Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth

by David Drake

  “Lucinus!” Varus cried. He stood and immediately toppled to his knees because his feet had grown numb while he hunched motionless. He crawled to the stern through the hooped deckhouse. He had previously avoided the shelter for no reason he could explain, but he had no time to waste now.

  The bow crunched up the beach, throwing Varus backward. Perhaps there was still time to get to another island.

  “Lucinus, look at the heads in the trees!” he said. He grabbed the magician by the shoulders and shook him to keep him from lapsing into unconsciousness. “We’ve got to get out of here while we still can!”

  Lucinus looked at him with a dull expression. His lips moved.

  “What did you say?” Varus said. “I can’t hear you!”

  “They won’t bother us…,” Lucinus whispered. He went limp in Varus’ arms.

  Varus carried him up the sand to just below the trees. He chose a location at the base of a palm. The scattered palms didn’t seem to have hanging heads, perhaps because they didn’t have proper branches.

  Lucinus should know whether the heads were dangerous. At any rate, there was nothing Varus could do about it if the magician was wrong.

  Varus pulled the boat a little farther up the beach. Seeing the hanging heads at least had the benefit of shocking him into greater alertness than he had risen to since boarding the vessel in Carce a lifetime ago.

  The faces had no thought or even life in them, but their sightless eyes followed him as he moved. A heliotrope followed the sun, of course, but that didn’t mean the flower had any hostile intent.

  It was a pity that there was no one with whom Varus could discuss the wonders he was seeing. Perhaps after they had found Zabulon’s Book and returned he could question Lucinus about the heads, about the bronze giant, about the sea on which they traveled, and about so much more.

  And perhaps one or both of them would be dead.

  Varus lay on his back beside the magician, sharing the rolled cloak again as a pillow. As the sunset faded, stars began to come out.

  Varus wasn’t a real astronomer, but he had as good a grasp of the heavens as anyone who didn’t depend on the stars for his livelihood or for his life: a farmer, say, or a sailor. To his surprise he recognized the constellations. They were the normal ones of home—but they were the stars of early spring, not the fall in which he had left Carce.

  As he pondered the sky, Varus felt another existence slowly envelop him. He was at the base of a hill. He began climbing the rocky path, knowing who he would find at the top.

  The old woman had been facing the other way as Varus reached the top, but she immediately turned to greet him. She wore a long white tunic without ornamentation, under a blue wrapper that covered her head like the hood of a cape. She said, “Greetings, Lord Varus.”

  “Greetings, Sibyl,” Varus said. He walked across the narrow crest of the ridge to stand with the old woman on the other side. “Mistress, why have you called me to you this time?”

  The Sibyl laughed in a cracked voice. “I cannot call you, Lord,” she said. “I am only a whim of your mind.”

  She looked over the precipice before them. Though she did not gesture, Varus followed her eyes as he was meant to do. Below was the beach on which he had landed.

  The stern of the boat was still in the water; he thought he had drawn it onto dry sand. It probably didn’t matter, because this sea appeared to be tideless. And in any case, he had done the best his body could manage at the time.

  Varus examined his own wan, lifeless face. It reminded him of the heads hanging from the trees, not the pleasant features he was used to seeing when he looked into still water or the polished bronze surface of a mirror.

  A scum of foam and flotsam bobbed minusculely at the edge of the sea. A shadow rose from it. Farther down the beach, a similar shadow rose or perhaps coalesced from the air.

  The shadows had no form. To the eye of Varus’ mind, they were merely palpable darkness.

  “Sibyl?” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. The darknesses were drifting slowly in the direction of the sleeping men. “What are those things? The mist, the blackness.”

  “They are Elementals,” the Sibyl said. “They are ageless and soulless, and they hate men.”

  “What are they doing?” Varus said as the Elementals drifted toward the sleeping humans.

  He wondered how his mouth could become dry. After all, his body wasn’t really here. He wasn’t sure it was below on the sand, either.

