Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth

by David Drake

  “He means the yew,” a dryad whispered hoarsely.

  “Such prickly things,” another said/agreed. “I can’t imagine why anybody would keep company with a yew.”

  “—said that there’s a passage in your garden by which we can follow her,” Corylus said, keeping his eyes on the leading dryad. He had to hope that she at least would stay focused for long enough to help him. “But now that we’re here, we can’t enter the garden.”

  He patted the invisible wall with the flat of his hand.

  The dryad laughed and took him by the wrist. “Of course you can come in,” she said, drawing him firmly toward her as though the barrier did not exist—which it didn’t, so long as she was holding him. “We’re glad to have you visit.”

  “Here, you come too,” said another olive nymph. She reached through the barrier, if it really was a barrier to the sprites. Their feet didn’t pass beyond the point that his finger reached in the other direction, though. Before her hand touched Pandareus, three of her fellows also snatched at the scholar’s tunic and left arm.

  “Mistresses!” Pandareus said as he fell off-balance into the garden. “I’m quite willing to enter. You don’t have to pull.”

  Corylus smiled as he stepped through. He’d expected the dryad to move back and give him room, however. Instead her arms wrapped about him and she kissed him hard.

  Corylus lifted the dryad off the ground, returning her kiss, then set her down at arm’s length when her hug slackened. He continued to hold her at a distance. “Thank you for your courtesy, Cousin,” he said, “but our friend may be in great danger. Can you guide us to the passage which leads us to where the magician has taken her?”

  Corylus didn’t know where Alphena was, let alone what sort of route would take him to her. This was as bad as wandering in darkness through the Hercynian Forest, hoping to find a soldier who’d gone missing.

  Corylus grinned. There might well be worse things lying in ambush here than there were across the Rhine—but at least for the moment the olive nymphs didn’t pose a life-threatening danger.

  Pandareus was in the garden also, almost hidden by the clot of giggling dryads around him. “Please, mistresses!” he said in as agitated a voice as Corylus had ever heard him use. “I’m not a eunuch, but I don’t find this in the least congenial. For one thing, there are far too many people—”

  Corylus thought he heard a minute hesitation as the teacher chose the word.

  “—around for me to be in the least titillated by your behavior.”

  “Such an old silly!” said a nymph. She winked at Corylus. “That’s half the fun!”

  “Please, Cousin,” Corylus said, his eyes on the dryad whom he held. Though other nymphs hovered close, he wasn’t being mobbed the way his teacher was; perhaps his nymph had authority of some sort over her sisters.

  She made a disappointed moue, then backed out of his grip. “Not this time, girls,” she said. “I’ll take them to the master’s bridge. Perhaps we’ll be luckier when they return.”

  “I think they’d be luckier too,” said one of the sprites stepping away from Pandareus with a look of disappointment.

  Pandareus straightened his tunic. “Thank you, mistresses,” he said. “I truly appreciate your enthusiasm, but I fear that I’m too staid to match it.”

  The dryad Oliva took Corylus by the hand and walked through the garden. Pandareus quickly fell into step on his other side, and the whole grove of olive nymphs followed in a chattering group.

  The automatons tending the plants were made of untarnished silvery metal. Close up their limbs and torsos appeared slender, but they weren’t as skeletal as they’d seemed when Corylus first saw them. Highlights from their highly polished surfaces hid their lines.

  “Ah!” said Pandareus as they passed an automaton trimming a rosebush with a large pair of secateurs. “That’s interesting.”

  Corylus raised an eyebrow toward his friend. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual.

  “The gardener slowed the rate at which it was circling the bush with its shears,” Pandareus explained. “Now that we’re past, you’ll notice—”

  He glanced over his shoulder.

  “—that it is pruning more quickly again. If it had continued at the same rate, I would have collided with it. Therefore, it is aware of our presence.”

  “Does that matter?” Oliva said with a puzzled frown.

