Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth

by David Drake

  Varus suddenly appreciated the scale of what he was seeing: two serpents of crystal each a thousand miles long writhed over the world, devouring rock and sea alike. As the Worms ate, they grew from the substance of the world that shrank beneath them.

  “Sibyl, how can I stop them?” Varus said.

  “When the Worms have hatched, no man can stop them,” the old woman said. She turned and met his eyes. “Not even you, Lord Magician. And the Worms have hatched!”

  Varus felt himself falling back into the Waking World, his soul rejoining his body and his friends in Puteoli. The Sibyl’s mouth opened, but he knew it was his own voice shouting, “‘A terrible snake breathing war against all life will kill every human and destroy the world!’”

  CHAPTER II

  Alphena started protectively toward her brother, because he was always disorganized after one of these spells. Embarrassment aside, Varus could be badly hurt if he stumbled the wrong way among these cages.

  “A snake!” said Macsturnas, rising on tiptoes and trying to look in all directions at once. “Where’s the snake? Where is it?”

  “There’s no snake, Lord Macsturnas,” said Alphena, turning to face the aedile. Corylus was already holding his friend’s arm, and Pulto had come from somewhere to stand on Varus’ other side. “That was just a line of poetry. My brother is a poet, and he’s always working on new verses.”

  She smiled, and she had managed to keep her voice soothing. Hedia will be pleased. “And even without snakes, your gift to the people of Carce will be marvelous, unique. I’ve been entranced by even this short glimpse of your animals.”

  If Macsturnas had been Alphena’s servant, she would have slapped him instead of burbling flattery. That would probably be the best way to settle even a senator who was sniveling with fear, but it wouldn’t be decorous. Her first concern had to be her brother.

  Paris, the old man who had come with Macsturnas, started past his patron to get closer to Varus. Alphena looked at him sharply. Either that or the way Pulto hunched caused Paris to change his mind and slip back behind the aedile.

  “A poem?” said Macsturnas. He relaxed visibly, though he still kept his arms closer to his sides than he had done before the fright. “Oh, I see. I wasn’t expecting … that is, I didn’t realize that Lord Varus was quoting poetry.”

  Alphena wasn’t sure, either, though it seemed likely enough. It was a good excuse to offer a stranger like Macsturnas, so she had offered it.

  Varus was standing straight again. Corylus had loosened his grip, though he still kept his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  Saxa looked almost as disturbed as the aedile had, though his concern was for Varus. He hesitated, unable to choose between going to his son’s side and leaving him to Corylus and his servant.

  Varus was probably better in their experienced hands. From the way Hedia shifted her body, she would have stopped Saxa if he had tried to join Varus.

  “Brother?” Alphena said, speaking clearly and louder than would have been necessary for Varus alone to hear her. “I was just telling Lord Macsturnas that you often call out lines when you’re composing poetry. The way you did just now.”

  Varus grinned at her. He moved his shoulder gently out from under Corylus’ touch.

  “Why, yes,” Varus said. He dipped his head toward the aedile. “I apologize if I startled you, Your Lordship. A muse like mine is a hard taskmistress, you will appreciate.”

  If Alphena hadn’t known that her brother had given up writing poetry after the humiliating failure of his first public performance, she would have taken his statement as his real feelings—just as Macsturnas did. The aedile now saw Varus as a ninny with illusions of talent, a self-important fool, and, above all, harmless.

  Hedia had been whispering into Saxa’s ear. Her smile hadn’t slipped, but Alphena was close enough to hear her mother’s urgent tone though not the words themselves.

  Saxa nodded three times as though settling a jumble of ideas into order in his head. He turned to the aedile and said, “Quite an interesting collection, Macsturnas. You’ve done well, very well for a young man. I shouldn’t wonder if your gift isn’t the standard against which all beast hunts in the future will be measured.”

  Since her parents had the aedile’s attention, Alphena moved without haste to join her brother and Corylus. Varus was fully himself again, adjusting the folds of his toga.