  “They have sucked existence out of men who landed here in the past,” the Sibyl said with the same calm certainty, “and they have hung the heads from the trees. They will do the same with newcomers, if they can.”

  “I’ve got to wake Lucinus!” Varus said. By now the blurs of foulness were on either side of the sleepers. “He must not have known about the Elementals when he said the heads wouldn’t harm us!”

  “Lucinus is a magician,” the Sibyl said. “He knows the Elementals will not try to harm magicians.”

  Varus shouted, “I’m not a magician! What do I do?”

  “Are you not a magician, Lord Varus?” the Sibyl said, her voice rising into a cackle of laughter. “Are you not?”

  “Let a burning power come through the sea to the land!” Varus said. There was a flash of light so intense that for an instant the water and sand were transparent.

  Varus’ spirit spiraled back into his body; he lurched upright.

  Lucinus still slept. The Elementals had vanished without a trace. Strands of hair dangled from a few branches when Varus looked around, but the heads were gone.

  I hope they’ve found peace.

  Varus lay back on the sand. He slept like a dead man.

  * * *

  HEDIA WAS SO SUDDENLY in another place that she swayed, though she hadn’t moved in any fashion that should make her stumble. She spread her left leg wider, as much to steady her nerves as for any physical need.

  Melino bent forward, bracing his wrists on his bent knees for support. Because he still held both staff and Book, he couldn’t use his hands. The demon ignored him and Hedia, facing the surrounding forest of what seemed to be giant grass stems. She wore an expression of either disdain or disinterest.

  The landscape was grayed out; the sky glimpsed through the vegetation was as featureless as a coat of indigo paint. Daisies wobbled twenty feet overhead, but there were monstrous trees as well. The ground was littered with dead leaves six feet long and chestnuts the size of grain baskets, some still in their husks.

  Hedia could hear music, but at first she couldn’t see where it was coming from. She jerked quickly around at seeing movement in the corner of her eye, but there was nothing but a giant fern where she looked.

  Frowning, she turned back. On a log that had been empty sat a youth with a feathered cap and a long smock, playing a coiled horn. Beside him sat a man-sized grasshopper with the head of a fox. It plucked the strings of a lute whose sound box was the shell of a river turtle. They were the source of the music Hedia was hearing. The turtle’s limbs, still attached, wriggled.

  The horn player watched her; the fox eyes did not, not openly at least. The notes of the lute ran around and through the soft waves of sound from the horn.

  People began to step out from around grass-blades or rise from behind pebbles. They wore all manner of clothing, generally pleated skirts for the females and breeches held up by shoulder straps for the men. Their headgear was invariably ornate, running to feathers and furs and metal spikes or sheets of foil.

  They looked odd without quite being grotesque. They gave the impression of being normal humans who had gone about all their lives with stone blocks on their heads, slowly flattening them into shorter, broader beings.

  “Where are we?” Hedia demanded. She spoke because the newcomers were making her nervous. If she simply stood and waited for others to act, she might show that fear.

  There were twenty-odd of the strangers. The tallest was shorter than Hedia and probably not even
as tall as Alphena.

  “We are in the place from which I went from this world to the Waking World,” Melino muttered.

  He opened the Book. As before, it spoke a word. Hedia felt existence shudder like a sheet of water sweeping over rocks.

  Melino tottered. Hedia put out her hand to steady him, but at the last moment she hesitated.

  The magician opened his eyes. He nodded toward two inward-arching grass-blades. Hedia could follow the opening between them for as far as her eyes could reach.

  “That way,” Melino said, closing the Book. He started forward.

  A short man in red breeches and a puffy white blouse stepped into the magician’s path. He wore a hat with a low crown. Tiny chariots appeared to race around its wide brim.

  “One moment, sir,” the little man said. “This can be a very dangerous place for those who don’t know its foibles. My family and I will guide you.”

  When Melino said nothing, the stranger said, “It would be very dangerous for you to attempt to proceed without our help.”

