by David Drake
“I don’t know,” Varus said. He shook his head ruefully, remembering the way he had said the same thing to the Sibyl in his … his dream? His waking reverie?
He considered the whole dream, frowned, and said, “I saw—I focused on, I mean; I saw all Carce. But I focused on the town house of Commissioner Tardus. I suppose I might have been thinking about him because of the strangers who accompanied him in the theater.”
“It’s equally probable,” said Corylus, “that the thing that disturbed you in the theater is the same thing that you saw, saw or sensed or whatever, in the vision you just experienced. That’s what you did, isn’t it? Have a vision?”
Varus bobbed his chin up in agreement. “Yes,” he said. “I saw Typhon starting to destroy Carce. It was much bigger than what we all saw here in the theater, but it was clearly the same creature. Then I was looking at Tardus’ house.”
“If we assume that the connection with Egypt is important…,” Pandareus said. He was in professorial mode again; he turned his right palm outward to forestall the objections to his logic.
“Then the crypt to the god Sarapis beneath the house of the Sempronii Tardi might explain the cause.”
“But, master?” said Corylus. “Private temples to Serapis—”
Varus noted that his friend pronounced the god’s name in Latin fashion while Pandareus had used Greek.
“—were closed by order of the Senate more than eighty years ago. Were they not?”
Pandareus chuckled. “Very good, my legalistic friend,” he said. “But my understanding—purely as a scholar, of course—is that the Senator Sempronius Tardus of the day chose discretion rather than to strictly obey to the order closing private chapels. His successors have continued to exercise discretion, since closing the chapel now would call attention to the past.”
He shrugged. “I’m told this, you understand—” probably by Atilius Priscus, but Pandareus would never betray his source “—but it’s entirely a private matter. The aristocracy of Carce do not open their temples—or their family secrets—to curious Greeklings, however interested in philosophy and religion.”
Varus sucked in his lips to wet them. “I think,” he said, “that Commissioner Tardus would open his house to the authority of a consul.”
Pandareus and Corylus both looked at him sharply. “Will your father help us in this?” the teacher said.
“I think he might do so at my request,” said Varus.
He smiled. Looked at in the correct way, everything is political. He said, “And I’m quite sure he will obey his wife in the matter. Judging from Hedia’s actions, she is just as concerned about this business as the three of us are.”
CHAPTER IV
Pulto was part of the rear guard, chatting in German with a footman who had been born in the quadrilateral between the Upper Rhine and Upper Danube, but Corylus walked beside Varus in the middle of the procession. His expression must have caught his friend’s eye in the torches which the linkmen carried.
Varus looked concerned and asked, “Is something wrong, Publius?”
“Nothing at all,” Corylus said. He gestured to the twenty-odd servants ahead of them—as many followed—and explained, “In the cantonments, a procession like this at night would be the Camp Police, is all. So I guess part of me is expecting some drunk to fling a wine bottle at us—or a chamber pot, to tell the truth.”
“We’re far more civilized here in Carce,” Varus said, relaxing into a smile. “A poor man might be set on and robbed, but we of the better classes travel in perfect ease and security. Unless we slip on the paving stones and fall on our backs, as I’ve been known to do.”
Two linkmen and two servants with cudgels led the entourage, singing about a girlfriend who had run off with a trapeze artist and now performed with him. This version was rather tamer than what Corylus had heard sung on the Danube, where the lyrics dwelt on the endowments of the acrobat which had lured the errant girlfriend away.
The song was to warn away footpads, drunks, and any poor citizen who happened to be sharing Orbian Street with them tonight and didn’t want a crack on the head. Corylus had learned quickly that in Carce, rich men’s escorts had a rough-and-ready way with potential dangers to those they were protecting.
“Manetho?” Varus called to the steward walking a pace ahead of his master. “We’ll go in through the back garden. I expect my father’s clients will be clogging the front entrance for hours yet after the—”
He paused. Corylus knew why, but the servants probably thought nothing of it.
