by David Drake
Pandareus had been making odd motions with his hands, curling and opening his fingers in a complex pattern. Is he praying? Varus wondered. Or is that some foreign gesture to turn away evil?
He was just opening his mouth to ask when Pandareus said, “I’ve counted three hundred and eighteen legs on the side we can see. And we don’t know with a creature like this that the entire underside isn’t covered with legs, instead of them being placed only around the outer rim of the body.”
He’s been counting, using the position of his fingers as an abacus! Varus realized in a gush of relief. He wasn’t as willing to claim prayer and charms were superstitious twaddle as he might have been a month ago, but it still would have been disturbing to see his teacher descending to such practices.
Aloud Varus said, “You said, ‘A creature like this,’ master. You think there are more of them?”
Pandareus laughed. They were probably the only two people in the theater who found humor in the situation. That spoke well for philosophy as a foundation for life, or at least for a dignified death.
The creature was tearing a path into the island, hurling increasingly large pieces of soil and bedrock into the ocean behind it. Its hundreds of tentacles worked together, waving like a field of barley in a breeze. They groped down into the land, then wrenched loose great chunks of it.
“Master?” said Varus as he jotted down details of the creature’s legs. They were all serpentine, but some had scales, some had nodules like a gecko’s skin, and the rest included a score of different surfaces and patterns. “It … Does it look to you as though it’s growing larger as it proceeds?”
“Very well observed, Lord Varus,” Pandareus said approvingly. “Note that the channel behind the creature is narrower than the front which his body is cutting now. Perhaps it’s devouring the rock, do you suppose? Though that doesn’t appear to be the case.”
Varus could see his companions in the Tribunal, but the audience in the belly of the theater was either hidden by the vision of destruction or had vanished into the blur that extended from the visible margins. Except—
Where the orchestra had been, the three strangers who accompanied Tardus were sharply visible. They glared at the creature as it tore through whatever stood in its way. The mixture of fear and fury in their expressions reminded Varus of caged rats, gnashing their chisel teeth in a desire to chop and gash in the face of certain death.
“Lord Varus?” Pandareus said without any hint of emotion in the words. He raised an eyebrow. “Is this your doing, I wonder?”
“No!” said Varus, angry for an instant. Then, when he had analyzed his response, he was embarrassed.
“I beg your pardon, teacher,” he said. “I was afraid you might be correct. I am afraid you might be correct.”
“You have mistaken a question for an accusation, my lord,” Pandareus said dryly. “The teacher who failed to train you out of that defensive reflex is to be censured. Furthermore, my question was rather hopeful.”
He gestured with his open left hand toward the vision. The monster was wreaking destruction at an accelerating pace.
“I’m quite certain of your goodwill toward mankind generally and toward me in particular, you see,” Pandareus said. “I would have been glad to learn that you had brought this thing into being; because if you did not, I have to be concerned about the intentions of who or what is responsible.”
The creature lifted a block of land greater than its own huge bulk, spun it end for end in its tentacles, and sent it crashing into the sea. The vision dissolved in spray.
Varus flinched instinctively, but the gout of water seemed not to reach the Tribunal. He had an impossibly good view of what was happening, but none of his other senses were involved.
“Master,” Varus said, “if I knew what was happening, I would tell you; and if I could stop it, I…”
The words dried in his throat. Pandareus and, on Varus’ other side, his family, were fading into a familiar gray mist which replaced the spray thrown up by the vision.
He was not moving, but reality shifted around him. He knew that he was walking through a foggy dreamworld in which other shapes and beings might pass nearby without him seeing them; but he knew also where he was going and who would be waiting when he arrived there.
Varus climbed up from the fog; it lay behind him in a rippling blanket, as though it filled a valley. The ancient woman sat under a small dome supported by pillars. Framing the top of her high-backed chair were two huge boar tusks.
No pig is that large! Varus thought. It would have to weigh more than a ton.
