by David Drake
VARUS WALKED DOWN the cloud-wrapped path at the woman’s side, picking his footing carefully. He forced himself not to look back. He wasn’t afraid of what he might see—there was probably nothing but more mist like the fluff which cleared for ten feet ahead of them as they descended. He was remembering the myths of men who looked back as they returned from the Underworld and lost the prize they’d gone there to gain.
“You are not returning, wizard,” the woman said, responding to his thought. “If you gain your wish, you will never return.”
“There’s nothing back there I need to see,” said Varus. “And I promised that I’d do this.” He cleared his throat and added, “I don’t care if I die, so long as I save the world.”
The woman laughed.
Varus shook his head in embarrassment. It disconcerted him to be with someone who seemed to know what he was thinking. He didn’t know what he was thinking himself, half the time.
He said, “But I admit that I’m afraid to die, Sigyn. I can’t help being afraid. I’ll still try to do whatever I have to when the time comes.”
The woman looked at him. She never wore what Varus would describe as an expression, but he thought the curves of her face became minusculely softer.
“Sigyn was afraid to die,” she said. “But when the time came, she died as all humans do. Even great wizards.”
Varus stared in horror. His left hand gripped the ivory talisman, and the throbbing in his mind was briefly overpowering. How could she be so callous?
He suddenly stepped far enough outside himself to catch the irony. He grinned, then with difficulty swallowed a giggle.
You could always find humor in things if you looked in the right way. Poets—and lawyers—were trained to look for the way that suited their purpose in each particular case. Varus had been mired so deep in self-importance that he hadn’t used his skills on his own situation—until a dead girl reminded him.
“Thank you, Sigyn,” he said. “I’ll do my best.”
She smiled again.
The clouds below cleared in a rush, melting as though the sun had burned off morning mists. They were descending into the round valley Varus had entered when he pursued the sacred chickens a lifetime ago.
The present path was steep but nowhere nearly as precipitous as the crater walls he remembered from the earlier visit. He and Sigyn would be able to run away rather than having to climb if the dragon pursued them—though of course the dragon wouldn’t be slowed noticeably by the slight incline either.
There was no doubt that this was the same valley: the opening to the cave had vertical sides and an arched transom, like the passageways of an arena. It was unnatural and unmistakable to anyone who’d seen it before.
“If the fruit”—Varus lifted the bunch in his right hand—“doesn’t poison the dragon quickly enough,” he said, “I suppose I could take us back to the grounds of the Temple of Jupiter.”
He looked at his guide. “That wouldn’t help me get into the Underworld, though,” he said.
“I do not belong in a temple,” the woman said, “nor would your temple welcome me. But the fruit of the First Tree is the source of all life. It will not poison the Guardian. There is no place too harsh for the fruit to root and grow, spreading life.”
“But—,” said Varus. “Sigyn, will the dragon even eat the fruit? Or does he eat just meat?”
“The Guardian will eat anything, wizard,” the woman said. “The Guardian would eat you and me.”
They were halfway down the crater wall. The great lizard wasn’t visible, but Varus had seen how quickly it could move after it appeared.
He looked at the woman. She had never set him a task that he couldn’t accomplish. That meant there was a puzzle here; he liked puzzles.
He didn’t like the thought of being gobbled by a beast he’d seen swallow a larger man whole, but that was the sort of thing that happened to epic heroes. Or at any rate, to the lesser folk standing at the side of epic heroes. Patroclus, the bosom friend of Achilles, could die that way.
Varus chuckled. “I wonder if Corylus is Achilles in this epic,” he said.
“There is no Achilles here, wizard,” the woman said. He couldn’t identify the emotion he heard in her voice. “You stand or fall alone.”
They had reached the floor of the crater. Side by side, they walked toward the cave mouth, choosing a path through the brush.
“You’re with me, Sigyn,” Varus said.
“Sigyn is dead,” she said harshly. And as she spoke, the dragon squirmed from the cave.
