by David Drake
Alphena realized that she was seeing the difference between rank, which her father and the aedile had by birth, and command, which Publius Cispius had gained on the frontier. She felt suddenly ashamed, though neither she nor her family was a part of this unexpected confrontation.
“No, Your Lordship,” Corylus said calmly, moving again to his father’s side. Nothing in Corylus’ tone suggested that the man to whom he was speaking had seemed to be on the verge of panic. “I was hoping that if you sent the creatures to Carce, there would be an opportunity for Master Pandareus to view them himself.”
“Oh!” said Macsturnas, suddenly embarrassed. “Why, yes, of course, what a good idea, Master—”
His mouth opened and shut for a moment without further words coming out.
He doesn’t remember Corylus’ name. Aloud Alphena said, “I’m sure Corylus and my brother will take care of that for you. You’ll see to it that the attendants in Carce are instructed to allow them and anyone they bring with them to view the animals. Won’t you, Quintus Macsturnas?”
Corylus glanced at her. His smile and the jerk of his chin in approval were minuscule, but Alphena noticed them.
“Why, yes,” the aedile said, his words running over each other. “Why, yes, of course, and—”
He returned his attention to Corylus.
“—I’m very appreciative to you both for your help.”
Veturius and Corylus’ father had been whispering while the others discussed what would happen in Carce. Now the beast catcher cleared his throat loudly enough to get attention. He said, “Your Lordships? Since the subject’s come up, there’s some other stuff I might ought to mention. I don’t know what it means or if it means anything, but if I have your permission?”
“Certainly, my good man,” said Macsturnas. “With my lord Saxa’s permission, of course?”
Father mumbled in surprise and some confusion. So long as they’re maundering about due deference and that sort of thing, there’s no danger, Alphena thought with relief.
She was sure that Hedia would have protected Corylus if the aedile had completely lost his head, as might have happened. But Alphena preferred that … well, she preferred that Corylus not feel obligated to her mother. Not that it was any of Alphena’s business what Hedia did, or what Corylus did!
“I bring my catches down the Nile instead of marching them cross-country to Mios Hormos like most suppliers do,” Veturius said. “It’s a harder trip than sailing up the Red Sea and then the canal and down to Alexandria, but I get different animals my way.”
He nodded toward the caged lizardmen. “Not usually this different, but different. And I don’t have competition, because nobody else in the business can put together teams like I do to get past the tribes on the Upper Nile, you see?”
Veturius and Cispius smiled at each other. Corylus was smiling also. Alphena turned her head quickly so that she wasn’t watching the men exclude her from the experience they had shared and she never would.
A pair of leopards stared fixedly between the bars of their divided cage. At me! she thought. But the cats were looking past her, toward the lizardmen.
Alphena had never been in an animal compound before, but for years she had visited the gladiatorial schools on the Bay when the family came to Puteoli for the summer. She had fancied fighting in the arena herself.
She’d have assumed a name like Victrix or Nike or Atropos, something romantic like that, but it would have been scandalous even so. She’d been sure that she could cow her father into pretending he didn’t know what his daughter was doing, however. Saxa liked a quiet life, and Alphena had found that she could get her way in the end if she screamed and carried on loudly enough.
Then her father remarried, and Alphena didn’t rule the household anymore. Hedia didn’t care about scenes. She was rumored to have been involved in scores of scandals. As Alphena got to know her stepmother better, she learned that this time the rumors were less than the truth.
The result was oddly comforting. Not being able to shock Hedia meant that Alphena didn’t have to try. She could do things because they pleased her, not because they would displease those around her. And when Alphena accepted that she couldn’t ever compete as a gladiator, she found that she actually didn’t want to.
“The lizards weren’t a problem while we were in camp,” Veturius said. “The Nubians who brought them in said they’d never seen monkeys like them before. They’d caught ’em in a box trap they’d set for a leopard, which seemed funny—getting all four in the same set, I mean—and they’d been feeding them meat like they would leopards. They’ve got sharp teeth, so I did the same. And like I say, no trouble.”
