by David Drake
“Mistress, I greet you,” he said. “I hope that you are well.”
The Sibyl gave a broken chuckle. “I am the creature of your mind, Lord Magician,” she said. “There is no well or ill for me.”
Varus felt his lips wrinkle as though he were sucking a lemon. She knows things that I do not know, he thought, and I’m not a magician.
Then he thought, But if I were a magician and afraid to admit it to myself, I might know things that I allowed myself to see only in these visions.
The Sibyl smiled as Varus argued silently with himself. Embarrassed, he looked into the valley beyond. Instead of a landscape, he saw a globe hanging in blackness. Its surface was moving.
“This is the world, Lord Magician,” the Sibyl said. “Not today, but one day.”
“It’s a sphere,” he said, not asking a question but voicing the statement to file it in his mind. “Then Eratosthenes was right.”
Varus didn’t have a mind for mathematics, but Pandareus told his students that they should attend the lectures of Brotion of Alexandria who was visiting Carce. He and Corylus were the only members of our class who did so.
He grinned at the memory. Corylus seemed to understand what Brotion was saying. Varus himself was pleased just to have remembered Brotion describing Eratosthenes’ calculations.
He looked at the globe. As before, the object of his attention became clear. For an instant he saw the tossing sea; then the surface of the world became a single throbbing creature: a myriad of heads, arms, and legs, but only one monstrous body. The whole world …
Varus jerked back with a shout, though there was no need to react physically. The globe and its pullulating surface first blurred, then vanished completely as fog filled the valley.
If I even have a body in this place.
“That is Typhon?” Varus said, trying to prevent his voice from trembling.
“That will be Typhon,” the Sibyl said. “Not today, but one day.”
Varus swallowed. “Sibyl,” he said, “how do I stop him? How do I stop that?”
He nodded toward the vanished image. He didn’t want to point, and he particularly didn’t want to describe what he had seen in words.
“Typhon will rule the world,” the Sibyl said. She took more pea pods in her right hand. “No one has the power to change that. Not even a magician as powerful as you, Lord Varus.”
Varus made a sour expression again, but he didn’t argue pointlessly. “Sibyl,” he said, “what should I do? What can I do?”
“What did the sage Menre tell you, Lord Magician?” the old woman said. She resumed shelling the peas, dropping them one at a time into the jar on her left.
“That was a dream, Sibyl,” he said, thinking back to his vision in the shrine of Serapis. “I dreamed that Menre gave me a book, but when I awoke with Pandareus, it was all as it had been when we entered the chapel. There was no book.”
The Sibyl’s jar was decorated with a single long band which wound from the base of the vessel to the rim. People of all ages and conditions walked up the slanting field. When Varus looked at the figures closely, he saw that they were moving, and he thought that some of them were looking out at him.
The Sibyl smiled. “Was there not?” she said. “What are you holding, Lord Magician?”
Varus held the winding rods of a large papyrus roll, open before him. He looked down and read aloud, “I remember the names of my ancestors. I speak their names and they live again!”
A causeway stretched before him, over the mists which hid the valley where Varus had watched the triumph of Typhon. The Sibyl crooned softly as she resumed shelling peas, paying Varus no attention.
He walked onto the causeway. He glanced over his shoulder once, toward the Sibyl. He wondered whether she was counting years or lives or some further thing … but it didn’t matter to him.
Gaius Varus was going to meet with his ancestors; and perhaps he would one day return.
* * *
ALPHENA WOKE SUDDENLY from a fitful sleep. Throughout the night she had been dozing off and on. Whenever she wakened, Uktena remained sitting cross-legged in the center of the chamber, smoking his pipe and mumbling rhythmically under his breath. Now he had gotten to his feet.
“Is it time?” she asked. Her voice caught. The acrid smoke—dried willow bark mixed with some broad-leafed local herb—had flayed the back of her throat. She coughed to clear it.