  Pandareus chuckled. “No more than any other information does, mistress,” he said. “And while there are other opinions on the matter, my philosophy has always been that nothing matters in the greater scheme of things.”

  Flowers and vegetables didn’t appear to have a fixed growing season here. Spring-flowering plants bloomed in the shade of trees that were already dropping nuts that should not have ripened until fall.

  They passed a beehive-shaped kiln. Two automatons were shoveling fuel into the furnace underneath it. As Corylus and his companions passed, another pair arrived with a handbarrow of waste to burn: dried clippings and the bitter sludge of skins and pits after the final olive pressing. Faint blue-gray smoke rose through a roof vent.

  “What are you firing, Cousin?” Corylus asked. It was a scene that might have occurred on any estate in the Republic, except that it was being performed by slender, silvery laborers.

  “Jugs for the wine and oil,” Oliva said. Pensively she added, “They’ll need to build another shed soon.”

  “What do you do with the produce, mistress?” Pandareus asked. “That is, what does the owner do with it?”

  “The servants store it in sheds,” the dryad said. “I don’t think anything happens to it after that, but I don’t pay much attention.”

  She frowned and added, “When I was young, I think our master took the oil away, but I didn’t pay much attention then, either. Why should I? And anyway, our master hasn’t been back in…”

  She made a circle in the air with her left hand as she concentrated.

  “Time,” she said to conclude her statement. For an olive nymph, that was a respectable intellectual achievement.

  They reached an open-fronted shed with a sloping roof. Inside were four rows of ordinary terra-cotta transport jars, amphorae. Their narrow bases could have been dug into sand to stand upright, but here they were just tilted back against the previous row and ultimately the back wall.

  There were about two hundred jars in this shed. Behind it was another shed—and so on, for farther back than Corylus could see. Presumably the file came to an end somewhere, since Oliva had talked of building more.

  “There,” she said, pointing to a marble structure similar to the base of an altar. Instead of a platform for sacrifice and the altar itself, it framed a corridor sloping down into the earth. Similar tunnels—cryptoporticos—were common features of extensive gardens.

  Corylus mounted the six steps of the base and crouched to look down the corridor without entering it. There was light—daylight, apparently—at the end, only twenty feet away.

  He rose to see if there was a window or opening of some sort in the ground to explain the light. He couldn’t see anything.

  “This is our master’s bridge of air,” the dryad said. “This is the way he entered his garden.”

  She frowned and said, “I don’t think he ever came from outside the way you did.”

  Pandareus squatted to look down the tunnel himself. “There’s a wall niche near the end,” he said. “I think there’s a statue in it, but—”

  He leaned to the side, supporting himself with his hand.

  “—I can’t be sure without going closer.”

  Corylus pursed his lips. The walls of this garden proved that air could be solid, but he would have preferred some other material for a bridge he was going to walk on. Though it couldn’t really be worse than some of the rain-slicked tree trunks on which he’d crossed gullies on the frontiers.

  “What is at the other end of the bridge, Cousin?” he asked, more to give himself time before he made wh
at he already knew was the inevitable decision. They couldn’t stay here in the garden, after all.

  The dryad ran a hand gently down his spine. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing as nice as you’d find here, I’m sure. You can stay, you know.”

  The—negative—echo of his thought made Corylus smile. “I’m sorry, Cousin,” he said, “but we can’t stay and still do our duty. Master?”

  Pandareus rose carefully to his feet and nodded.

  “Then let’s go,” Corylus said, striding down the sloping corridor. The stone of the passage was polished gneiss glittering with mica and bits of quartz. Wet, it would have been dangerously slick.

  Something moved in the wall niche ahead. A bronze automaton eight feet tall stepped out to confront them. It held a curved sword in each of its four arms.

  “I am Talos!” it thundered. Its swords danced before it in an impossibly intricate pattern. The blades never touched one another, but Corylus doubted a finger’s breadth of the area before Talos would have escaped their keen edges.

  “I will kill any who attempt to pass me,” the automaton said, “saving Vergil, my master!”

