by David Drake
“Your ladyship,” he said, offering it to her.
Alphena was trembling from all the emotions that she hadn’t given in to over the past short while. “Sit down, both of you,” she said. With that for an excuse, she quickly seated herself on the end of a bench intended for swordsmen tightening the straps of their sandals before they began their exercises.
When she had entered the gymnasium, the men had been beside one another on the raised stone slab into which posts were set when the grounds were used for fencing practice. They sat down as directed, but Alphena noticed that they had moved as far from her bench as they could get.
Pulto gave a little cough and swigged wine. Avoiding eye contact by looking into his cup, he said, “Master Corylus has spoken well of your judgment, your ladyship.”
Alphena froze. What does he mean by that?
She smiled. At first she was forcing the corners of her lips upward, but the humor of the situation struck her.
“Thank you, Master Pulto,” she said. “Though if you mean that I can recognize circumstances in which a proper young lady knows better than to walk in on a male acquaintance, I can only say that Mother hasn’t yet made that proper a young lady of me.”
Lenatus choked, blowing a spray of wine out his nose. Pulto simply froze.
“Fortunately…,” Alphena continued. She enjoyed the feeling of being in control of a situation without screaming at people. “Master Corylus is a proper gentleman. Despite my own failings, the worst would not have happened.”
Mother really has taught me things. As soon as I was willing to learn them.
“But let’s change the subject,” Alphena continued calmly, looking at the old soldiers over the rim of her wine cup. “What do you—both of you—think about what happened in the theater this afternoon?”
If she had asked that question bluntly when she walked into the gymnasium, they would have mumbled and lied. They were off balance now, because she’d delicately hinted at a bawdy joke that they understood very well. They would much rather talk frankly with a senator’s daughter about magic and sorcerers than to join her in a discussion of sexual shenanigans.
“Your ladyship…,” Lenatus said. He wasn’t mumbling, but his voice was low. “I wasn’t … I mean, I was here in the house when all that happened.”
“Yes,” said Alphena crisply; no one could mistake her tone for agreement. “But you were talking to your friend about it, were you not?”
Pulto croaked a laugh. He emptied his cup and said, “This is dry work, your ladyship. Do ye mind if I have some more of this good wine while we talk?”
“Not at all,” said Alphena. Her nose was too snubby for her to look down at it with aristocratic hauteur, but just trying made her grin; which was perhaps an equally good way to get information out of these veterans. “Here, you can top off mine—”
She held the cup out.
“—too. Don’t worry about more water.”
“It’s going to be hard times if his lordship needs me escorting him when he goes out to a show,” Lenatus said wryly. He offered his cup when Pulto had filled Alphena’s. “Mind you, I’d prefer that to what’s going on now. Whatever it is.”
“Right,” said Pulto, sitting down again. “You always know where you’re at in a fight.”
“Of course,” Lenatus offered, “where you’re at may be so deep in the soup that you’ll never see the surface again.”
They were … not so much treating Alphena as one of them as talking as if she wasn’t present. Which was good enough.
“I hate for my wife to be mixed up in it,” Pulto said, taking half the cupful without lowering it from his lips. He looked at Alphena. “You know about that, right, your ladyship? That Lady Hedia is going to see my Anna tomorrow?”
“Yes,” said Alphena. “I’ll be accompanying my mother.”
After a pause for thought, she went on, “I think in these times that we all should help to the degree we can. Help the Republic, I mean.”
Lenatus looked at her without expression, then took a silent swallow of wine. Alphena had the uncomfortable suspicion that if she hadn’t been his employer’s noble daughter, he would have spat onto the dirt.
“I guess Lenatus and me know a bit about serving the Republic, your ladyship,” Pulto said. He sipped wine and swizzled it around his mouth before letting it go down. “And Anna too. She was there on the frontier as sure as me and the Old Man and the boy. Who isn’t such a boy now, is he?”
