by David Drake
The Hercules of ancient legend carried a plain oak branch for a club and wore a lion-skin cloak. Later myth made the skin that of the gigantic Nemean lion, sprung from the blood of the monster Typhon. No writer before now had suggested that the lion’s skin had been sprinkled with gold dust so that the spectators in the highest seats of the theater could see it sparkle, but Corylus supposed that might be an aspect which had simply gone unremarked in the past.
Euripides had given Heracles a brazen club, the gift of the god Hephaestus. Saxa had gone the Greek one better by gilding the club, but either metal was too sophisticated for the rustic hero.
Heracles’ armor—here golden—and the shield banded with gold, silver, and ivory had even more ancient evidence: the poet Hesiod, second in time and—some said—second in literary importance to Homer himself.
Even a great writer could come up with a bad idea in search of an effect, though. When one did, he opened a passage through which a Replacement Consul of the future could drive whole herds of absurdity.
Saxa wouldn’t have written the mime himself, of course. For a moment, Corylus wondered if Varus had. No, he would’ve said something. And besides, Varus had given up dramatic writing after his public reading last month.
Corylus glanced again at his friend and saw that he was jotting notes with a short bronze stylus on a tablet. Varus had decided to become a historian of the sacred rites of the Republic. That meant not only things like the auguries attending the appointment of a consul, but also theatrical performances like this one: they too were religious in character.
If something went wrong with a mime, a gladiatorial spectacle, or a beast hunt, it had to be repeated: restarted, in official terminology. That clause had been used to extend public events beyond the limits set for them by ritual.
In the past, a rich man could keep a spectacle going as long as he thought necessary to burn his name into the memory of the electorate. That wasn’t required now that officials were elected only after being nominated by the emperor. Indeed, a thoughtful senator might conclude that it wasn’t entirely wise to call the emperor’s attention to one’s wealth and popularity.
New “denizens of the deep” flowed along the channel: a cuttlefish lifting its arms, and a sea horse on which a painted triton rode. Floats in water so shallow wouldn’t bear the weight of an actor, but overhead performed three rope dancers dressed as sea nymphs in diaphanous silk.
Hercules gestured with his left hand and said, “Blessed will the people of this land be…!”
Flats against the rear wall of the stage rotated on vertical axles to display city walls beyond which red roofs peeked. “… when my successor arrives to dispense the justice and mercy of godlike Caesar!”
“Say, how are they doing that?” Pulto said in a low voice. He nodded toward the stage. “The sea, I mean. That really looks…”
The right corner of the stage had gotten darker. Corylus frowned. He couldn’t see the rope dancers anymore, and the water had become the dusty gray color of old lead.
Indeed, Corylus couldn’t see the back of the stage: a sea covered with an angry chop seemed to stretch into the distance. The serpentine neck that lifted momentarily and disappeared again certainly didn’t look like a bobbing flat.
“By Hercules!” Pulto said. “That looks bloody real!”
The oath had nothing to do with this mime. Hercules was the common man’s god, a good-natured fellow who drank too much and got into fixes, and who therefore could understand the problems of an ordinary soldier or farmer.
Corylus looked at the Tribunal. Saxa was beaming. There may have been a touch of surprise in back of his pleased expression, but he didn’t appear concerned.
Varus and Pandareus leaned forward transfixed. Varus continued to jot notes with a stolid determination which delighted Corylus but didn’t surprise him.
Varus consistently displayed as much physical courage as anyone Corylus had witnessed on the frontiers. There were plenty of men in the legions who could stand before a charge of screaming Germans, but there were very few who could have done what Varus was doing now. Not if they knew what Varus—and Corylus—knew about what was really happening.
The “city” of painted canvas took on depth. The walls shone brighter than the armor of Hercules, who now cowered on his rock, and the tiled roofs had risen into high crystal towers.
“How are we seeing this?” Corylus said. Pulto might have been able to hear him, but he knew he was really speaking to himself, attempting to impose reason on something beyond all reason. “It’s too clear!”
