by David Drake
“Glad to hear it,” Corylus muttered. He coughed to clear the constriction from his throat. I’ve been praised in more florid terms. But I’ve never had a compliment that meant more.
Cispius hadn’t offered questions when his son asked to borrow a cart and a driver who could find the estate that had belonged to the poet Vergil on the Nola Road. He wouldn’t have survived on the frontier, however, if he hadn’t been able to see more than bushes in a seemingly neutral landscape.
“Are you expecting trouble, Publius?” Varus said with a deadpan expression. “Because if you are, I’m afraid you brought the wrong sibling.”
He paused, then added, “Unless perhaps I was able to put the miscreants to sleep by declaiming some of my verse.”
Corylus had let his mind wander into darker passages, so though he heard his friend’s words, they didn’t register for a moment. When Corylus did understand, he snorted with laughter.
“Thank you, Gaius,” he said. “I don’t foresee anything more strenuous than a literary discussion, but I’m glad that you’re prepared to do your part if necessary.”
There was a blockage ahead. A man and woman with a girl of no more than eight were leading their three donkeys abreast so that they could chat on the way into town with panniers of vegetables. Almost all the traffic at this hour of the morning was of goods and produce headed in from the country for sale—or directly to the tables of noble households.
Lycos murmured to slow the mule, then ticked the man—presumably the husband—under the nose with his twelve-foot switch. The fellow shouted in surprise and anger, but he dragged his wife’s and daughter’s donkeys into line ahead of his to give the cart room. Corylus had half-expected the man to want to discuss the matter, but apparently his first sight of Lycos’ face had left him with no desire to spend time shouting into it.
“When I first saw the cart…,” Varus said. “I wondered why the driver had such a long switch. I now have the answer through direct observation, a technique which I prefer to that of deduction.”
“Socrates may have been able to draw abstruse knowledge from the mind of an unsophisticated youth,” Corylus agreed, “but I sure can’t do that from my own mind. And with all honor to Aristotle, I know a heavy weight doesn’t fall faster than a lighter one. When I was ten, I made a clay pellet the same size as a lead sling-bullet; they both hit the ground at the same time when I tipped them from the barracks’ roof.”
The wall on the right was in bad repair. Ground shocks this close to Vesuvius could crack masonry, let alone shake apart a wall made of fieldstones stacked on one another.
“Does your father know anything about this Lucinus?” Varus said, also looking up the road ahead.
“He knew the property,” Corylus said, recalling their conversation during the previous night. “It’d been vacant for years, but a new owner moved in about the time Father bought the perfume business here before he retired. The owner keeps to himself and doesn’t even have servants living on the property. A farmer on the road just this side sends men over during daytime to take care of the few crops and goats. And the farmer’s wife sends a maid to cook and do housework.”
Unexpectedly Lycos turned his fierce eye on them. He said, “Nobody human lives there but the old wizard himself. At night, though, there’s lights and there’s things moving and there’s sounds too. I’ve been by after dark myself, coming back from a delivery, and I didn’t like what I heard. I didn’t waste any time getting past, for all that you can’t see the place from the road.”
“Well, we’re going there in daylight,” Corylus said. He was making an observation aloud, not trying to quell his own fear or that of his companions.
He wasn’t particularly afraid. He’d faced demons and he’d faced Sarmatian warriors. He didn’t look forward to repeating either experience; but if he had to, he would do his duty as a soldier’s son and a citizen of Carce.
Varus didn’t have the kind of hot courage that sent a legion uphill into a mass of tall, screaming Germans, but Corylus had never seen him flinch at any danger. If Corylus hadn’t known Varus so well, he might have thought his friend had no emotions. In fact, he was as sensitive as he was observant, but he relied on his intellect in a crisis. The fact that Varus was afraid—as he was surely afraid many times, because he was far more aware of possible dangers than most people were—simply didn’t affect his behavior.