“—the success, that is, of his mime.”
“As your lordship wishes,” Manetho said. He trotted forward, though the men in front had probably heard the command without it needing to be relayed.
Pandareus had insisted on going home on his own to his tiny apartment off the Sacred Way. He’d insisted he would be in no danger because he had many years of dodging trouble at night in Carce.
No doubt that was true, but Corylus still wished that Varus had succeeded in getting their teacher to accept a couple husky servants to convey him. Marmots had a great deal of experience foraging on grassy alpine meadows, but eagles still caught their dinners.
One of the linkmen waited at the mouth of the alley as a marker, while his partner and the cudgel-bearers turned down it. From the near distance ahead a deep voice boomed, “Who’s there?”
“Keep your tunic on, Maximus!” the linkman said.
“Both of you pipe down!” said Manetho. “Let’s not embarrass the consul in his own home, shall we? He’ll be meeting in his office with the leading men of the Republic right now.”
“That isn’t how I would have described my father’s clients,” Varus said, leaning close to Corylus. Even so his voice was barely audible. “But I suppose it sounds better than ‘feckless parasites’.”
“Well, I’m sure they’re the leading feckless parasites,” Corylus whispered back. That he dared make such a joke to a noble showed—showed Corylus himself—how much he trusted Varus and considered him to be a friend. He’s a man I’d take across the Rhine, Corylus thought, putting it in army terms.
The alley was narrow; the procession slowed to a crawl while Maximus, the nighttime doorkeeper, pulled open the back gate. He had been waiting in the alley with his lantern instead of watching the portal from inside.
Pulto slipped—more likely, pushed—through the intervening servants to join his master. If Varus hadn’t been present he would probably have asked Corylus what he intended to do now, but under the circumstances he merely grunted, “Sir,” politely.
The line was moving again. The footmen who’d been in front were blocking the other end of the alley against rampaging housebreakers or other equally unlikely threats.
Most of what a rich man’s servants did was either make-work or simply sit on their hands. There were too many of them for it to be any other way. Saxa had well over two hundred servants here in his town house: he could have rebuilt the whole structure with a smaller crew.
“Unless you want me with you, Varus…?” Corylus said, raising an eyebrow.
“No, I think it’s best if I see Father alone,” Varus said. “I can take him away from his clients, but to bring my friend with me would be insulting. I’m perfectly willing to insult them if I need to, but I don’t see the necessity in this case. Would you care to wait in the gymnasium until I have an answer?”
They’d reached the gate; Maximus raised his lantern. Varus’ smile in the flickering light was engaging, but Corylus recognized an underlying hardness that he had noticed before in aristocratic tribunes posted to the frontiers for a year on a legion’s staff. The nobles of Carce were pampered, certainly, but their enemies had rarely found them soft.
“If you don’t mind…,” Corylus said as they passed through the gate. “I’ll wait here in the garden.”
He gestured. The central court had a pool and extensive plantings, but the walled back of the property was a garden also. Seven days ag
o there had been a peach tree and a pear tree as well as flower beds. The blooms were generally cut for decorations inside the house, but there was a little summer bedroom with wicker screens on either side of the enclosure.
“Certainly,” said Varus. “Would you like something to eat or drink while you’re waiting?”
“No,” said Corylus. “I’ll be fine. I just like flowers, you know.”
“If it’s all the same with you, master…?” Pulto said. “I’d like to chat with my buddy Lenatus in the gym.”
“Yes, of course,” Corylus said. Pulto nodded gratefully as he strode through the gateway to the house proper on the heels of the servants.
There was nothing unusual about the request. Lenatus, whom Saxa had hired as the family trainer, was an old soldier whom Pulto had known when they were both stationed on the Rhine. The haste with which Pulto moved would have puzzled Corylus if he hadn’t known the reason, however.