The ivory was yellow, and the tips had been worn by heavy use. He remembered that Apollonius claimed that Hercules sent the tusks of the Erymanthian Boar to Cumae.
“Why do you come to me, Lord Varus?” the old woman said. “The power is yours, not mine.”
“Sibyl, I know only what is in books,” Varus said, using her proper title. “Tell me what I saw in the theater.”
Then, because he knew his body remained seated with his family in the Tribunal, he said, “Tell me what I am seeing.”
The Sibyl turned her head, looking down the slope opposite to the direction from which Varus had approached her. He followed her eyes to the scene he had been viewing in the theater, but now he watched as if from a great distance above. The creature ravaged an island or rather a series of six rings, each inside the next larger and all touching or nearly touching at the same point of the circles.
Volcanoes, Varus realized. Or anyway, a volcano which had erupted six times on successively smaller scales. The craters were nested within one another, but cracks in their walls had let in sea to create a series of circular islands.
Even the most recent event must have been far in the past. Except where crystal palaces sparkled, heavy jungle covered the rims of the cones and their slopes above sea level.
The creature itself had grown to the size of an island as it demolished the linked cones. Varus remembered waves washing over the sand palaces he had built on the beach at Baiae when he was a child.
“You see Typhon destroying Atlantis,” the Sibyl said. Her voice was as clear and unemotional as the trill of nightingale. “The Minoi, the Sea Kings of Atlantis, were not such fancies as Plato believed when he invented stories about them. But I know only what you know, Lord Varus.”
I didn’t know that! Varus thought. He grimaced. She knows what I think, whether I speak or not.
“Mistress?” he said. “Is it real, what we see? Is it happening?”
Spray and steam concealed whatever was left of the ring islands. Will the creature break through to the fires remaining under the surface of the sea? And if so, what then?
He doubted that Typhon would be harmed even by a fresh eruption. As for Atlantis, it could scarcely be more completely uprooted than it was now.
“It may have happened, Varus,” said the Sibyl. “There are many paths, and on this path Typhon destroyed Atlantis.”
“What happened next?” Varus said. He looked into the old woman’s eyes. Her skin was as wrinkled as that of a raisin, but her features nonetheless had a quiet dignity. “After, after Typhon destroyed Atlantis, what did it do?”
The Sibyl turned her palms up, then down again. “If Typhon destroys Atlantis, will it not destroy this world, Lord Varus? Who but Zeus with his thunderbolts could halt him?”
The linked islands were a sludge of steam and drifting ash. Typhon, larger by far than the monster of his first appearance, crawled eastward. The setting sun threw his shadow across a red-tinged sea.
“Mistress?” said Varus. In this place he no longer had his notebook. He regretted that, because holding it would have given him something to do with his hands. “Is Zeus real?”
The Sibyl laughed. She said, “I know only what you know, Lord Varus. Are the Olympian gods real, philosopher?”
Of course not, Varus thought, though he didn’t open his mouth. I’m an educated man, not a superstitious bumpkin.
&n
bsp; The Sibyl laughed again. “Then let your philosophy console you!” she said.
The mist rose, lapping Varus’ waist and stretching wisps toward the Sibyl’s chair. He could feel words of closure trembling in his heart. Before they could burst from his mouth he cried, “Sibyl, was the Erymanthian Boar real? Did Heracles kill it?”
Without turning her head, the Sibyl lifted her right hand and caressed the great tusk beside her head. She said, “You are a clever, educated boy, Lord Varus. Something was real, and someone killed it. If you wish to say they were the Erymanthian Boar and Heracles, who is there to stop you? Not I, surely.”
“Open the Earth and the World to me!” Varus’ lips shouted. His soul plunged through ice and fire until it filled his body again. He rocked on his stool and would have fallen if Pandareus had not caught him by the shoulders.
The illusion had vanished. The actor playing Hercules sprawled sobbing against the stone backdrop. Others of the performers huddled together or had fled from the stage.