“I’m sorry, Pulto,” Alphena said, feeling her cheeks burn. Ordinarily she would have reacted by shrieking angrily at the cause of her embarrassment, but she wasn’t going to do that again. Or anyway, she wasn’t going to do that this time. “I’m uncomfortable about it too, that’s all.”
She cleared her throat. “But what was it you saw?” she said. “What did you think it was?”
Looking at Lenatus, she said, “What did you just tell your friend Lenatus it was?”
The trainer barked out a laugh. “I can answer that, your ladyship,” he said. “Pulto here told me he had no bloody idea of what he’d just seen except it scared the living crap out of him, and could I maybe find a jar of wine.”
He lifted the cup in his left hand; he’d emptied it again. “Which I did, begging your pardon, but I’ll pay it back to your father out of my salary.”
Alphena waved the thought away brusquely. This was as proper a use for her father’s wine as any in the Republic.
“Mistress?” said Pulto. He grimaced and corrected himself, saying “Your ladyship, I mean. You were there. What did you see? If a fellow can ask, I mean.”
Alphena looked at them. At last she said, “I saw a man wearing a breechclout, with his hair in two braids. He was as old as you are, but he looked very fit.”
When she heard the words come out of her mouth, she paused in renewed embarrassment. “I didn’t mean—” she blurted. She stopped because she didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t make the insult worse.
“Go on, your ladyship,” said Pulto calmly. He clapped his belly with his cupped left hand. “I live in this flesh, so you don’t need to tell me I’m not the hard young cockerel I was when first I enlisted.”
“Well, anyway,” said Alphena, “that’s what I saw: a man. And he was destroying what looked like a city, only it was so tiny.”
She closed her eyes and forced herself to add, “Just for an instant I thought I saw tentacles and snakes like Syra said. Like a lot of other people thought, I suppose. But I saw a man.”
“I saw the tentacles and all,” Pulto said, speaking to his empty cup. “Only then I didn’t think it was real, so it didn’t bother me.”
He looked up with a lopsided grin. “It wasn’t till I saw how your brother and the Greek professor were taking it that I started to get worried,” he said. “And then Lady Hedia coming to see my Anna for charms—because that’s what it is, I know from how she asked it—well, that pissed in the wine for sure.”
“But do you know what it means?” Alphena asked. She suddenly felt very young. She wanted these two hard men to protect her, but she didn’t know from what. “You’ve been in, well, battles! What’s going to happen now?”
The men looked at one another. Lenatus unexpectedly chuckled. “You remember Stellio?” he said to his friend. Both of them laughed.
Alphena felt her anger rise despite trying very hard to choke it down. Pulto read her reaction correctly. “Your ladyship,” he said, “what we mean is that nobody can tell you what’s going to happen in a battle. Even if that’s what this is, though I don’t much see it.”
“Stellio was a lazy scut, even for a Sicilian,” Lenatus said. He sounded apologetic for being insultingly unclear when he first mentioned the fellow. “And I’ve seen rabbits with more stomach for a fight than he ever showed.”
“We were going to assault a couple German hill forts the next day,” Pulto said. “Only Stellio gets his foot under a cartwheel, by accident—he says—and he won’t be able to
hold his rank when we charge. So he got assigned to the artillery. He can turn the crank of one of the dart throwers, bad foot or no bad foot. But staying well back from German spear range, you see.”
“So we’re lined up and waiting the word,” Lenatus said, speaking as he refilled all three cups. “The Germans are up on their mound, shouting and booming their spear shafts against their hide shields, and I got to say, I’ve been places I was happier being. Up rattles a mule cart and hauls around, and it’s Stellio in the back with the dart thrower.”
“He’s grinning like anything,” Pulto said, picking up when his friend took a swallow of wine, “and he starts cranking the arms back. And I hear whack!”
“I was looking right at him when it happened,” Lenatus said, almost bursting with suppressed laughter. “The lever snapped right at the spring and come flying around on the cord. It caught Stellio on the back of the neck and broke it neat as a chicken for dinner!”