So long as Pulto thought the vision in the theater was stage trickery, it hadn’t disturbed him. Now he had realized that it was real. That made him all the more uncomfortable about magic and the traces it left.
Corylus looked around. He was alone in the garden except for Maximus, who had pulled the gate closed and stood against it with the lantern, looking unhappy.
“Ah…,” said the doorkeeper. “I suppose you’ll want me to keep you company back here, sir?”
Maximus had the shoulders of a bear and arms that hung almost to his knees. His strikingly ugly looks caused him to be stationed at the back gate, not at the front where the senator’s distinguished visitors entered, but Corylus had found him intelligent and, surprisingly, literate in Greek with a smattering of Latin as well.
“I don’t see why,” Corylus said, smiling. “It seems to me that you can guard things just as well in the alley as here. I’ll just think for a while.”
“I guess you know what you’re doing, sir,” Maximus said. “Only me—it doesn’t feel right back here since the pear tree died, you know? It used to be that other fellows would come sit with me, you know? But none of the servants like to come back here now. And, ah … I sometimes think I’m seeing somebody. In the corner of my eye, you know?”
“I’m sure I’ll be all right,” said Corylus; he gestured toward the back gate. “And you can take the lantern. There’s plenty of moonlight for me.”
“Thank you, sir!” the doorman said with an enthusiasm that a gold piece for a tip couldn’t have bettered. He was out into the alley again, banging the gate closed, almost before he’d spoken the last syllable.
Corylus looked around again, his smile rueful. The garden wasn’t a ruin, not yet, but even the crescent moon showed him that it was neglected.
Ten days since, Saxa and the Hyperborean sorcerer who had gained his confidence had held an incantation here. Their magic had resulted in a blast of intense cold which killed the pear tree, and it had also worked deeper changes to the setting.
Corylus had his own reasons for being here, but he wasn’t surprised that the servants kept away. That included the gardeners: the dead pear had been removed, but no one had watered or weeded the flower beds since the incantation.
There was a covered walkway against the partition wall between the garden and the house. Corylus settled himself on the pavement, facing the alley. The peach tree on the left side of the garden was in full flower. Its branches, fluffy and white in the moonlight, overhung the wall at several points.
If all those flowers are allowed to set fruit, Corylus thought, the weight will break the branches. If the gardeners won’t do something, perhaps I should—
A woman—a female figure—stepped into the moonlight, as he had expected she would. Corylus rose to his feet. “Good evening, Persica,” he said.
The dryad flinched, but she didn’t disappear. “Are you angry with me?” she said in a small voice. She turned her face away, but he could see that she was watching out of the corner of her eye.
“No, Persica,” he said. “I think we’ve both learned things since we met before.”
The nymph had tricked him into a past time. Her malice came from petty stupidity rather than from studied cruelty. She—“Peaches”—was small-minded and not over-bright, so how else could she have acted?
“I’d be angry if you tried to do it again, though,” he added.
Persica sniffed. “No fear of that!” she said bitterly. “The woman here—she’s a demon! She said she’d peel my bark off with a paring knife. She meant it!”
“If you mean Lady Hedia…,” Corylus said, hiding his smile because the dryad would have misinterpreted it. “Then I suspect you’re right.”
Persica gave a peevish flick of her hand. “I don’t pay any attention to humans’ names,” she said. “Why should I?”
She kicked morosely at loose dirt where the pear tree had been. Though the gardeners had grubbed out the frost-shattered trunk, they had neither planted a replacement nor resodded the soil turned when they ripped up the roots.
“I never thought I’d miss Pirus,” the dryad muttered. “So full of herself because she had nice hair. As if nobody else had nice hair!”
Persica tossed her head but swayed her body as well, so that her long red-blond hair swirled in one direction and her garment in the other. The fabric was sheer. It had scattered light in bright sun, as Corylus remembered, but now in the moon glow it was barely a shadow over her full breasts and the rippling muscles of her belly.