Corylus hadn’t met Lycos before they got into the cart together this morning. There were very brave people—Pulto was one of them—who were afraid of magic though they feared nothing in the natural world. If Lycos had been such a man, Cispius wouldn’t have chosen him to drive the cart this morning.
Corylus turned toward his friend and said, “Did you have any trouble getting out? That is, getting out without an army of attendants?”
Varus smiled. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it back in Carce,” he said, “but the staff here doesn’t know me well enough to be contemptuous. I told Balbinus that I would be going off with you at dawn wearing simple clothes—”
He tweaked the collar of his plain white tunic. He wore a cape of coarse blue wool over his shoulders; the hood was back. Except that both garments were new, he might have been a farmer dressed in his best.
“—and he saw to it that I was wakened in time and had suitable garments. Instead of telling me it was impossible, as Agrippinus would have done in Carce. Or rushing to Father with the news that I had gone mad, because obviously no nobleman in his right mind would wish to do such a thing.”
Varus spoke without apparent resentment. Most servants didn’t have the education to appreciate his virtues, and the fact that the son of the house was diffident and polite—particularly by contrast with his sister, Alphena—had made him an object of contempt rather than affection to the staff in Carce.
Perhaps Varus understood the expression on his friend’s face, for he added with a smile, “We don’t live in a philosophical paradise of the sort Plato visualized, Publius.”
“Given the state that Plato created when his student Dion was Tyrant of Syracuse,” Corylus said, his tone sharper than he had expected it to be, “I believe we can be thankful for that.”
They were passing a farmhouse on the right; it was of some substance though not a nobleman’s villa. The walls had been stuccoed white at one time, but patches of plaster were missing. Lycos nodded toward it and said, “That’s the farmer who hires out at the place we’re going. And here’s—”
Two men watched from the veranda in front; several others working in the yard followed the cart with their eyes as Lycos turned it up a little-used track to the left.
“—the drive we take,” Lycos concluded.
The road twisted through fields overgrown into a tangle of brush and saplings. Occasionally an umbrella pine rose to fifty feet, but for the most part the growth formed a tangled screen twelve or fifteen feet high.
“Hard to imagine this being owned by the man who wrote the Georgics,” Varus said sadly. “He loved his land.”
The cart turned another kink in the road. Ahead of them was what had been a proper villa but was well on the way to becoming a ruin. Part of the roof had fallen in; a pair of black goats munched grass, which was growing among the remaining tiles. They watched the vehicle, their jaws still working.
A man sitting on the front steps rose. He moved in tiny jerks as though his limbs were controlled by strings.
“This…,” said Corylus, reaching into the bed of the cart for his cornelwood staff. “Is Master Lucinus. We’ll see what he loves.”
* * *
VARUS WAS SHOCKED to see the ruin of Vergil’s property, much more so than he would have expected to be if someone had suggested it ahead of time. The Eclogues had been juvenile work, mere imitations of Theocritus and of Greek imitators of Theocritus, interesting to be sure, and a window onto the development of the greatest Latin poet—and perhaps greatest poet without limitation—of all time.
The Georgics, though,
were love lyrics not to fanciful shepherd maids but rather to the land itself and to the life on it. Even a scholar like Varus with no personal experience of farming could read that love in every line of the four books. To come upon Vergil’s house half-roofless and his fields abandoned to brush was like seeing the smoldering remains of a district in Carce after a fire.
The man walking toward them from the porch was dressed like a field hand rather than as the owner—or even manager—of a villa, but it was in a cultured accent that he said, “Welcome, Lord Varus. And thank you, Cispius Corylus, for bringing your friend to me. You and the world may benefit by continuing to exist.”
“I did not bring my friend, Lucinus,” Corylus said. “I described the situation and he made the decision to come with his own fine mind. Because I’m not sure myself that his choice was the correct one, I have accompanied him.”