  It was a single piece of cloth. Despite its quality—the son of Alphenus Saxa wore the best Spanish wool woven so fine that it was relatively comfortable even on a day as hot as this—the toga had begun to loosen while Varus sleepwalked through the compound. Tradition forbade a gentleman of Carce from pinning the ancient garment in place.

  “I just asked your brother…,” Corylus said. He spoke in a calm voice that wasn’t a whisper but couldn’t be heard beyond the three of them. “Whether he was quoting the Sibylline Books again.”

  “And I was about to reply,” said Varus, “that I can’t very well say because I’ve never even seen the books. But judging from what Commissioner Priscus said when I had one of these spells before, I suppose I was.”

  He made a moue of embarrassment and added, “At any rate, I was dreaming of the Sibyl again. Having a vision, at least.”

  Pulto had joined Cispius and Veturius. They stood shoulder to shoulder, far enough from the cage behind them that the six wolves within couldn’t scrabble far enough through the bars to reach the veterans’ legs.

  The three veterans were stiffly alert, scanning the entire scene but staying safely clear of whatever was going on. It was an affair of their betters. Until one of the nobles directed an order toward them, they weren’t going to get involved.

  Cispius glanced toward his son more often than his companions did, but his face was expressionless. Alphena wondered what he was thinking.

  She grinned. Varus and Corylus both noticed the expression, but neither responded with anything more than a frown.

  “I’m not sure what I think just happened,” she said, answering her own unspoken question. A combination of humor and hysteria almost tipped her into wild laughter. “So I shouldn’t be worrying about other people, should I?”

  “The Sibyl showed me lizardmen like these,” Varus said, nodding. “They may be called the Singiri.”

  “Are they a danger?” Corylus said. “Is there an army of them marching out of Africa?”

  “I don’t think so,” Varus said, dipping his chin in denial. “No, I’m sure that’s not it—not what the Sibyl was warning me about. But there are Worms coming out of the Earth and devouring it as though it were an apple. Great, glittering Worms, devouring the whole surface and all life with it.”

  “I wish Pandareus were here,” Corylus said quietly. “We should have brought him with us from Carce, Gaius. He would have come if we’d asked him—and the rest of his students wouldn’t have cared; they’d have been pleased at a day or two more holiday. You know they would.”

  Alphena looked from one youth to the other, waiting for either of them to come to the obvious conclusion. When neither spoke, she said, “Well, we’ll bring him here now and he can look at the lizardmen himself. I’ll send a messenger to Carce and have one of the stewards at the town house engage a mail coach for him. He can be here by tomorrow night.”

  Her brother and Corylus were babbling agreement to her back as Alphena strode toward the servants waiting outside the compound.

  * * *

  HEDIA MADE A POINT OF WALKING on her husband’s right with her fingers on his elbow. In the tight alleys of the compound that meant that Macsturnas occasionally had to wait for them to go on ahead.

  “Why are the horns of that deer so twisted, Master Veturius?” she called to the owner just ahead, as he and Corylus’ father led the procession out.

  Cispius muttered something to his friend. Veturius showed surprise, then looked over his shoulder and said, “Your Ladyship, I mean—”

  He hadn’t actually called her “mistress�
�� before his friend warned him, but the word had obviously been on the tip of his tongue.

  “—that’s a desert antelope, an oryx. And I don’t know why the horns are that way, but the reason he’s here and not in the pasture is that this particular one’s a bloody son of a bitch. Those horns aren’t just for show: he spiked a zebra through the lungs on the crossing from Alexandria. That’s fine in the arena, but I don’t get paid for animals I don’t deliver there.”

  “Thank you, Veturius,” Hedia said. Under other circumstances, she would have dropped back and let the senators walk together. She hadn’t done so this afternoon because, despite her smile and the cheerful tone with which she discussed the animals as they passed, she was angry and perhaps a little frightened.

  Certainly a little frightened.

  Hedia wasn’t afraid of the priest whom Macsturnas had brought with him, Paris, but neither did she want the old man directly behind her. He was an unpleasant sort who clearly disliked her and Saxa. Paris might not be the reason Varus had had his spell, but there was probably a connection with the fact that the priest had appeared just before it happened.