“I used to watch you humans, at least,” she said. “You aren’t much, but you’re company. Now I don’t even have that.”
She looked squarely at Corylus and pleaded, “Is it because of me? I wouldn’t hurt them! I didn’t mean to hurt you, just, well, I was angry. Who wouldn’t have been angry with that Hyperborean sorcerer killing Pirus right beside me?”
“I don’t think it’s you, Persica,” Corylus said. He touched one of the flat marble spinners which hung from the roof over the walkway. They turned in the breezes, scattering light into the shadowed interior. The nymph had used their reflections to send him to another time and place.…
But if Persica hadn’t indulged her whimsical malice, Corylus wouldn’t have gained the tool and the knowledge that had helped save Carce from destruction. As a matter of fact—
“If you hadn’t tricked me the way you did, Persica,” he said, “I would have been burned to ash or less. And so would you.”
Every land and perhaps the seas as well would have burned, would have been buried under fire. Except that a peach dryad had, in a pet, sent the youth who rejected her advances to the place where he needed to be and where the world needed him to be.
Perhaps the Stoic philosophers were right and gods did look after men. Chance, the whim of atoms clashing together, seemed a slim reed on which to support the series of events which had saved the world.
“Well, anyway, I didn’t mean any harm,” Persica muttered. She seemed to be walking aimlessly, her eyes on the ground, but she meandered closer to Corylus. Looking up, she said, “But I’m so lonely. I don’t let humans see me, but I just wish they’d come here to the garden again.”
She tossed her head and gave him a knowing smile. “You can see me,” she said, “but you’re one of us. Your mother was, and on her side you are.”
“That may be true,” Corylus said. “But it doesn’t matter.”
He was uncomfortable talking—thinking—about what Pulto had recently told him about the mother who had died giving birth to him. It didn’t really matter whether she was a beech nymph or the Celtic girl his father would have married as soon as he could at the end of his military service. I am a citizen of Carce!
Aloud Corylus said, “The Hyperborean’s magic clings here, that’s all. It’s like the smell of rotting blood in the arena, even though they change the sand after every performance. It makes the servants uncomfortable, that’s all. That’ll wear away.”
He smiled encouragingly, knowing that what he said was only partially true. The
powerful magic which had been worked here created a weak spot in the fabric of the cosmos. Ordinary humans in this garden—Maximus, for example; the doorkeeper who spoke of seeing things out of the corner of his eye—became more sensitive to matters that would ordinarily be hidden.
“It won’t have time to,” Persica said bitterly. “The Hyperborean is gone, but it’s still going to end quickly.”
She shivered and hugged herself. Looking up she said, “You can feel it too, can’t you? The sea will do what fire did not.”
Corylus rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. His lips were dry. “You mean Typhon?” he said, remembering what Varus had said in the theater.
The nymph flicked her hand again. “What do names matter?” she said. “It will be the sea and the thing that is the sea.”
She had sidled to within arm’s length of Corylus. Now she leaned closer, not quite to the point of touching him.
“A little warmth would be so nice,” she said. “It isn’t much to ask, is it, when the end is coming so soon.”
“Persica, please don’t,” Corylus whispered.
Varus would be back shortly, but even if he weren’t … Corylus thought of the monster he had seen, then imagined that it was tearing apart Carce instead of some crystal echo of a philosopher’s dream. He was frozen inside, and the only emotion he felt was fear.
Persica didn’t edge closer as he thought she would do. She hugged herself again and said, “I don’t really mind dying. I’m a peach, after all, not an oak or one of those ugly pine crones. But a little warmth, cousin…? Just a little warmth?”
“I can’t, mistress,” he said. He heard a babble of voices in the central courtyard. Varus must be coming back. “Please, I can’t.”
Corylus expected a tantrum or worse, remembering the way the nymph had behaved the first time they met. Instead her face scrunched up in misery.