelve be stopped, Maron?”
He shrugged and smirked at her again. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Time will end even the Twelve. And the First Tree will cover the waking world again, as it has twice in the past. I will keep you occupied, woman.”
All the world, Hedia thought. She didn’t have anything to say, and her throat was too dry for words anyway.
“We’re close by the girl, now,” Maron said. “I’m compelled to take you both safely to the passage to the waking world, but don’t worry. You don’t have to go.”
All the world …
CASSIUS TOOK ALPHENA’S sword from the wraith, then grinned at her. She tried not to react. I am a proud daughter of Carce.
With the hilt in his right hand, Cassius flicked the blade with the nail of his left index finger. It rang like a golden chime, a sound as musical as the call of a linnet.