The creature who had been watching Alphena ran its forked black tongue around its lipless mouth, then yawned. The teeth in front were pointed, though those farther back in the jaws had shearing edges. The leopards caged behind the visitors both shrieked in response to the lizard’s display.
The cats’ cries made Macsturnas squeeze his arms close to his chest as though he were hugging himself; his eyes darted from Veturius to the leopards and back. Saxa simply looked interested as he turned toward the sound. Alphena was ready to stop him if he tried to get close to the cats, but Hedia had already put a restraining hand on her husband’s shoulder.
When the aedile twitched, Alphena got a good view of Paris, who was examining the lizardmen in apparent satisfaction. The old man had ignored the leopards, but when he noticed Alphena’s attention he glared at her with hatred.
Alphena stared back, mimicking Hedia’s look of scornful contempt. Paris grimaced and turned. I’ll never be as good as she is, but I’m learning.
“The locals aren’t the only problems in the south,” Veturius said. He’d waited for the cats to fall silent, but the screams hadn’t otherwise affected him. “There’s fevers and skin rot and Mithras knows what all else. Though—”
He grinned at Cispius.
“—I never lost a man to frostbite, I’ll say that for the posting. Anyways, I got a fever and couldn’t do aught but sweat and moan the next three days. Now, the barges were ready and we pretty well had a load, so my number two, that’s Tetrinus, he decides it’s time to head back.”
Veturius knuckled his nose again. “You remember Tetrinus, don’t you, Top?” he said. “Brave as you could ask, but maybe not the best on details.”
“Especially if he was drinking,” Cispius agreed grimly. “Which I’d guess he was if you were flat on your back.”
“Yeah, that’s so,” Veturius admitted. “Not so much he wasn’t in charge and no mistake about that, but Pampreion, the attendant who was supposed to be feeding the lizards, it turns out he wasn’t when I wasn’t around to watch. He really hated them. He was an Egyptian and I think there was some sort of religious thing going.”
Alphena eyed the creatures again. Their hides were dusky with dark green hints, but one was noticeably paler along the spine and seemed older than his fellows. All four wore collars of coppery hoops and spikes, but the old one also had around his waist a loop of chain made from the same dark metal.
She was losing interest in the creatures. In truth, she had never been very interested in animals. These could be dangerous, no doubt; but so were leopards, and the cats were much more attractive to look at.
And even leopards weren’t dangerous at a staged beast hunt in the arena like what Macsturnas was planning to stage. The “hunters” would be archers and javelin throwers standing behind a metal fence. They could shoot through it, but the animals couldn’t get to them.
If elephants were to be killed, the hunters stood on stone stages higher than the great beasts could reach. Sometimes a hundred arrows would feather an elephant before it died.
If cats were to be the victims, netting would extend for ten or twelve feet above the fence. These lizardmen could probably climb, so they would be shot from behind nets also.
There was no skill to killing animals in the arena and therefore nothing of interest to
Alphena. A well-matched pair of gladiators, on the other hand, was like a dance with an added thrill of danger.
“Three nights downriver the whole flotilla was anchored in the current, as usual,” Veturius said. “It’s safer than tying up to the shore that far south. There was the god-awfulest scream I ever heard, and I’ve heard a few, let me tell you.”
A thought made his face scrunch and look momentarily uglier than usual. “You know, I hadn’t thought about that,” he said. Though everyone could hear him clearly, he was speaking to Cispius rather than addressing the whole group. “That brought me out of the fever. The boys, they’d pretty much given up on me, you know.”
“If a scream in the night doesn’t wake you,” Cispius said with a grin of sorts, “then you’re likely to be the one screaming yourself in the time it takes the next German to get to you.”
“Aye,” Veturius agreed. “Well, I got up anyhow. The cage with the lizards was on the same barge as me but none of the other animals. When we got torches lighted, there was Pampreion inside the cage and the lizards were eating him.”