  Melino sniffed. To the ring demon he said, “Deal with him.”

  The demon’s expression might have been a smile. She said, “Pluck,” and extended her left hand. A dusting of ruby sparkles drifted from her fingertips toward the strangers’ spokesman.

  The little man backed away, but the sparkles encircled him and closed in. “Please, good master, you must have misunderstood me!” he said.

  The sparkles pulled back from the little man’s torso, tearing his blouse and trousers away in shreds. His torso was ridged, and a third pair of limbs had been concealed under his clothing.

  “We meant no harm!” the little man squealed, though he wasn’t a man. His fellows had vanished. “You must believe—”

  The sparkles pulled away the three limbs on his left side as they had done his clothing. He fell to the ground, shrieking wordlessly. He began to wriggle in a circle, but he couldn’t rise.

  “That should be enough of a lesson,” Melino said. He was breathing hard. “Come along, though, before something worse finds us.”

  He started in the direction he had indicated, walking around the crippled spokesman.

  “Are you going to finish him?” Hedia said, skirting the writhing thing a little wider than Melino had done.

  “He’s no longer a danger,” Melino said. “He can squirm as long as he wants to. Although—”

  He looked at Hedia.

  “—are you hungry? They taste like crabmeat.”

  “Thank you,” said Hedia, “but I don’t care for shellfish.”

  They walked briskly through the forest. The demon was leading.

  Sexual bondage with the right partner could be pleasant, but Hedia had already decided that the magician would not be the right partner. The business behind them merely reinforced that opinion.

  The lute was still playing. The turtle’s feet plucked the strings.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The haze cleared, and Corylus could see the ground on which he walked. The sky remained featureless: evenly lighted, but with the same greenish cast as the atmosphere that had formed the curtain between wherever this was and the Waking World. The yew sprite released his hand, but she moved slightly closer to him.

  He leaned forward to look past her and said, “Pandareus?”

  “Yes, I’m quite all right,” said Pandareus. “But I’m interested in the ground cover. Have you noticed it?”

  Only to the extent of making sure that we’re not stepping off a precipice, Corylus thought, but he didn’t expect the scholar to be concerned with the possibilities that Ethiopes—or Germans; there was no end of potential enemies—would momentarily charge over the horizon.

  “No, master,” Corylus said. “It looks like mushrooms, but I don’t think they’re dangerous. Unless we eat them, perhaps.”

  “Fascinating,” Pandareus said, his eyes on the ground. “I almost hate to step on them, they’re so lovely.”

  The mushrooms covered the ground for as far as Corylus could see. The only difference when he looked back was that their three sets of footprints—paired trails rather than prints because their toes had dragged through the fragile growth—started in the middle of the plain.

  Their colors differed, mostly in the form of soft pastels but with occasional vivid splotches of red. Corylus instinctively avoided those last. Some varieties of fungus clumped together or formed streaks across the multi-colored background, occasionally forming patterns that seemed to have meaning.

  Corylus wasn’t in a mood to consider beauty. Something was a threat or it wasn’t; and at present, nothing seemed to be a threat.

  “The footing’s all right,” he said. The mushrooms gave only the slightest resistance to his heavy sandals, pulping as he touched them but sometimes coating his foot with dust or slime as he tramped on. It was like walking across thin mud on top of ground that was still frozen beneath.

  Corylus was irritated that Pandareus was behaving like a scholar, not a fellow soldier on a dangerous reconnaissance. He chuckled at the realization. He would have gripped his teacher’s hand in friendship if the dryad hadn’t been between them.

  “Corylus?” Pandareus said, responding to the laughter.

  “You remind me that there are things beyond the present, teacher,” Corylus said formally. “And that if life has any meaning, those things are the only ones that are important.”

  “We could have walked within the forest,” said Taxus, glancing toward Pandareus. “You would not have damaged the mushrooms then, nor damaged the ones who live within the mushrooms. But—”

  She looked now at Corylus; her fingertips caressed his sword scabbard.