He wished he were with Pandareus and Varus now. They were talking in the Tribunal, two learned men discussing in the light of their philosophy the events they observed.
I am a citizen of Carce, a soldier and the son of soldiers. I will not flee.
The spectators began to applaud by shuffling their feet. They think it’s a stage effect! Corylus realized. They can’t imagine anything else that it might be.
The things Corylus had seen during the past ten days let him consider a broader range of possibilities than the general audience did, Gaius Saxa included. Ignorance would have been less uncomfortable.
Man-sized figures moved on the walls of the city, and the peaks of individual waves flicked foam into the breeze. A painter might manage the precision, but not the movement. No human eye could make out such detail from where Corylus sat. The spectators stamping delightedly from the base of the Temple of Venus at the back of the theater were hundreds of feet still farther away.
The sky continued to darken. Corylus could no longer see the stage, but the city and the sullen ocean spread to the limits of vision.
Tardus remained seated, unaffected by the scene or the clamor it provoked. His three companions had risen to their feet and were chattering with animation. Their words were lost in the applause and the howl of a wind that Corylus could hear but not feel.
The foreigners looked as frightened as Corylus felt. I am a citizen of Carce.…
The darkness spread, now engulfing the Tribunal. The last thing Corylus saw as he glanced upward was Hedia leaning forward for a closer look at what was before her. Her profile was cool and perfect.
* * *
I WONDER IF I’M GOING MAD? Hedia thought. The idea caused her to bleat a laugh. Would that be a good thing or a bad one? Something that can be treated with a dose of hellebore would be better than what it means if I’m seeing what’s really there.
“Isn’t it wonderful!” Saxa said, more excited than Hedia remembered him ever being during sex. “Why, Meoetes didn’t suggest he was going to do this! Look at how clear the walls of Olisipo are! Marvelous!”
Hedia glanced at her husband, wondering if he were prattling nonsense to mask his fear. He wasn’t. Saxa thought he would see a painting of the capital of Lusitania. He saw what he expected, stagecraft, and he was delighted that it was so good.
She patted the back of his hand with a wry smile; he gripped her fingers in excitement. Obviously, he’s seeing the same thing I am, so I’m not mad. Well, hellebore probably doesn’t cure madness anyway.
The city was becoming more distinct and spreading to fill … to fill her field of view, Hedia had thought at first, but it was more than that: she was becoming a part of the city. She could see and touch Saxa and—she reached to her left and squeezed Alphena’s elbow just to be sure—her daughter, but the unfamiliar towers and gleaming walls were equally real, equally present.
Men looked out to sea from the battlements. Most wore fringed tunics of unfamiliar cut, but a few were in flaring armor of the same fiery metal as the walls themselves. They didn’t disturb Hedia: Carce was full of foreigners, barbarians—people who, instead of speaking in Latin or Greek, chundered words that sounded like bar-bar-bar to civilized folk.
Among the humans were glittering figures, manlike but not men. They were the glass men which Hedia had seen in her nightmare, them or their close kin.
The audience here in the Pompeian
Theater was as delighted with the spectacle as their patron was. They stamped their feet and waved scarves and capes to signify their approval.
The demonstrations had started at the highest levels of the theater. Hedia suspected the spectators there had been seeing detail beyond what they had thought was possible, causing them to react even more quickly than the folk in better seats.
Hedia’s brief smile was as cold as the emperor’s charity. The spectators had been correct: this detail was impossible to achieve—by human efforts.
If the vision on stage is real, Hedia thought, then what I saw in my dream was real also.
Varus would probably tell her that her logic was flawed. She wasn’t a philosopher, but she was correct. This is real, and the nightmare is real; and the nightmare isn’t over.
Hedia touched her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, then reformed them into her aristocratic smile. Any observer would think that she was as pleased as her husband by the drama being acted on stage.