Uktena thrust the stem of his pipe beneath the cord of his breechclout and stepped to the simple ladder. Either he didn’t hear her, or he was ignoring her.
Alphena got up. She had sat, sleeping and waking, with the copper axe in her lap. She gripped the haft firmly as she waited to follow the shaman. She wasn’t used to the way the axe balanced in her hand, but it was lighter than a sword and she ought to be able to handle it without strain.
Uktena lifted the mat away from the kiva’s entrance. His movements were slow and exaggerated, as though he were performing a ritual dance.
Alphena scrambled to catch up as the shaman strode through Cascotan. Villagers watched silently; no one was working.
The sky seemed bright after the smoky kiva. Though Alphena couldn’t see the sun from where she stood, dawn had turned the tip of Procron’s fortress to black fire.
Uktena walked with deliberation toward the shore. He didn’t look to either side.
The three sages waited midway between the village and the saltwater. As before, Wontosa stood a half step ahead of his companions. He said, “Greetings, master! Are you ready to drive the monster away from our shores?”
Uktena did not speak, but for the first time since he emerged from the kiva, he turned his head—toward Wontosa. The sage stiffened and his eyes lost focus momentarily.
Alphena followed Uktena. As she passed, Hanno called, “You, girl.” He didn’t shout, but he managed to put a threat in his tone. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to stand with my friend,” she said, pausing to look squarely at the sages. The axe head rose slightly as she spoke. “Come with us, why don’t you? Aren’t you all magicians?”
Hanno didn’t respond. Wontosa and Dasemunco were looking out to sea, pretending that they weren’t aware of Alphena’s presence. She spat on the ground and hurried on to join Uktena.
The shaman had reached the shore and stopped; his bare feet were just above the tide line. He dropped the murrhine pipe on the beach behind him. The surf was sluggish, like the movements of the chest of a sleeping dog.
Lightning flashed in the far distance; no thunder accompanied it. Alphena looked up in surprise. The morning had been clear when she saw the sky from the mouth of the kiva, but a scud of clouds was racing in from the west.
The sun rose, throwing the shadow of the black spire toward Uktena. He lifted his right arm, the palm toward the east.
Alphena, to the shaman’s left side and a pace behind him, glanced at his shadow. It was elongated but as sharply chiseled as the reliefs on a temple facade, then—
Something squirming and huge spread across the shoreline and beyond, covering the land. It was not a shape but a blackness too pure to have form.
The shadow was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Uktena faced east.
The top of the black fortress split open. Procron, a figure in orichalc armor without the helmet, drifted out like a wisp of gossamer. In place of his human head flashed a diamond skull brighter than the fiery metal.
Uktena walked forward with the same awkward determination as before. His feet touched but did not sink into the slowly moving water. He raised his right arm, bent at the elbow; his left hung at his side. He was chanting, but Alphena could not make out the words.
She went out fifty feet from the shore, trying to follow. There the low waves caught the hem of her tunic and with that purchase threatened to pull her over. She lifted the garment, preparing to fling it away, but she stopped when she thought about what she was doing. Grimacing, she backed to where the water reached only to mid-shin.
/>
Alphena had seen many gladiatorial battles. Splashing in water that would shortly be over her head, she would be completely useless in a fight against an enemy who walked on air.
Worse, if Uktena took notice of her, she would handicap him. She didn’t mind risking her life, but she dared not risk the life of the friend she was supposedly helping.
Brilliant purple light flashed from Procron’s skull, sizzling against a clear barrier an arm’s length short of Uktena’s chest. The bolt dribbled off like rain blown against a sheet of metal.
The sea beneath Uktena hissed. Alphena—near the shore now, a quarter mile behind him—felt her legs tingle and the hair rise on her arms and the back of her neck.
Uktena continued forward. Alphena thought she heard his voice in the thunder rumbling overhead.
Procron drifted closer, his arms folded across his chest. He slammed out another bolt, brighter than the sun at noon.