  “—they might have damaged you, some of them. And besides, you are a short-lived race and might not have lived long enough to reach the garden.”

  “I doubt that the color patterns would be as attractive at that scale,” said Pandareus. “Although if I was forced to make them my life’s work, I’m sure I would find a great deal of interest in them. I’m a philosopher, after all.”

  Corylus laughed outright. The most amusing aspect of his teacher’s statement was that though he said it in a tone of dry humor, it was literally true, every word. And Pandareus knew it was.

  “There,” Taxus said, gesturing ahead of them with her right hand. “The garden of Vergil.”

  “The poet Vergil?” said Pandareus, his voice unnaturally flat.

  “He may have been a poet,” the dryad said. “He was a magician, surely.”

  She looked at Corylus and added, “I’m not good at human names, you know, Cousin. But he marked this garden as his own, and no one forgets that.”

  Corylus supposed that he shouldn’t have been so surprised. Lucinus had spoken of his uncle Vergil’s magic, after all. It remained a shock to learn that the man who wrote, “I sing of arms, and the man who first driven by fate fled the shores of Troy to Italy,” used that same skill with words to twist the Waking World to his wish and to build a garden here in the Otherworld.

  The garden ahead was extensive, though Corylus couldn’t tell how far back it stretched because the terrain was dead flat. The rows of olive trees might reach into the infinite distance from all he could tell.

  He glanced at Pandareus and said, “The ground is unnaturally flat.” They both grinned at the joke.

  “I’ll leave you here,” said Taxus. “You’ll have to make your own way through the wall … though I don’t think that you’ll find that difficult.”

  She smiled knowingly. “You won’t, at least, Cousin.”

  “I don’t see the wall,” said Pandareus. “Ah. But I’m not a magician, so I shouldn’t expect to see a barrier built by a magician.”

  “Thank you, mistress,” Corylus said, bowing to the dryad.

  She stepped back but eyed him with speculation. “May your roots always find water, Cousin,” she said. “And perhaps we will meet another time.”

  Instead of walking away, she vanished. There were now onl
y two tracks across the colored fungus, those of the humans; the dryad might have been a dream. Corylus and his teacher stood at the edge of the garden.

  The cultivated ground stood out from the mushroom forest as sharply as a volcanic vent raising its cone in a pasture. There was a row of olive trees on the outside edge and individual olives were scattered deeper within the garden to shield and support grapevines. Corylus could see flowers and vegetables in furrows beyond—

  And workers as well, all of whom were automatons. Some hoed and pruned, and two were gathering ripe olives into the handbarrow in which they would transport the olives to an unseen press.

  “They don’t appear to see us,” Pandareus said.

  “Be thankful you don’t look like a cabbage worm, then,” said Corylus. “My concern is the form the barrier takes.”

  He reached out with his left hand. He thought of using the toe of his sandal, just in case the barrier was a sudden sheet of flame, but he decided that would be cowardly. Nonetheless, it was with his extended little finger that he probed—nothing, but a nothing as solid as polished granite. Only air protected Vergil’s garden, but that air was impenetrable.

  “Well, that could have been worse,” Corylus said, feeling a rush of relief. “Mind you, it doesn’t get us any closer to entry.”

  One, then a full dozen olive nymphs appeared and walked to where Corylus and his teacher stood outside the wall. The nymphs looked mature—certainly not in their first youth—but were radiant with health.

  The first to step from her tree stood arms akimbo, smiling at Corylus; her sisters stood just behind and to the sides. They wore gray-green tunics so thin that they were transparent except when they caught the light.

  The first dryad said, “We’ve waited a long time for visitors, but you’re worth waiting for, Cousin.”

  “The other one’s cute too,” another said with the back of her hand across her mouth to hide her lips’ moving. She and the nymphs closest to her giggled.

  “Mistress,” Corylus said, “we’ve come to find a way to rescue our comrade, who was stolen away by a magician. Your cousin who guided us here—”