  Talos stepped forward.

  Corylus had drawn his long sword, but he had seen too many battles to doubt how he would fare against the automaton. “Run, teacher!” he shouted. As soon as Pandareus was clear, Corylus sprang out of the tunnel himself.

  He waited to see if Talos would follow; the ramp’s slope gave the man at the top some advantage, though a slight one. Instead the automaton returned to the niche in which it had waited. Its bronze feet clashed against the stone, and its throat gurgled with laughter.

  * * *

  ALPHENA KNEW THAT SHE WAS DREAMING, but she couldn’t wake up. She had no body; at least she wasn’t aware of her body as she watched a giraffe drink from a clear, shallow stream while another kept watch. The one drinking had spread her forelegs to twice the width of their hind legs, reducing the distance that her neck had to slant down to the water.

  Across the creek, the Daughters of the Mind were dancing. Whose mind? All Alphena knew about them came from the Child, and she wasn’t sure she should believe anything he said. Though there didn’t seem to be any reason he should lie about the three figures who circled the glowing Egg.

  If the dreaming Alphena had had a face, her lips would have smiled. Perhaps the Mind is a rhetorical device like the ones that my brother and Master Pandareus get so worked up about.

  The female giraffe raised her neck; the male that had been watching kicked his forelegs sideways and bent to drink in turn. Suddenly both the giraffes straightened and turned, bolting back through the forest. They didn’t call out, but their hooves slammed the sod like mauls, spurning back huge clods.

  A cloud of scarlet butterflies rose into the air. Alphena hadn’t noticed them until now.

  A lens of air blurred. Through it walked Paris, the Etruscan priest she had followed into the tomb. He was chanting.

  Paris stepped to the side, making room for the first of what became a long line of horse-headed giants like the one Alphena had killed. They spread to either side as they advanced toward the Daughters, their weapons ready.

  The young women didn’t take obvious notice of their danger, but the pace of their dance quickened. The Egg brightened and dimmed as it spun, never remaining a single color long enough for Alphena to identify it.

  Alphena had believed that the Egg was within the circle of the dancers. From her present vantage point, she was no longer sure. Though the Daughters were clearly dancing around the Egg, it appeared to be infinitely far away.

  It faded and they faded, vanishing from the plain. Grass and the dust from which it grew were disturbed where the Daughters had danced.

  The Horseheads stopped where they were and trudged back to the portal from which they had emerged, lowering their weapons. One by one they passed through the portal. Paris followed them, and the portal closed.

  Alphena’s dream changed to a steep slope above a vividly blue lake. Lobelias and cabbage-topped trees with shaggy trunks surrounded her.

  The Daughters were dancing across the lake on a bare, fairly level patch on a slope similar to that of the dream Alphena’s vantage point.

  She wondered if this was a volcanic vent, because the only similar terrain of her waking existence had been a cleft in the side of Vesuvius. That had been raw and steaming, the very rocks flayed by sulfur fumes oozing from cracks in the sides. The vegetation here was strange but thick, so any eruptions must have been in the far past.

  As the dancers circled, there was sudden commotion in the nearby forest. A trio of giant apes with shaggy fur shouldered their way through the vegetation, occasionally glancing over their shoulders and hooting.

  Moments later, a portal opened in the air not far from the Daughters. Paris emerged, then the Horseheads just as before. They tramped down the slope, moving as deliberately as the surface permitted.

  Alphena was reminded of dogs hunting in the arena. Instead of springing violently toward their prey like cats, canines paced around the enclosure in a seemingly leisurely fashion. Eventually even the swiftest antelopes would begin to stumble and the pack would close in.

  The Daughters merged into another place, as before; again the hunters returned to the portal from which they had emerged. Alphena knew she was dreaming, but it seemed to her that the Horseheads had come nearer to their prey this time.

  The hunt continued, scene after scene. The landscapes were all different and all unfamiliar, but occasionally Alphena recognized an animal from the arena.