Uktena staggered, half-turning. Alphena fell backward in the water from the visual shock. She blinked furiously, trying to clear the orange afterimages flaring across her eyes.
Uktena resumed his advance. His form was shifting, swelling.
Alphena squeezed her eyes closed, pretending that what she saw was because afterimages were distorting her vision. She whispered, “Vesta, make him safe. Make him not be changed.”
Huge, tentacled, and many-legged, the thing that had been Uktena approached the Atlantean. Both hung in the air. Procron loosed a series of dazzling, crackling bolts, flinging Uktena back. Tentacles shriveled and the swollen body seemed to deflate, though the purple haze which spread about the scene blurred the forms of both combatants.
The sea beneath them was bubbling. Dead fish and stranger creatures rocked on the surface, many of them boiled pink or red. Alphena’s skin itched as though she had gotten a bad sunburn.
Uktena surged toward Procron again. A purple flash and thunderclap drove them apart short of contact.
Procron tumbled, his armor flashing brightly, but he regained control above the water. Wobbling, dipping like a skylark instead of rising smoothly, the Atlantean took an aerial post midway between the shore and his gleaming fortress.
Black and smoking, the creature Uktena had become dropped into the sea. Spray and steam spouted fifty feet in the air.
The wave from the impact sent Alphena tumbling. She got to her feet and began sloshing toward where the shaman had hit. She screamed and raised her axe to threaten anybody who came close to her.
Uktena bobbed into view. For a moment he lay sprawled facedown on the slow swell; then his head lifted and he shook himself.
Treading water, Uktena looked out toward his opponent. Procron showed no signs of returning to try conclusions again. Carefully, painfully, the shaman began to stroke for shore.
Alphena, waist deep when the sea was at rest, watched for a moment in hesitation. She bent and took off her sandals, throwing them to shore. Holding the axe helve with her knees, she pulled her tunic over her head. After rolling it into a loose rope and retrieving the axe, she walked in the shallows toward the line Uktena was taking.
Overhead, the clouds were breaking up again. Alphena thought it had rained briefly, but the swirling battle had whipped the sea to froth; the spatters she felt might have come from that.
Uktena had paused. A swell lifted him; when it dipped away again, he lay as motionless as a mass of seaweed.
Alphena sloshed forward. “My friend!” she called. “My friend Uktena!”
The black spire had closed again. Procron must have returned to his fortress; at any rate, Alphena couldn’t see him anymore.
Uktena roused and splashed feebly. Alphena shouted, but it wasn’t a word. She bobbed out as far as she dared and flung the end of her rolled tunic toward the shaman. For a moment she was afraid that he wouldn’t take it; then one of his sinewy hands twisted itself into the fabric.
Alphena’s feet didn’t touch bottom when her nose was above water. She dipped, digging her toes into the sand as she pulled hard on the makeshift rope. With the slack that gave her, she fought a foot or two closer to shore and repeated the process. She could swim, but not well and not while holding the axe. She wasn’t going to let go of the axe.
After a very long time, she could walk normally. Uktena tried to get to his feet. His eyes were blank. Alphena threw his right arm over her shoulders and gripped that wrist with her left hand. Staggering—she was exhausted, and the shaman was a solid weight, not large but all bone and muscle—she started for the kiva.
She saw the pipe. Bending carefully she retrieved it and held the reed stem alongside the axe helve.
Smoke hung over the village. The end poles of one of the huts stood at the edge of a blackened oval. In the center, the ground had been blasted into a waist-deep pit on whose edges grains of sand in the soil had been fused into glass. Several other fires lifted coils of smoke from the pines in the near distance.
The three sages squatted with their heads close together, whispering among themselves. They didn’t call to Alphena, but their eyes followed her and the shaman. The villagers watched also, in silence.
“Bring us food and water!” Alphena shouted. “At once!”
She didn’t know whether she would be able to get Uktena into his underground chamber. There was time enough to decide that when they reached the entrance.