The men laughed together, more freely than before. Alphena wondered for a moment how much wine they had drunk, but she’d drunk more than her usual as well. She joined the laughter.
“And the beauty of it,” Pulto said, his voice rising as if to be heard during a drinking party in barracks, “is that we didn’t lose another bloody man that day. Not a one! The first salvo, one dart pinned the top of the chief’s shield to his forehead and helmet. He tumbled down the hill, stiff as a board, and the rest all bloody ran off the other way.”
“May my dick turn black and fall off if it didn’t happen just that way!” Lenatus burbled.
The laughter died away. They’re probably hoping I didn’t hear that, Alphena thought. Or at least that I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it, which I certainly will.
“I understand that the future isn’t really predictable,” Alphena said carefully. “And I guess we can hope for a lucky dart shot, whatever that may mean now. I just wish I had something better to hope for.”
“Your ladyship?” Pulto said. “We’re not laughing at you. And we feel the same way. We wish we knew what was coming. Because we think something is, too.”
“All I can tell you about a battle…,” Lenatus said, lowering his cup and looking at her with an expression something between calm and defiance. “Is that what happens is generally going to be worse than you figured it to be.”
“But you deal with it,” said Pulto earnestly. “You always deal with it, however piss-poor a deal it is you get handed.”
That’s what soldiers do, Alphena realized in a flash of understanding. She had thought being a soldier on the frontier meant fighting … but that was only part of it. They dealt; even though all they knew about the future was it would probably range from unpleasant to awful.
That was much the same as being a woman in a world which men thought they ruled. Hedia had shown her that. Hedia dealt, and thus far she had dealt successfully.
There was a bustle of voices in the passage from the house proper. Alphena set the cup down and rose.
“Thank you both,” she said. “You’ve helped me to understand the situation. And now—”
She turned to the door.
“—I believe I’ll join my brother for a moment before I dine.”
And just possibly I’ll chat with Corylus as well as Varus; but no matter what, I’ll deal. Mother will be proud of me.
* * *
HEDIA ROSE FROM HER BED. A light burned in the alcove where her maid slept. Hedia didn’t need the light because she was still asleep. She walked through the door of her suite, then drifted down the staircase.
Servants sprawled in the portico around the central courtyard. Five or six were dicing by lamplight, laughing and muttering curses. The familiar noise didn’t disturb the nearby sleepers.
In a back corner was the miniature terra-cotta hill on which snails crawled till a cook’s helper plucked them out for dinner. They continued to meander slowly along the molded curves.
Hedia walked past the doorman and through the thick wooden door. No one saw her. She wondered if she were dead. Part of her mind felt that the thought should make her smile, but her face did not change.
The sky was moonless, starless. Instead of starting across the square on which the house fronted, she had entered the mouth of a cave as great as all the night.
The opening was familiar: Hedia was walking down the long slope to the Underworld. In the lowest level she had seen her first husband: Calpurnius Latus, dead for three years.
She was going back to the place of the dead. She was going to death.
Hedia heard screams from a side passage. She would have turned to look, but her body could not move; it merely glided forward with no more effort or volition than a feather in a stream.
But she didn’t have to look to see. The screams came from a score of women and girls, all of them familiar to her. Each was the age she had been when she died, of fever or accident or in childbirth; and one, Florentia Tertia, strangled by her husband’s catamite while her husband watched, doubled up with drunken laughter.
Hedia’s acquaintances—her friends, as she would have described them in public—were being devoured by a great lizard. Its jointed forearms stuffed the victims into its maw, where upper and lower jaws ground them like millstones. The women were scraped to chips and smears … only to reappear and to wail again, and be devoured again, endlessly. Endlessly.…
When Hedia had come this way before, she had walked on her own feet. Now she was …
No, I’m not, she realized. I’m not really here. This is a dream, a nightmare if you will, but it isn’t happening to Hedia, daughter of Marcus Hedius Fronto and Petronilla, his second wife.