  Once she saw a herd of elephants. They were giants like the one from deep in Libya that Veturius had brought back along with the lizard-monkeys, the Singiri. These were placid in the presence of the Daughters, but when the portal formed, the herd fled through a belt of bamboo, splintering the tough grass that Alphena would have expected to stop even such great beasts.

  How long…? Alphena wondered, weighed down even in her dream by the number of images.

  And then she was watching from the village where the Horsehead had attacked her, but while it was still a bustling community. The Daughters danced in the plaza in front of the ugly black idol. Villagers looked on with wonder and delight, but they were no more frightened by what they saw than the wild animals of previous scenes had been.

  From the air, between the circle of dancers and the outer circle of spectators, appeared a pair of Singiri. Instead of being naked except for chain collars like those in the animal compound, these wore vests from which tools and weapons hung. Each held a small, round shield of dark bronze in his left hand and brandished a curved sword of the same material in his left.

  The spectators’ skins were much darker than those of the Daughters, and they were taller as well, as tall as Germans. The Singiri shouted to them in a language that the Nubians understood but Alphena did not. The village males ran into the huts for weapons; the women snatched up children, gathering their offspring around them.

  The village was surrounded by a wall of poles woven into a fabric that would have stopped a herd of bulls, but the gates suddenly burst open. Horseheads burst in, a larger number than Alphena had seen before. They were six wide in the gateway and more came through for as long as the vision lasted.

  The only reason there was a battle at all was the stand the two Singiri made, slowing the onslaught for long enough that many of the villagers could arm themselves. Even so it was a massacre for all but the first minute or so.

  The Daughters and their Egg melted away, but it had been very close for them this time. If the Singiri hadn’t been present …

  Instead of leaving as soon as the dancers escaped, the Horseheads took time to kill every animal in the village. A few women threw their offspring over the walls, which had become a trap rather than protection.

  Almost at once the little corpses were flung back inside, impaled on stone spears. The village had been completely surrounded before the attack began.

  When
everything was dead, the attackers shambled back toward the Etruscan priest and the portal. The last thing they did was place the crudely hacked-off heads of the Singiri in front of the idol where the skulls of men and crocodiles already rested.

  “Well, have you had a long enough nap?” rasped an unpleasant voice in Alphena’s dream. She opened her eyes.

  She was staring at the wooden idol that she had used as a shield. “Who spoke?” she said, sitting up. Her head throbbed.

  The idol licked fresh blood from its face with its iron tongue. It grinned at her.

  “I did, Alphena,” it said. “Who did you expect?”

  * * *

  VARUS LOOKED OVER THE BOW of the boat, then off to either side. Looking back would mean seeing Lucinus, whose face was as dead as the Egyptian mummy that Saxa had once bought for his collection.

  That specimen had quickly begun to rot in the humid atmosphere of Carce. Saxa’s fastidiousness had overcome his collecting instinct and the mummy had gone onto a pyre like many less august personages, but Varus had first unwrapped it out of scholarly curiosity.

  The mummy had been interesting to Varus’ intellectual side, but it was disgusting to him as a human being. Thinking of that centuries-old corpse in parallel with the magician on whom his life depended verged on being frightening.

  Varus grinned. He couldn’t avoid weaknesses; but so long as he could smile at them, they were under control.

  On previous days, the boat had regularly passed close to islands that provided subjects about which Varus could speculate. This blank, blue sea had nothing for his mind to fasten on, though there were specks in the heavens that might have been interesting if they had been close enough for him to see details.

  Given that the specks were extremely high, well above the occasional cloud, they must each be bigger than the boat. Varus decided he would rather be bored than learn just how interesting a flying creature of that size could be on really close acquaintance.

  He looked into the sea again. The water was so clear that sometimes Varus thought he saw ripples on the sea bottom. Once, far to the left side, he saw a cloud of fine sand settling back over a stretch at least a furlong across, though he couldn’t tell what had caused the disturbance.