“And bring my sandals and tunic!” she added. “I left them where we came out of the water.”
They would have been that much more to carry. She still had the axe, though.
Alphena walked slowly toward the kiva under the weight of her friend. She tried to forget the image of the monster which had battled the Atlantean wizard.
* * *
A BIRD—OR FROG, or lizard, or Venus knew what—squealed imperiously from the canopy above them. Hedia didn’t bother to look up. She was numb from stress and from stumbling through the jungle.
And from lack of sleep, now that she thought about it. She hadn’t slept since the previous morning when she was on the run from the Servitors, and she hadn’t slept well then.
Lann gave a sharp bark and halted. Hedia stopped also, but she lost her balance and almost toppled into the ape-man. She lifted the spear—with difficulty; the muscles of her arms didn’t obey any better than her legs were doing—and tried to look in all directions to find the threat.
There was no threat. They were back in the ruined keep where Hedia had first escaped from the Servitors. It was Lann’s keep, she had been told by one of the hunters on the ship. Now Lann was squatting, pulling apart the vegetation that had grown through the blocks of shattered crystal.
Hedia looked for a place to sit. An oval slab of roof had fallen without breaking further. Its longer axis was greater than she was tall. Vines had squirmed up from around its edges, but no shoot could penetrate crystal which was nearly a foot thick. She used the dagger to saw through a few stems, then pulled them out of the way and seated herself.
She had wanted to get off her feet even more than she wanted something to eat, but she was hungry enough to eat a snake raw. She looked around hopefully, then reminded herself that she might better watch what the ape-man was doing. Her chances of escaping the Minoi—not to mention her only realistic chances of getting something to eat—depended on him.
Lann raised a piece of charred wood. A branch flung burning into the fortress when Procron shattered it? Hedia thought. Then she noticed that the underside of the wood had been carved in the supple likeness of a woman’s calf. It was part of a wooden statue; the fragment had been perfectly modeled.
The ape-man put the leg down beside him and dug again into the pile before him. The fortress had crumbled into chunks of varying size, ranging mostly from as big as Hedia’s fist down to sparkling sand. No more wood appeared, though his spade-like hands came out blackened by charcoal. His palms were longer than a man’s whole hand, with relatively short fingers.
Hedia wondered if Lann—when he was human—had carved t
he statue himself, and who he had used for a model. Absently, she rubbed her own right calf.
The ape-man rose to a half-crouch, not quite as erect as even his normal bent posture. He walked splay-footed a few paces further into the ruin. Bending, he began to tear out saplings with spindly trunks and a few broad leaves.
The bird called again. Lann leaped erect and screamed a challenge. Sweeping up a block as big as his own head, he hurled it toward the sound. The missile crashed against a tree trunk as loudly as a ballista releasing, but it must have missed. The bird gave a startled squawk and flew away. It sent back a diminishing series of complaints.
Hedia rolled her legs under her so that she could leap off the slab in any direction if she needed to, but she continued to smile. She was confident that none of the men she’d met in the past would have realized how tense she was, although Lann might smell it in her sweat.
She was watchful rather than afraid. This wasn’t a new experience for her, though it was unusual in that the ape-man wasn’t drunk.
Lann gave a final growl, then pulled up another sapling. Its roots bound a piece of garnet or ruby, a fragment of a triangle which would have been four inches on a side when it was whole. Lann buffed it clean with his thumbs and set it on a woody runner thick enough to have been the trunk of a small tree. He went back to work.
Hedia wondered how long ago the destruction had occurred. Her first thought would have been “decades,” but the night she had spent in this soggy jungle had shown her how quickly plants sprouted here.
Cooing with excitement, the ape-man came up with two more crystal fragments. He rubbed them clean like the first piece, then licked the mating surfaces with a black tongue the size of a toilet sponge.
He fitted the parts together with care that Hedia wouldn’t have thought his broad fingers were capable of. Holding the recreated triangle in his left hand, he touched it in the center with his right.