The entire audience was on its feet, stamping and shouting, “Saxa! Saxa! Saxa!”
Father must be very pleased, Varus thought. I wish I knew as little about what happened as he does, so that I could be pleased also.
CHAPTER III
The vision disappeared as suddenly as a lightning flash, leaving nothing behind but memories. Hedia was so cold inside that she continued to sit in numb silence, oblivious of the change.
The spectators, all the many thousands of them, were going wild. That’s dangerous! she realized. Fear for her husband and family broke her out of the gray chill that had bound her.
Hedia got to her feet. She wasn’t fully herself—she knocked the stool over behind her—but nobody would notice in this confusion. Alphena glanced up as Hedia walked toward the back of the Tribunal. The girl looked as though she wanted to say something, but Hedia had no time for chatter.
Servants waited in the rear of the box. Though excited, they didn’t seem worried—or anyway, not more worried than could be explained by the fact that their mistress was approaching with a hard expression.
Hedia ignored her personal maid, Syra, and instead stepped close to Candidus, a deputy steward and the senior servant present. She gestured him to bend over so that she could speak into his ear and be heard.
I’ll probably have to shout anyway. Shouting was undignified, but Hedia supposed that under the circumstances she couldn’t complain about a minor indignity.
She smiled. She couldn’t change how she felt, but she was too self-aware not to be able to view herself clearly.
“Candidus, find the impresario Meoetes and tell him in the senator’s name to draw the curtain at once,” she said, holding the lobe of the servant’s left ear between her thumb and forefinger. “At once, do you understand? And go yourself; don’t pass this off to an underling who might be disregarded.”
She wasn’t pinching him, but her touch reminded the servant that he was dealing with Hedia, not her gentle, diffident husband. Candidus would obey, without question or hesitation.
The fellow made Hedia want to slap him. Well, cane him; she certainly didn’t want her bare hand to touch his greasy skin. She had decided when she took charge of Saxa’s household that so long as the servants obeyed her instantly, she would ignore any behavior that didn’t directly touch the honor of her new family.
“At once, your ladyship!” Candidus said. He went down the stairs at the back of the Tribunal, taking each step individually but quickly.
Though a slave, Candidus affected a toga at public events like this one. The thick wool made him sweat like a broiling capon. In Hedia’s present mood, the fellow’s mere presence seemed an almost unbearable provocation.
She turned and almost cannoned into Alphena, who must have followed her. Hedia stifled a curse—she’s following me to help, but this isn’t the time for it!—and hugged her daughter by the shoulders and swung around her.
“Give me a moment, dear,” Hedia said. “I must speak to your father.”
Saxa sat with his hands on the arms of his chair, beaming and blinking. He no more understands the situation than a bull being led to the altar does! Hedia thought, then muttered a prayer that the metaphor might not be a prophecy.
Syra had righted the stool. Hedia leaned across it, graceful despite her hurry, and touched her husband’s upper arm.
“Dearest,” she said, hoping that concern wouldn’t give her voice the whip-crack edge she knew it got at times. “Get up and thank the emperor. Raise your hands for silence. When things quiet a little, say that this was done by the emperor’s gift. Make sure that at least the orchestra hears you. Do you understand?”
“What?” said Saxa. He looked at her, blinking. He seemed surprised to hear words in the midst of applause that had as little content as a crashing thunderstorm. “The emperor, my dear? No, Meoetes did all this, but he was doing it for me.”
“My lord and master,” Hedia said, chipping the words out and no longer trying to hide her frightened anger. “Tell Carce that it owes this entertainment to the emperor. Otherwise you and Meoetes and your family will be entertaining the city from the tops of crosses!”
Saxa looked blank for an instant. “Oh!” he said. “Yes, this was … this was…”
Apparently he couldn’t decide how to describe the vision any better than Hedia could have, so he lurched to his feet instead of finishing the sentence. He raised his arms. For a moment the cheers increased, but Saxa turned his palms outward as though pushing the sound away.