It started for them without hesitation. Its claws clacked and sparkled on the rock, and its breath smelled like the arena after a long August day of slaughter.
Now.
He ran two steps forward. A voice in his head reminded him that the one time he’d tried to throw the discus, it had sailed off at almost ninety degrees to the direction he’d intended. A gymnasium attendant had thrown himself flat, that time. If Varus missed by that much with the bunch of berries, the dragon would ignore them, at least until it had eaten the two humans.
He threw. The bunch arched high in the air, spinning over and over the twig it was attached to.
The dragon’s forequarters lifted like a viper rising to strike. Its jaws, each the size of a rowing skiff, slammed on the berries like the release of a siege catapult. The creature rocked down as gracefully as a gymnast, then started for the humans again.
Help me! thought Varus. His inertia carried him forward, into the fog he’d first encountered in the vault of the temple. It was as thick as spun wool.
He heard the sound of laughter, female but cruel beyond his previous conception. A form lurched across the path in front of him. The mist cleared enough for him to see that it was a spider; its body was pale white and the size of an ox.
Varus froze, then strode forward deliberately. He couldn’t see anything through the fog. If he stepped off a cliff or into the teeth of another great spider—did spiders have teeth?—then his troubles were over.
The fog cleared. The old woman waited for him in a grove of oak trees.
It must be springtime, for the leaves had the bright flush of new growth and the insects hadn’t been at them yet. She was tending a brazier which stood on three legs shaped like stylized goats; thin violet flames wavered from what looked like chips of quartz, not charcoal.
“You have come to see me again, Lord Varus?” she said. He took the deeper crinkling of her face as a smile, though he knew he could be mistaken.
“I need you, lady,” he said. “I must destroy a dragon so that my companion and I can pass into the Underworld. I don’t know how to do that myself.”
“All knowledge is yours, Lord Varus,” the old woman said. “You wear the amulet that was Botrug’s and is now mine. But if you choose to use your power by imagining me—”
She lifted her right hand; her mouth opened to chant.
Varus was in the valley again, facing the dragon. He staggered; Sigyn caught him by the arm. He cried, “Thou wilt burgeon in greatest abundance!”
Her fingers felt cold. He didn’t think he had touched Sigyn before. He straightened with a little effort.
The dragon stepped toward them. It was only thirty feet away, and its legs, though stumpy in comparison to the length of the body, covered ten feet with each pace. Its foreclaws gouged the hard volcanic rock into puffs of dust and sparkling.
The creature paused and lifted its head slightly. Its right eye glittered like a ruby.
“You say the fruit isn’t poison,” Varus said. He started out in a whisper, but he had to raise his voice to be heard over the snorting gale of the dragon’s breath. “But if the fruit grows as you say, perhaps he’ll swell till he bursts.”
“The Guardian cannot be harmed, wizard,” the woman said. “Not by poison, not by bursting. The Guardian cannot be harmed.”
“Then run, Sigyn,” Varus said, holding himself straight. The dragon moved its head slightly; its right foreleg was s
till poised in midstep. “I’m going to stay here.”
The creature’s jaws opened slowly. Instead of presaging the final lunge that Varus expected, that was the only movement.
Tendrils of vine squirmed from the dragon’s mouth, curling up and around. The creature looked surprised. Cocking its huge head, it clawed at the swelling foliage. A rumble came from deep in its abdomen.
“Sigyn?” Varus said. He didn’t ask the question he’d formed: the answer was obvious. The fruit of the First Tree couldn’t burst the dragon’s stomach from inside, but neither could it be prevented from making its way up the creature’s gullet.
As though the claws’ touch had magical effect, the vine exploded into a torrent of greenery as forceful as a waterfall. Leafy vines wrapped the dragon’s body, band after band of them. The bundle continued to writhe, but now very slowly.
The dragon’s forelegs were lumps in a tube of green. A claw poked out, then was covered again by leaves.
“You do not sufficiently credit your own power, wizard,” the woman said. She smiled again and took Varus by the hand. “Come. You have opened the way for us to descend to our destinies.”