The present audience had lost all sense of decorum in its delighted amazement, but even whispers would be loud when multiplied by tens of thousands. Nonetheless, Hedia heard screams of terror over the applause.
She couldn’t see the actors and technicians on the other side of the stage where now another world was spreading. If they were alive, they knew that what was happening was more than theatrical trickery.
They must be terrified, Hedia thought. They must be as frightened as I am.
She smiled calmly as she watched and waited. She had no better choice than to behave like a lady; and perhaps that was always the best choice anyway.
The city before her was as clear as coral viewed through the waters of the Bay of Puteoli. Hedia—the whole audience, she supposed—saw more than mere eyesight would have allowed if the place had been as close as the stone stage front. It wasn’t huge, certainly not as big as Carce. It seemed more the size of Herculaneum on the slopes of Vesuvius, where a sometime friend of Hedia’s had a vacation villa.
I should make a point of seeing Maternus again when I next visit Baiae, she thought. The pleasant memory helped calm her, though no one looking on would have realized the patron’s wife was in the least disturbed.
The buildings were shining towers, much higher than anything in Carce. The tallest of the lot was a smooth spire with no steps or stages, rising from the plaza which faced the seafront. Hedia had heard of the pyramids of Egypt, but those were described as being of stone and as broad as they were tall. This was a slender crystalline cone topped with a ball of the same blazing metal as had been used in the walls.
The city had been built on a bay, and the shore curved outward in both directions. In the corner of her eye Hedia thought she saw the glint of water inland as well, but that could have been another crystal building.
She couldn’t look away from the moving statues on the walls. In dreams the most innocent flower or vista can terrify because it is terrifying, not from any property which the waking mind can recognize. The glass men frightened her only because they were frightening in her dream; and even there, they radiated doom only because of the nightmare ambiance.
Ships floated in the harbor at the foot of the city walls. They were larger than the barges which rowed pleasure seekers on the Bay of Puteoli to the Isle of Capri but no bigger than the fifty-oared liburnians of the naval detachment at Misenum, adjacent to Baiae. One ship moved, then a second.
Hedia gasped with surprise. Instead of moving out to sea on crawling oar strokes, what she had thought were sails were beating up and down. The ships lifted from the water like heavily laden gulls.
“Hurrah!” Saxa cried. “All honor to Meoetes!”
Hedia’s smile became wry. She knew that her husband was cheering his impresario, but it must seem strange to the audience to hear the patron applauding his own spectacle. Except—
Her face became briefly expressionless before resuming its look of bland acceptance.
—that no one in the vast audience was paying attention to Saxa. Wonder at the performance had overwhelmed every other interest and speculation.
There were six ships in the air now, moving with increasing speed and agility as they rose. A few glass figures were on deck, generally standing at the tubular equipment in the bow. Each of these ships had a figure in gleaming armor in the stern where the helmsman of a normal vessel would grip the steering oar. A few ordinary human beings in tunics were scattered among the squadron, working at undecipherable tasks.
Though the sky was bright, the sun had begun to flatten and turn crimson on the western horizon. When the sea began to roil, Hedia thought at first that it was a trick of the light on the wave tops.
The flying ships curved toward the disturbance, continuing to climb. The water was suddenly as bright as blood. Something started to rise from it.
The thing was huge beyond all living measure.
* * *
AS THE OCEAN BEFORE THEM BOILED, Alphena leaned forward. She felt an anticipation which she couldn’t understand, let alone explain to anyone else.
A tentacled horror the size of an island rose on hundreds of twisting, serpentine legs. It paused for a moment, then surged toward the city. Two of the flying ships turned toward the creature and sprayed flame from the apparatus in their bows.
An arm hundreds of feet long curled out, coiled around the stern of one vessel, and clubbed it across the hull of the other. Both broke apart, spilling bodies and fragments. The bow of the free-flying ship splashed into the sea and sank. The monster hurled what was left of the ship it held toward the city.
This is wrong! Alphena thought.