Again the smile didn’t reach her lips. Her lips were with the rest of her body, asleep in a town house in the Carina District, rather than slipping with her mind toward Hades’ realm. In a manner of speaking, it didn’t matter: Hedia wouldn’t have run if she could have. But knowing that this was unreal allowed her to feel smugly contemptuous of an experience which until that moment had been frightening.
Very frightening, in fact.
When Hedia walked this long corridor before, she had heard terrible sounds from side-branchings as she passed. Only the few paces of sloping track before her had been visible, however. Now she had a detailed awareness of what that was happening on either side of her route.
Flames that burned men but did not kill them. Insects that looked like locusts but which ate human flesh. Hair-fine quills that pierced to the victims’ marrow by the thousands and drew out agonized cries but not lives.
Always the torture, always the cries, always the agony. And all of the victims were people whom Hedia had known while they were alive, but who had died.
The passage downward ended where Hedia expected it to, in a glade surrounded by trees with huge leaves. Her first husband, Gaius Calpurnius Latus, stood in the embrace of a plant whose foliage was formed into vast green hands.
Latus did not see her. Around him, close enough to touch if she wished, were the three glass figures of Hedia’s earlier nightmare. Their limbs did not seem to have joints, but the transparent material went milky when it bent and cleared when it straightened. Their eye sockets were indentations, their mouths were short notches.
One of the figures turned his empty visage slowly toward Hedia. Latus began to scream as though his guts were being wound out on a stick, screaming without hope and without relief. The figure reached toward Hedia’s left wrist. She pulled away—
She sat upright in her bed. Her throat was raw. Syra stood beside her, her face terrified. Oil had spattered from the lamp in the maid’s left hand as she jerked back; her right hand was outstretched. She must have touched her mistress; her mistress, who had been screaming in terror.…
Other servants had entered the bedroom or were peering through the doorway, drawn by the cries. They backed away or lowered their heads as Hedia straightened. They were afraid to be seen, afraid of what was happening, afraid.
I certainly can’t blame
them for that, Hedia thought. She smiled coldly at herself.
She stood up. “I—” she began. Her throat felt as though she had been downwind of a limekiln.
“Wine!” she croaked, but she reached the bedside table before Syra could. Silver ewers of wine and water stood to either side of a cup whose red figures showed Pasiphae welcoming the bull into herself. She ignored the cup, drinking straight from the ewer instead.
She lowered the container and looked around at the servants. “Go on about your business,” she said brusquely. “Have you never had a bad dream yourselves?”
She lifted the ewer, then paused. “One of you bring more wine,” she said. “A jar of it. The same Caecuban.”
It was a strong vintage. The alcohol didn’t so much soothe her throat as numb it after a moment of stinging.
Servants shuffled out, briefly crowding in the doorway. The ones who remained had probably been afraid to call attention to themselves by ducking away sooner.
Hedia poured the remaining contents of the ewer into the cup. She thought of adding water this time but decided not to. By now it wouldn’t shock any of them that Lady Hedia sometimes drank her wine unmixed.
“Your ladyship…?” Syra whispered. She didn’t know what to do.
Hedia lowered the cup. She had been holding it in both hands as she drank, because her arms were trembling.
“As soon as the jar of wine arrives,” Hedia said. “Which had better be soon. When it does, you can go back to bed. I may sit up for a little.”
Until I’ve drunk enough to dull the memory of that dream.
“I’ll stay up too, your ladyship,” Syra said. “In case you need something.”
The girl wouldn’t be able to sleep either, Hedia supposed. Awake, she wouldn’t have to worry that her mistress might strangle her in a fit of madness.
“Yes, all right,” Hedia said.
She looked about her, suddenly aware of what had escaped her earlier in her fear. The walls of this room were frescoed with images of stage fronts: heavy facades above which stretched high, spindly towers. Hedia had had the suite redecorated when she married Saxa: her immediate predecessor had preferred paintings of plump children riding bunnies and long-tailed birds in a garden setting.