  “Ah, there’s Alphena,” Saxa said when he saw their daughter waiting for them at the compound’s gateway. “I saw her go off, but I didn’t want to say anything while—”

  He leaned his head close to finish in a whisper, “—I was talking to Quintus Macsturnas.”

  “Yes,” Hedia said. “She had some direction to give one of her servants, I suppose.”

  Hedia didn’t have the faintest notion of why Alphena had rushed out of the compound. Her relief at seeing the girl standing decorously at the gate was greater than her husband’s, though no one watching her would have guessed she had been concerned.

  “I say, Lord Saxa?” Macsturnas said as he came abreast of Hedia and her husband again. “I’m giving a small dinner tonight. I would be honored if you and your son could join me.”

  Hedia glanced back to see if Varus and Corylus were with them now. They had been talking with Alphena, but they hadn’t joined the girl when she strode off.

  Perhaps they were still viewing the lizardmen. At any rate, they weren’t visible for as far as Hedia could look back along the road into the compound. Four burly men were moving a cage of baboons down a cross aisle. The laborers looked as savage as the beasts, and the ridged scars of old whippings covered the back of one of the nearer men.

  “My premier cook remains in Carce,” the aedile was saying, “but my man here at my house on the Bay is quite good, especially for seafood. His Lucrine oysters in a sauce of cheese and giant fennel are wonderful, wonderful. And the oysters won’t be more than an hour out of the water, of course!”

  “Well, I don’t know about Varus…,” Saxa said doubtfully. He looked around anxiously: he didn’t seem to have noticed that Varus was staying behind.

  “Our son is continuing to examine the creatures, Lord Husband,” said Hedia over her shoulder as she walked to Alphena’s side. “And I believe Master Corylus is with him.”

  “We thought Pandareus should be told about the lizardmen,” Alphena said quietly when Hedia joined her and they turned to go out into the street. “And about my brother’s vision, since he already knows that Varus has them. He said he saw the Sibyl again and there were Worms.”

  “Master Pandareus is a very sensible man as well as a learned one,” Hedia said calmly. “I shall be pleased to hear his advice in this instance, as before.”

  She spoke in a normal voice, but no one outside the household would be able to overhear the conversation. The attendants had kept a considerable space clear for the return of the senators and their closest associates, but of course the attendants themselves were a crowd.

  “Our lord is discussing dinner with Lord Macsturnas tonight,” Hedia said. Her index finger made so slight a gesture toward the senators that only someone who knew her well would notice.

  She smiled with an almost professional brightness and continued, “Are you looking forward to our own dinner tomorrow with my friend Bersinus? It may not be as learned as a senator’s table, but I have reason to hope it will be more interesting.”

  “I’m going,” Alphena mumbled toward her hands. She raised her eyes to meet Hedia’s with conscious effort—and blushed. “That is, I’m a little nervous, but I realize I must learn about … about this sort of thing.”

  Syra and Florina, Hedia’s chief maid and her daughter’s, stood at arm’s length from their mistresses, as silent as the rolled awning of the jeweler’s stall behind them. Florina was the first permanent servant Alphena had had since she outgrew her nurse.

  Until recently, the duty of serving Saxa’s willful, contrary daughter had been assigned as a punishment rotated among the members of the household who were out of favor with the majordomo. Alphena had resented more or less everything, so far as Hedia could tell. Saxa could avoid her tantrums, but the servants could not.

  Hedia could have kept away from Alphena—and Varus—also, but she took her duties as their mother by law seriously, as she took seriously everything to do with family. She smiled; a stranger might have said that the expression would cut glass. Alphena had been making a real effort to behave like a lady since she had learned—been forced to learn—that though this was a man’s world, a proper lady was by no means powerless in it.

  “You have a charming face,” Hedia said, “and you move as gracefully as any woman of your age. It’s time that polite society learns to appreciate your beauty.”