As if she had blinked and cleared a distorting film from her eyes, Alphena saw a human giant where she had briefly imagined a monster. His iron gray hair had been caught in a pair of braids that hung down his back. His only garment was a leather breechclout on which colored splints picked out a border and a sunburst design.
The muscles wrapping the giant’s broad, bare chest were as distinct as if a sculptor had chiseled them. Water cascaded from his body; he took another calm step forward.
The giant looked at Alphena. He smiled, the first expression she had seen on his face. He had an enormous dignity, the sort of feeling that the statues of gods should project, but never did in Alphena’s experience.
He’s not a giant! Alphena thought. She was certain of that, for all that he towered over the city walls and the tiny figures on them. He’s my brother’s height!
The four remaining ships flew toward the giant in line abreast. His face lost its smile; his right arm moved as swiftly as that of a gladiator casting his net. His fingers slapped the endmost ship, flinging it into its next neighbor. Both broke apart. The two surviving vessels curved off.
The man reached into the water as if groping for clams at the shore. The remaining ships slanted toward him. One pulled ahead and sprayed flame across the man’s left shoulder.
Instead of reacting to the attack, the man straightened slowly; the muscles of his back and arms bunched with the effort. A plate of rock tilted up in his hands; a section of the city walls lifted with it. The thick metal walls bent like foil, then tore from bottom to top.
Spectators on the battlements, tiny by contrast, had begun to flee from the man’s approach. Those who had not yet gotten clear fluttered away like chaff from a threshing floor.
The vessel which had sprayed fire now sheered away. The second, no longer blocked by its fellow, slid in. As part of the same smooth motion that had torn the slab from ground, the man threw it.
The rock sailed through the air like a hard-thrown dirt clod, but each of the pieces weighed tons. The nearer ship vanished like a cherry blossom caught in a hailstorm. The more distant might have escaped had not a sheet of gleaming wall tumbled through it lengthwise.
He knew what he was doing from the moment he bent over, Alphena realized. He had decided how to destroy them before they even attacked.
Varus studied history and literature, maki
ng connections between separate events in a fashion that astounded scholars far older than he was. Alphena was interested not in books but in gladiators. That might be unladylike, but she had come to suspect that her own mind was as good as her brother’s, or nearly so.
A successful fighter swam through his battles the way a hawk did the air. Alphena had never seen anyone in the amphitheater who displayed more liquid grace than this half-naked barbarian.
He’s magnificent. He’s as old as my father, but he moves like a weasel. A huge, powerful weasel.
The man wriggled his shoulders, loosening his muscles after the effort of moments before. His left arm was angry red, and blisters were popping up on the skin. Alphena thought he might rub the injury, but instead he merely shrugged and grasped another shelf of rock.
This time he rose from his knees instead of lifting with his back muscles. A quarter of the city toppled inward, shattering tower against tower to fill the streets with fragments.
The great slab rolled back. The man caught it, braced himself, then lifted it overhead. It must be as heavy as the cone of Vesuvius, Alphena thought.
She was as thrilled as she had been the afternoon she watched the swordsman Draco defeat seven netmen consecutively, a feat never before accomplished in the amphitheaters of Carce. He’s magnificent!
The giant smashed the slab down onto what remained of the city. The vision was soundless, but pulverized dust exploded outward to settle on the sea and the surrounding forest promiscuously, like a gray pall.
The man turned his head. Alphena thought he was looking straight into the Tribunal. He smiled minusculely—
At me!
—and reached down for another mass of rock. The sea behind him bubbled, surging up the passage he had torn into the land.
Magnificent.
* * *
VARUS TOOK NOTES as he observed the monster. He had filled the four leaves of his first notebook and was already well into the extra one he had brought as an afterthought.
He smiled slightly. Perhaps he could scribe additional notes on the Tribunal’s stuccoed railing. If he had considered that possibility, he would have inked notes on shaved boards instead of scribing them on wax with a bronze stylus. Of course, he would probably have run out of ink by now also.