by David Drake
The decks of the Atlantean vessel were crowded with people. Most of them wore brightly colored off-the-shoulder tunics, but there were also archers and spearmen in simpler garb and a handful of exquisites—women and children—who glittered like spiderwebs frosted with dew.
Many Atlanteans stared at Corylus, but they didn’t seem concerned. They must think he had come through the portal ahead of their ship, that was all.
A Servitor stood beside the armored Minos in the stern; another held the grips of the fire projector in the bow. The glass men were looking down at the plaza between the sundial and the Altar of Peace where citizens of Carce were gathering to see the wonders despite the threatening clouds. The Servitor in the bow slanted his weapon to sweep the crowd.
In another world, the Minoi would meet the Senate in peace and their people would settle in this world, another nation among the hundreds already within the boundaries of a peaceful empire.
In another world. The Atlantean ship was within fifty feet, proceeding parallel to Corylus’ craft but not as swiftly.
The Ancient howled a word. Corylus didn’t wait for the sprite to translate—if she intended to—before he squeezed with his thumbs. Nothing moved beneath them, but there was a loud roar, a blast of heat on his cheeks despite the mesh visor, and a throbbing vibration through the hull.
A spray of flame washed across the sails of the Atlantean ship; they vanished into puffs of ash drifting on the breeze. The vessel rolled over on its side, spilling its passengers and crew before plunging after them. The Minos dropped like a blazing meteor.
Corylus lifted his thumbs. The Ancient was keening something as he brought their ship around to engage the second Atlantean. The Servitor at the weapon of that one was no longer concerned with the civilians below, though the projector’s inertia slowed him.
A third ship was squeezing through the disk. Behind it were scores of others, more than Corylus could begin to count in a brief glimpse.
He adjusted his flame projector. He thought he heard the sprite sobbing, but that was a concern for another world, a world that didn’t exist today.
* * *
HEDIA SAW A BRIGHTER PATCH in the blur ahead of them. There had been an omnipresent buzzing, like that of many distant insects; now it began to congeal into voices. To her surprise, Lann first slowed, then stopped and stood erect.
Hedia made a quick choice and stepped around him, striding briskly. She couldn’t hear words, but the rhythms of the speech ahead were those of Latin.
The ape-man gave a plaintive chirp. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that he was shambling along behind.
The air changed and the brightness gained texture. When Hedia looked straight ahead she saw only the flagstones, but there were other movements in the corners of her eyes: a pair of sheep, long-legged and shaggy, stared at her with their jaws working in a circular motion. Again, a young man made a half-turn to loose a discus. His muscles were so chiseled and perfect that Hedia almost missed a step.
The vision faded. The athlete was gone with the sheep.
Without conscious transition she stepped from the path onto the pavement within the marble screen of the Altar of Peace. Around her marched in low relief the sacrificial procession with which Emperor Augustus had inaugurated the altar.
A huge storm boiled in the sky around the horizon, but shimmering light held clear the air directly overhead. The light blazed from the orichalc sphere on top of the pointer of the sundial which Augustus had erected at the same time that he built the Altar of Peace.
A portal almost a hundred feet in diameter balanced above the monolith. From it, as Hedia watched, struggled a flying ship.
The Minoi were here. They had caught her.
Hedia walked out through the west doorway of the marble screen. Directly ahead, the Egyptian obelisk rose above the heads of the spectators.
She was stark naked, with nothing to hide her cuts, bruises, and general grubbiness. At least she had gotten used to going barefoot, so the hard pavement didn’t bother her now.
A ripping sound, not loud but savage, drew Hedia’s attention to the sky. Two Atlantean ships flew past one another in opposite directions. A cone of flame, bright orange on the edges but a lambent white at the core, spewed from the bow of the more distant ship. It bathed the sails of the nearer vessel, setting them to blaze like gossamer.