Together, Varus and his guide entered the mouth of the cave. Her fingers were like ice, but he trembled for other reasons as well.
CHAPTER XVI
Corylus squatted on the bank of the Ice River, looking toward the Horn beyond. As before, a line of bitter smoke streamed from the cone to etch the white sky.
The water chuckled, curling past blocks of drifting ice and the roots of trees exposed by the freshet. The scene was as busy as the peddlers’ kiosks filling the Field of Mars in Carce, though here the busyness was of hatchling insects, the birds preying on them, and voles scampering about to crop the young shoots uncurling from the roots of the grasses.
In the sky was a hawk, but it kept at a safe height to avoid Corylus. He looked around, wondering if the ravens were watching him. They weren’t; or at any rate, they weren’t from where he could see them.
Corylus rose with a sigh. He’d come by himself, though Sith had wanted to accompany him. He’d thought—he grinned: he’d prayed, really—that by musing alone and staring at the river, a solution to his problem would suddenly appear. That had never happened to him in the past, but the rules of this place might be as unusual as the matter which had caused him to be here.
Instead, spring in Hyperborea was much like spring on the Upper Rhine. Corylus felt his mind going back to his boyhood, when the problems—in hindsight—seemed a great deal more straightforward and trivial.
They’d seemed both knotty and serious at the time, of course. And while the task of diverting the Ice River into a bowl ten miles to the south might someday seem laughably simple, Corylus wouldn’t have a future if he didn’t solve it now. Frothi wasn’t the sort to spare a stranger who had failed to meet his challenge.
The hawk screamed: it must be a harrier. Corylus couldn’t make out the bird’s markings against the pale sky, but its call was unmistakable.
Smiling faintly, Corylus settled at the base of Odd’s cairn and leaned back against the stones. He was facing south, so the sun was fully on him. If he couldn’t solve the problem himself, he would call on the being who presumably could: Odd’s Vengeance. He closed his eyes and let the sun’s warmth creep into his bones.
The hawk called again, but the sound touched Corylus only the way the ant tickling the back of his left knee did, or the delicate scent of the lingon flowers mixed with the grasses. Corylus hadn’t been sure that he could relax under these circumstances, but he’d had a rough couple days. Quite apart from the physical labors, there’d been the stress of wondering what the Fates would throw at him next—and facing each next thing down.
He felt his mouth smiling. Confronting Frothi had if anything taken more out of him because there hadn’t been a fight; that would have burned away the emotions which instead had continued to curdle his blood. Sith had done a great deal to settle him, but that had been strenuous too.
The soil Corylus sat on sighed, and the breeze and the sun toyed with his hair. Behind him, the river joked with the ice. Everything here was warmth and peace.
Frothi and the wizard had found Odd in his trance and drowned him; they could do the same to the stranger who claimed to be Odd’s heir. Corylus didn’t think they’d dare to try while the tribe—and especially Sith—were watching for something of the sort, but it didn’t matter: Corylus couldn’t dig a ten-mile canal by himself. If Odd’s Vengeance came to him only while he slept, then he would sleep.
He heard giggling and turned. Girls stood in the grove of willows just upstream of where Corylus had built the cairn. When they saw him looking at them, one of them shook out her ash blond hair and said, “So, you’re going to notice us after all, Corylus? We’d decided that you thought you were too good for us.”
She stretched to her full lissome height, twining her arms together above her head. Her breasts were small, but the nipples thrust hard against the silk of her silvery tunic.
“I’m sorry, ladies,” Corylus said, rising to his feet. He wasn’t here to socialize, but neither was he going to be discourteous. “I hadn’t seen you. I certainly wouldn’t have ignored anyone as lovely as yourselves if I’d been aware of your presence.”
He grinned. After all, he hadn’t been accomplishing anything. He hadn’t even managed to get to sleep.
“I’ll forgive you,” said the nymph who’d spoken, “if you’ll give me a kiss.”