  “If I’m really graceful…,” Alphena said. She was trying to sound cynical, but Hedia heard an underlayer of pride. “Then it’s because of the swordsmanship training I get from Master Lenatus. You should thank him.”

  “I have thanked Lenatus for his many services to the family,” Hedia said, though the words weren’t precisely agreement. The trainer, an old soldier and a friend of Corylus’ servant Pulto, had been very circumspect in giving the lessons Alphena had demanded and her father was unwilling to forbid. “And you certainly are graceful, though I think the more usual sort of deportment teachers would have been able to bring out your natural gifts as well.”

  Lenatus was a freeborn citizen of Carce, but the gap between an ex-soldier and a senator’s daughter was as great as the distance between the soldier and a slave. A weaker man might well have allowed Alphena more leeway—sparring with her or even arranging secret bouts and praying that they wouldn’t come to the attention of his employer.

  As they would certainly have done. Even Saxa would have had all those involved in the business executed; and if Hedia was on the scene, they would have been tortured to death. It would have brought disgrace to the family.

  Still, wearing armor as she danced about the post she was hacking at with a heavy wooden sword probably had made Alphena more graceful. Clumsiness spilled her in the sawdust of the exercise yard, after all.

  Recent events had taught Hedia to respect her daughter’s merits as well as teaching Alphena to respect her mother. Swordsmanship wasn’t a common accomplishment for a polite lady, but Alphena’s skill had saved her life; and it had saved her mother’s life as well.

  Alphena shifted into a marginally stiffer posture. Her lips pursed as she formed the words she intended to say next. Hedia noticed the hesitation, but her pleasant smile didn’t slip.

  “I think I’ll go shopping by myself this afternoon, Mother,” Alphena said. “Rather than going straight back to the house.”

  The girl was trying to keep her statement from being a challenge, but she obviously felt that any attempt to assert her own will was going to be examined by her mother before it would be allowed to take place. Alphena was correct in her understanding, of course.

  “I’m sure you’ll be quite safe with your own escort, dear,” Hedia said. “Though if you’d like to borrow some of my servants, I can easily spare them as I’ll be with Lord Saxa.”

  Hedia offered the additional attendants to show gentle interest instead of brusquely sending Alphena
on her way. They would be quite unnecessary unless the Germans raced over the Alps and began pillaging Puteoli.

  A few weeks earlier, when the Alphenus household had been in an uproar because of the way Hedia had vanished, Alphena had kept her head and managed to right the situation. Ten of the male servants had coalesced around her, because she was fearless and her crisp orders convinced others that she was in charge of whatever was happening.

  Those servants had since become Alphena’s escort. They had come from various divisions of the staff: footmen, kitchen staff, groundskeepers, and even one of the hairdressers. They weren’t in their original positions, but Saxa’s house in Carce had a staff of over two hundred, so there was no reason they couldn’t assign themselves to escorting the daughter of the house.

  They weren’t the biggest servants in the household man for man, and they weren’t even the ugliest and most threatening, which was the usual way to select personnel for public escort. The fact that they had volunteered themselves into what looked at the time like a dangerous job outweighed—in the opinion of Lenatus as well as in Hedia’s own—any amount of muscle.

  “Oh, I’ll be all right, I’m sure,” Alphena said, looking relieved that Hedia hadn’t made a fuss. Alphena took a deep breath and said, “I thought, I’d, ah, look for jewelry. Not for swords or armor or something. Not today, I mean.”

  “I’m sure that will be very nice, dear,” Hedia said, also relieved. “Something to wear to Bersinus’ dinner?”

  She had forced herself not to ask what kind of shopping her daughter had in mind. Hedia’s real concern had been that Alphena planned to buy not a sword but rather a gladiator or two. Hedia would have had to prevent that, which would have undermined her recent months of building trust between her and her daughter.

  “Not really,” Alphena said, looking unexpectedly concerned. “Well, I mean I suppose if I find something that I think.…”

  In a burst of candor she met Hedia’s eyes and said, “Mother, I’ve been having dreams and I don’t know what they mean and I just felt that I ought to go shopping!”