The victim turned belly up like a dead fish, then dived toward the river. The pair of Servitors clung to the bow. The Minos was flung out with his screaming retainers. His orichalc armor caught light from a thousand angles. He smashed into the facade of the Temple of Saturn and slipped down broken.
The ship that had attacked rose into the air, its sails beating strongly. Hedia looked at it sharply. An armored Minos controlled the flame weapon in the bow instead of guiding the ship as had been the case every previous time she had seen the Atlanteans flying. What on Earth is that animal in the stern?
Lann came out of the enclosure behind Hedia, putting his knuckles to the pavement and swinging down the steps like a man on double crutches. He nuzzled her hand and made a deep moaning sound.
People nearby had begun to notice them, though the only one who seemed really frightened was a little girl who grabbed her mother’s tunic and babbled in a high-pitched Eastern language. A naked woman and a huge ape must seem minor in comparison with flying ships battling in the sky.
“Make way for the noble Consul, Gaius Alphenus Saxa!” shouted a deep voice coming from behind.
Hedia spun around. She hadn’t been thinking about her husband, but of course he would come here. Saxa wasn’t what anyone would call a man of action, but he was dutiful to a fault. As consul—for another few days before his brief appointment ended—he would immediately have rushed to the site of the great wonder taking place on the Field of Mars. Household servants followed him, but his lictors led the entourage, adding official status to their husky presence.
The storm that filled the horizon rippled with nearly constant lightning, but the thunder was muted by the distance. Clouds seemed to strain at the bubble of clear air the way surf rolls against a cliff; but again like the cliff, the bubble cast them back.
Even the powerful voice of Saxa’s chief lictor seemed thin against the background of crowd, storm, and the battle in the sky, but his men had opened their ceremonial bundles. Saxa’s servants were carrying the loose rods and axes, but each lictor had kept out a rod which he used freely to open a path through the crowd for the consul.
The man who walked as the point of the advance, swinging his rod with both hands, saw Lann. He shouted, “Watch it there! Axes! Axes!”
“My lord husband!” Hedia said, stepping toward the procession and waving her right arm in the air. She wasn’t sure that Saxa could see her through the press of his escort, and she was nearly certain that none of the lictors would recognize her in her current state. “Saxa, my heart!”
“That’s her ladyship!” cried Callistus, forcing his way out through the lictors. Though soft, he was a tall man and more alert than Hedia would ordinarily have given him credit for. “Your ladyship—”
He paused to stare at her. Without a further word, he whipped off his ornate toga and settled it over her shoulders.
Lann growled and surged toward the steward. Callistus shrieked and fell back. Some of the lictors had retrieved their axes; they sprang forward. There was nothing symbolic about the axe blades now.
Hedia threw her arms around the ape-man’s head and covered him. “He’s a friend!” she shouted over her shoulder. Then—because in fairness to the lictors, they had every reason to be concerned for the consul’s safety—she said, “Lann! No! These are my friends! Sit down and be good!”
“Dear heart?” Saxa said, forcing his way with some effort through his entourage. “What’s happening here? You know, don’t you? Tell me what I should do.”
By Hercules, husband, how could I possibly know! Hedia flared; but that was exhaustion and frustration reacting, an
d the emotion—it wasn’t thought, not really—didn’t reach her lips.
The lictors had drawn back, allowing Callistus to get to his feet again. The ape-man unwrapped his head from folds of the toga, looking puzzled. His anger at the steward had passed, and he didn’t seem to regard the men with axes as a danger. His only concern had been what he perceived as a threat to Hedia.
Stroking Lann’s shoulder, she glanced up at the sky. The ship whose Minos was in the bow had climbed and was circling the other vessel. That second ship tried to keep its bow and the weapon there toward its pursuer, but it wallowed uncomfortably. There were at least a hundred people standing on its deck, a crowd that would have sunk a vessel of its size on the water and was threatening to do the same for this flying one.
Hedia did know why the Atlanteans were appearing over Carce. That was so obvious that she was embarrassed to remember her flash of unspoken anger at being asked the question.