He patted his staff into his left palm with a whap. It was made of dogwood, which was tough and heavy beyond any other wood Varus was familiar with. I could ask Corylus if there’s any wood that is tougher—but if there were, that would be what he was carrying.
“If we choose to leave, we will do so whether you and your servants wish that or not.”
“Come into the house, young gentlemen,” Lucinus said, giving Corylus an amused smile. “I sent my gardener and housekeeper home immediately when they arrived this morning, because my art had told me you were on your way. You will remain—or you at least will, Lord Varus—because of your sense of duty to Mankind, not due to any compulsion from me.”
A half step behind Lucinus, Varus walked toward the house. Without trying to hide his cold disgust, he said, “If this is really Vergil’s farm, then I’m distressed to see its present condition.”
“My uncle lived and worked here for many years,” Lucinus said calmly. “For the last eight of those years, I was his student and his assistant. I learned much, but no other human will ever be my uncle’s equal in his true art.”
On the veranda, two steps up from the bare yard, Lucinus turned to face his visitors. He said, “My uncle understood that things merely of this world are of little concern. He wrote his verse for eternity, but his true work was beyond time and space. I attempt to carry on his true art. I need your help now to do so, Your Lordship.”
“Is it poverty which prevents you from maintaining the property?” Corylus said. He glanced toward Varus and added, “Because I’m sure there are wealthy men who would willingly contribute to the maintenance of an estate of such significance.”
Gaius Alphenus Saxa among them, as Corylus knows, Varus thought. Even without his son begging that he do so.
“Money!” Lucinus snapped. “What do I need of money?”
He stalked into the villa’s reception room—the upper hinge of the front door was wobbly, causing it to hang askew—and around the pool in its center. The basin was cracked and empty except for a slime that managed to survive on rainwater funneled through the opening in the roof. On the bottom was a mosaic picture, possibly of Triton and Thetis; the green shadow of algae was too thick for Varus to be sure.
Lucinus took an earthenware jug from a wall niche that was probably intended for a bust or wax mask of one of the owner’s ancestors. He tipped it onto the floor; gold and silver coins spilled out. Or were they …
Varus squatted, completely forgetting about the reason he had visited Lucinus, and picked up a gold piece the size of his thumbnail. It was stamped with a man’s head in relief, surrounded by writing. The script wasn’t Greek or that of any language he was familiar with.
Lucinus smiled down at him and said, “I think that one’s Carian, but it doesn’t matter. I trade them as bullion for necessary supplies, and of course as rent to Charax for the use of his slaves.”
Varus set the coin back on the pile and straightened. Many questions roiled in his mind, but he wasn’t sure that asking any of them would bring him more wisdom than keeping silent would—so he kept silent.
“I do not have my uncle’s skill in the art…,” Lucinus said. Varus thought he heard a hint of pride, though the older man seemed at pains to hide it. “Nevertheless, I have some skill. If gold could buy silent attendants, I would have them. But I cannot allow the details of my researches to become known to the wider world.”
He shook his head and went on bitterly, “The common people—laymen, all laymen whatever their rank—would burn me and everything of mine! Though it’s for their own benefit and for the survival of the world that I succeed.”
“How did your uncle maintain the property?” Corylus said. “Since you claim he was a magician also.”
“A magician?” Lucinus repeated. “Yes, but so far beyond what you mean by the word that you can’t fathom the difference. My uncle could not buy trustworthy servants, so he made them. He built twelve automatons. Their bodies were silver, and quicksilver blood ran in their veins. They lived in a shed by day and worked the farm by night, and they vanished when he vanished.”
He shrugged. “I do not have that power in the art. I live in three rooms here—”
He gestured, not to the habitable portion of the villa but to the doorway on the left. The ceiling beyond had collapsed. Broken timbers stuck up above the tiles, and a ground squirrel scampered from its hole and out of sight.
“—and let the rest go, as my uncle would have done if he had been in my circumstances.”