He grinned at the memory. “Starting with the liver and lights,” he said. “Just like a leopard.”
“The lights?” said Hedia coolly. “Do you mean the eyes?”
“Huh?” said Veturius. He thumped his chest. “Oh, no, ma’am, the lungs.”
Veturius took a deep breath as he collected his thoughts. “His head wasn’t touched,” he said. “Just spattered a little from when they opened up the ribs. And the old lizard, he looked at me like what was I going to do about it? And I figured, well, there wasn’t any helping Pampreion now and the lizards were worth something, so, Hercules … Not like the first time I lost a man, you know?”
Alphena looked at her stepmother and wondered about tomorrow night. Hedia had told her that they would be going to a dinner party—a real dinner at the house of one of Hedia’s fashionable friends. Alphena knew that it wouldn’t be the sort of wild party she heard whispered about on the rare occasions that she socialized with girls of her own age; but still.
A few months ago she would have been horrified and disgusted if someone had insisted that she attend such a gathering. Now she was willing to admit that she was a little apprehensive … but a little excited also.
She had come to understand that Hedia wasn’t interested in making her submissive but rather in teaching her to know how to behave decorously according to the rules of whatever society she found herself in. Behaving like a lady did not, in Hedia’s judgment, always mean behaving like a Vestal Virgin.
“How had Pampreion gotten into the cage?” Corylus asked. His father looked at him in approval.
“Well,” said Veturius, “what I told the crew must’ve happened was that he swam over to my barge during the night and was going to tease the lizards. He was a nasty piece of work, Pampreion, though he was smart enough to be useful if you kept an eye on him. Anyway, one grabbed him and dragged him through the bars. Only … well, Pampreion couldn’t swim that any of us had ever heard. And there was his head, like I told you.”
Veturius shrugged. “I wouldn’t have said there was room enough between the bars for his head to fit through,” he said. “But there it was, ears and all, and the only other way it could’ve got there was if somebody picked the padlock, brought Pampreion in to eat, and locked the door behind him.”
“Master Veturius and I thought that was an interesting story, Lord Macsturnas, that you might want to know,” said Cispius. “To add to the interest of the gift you’re preparing for the Republic.”
“Veturius?” said Hedia as though she were addressing a servitor at dinner. “What did you do about the creatures after that experience?”
“Do, ma’am…,” Veturius said, his face twisting again. “Well, I’ll tell you the truth. I made sure the lizards always had food and water. I handled it myself because the rest of the crew didn’t fancy being around them much. And we never had another lick of trouble from them, not a lick.”
Silence followed as those present digested the story they had just heard. Then Varus straightened and opened his mouth to speak.
* * *
“GREETINGS, LORD VARUS,” the Sibyl said.
She glanced around to acknowledge his approach, then returned her attention to the scene below. Varus stepped to her side and looked down from the cliff. Increasing mist shrouded the rock, but the scene on the valley floor was as sharp as the lines of his own palm.
“Greetings, Sibyl,” Varus said. “Why have you called me here?”
The Sibyl of his visions never changed. She was an old—unthinkably old—woman wearing a white linen tunic and a cape the color of a summer sky. A fold covered her head in Greek fashion. She always seemed pleased and somewhat amused at his presence.
She laughed, a sound more like the chirping of insects than anything from a human throat. She said, “I cannot summon you, Lord Magician! Who else has powers like yours? Certainly not me, a wraith who exists only in your own mind.”
Varus grimaced. If you’re a part of me, then how do you know things that I do not? You know the past and the future, and things completely beyond time.
But experience had taught him that asking such questions aloud would bring him no answers of any use. He focused on the scene at the bottom of the valley.
Often when Varus looked from the Sibyl’s vantage point, he saw himself and his companions below, as though his soul were using the eyes of a raven perched on a high crag. This time, though, he watched scaly swordsmen battling with seven-foot-tall giants with mottled hides and heads like horses. They fought on a neglected field, trampling goldenrod and blooming thistles in their struggles.