She had watched the ape-man loose Typhon on Atlantis. The Minoi who could flee before the monster were of course doing so.
And she knew what Saxa must do. Unfortunately she didn’t think that would be enough to save Carce, though.
“Husband!” she said. Her voice was crisp and her back straight. Nothing in Hedia’s manner suggested that there was anything unusual in her presence or costume. “The ships full of people are Atlanteans trying to leave their island before it sinks. They’ll destroy Carce to make a place for themselves—you saw in the theater what their weapons do, the way they spew fire.”
The sky ripped as one ship sent a cone of flame across the other, lighting the sails and touching the passengers packed on the forward deck. People shrieked and threw themselves over the railing, their clothing afire.
Their clothing burned, and also their flesh: the smell of meat cooking was unmistakable. The emperor had lighted the Circus for a beast hunt one night with the households of four plotters, dipped in tar and hung from poles before being ignited. The screams had sounded the same that time.
Perhaps because the passengers in the bow jumped away from the jet of fire, the ship reared like a horse, then plunged into the ground stern first. It landed on a line of clothiers’ booths toward the river. The hull shattered, killing those still aboard as well as spectators.
“But why are they fighting?” Saxa asked. He rubbed his lips with his left hand as if trying to muffle the admission of his ignorance.
“I don’t know and it doesn’t matter,” Hedia said. “You have to summon troops with artillery.”
Did the garrison of Carce have ballistas and catapults? The Watch certainly didn’t, but the Praetorians might have some. Some.
“We have to be ready to fight the Minoi when they stop fighting one another.”
Another ship was pressing through the portal. For a moment the scene reminded Hedia of a bubble on the surface of swamp, swollen about the stem of a reed. The defending vessel was climbing again.
“My dear!” Saxa said in obvious surprise. “I have no authority to do that. The Watch comes under the authority of the emperor’s prefect, and as for the Praetorians—my heart, you know they wouldn’t take orders from a senator. Any senator, but I’m afraid they would find me less impressive than most of my colleagues.”
“But we have to fight them!” Hedia said, weak-kneed with horror that her husband had just corrected her on a question of political practicality. Of course the Praetorian Guard wouldn’t take the orders of a senator. The Praetorians existed largely to keep the senators themselves in check. “Husband, look at the flames they shoot! If a hundred ships start lighting fires across the city, we’ll all burn. Everything will burn!”
The people nearest Hedia were listening to the argument with frightened incomprehension. The words didn’t mean anything to them, but anger and fear were obvious in Hedia’s voice. Even a slave freshly dragged from the interior of Spain could understand what that meant.
Lann looked, perhaps for the first time, at the portal which seemingly balanced on the point of the granite obelisk. He hooted softly, then bared his teeth and boomed a challenge Hedia had heard before: in the forest immediately after her escape from the Servitors, when the ape-man confronted the lizard which was about to leap on her; and toward the Minoi pursuing them in the passage back to Carce, before he loosed Typhon.
Lann put his head down and bulled his way on all fours into the screaming crowd. The spectators were too closely packed for him to shove them out of the way: rather, he crushed them down or hurled them into the air like spray from the prow of a ship.
The warships in the sky continued to maneuver. Two more had struggled through the portal and a third was on its way. Carce’s sole defender slanted toward them, but it couldn’t forever stop a fleet as big as the one Hedia had seen in the skies above Poseidonis.
And when it lost the unequal struggle, Carce had no other defense.
* * *
VARUS STOOD AT what he thought was a safe distance from the spire’s double doors. He expected them to swing outward and possibly to swing very fast, because he couldn’t assume that they would be bounded by the constraints of the material world.
Instead of opening, the black crystal valves dissolved into a thin haze. Through it he could see figures moving.
Varus grinned wryly. He had been correct in realizing that the doors might not open like those of the emperor’s town house. He had been wrong in his unstated assumption that they would open in the material plane. Pandareus would be disappointed at the blinkered viewpoint his student had demonstrated.