Lucinus walked through to the garden in back of the building. The house was of an old design without an interior courtyard; old even in Vergil’s day, Varus would have thought, though at this distance from Carce fashions probably didn’t change as quickly as they did in the capital.
After a moment to adjust to the fact that there were no flowers, Varus saw that the garden was in better condition than any room of the house proper. The rows had been weeded, and the apple and peach trees flanking the vegetables were heavy with still unripened fruit.
Varus heard tapping behind him and turned. The goats looked down from the roof at him. Their jaws rotated sideways, which he found to be disconcerting.
Lucinus bent and picked up a clod from between a pair of bean vines climbing poles. The trenches between rows had been recently watered, but the soil of the mounds on which the beans were planted was dry and crumbled easily under his thumb.
Mumbling, “Their eyes glow and their tongues lick the air like hissing fire,” Lucinus tossed the dust into the air. For a moment the loose soil was a smear in the morning sunlight; then an image gripped Varus’ mind and drew him into it. He felt his breath catch, but he was a disembodied viewpoint hovering above horror.
A familiar horror: he was looking down on the great crystal serpents that he had watched from the Sibyl’s side. Now they gouged across the landscape like rivers in flood, devouring their banks and whatever was before them.
“These are the Worms of the Earth,” said Lucinus’ voice. “They are Earth’s revenge for the destruction of her children, the Titans. If they are released—”
For an instant, Varus watched from the porch of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest in the center of Carce. People in the Forum below were foreshortened, moving dots rather than human beings, while beyond to the east spread the familiar thousands of houses and apartment blocks in which he and his fellow citizens lived.
“—they will destroy life and the land on which life exists.”
Filling the far horizon, red with the setting sun, advanced a wall of crystal. Houses and hills and the bedrock itself vanished into its blazing, jewel-like facade. People were too small to matter on such a scale, but Varus’ mind echoed with screams that his ears could not hear, the deaths of thousands upon thousands, the deaths of all men and all things.
“And a wizard named Melino, who was human when he went to the Otherworld but is human no more…,” continued the voice of Lucinus, “will release the Worms, for he is mad and a demon.”
The blazing crystalline maw swelled over Varus’ viewpoint; then the vision shattered into blackne
ss. Varus was in Vergil’s garden again. The goats had vanished and Corylus, his face impassive, stood with his left hand flat against the trunk of the peach tree. The staff was in his right.
Lucinus gave Corylus a superior smile and said, “You’re a soldier, aren’t you, Master Corylus? How do you like the Great Art?”
“I intend to become a soldier,” Corylus said. He didn’t sound angry, but there was no give in his voice. “I didn’t like what your magic showed me. How do we stop it, Lucinus?”
Varus had first thought his friend was supporting himself against the tree. Closer attention showed that his hand was caressing the bark lightly, as if it were the peach that needed comfort.
“You have no part in the matter, Master Corylus,” Lucinus said. He sounded noticeably more polite than he had a moment before. “Your friend and I are students of the Art, are magicians, if you prefer. Between us, Lord Varus and I may be able to retrieve Zabulon’s Book from where my uncle placed it when he found that his fate was near. With the Book, it may be that we will be able to prevent the release of the Worms.”
Corylus gave the tree a last pat and straightened. “What precisely do you expect Varus to do?” he said in the same calm, humorless voice.
Lucinus turned to Varus to protest. Before Varus could tell him to answer the question, the older man’s scowl cleared. He nodded to Varus, then faced Corylus.
“Zabulon was the first astrologer and the first master of the Great Art,” he said. “He put his wisdom and his soul into a book, which he took with him to an island separate from this world and from the Otherworld. My uncle journeyed to Zabulon’s Isle and took the Book from Zabulon.”
“Zabulon is still alive?” Varus said. He had never heard the name before; he wondered if Pandareus had.
“Zabulon’s body is not alive,” Lucinus said, looking at him. “But Zabulon’s Book lives. My uncle returned the Book to its owner’s hands.”