“I recognize the lizardmen,” Varus said. In this vision the creatures wore bronze armor, but there was no doubt that they were the same race as the ones in the cage in Puteoli. “But who are the giants they’re fighting? Are they from Africa too?”
“They are the Ethiopes,” the Sibyl said. “A very long time ago the Ethiopes came to Africa from India. In Africa they fought the Singiri, whom you call lizardmen. As you see.”
Below, the lizardmen had been retreating to keep from being surrounded, but they now stood back to back in a circle. There were only a dozen of them standing, though six or eight more armored bodies lay as lumps on the flattened meadow.
At least a hundred Ethiopes had fallen, dead or too injured to advance farther, but hundreds more pressed the surviving lizardmen. The weapons of the horse-headed giants were crude, heavy-shafted spears with flint points, but they thrust with enormous power.
Repeatedly Varus saw a lizardman flung backward by a blow that his shield had stopped. Sometimes the stone point shattered; the metal looked like bronze, but it blocked spears that would have penetrated an infantry shield’s two-inch thickness of laminated birch.
Even so, the lizardmen tangled with one another, then fell and were battered to death. Corylus—or Alphena—would understand better what was happening, but even Varus could see that the fight would be over shortly.
“You say this was long ago,” Varus said. “The Singiri … that is, do the Singiri still live in Africa?”
He had started to say that the lizardmen still lived in Africa, but that was an assumption that the fact that Veturius had found four of the creatures in Africa did not prove. Veturius himself had been in Africa too, and he certainly didn’t live there.
“The Singiri could not stand against the Ethiopes,” said the Sibyl. She spoke dispassionately, as Pandareus had done two days ago in explaining why the unvoiced letter h remains in the written form of the noun “honor.” “But their princess was a magician and created a haven for her race within the Earth.”
Two armored lizardmen fell simultaneously, opening a gap in the defensive circle. Then they were all down, dead or dying as the Ethiopes pounded them like grain in a mortar.
The Sibyl moved her left hand as though wiping the surface of the air. The battle blurred away. In its place was the image
of a distant hillside on which thousands of Singiri stood. In front were armored warriors while behind them sheltered slender females and offspring as supple as trout.
Ethiopes in tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands poised below the Singiri. There were males and females alike, both genders armed, both savage. The horse-headed giants swept forward with a great cry, a pitiless tide.
The hill behind the lizardmen gouted rock like a cold volcano. The spray rose and continued rising. The Singiri warriors continued to face their opponents, but the Ethiopes paused to view the wonder.
The column of rock slackened, then stopped. An Ethiope stepped forward and shouted back to her fellows; the onslaught resumed. The ranked Singiri faded and vanished like wraiths of gossamer on the wind. The Ethiopes continued to advance because only those in the front of the mass could see what had happened.
Varus looked at his companion. “Why have the Singiri returned, Sibyl?” he asked.
There was movement in the corner of his eye. He turned quickly. The rock that had blown skyward now cascaded out of the sky. It buried the hillside and the valley below in a churning, thunderous torrent.
Clouds swirled even after the dust ceased to fall. It formed images and dissolved and re-formed again and again. As it settled, a mountain slowly emerged where the valley had been. There was no sign of the Ethiopes.
“The Singiri have lived for a thousand ages in their place, complete in themselves because of the magic of their princess,” the Sibyl said. “But they are safe only so long as the Earth is safe. And driven by a great magician, the Earth—”
She gestured again with her open palm.
“—has turned against all life.”
In front of Varus was the image of a ball on which movement glittered. Caterpillars on a globe of fruit, Varus thought. Crystal caterpillars on a plum or a—
“You see the Earth,” the Sibyl said. “And you see the Worms of the Earth, her children. They will scour the planet bare to its molten core, Lord Varus.”