I wonder if I’ll ever see Pandareus again?
A sheet of lightning covered the sky for long moments, pulsing among the clouds. Beneath the shadowed gloom that followed, Varus walked toward Procron’s fortress. The Sibyl was at his side, her expression unreadable.
She looked toward him and said, “There are many futures, Lord Wizard. In some of them you meet Pandareus again. Do you wish to know which of the Fates’ threads you walk?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Varus said. Until he spoke, he hadn’t realized how completely true the statement was. “This is my duty, so I’ll carry it out to the best of my abilities.”
It was easier to get on with life when one disregarded questions of personal survival. Zeno of Citium and those who had developed his Stoicism would be pleased that a young scholar had achieved such understanding.
The Sibyl made a sound like a pour-spout gurgling. It was probably meant for a chuckle. Anyway, it allowed Varus to smile at himself as he walked beneath the pointed crystal arch and felt gray fog enter his bones.
Varus paused. He had expected—without consciously framing the question; Pandareus will be disappointed—the fog to be a membrane, a permeable replacement for the solid doors. Instead it was a dim cave which branched in more directions than he could count on his fingers.
The Sibyl pointed her right arm forward and said, “Grant me a path—”
“—over which I may pass in peace…,” continued Varus in the same high-pitched voice. He was reading the scroll open in his mind. “For I am just and true!”
Despite the situation, he felt his lips rise in a smile. Every philosopher should be just and true. I at least strive for those ideals.
A tube of rosy light snaked through the fog, wide enough for two to walk in. It went farther—much farther—than should have been possible within the crystal spire, which Varus had judged to be no more than a hundred feet in diameter at the base.
Still, he couldn’t be in doubt as to his path; he strode in and walked as briskly as he would have done in Carce, passing from his father’s house to the Forum or perhaps to a temple whose library he wanted to consult.
In Carce Varus would have had a guard of servants, to keep his surroundings at bay; here the light did the same. Occasionally something came close enough to the glowing boundary to give him a good look at it. He passed three slender forms in flowing tunics who stood arm in arm, watching him with wide eyes. They were as supple as
the Graces themselves; he couldn’t guess at their gender or even—
“Sibyl?” Varus said. “Are they human?”
“What is human?” the old woman said. “Many scholars including Aristotle have debated that. None of them came to a decision that you were willing to accept, Lord Varus.”
Then in a less whimsical tone she said, “Their ancestors were human. Whether or not they remain human is a question for philosophers, not for a soothsayer.”
I can be a very frustrating person to talk with, Varus thought again. If I’m really talking with myself.
He smiled again. He was amused at the insight—and he was amused that he had found a purely philosophical question to take his mind off the problem of what lay in his own immediate future. Both problems were insoluble, but considering the definition of “humanity,” weren’t emotionally trying.
For a moment, Varus saw vast machines beyond the faint rosy membrane, deeper shadows bulking in the purple-gray dusk. They moved repetitively, the movement visible though the forms were only blurs. He could not tell how distant what he saw was, or even if he was truly seeing anything.
As suddenly, he stared upward in horror: Ocean given physical form. A thousand ravening maws slavered toward him, tens of thousands of limbs kicked and clawed and coiled—and then storm-tossed water surged down, a sea greater than the world itself. Froth flicked from the whitecaps. Monster or ocean met eye-searing purple lightning and vanished into haze, through which the reborn terror drove to vanish in turn. The roar was deafening.
“Perhaps, Gaius Varus, you should consider preserving your fine mind by leaving this place,” the Sibyl said. “You are still able to, you know.”
Varus glanced at her in irritation. “To go where?” he asked. “Back to Carce, where Typhon will be driven if I don’t stop Procron here?”
She gave him another enigmatic smile. “You don’t mind my suggesting that you are a coward,” she said in a musing tone, “but flawed logic offends you. Does that make you a brave man, Lord Wizard, or a fool?”