“Give each of us a kiss,” said a sister; other nymphs giggled. All ten or twelve sprites from the stand of willows were sauntering toward him.
Corylus had grown up in army camps. He was a good-looking youth and the son of an officer besides, so he was well used to getting offers of female companionship. The situation in Carce hadn’t been a great deal different, though in the better parts of the city, women generally put a gloss of culture on their propositions.
“Ladies, you’re all very lovely,” he said, sweeping his smile around the, well, grove of women. “I’m flattered, and another time I’d do my best to respond, but right now I’m hoping the man buried here will visit me. I need to divert the river”—he gestured—“south, and I don’t know how to do it.”
“The wizard Odd is dead, Corylus,” said a nymph. “He can’t help you.”
“He means Odd’s Vengeance,” the first sprite said. “But he”—she returned her gaze to Corylus; her eyes were slightly slanted and had a tawny luster—“can’t help you either, dear.”
“We can,” said another sprite.
“We can!” the grove chorused together.
“Would you like us to help you, Corylus?” said the leading sprite archly. “For kinship’s sake?”
“And for a kiss!” cried a sibling, but she broke into giggles and ducked away after she spoke. Perhaps the request had been a joke.
“We’ll need help,” said a sprite. “But surely all our sisters will join in, won’t they?”
“We would!” cried a sprite.
“All our sisters will help Corylus,” said another. “For kinship, and because he’s so handsome.”
“Ladies …,” said Corylus. He didn’t understand what was happening. He was pretty sure that if he said the wrong thing—promised the wrong thing—to these tree nymphs, the result could be as bad as failure, at least for himself personally. “I would appreciate any help you can give me. But I need to know what I would pay for that help first, please.”
“For kinship, Corylus,” said the leader. “But you’ll have to dance with us.”
Corylus realized the landscape in which he stood and spoke had become slightly blurred, as if he were seeing it through a sheet of glass with a faint yellow tinge. The sprites were sharp and clear, and battalions of similar laughing women were coming from all directions. What is happening?
“Your ladyship …,” Corylus said. He had no idea of how to address a tree nymph, but erring on the side of courtesy was never a bad idea. �
�I’ll of course dance with you, but I have other duties. If you please—I must be able to perform those too.”
“We mean you no harm, Cousin,” said the leading sprite. “We’ll release you. But you must join the dance if we’re to help.” She offered her hand. “Come, dear,” she said, grinning wickedly. “You won’t regret it, and we’ll enjoy it a great deal.”
“I would be honored,” Corylus said. He took her hand in his left, and another sprite took his right. Nymphs of all types and ages joined them, but the slender spirits of the willows were in the great majority.
They began to pace to a high, piping rhythm. Corylus wasn’t sure where the music came from. It was as though grass flowers were singing and the breeze accompanied them.
Perhaps there was a pattern, but so far as Corylus could see, the dancers drifted like thistledown or bubbles on the surface of a pond. Sprites left the rout and others took their places. Some whirled away, linked hands with siblings, and waded into the river. The chill didn’t seem to affect them. Others spun on their toes, digging into the soil. Sisters joined them, laughing and gesturing rhythmically in a serpentine line stretching southward.
Corylus danced with high steps, turning deliberately while he raised and lowered his arms. The conscious part of his mind recognized his motions as being those of the Salii, the dancers who performed with the sacred shield of Mars and its eleven exact duplicates; the original had fallen from the heavens. He wasn’t copying the priests, though: his limbs were performing the evolutions that had flowed into them from the touch of the willow sprites.
Corylus felt sunlight and the moisture in the ground. The dance exhilarated him as wine never had. Not even his greatest triumph on the sports field could equal what Corylus felt now. He laughed and felt the world laughing in the voices of his companions.
The earth cracked. A split ran jaggedly through and beyond the dancing spirits. Prairie grasses waved and shuddered southward as the rock continued to break apart. The river chuckled and bounced into a new channel, directed by the nymphs linking arms in the former stream.