Hedia sank onto her stool, feeling unexpected relief. She couldn’t do anything about the glass figures of her dreams, but at least she had gotten Saxa—gotten her whole family—out of the immediate trouble. At any rate, she had done what was humanly possible to avoid immediate repercussions from this vision, this waking nightmare.
The curtain was canvas and split ceiling to floor down the middle. Ordinarily only half was used at a time, concealing set changes on a portion of the long stage. Now both right and left portions began to move toward the center, but they jerked and stuttered instead of sliding smoothly as they had before. By leaning over the railing, Hedia could see that three and four men were manhandling the heavy curtains rather than the dozen stagehands in each of the original crews.
Candidus must have carried the message successfully; that, or Meoetes had come to the same conclusion on his own. The actors still on stage looked like casualties of a gladiatorial show that the doctors and Charon—the costumed slave who drove the dead wagon—hadn’t gotten to yet.
“My fellow citizens!” Saxa said. “Hail to the noble and generous emperor who has granted you this gift. Carce rules the world, and the emperor is the soul of Carce!”
His voice was pitched too high to command authority, but he was managing good volume; he would be heard. Hedia nodded approvingly.
“Long live the emperor!” Saxa said. “Long live the emperor, our father and god!”
Cheers and the banging of sandals on stone again overwhelmed the theater. Hedia noted wryly that her husband’s fellow senators were the most enthusiastic, capering like monkeys in the orchestra. Nobody wants word to get out that he was behind-hand when everyone around him applauded the emperor.
Hedia started to relax, but now that the immediate danger was past, memory of the dreadful glass figures returned. The memory gripped her like a hawk sinking its talons into a vole. She felt dizzy for an instant; she felt Alphena take her arm to steady her on the chair.
She recovered, straightening like the noble lady that she was. She patted her daughter’s hand affectionately.
There was something very wrong going on, but there had generally been things wrong in Hedia’s life—before her first marriage to Calpurnius Latus and most certainly ever afterward. She had seen her way through those troubles, and she would see her way through this one also.
She had to, after all. What would poor dear Saxa and his children, her children now, do without her?
T
omorrow she would visit Anna, Corylus’ housekeeper and his former nurse. Anna was the wife of the boy’s servant Pulto—and she was a Marsian witch.
And if Anna couldn’t send away those glass nightmares, Hedia would find another way. It was her duty as a wife and mother, and as a noblewoman of Carce.
But oh! She wished Corylus was holding her now in his strong young arms!
* * *
THE SPECTATORS WERE BEGINNING to drift toward the exits. Corylus led his burly servant through them against the flow. Pulto would have been more than willing to force a path, but Carce wasn’t a frontier cantonment and Publius Corylus was no longer the son of a high military officer.
Still, though Corylus didn’t push people out of his way, the senator’s toady who thought to shove the youth aside got a knee in the crotch for his bad judgment. He heard Pulto chuckle behind him. I am a freeborn citizen of Carce, and I learned on the Rhine how to handle lice.
They got clear of the audience and found that the steps from the orchestra to the stage were concealed behind an offset panel. “Just like a Celtic hill fort,” Pulto said as he followed his master up them.
Corylus’ face blanked as he tried for an instant to fathom the deep inner meaning of what his servant had just said; then he smiled. There isn’t any deep inner meaning, here or ever with Pulto. He’d seen the entrances to Celtic hill forts designed the same way, so he said so.
Corylus ducked behind the curtain. A few actors were still standing on stage. One had been dressed as a naiad in silk pantaloons painted to look like a fish’s tail with flowing fins. She had stripped off her costume and stood nude, weeping desperately.
“What’s all that about, do you think, lad?” Pulto asked in puzzlement.
Corylus glanced at him; they were side by side again. Pulto still thinks it was all stagecraft!