Dama crowed, trying to imagine Vettius too dignified for a fight.
“That’s the sort he is,” the soldier agreed with a rueful smile. “He expects me to keep my cut-throats in line without dirtying my boots. A popular attitude this side of the river, it seems.”
Knuckles slammed on the steam-room door. Both men looked up sharply.
“Sirs, quickly!” the attendant hissed from outside.
Dama threw the door open for the frightened attendant. “Sirs,” the slave explained, “the Count has come for the legate Vettius. I misdirected him, thinking you might want to prepare, but he’ll be here any moment.”
“I’ll put on a tunic and meet him in the changing room,” the soldier decided. “I’ve no desire to be arrested in the nude.”
The frightened changing room attendants had disappeared into the far reaches of the building, leaving the friends to pull on their linen tunics undisturbed. Celsus burst in on them without ceremony, followed by two of his runners. He’s not here to charge me after all, Vettius thought, not without at least a squad of troops. Though Mithra knew, his wishes would have supported a treason indictment.
“Where have you been?” the official stormed. His round face was almost the color of his toga’s broad maroon hem.
“Right here in the bath, your excellency,” Vettius replied without deference.
“Word just came by heliograph,” the count sputtered. “There were ten attacks last night, ten! Impregnable monsters leading them—Punicum, Novae, Frasuli, Anarti—posts wiped out!”
“I told you there were other attacks planned,” the soldier replied calmly. “None of them were in my sector. I told you why that was too.”
“But you lied when you said you killed a monster, didn’t you?” accused Celsus, stamping his foot. “At Novae they hit one with a catapult and the bolt only bounced off!”
“Then they didn’t hit him squarely,” Vettius retorted. “The armor isn’t that heavy. And I told you, I shot mine through the viewslit in his helmet.”
The count motioned his runners away. Noticing Dama for the first time he screamed, “Get out! Get out!”
The merchant bowed and exited behind the runners. He stood near the door.
“Listen,” Celsus whispered, plucking at the soldier’s sleeve to bring his ear lower, “you’ve got to do something about the giants. It’ll look bad if these raids continue.”
“Fine,” Vettius said in surprise. “Give me my regiment and the Fifth Macedonian, and some cavalry—say the Old Germans. I’ll level Torgu and everyone in it.”
“Oh no,” his pudgy superior gasped, “not so much. The Emperor will hear about it and the gods know what he’ll think. Oh, no—fifty men, that was enough before.”
“Are you—” Vettius began, then rephrased his thought. “This isn’t an ambush for one family, your excellency. This is disposing of a powerful chief and maybe a thousand of his followers, a hundred miles into Sarmatia. I might as well go alone as with fifty men.”
“Fifty men,” Celsus repeated. Then, beaming as if he were making a promise, he added, “You’ll manage, I’m sure.”
The two riders were within a few miles of Torgu before they were noticed.
“I shouldn’t have let you come,” Vettius grumbled to his companion. “Either I should have gone myself or else marched my regiment in and told Celsus to bugger himself.”
Dama smiled. “You don’t have any curiosity, Lucius. You only see the job to be done. Myself, I want to know where a nine-foot giant comes from.”
They eyed the sprawling herd of black cattle which were finding some unimaginable pasturage beneath the snow crust. Perhaps they were stripping bark from the brush that scarred the landscape with its black rigidity. A cow scented the unfamiliar horses approaching it. The animal blatted and scrambled to its feet, splashing dung behind it. When it had bustled twenty feet away, the cow regained enough composure to turn and stare at the riders, focusing the ripple of disturbance that moved sluggishly through other bovine minds. Face after drooling, vacant face rotated toward them; after long moments, even the distant herdsman looked up from where he huddled over his fire in the lee of a hill.
Dama’s chest grew tight. There was still another moment’s silence while the Sarmatian made up his mind that there really were Romans riding toward Torgu through his herd. When at last he grasped that fact, he leaped to his feet yipping his amazement. For an instant he crouched bowlegged, waiting for a hostile move. When the intruders ignored him, the Sarmatian scampered to his horse and lashed it into a startled gallop for home.
The merchant chewed at his cheeks, trying to work saliva into a mouth that had gone dry when he realized they would be noticed. He’d known they were going to meet Sarmatians: that was the whole purpose of what they were doing. But now it was too late to back out. “About time we got an escort,” he said with false bravado. “I’m surprised the Sarmatians don’t patrol more carefully.”
“Why should they?” Vettius snorted. “They know they’re safe over here so long as a brainless scut like Celsus is in charge of the border.”
They jogged beyond the last of the cattle. Without the Sarmatian’s presence the beasts were slowly drifting away from the trampled area where they had been herded. If they wandered far they would be loose at night when the wolves hunted.
“Cows,” Vettius muttered. “It’s getting hard to find men, my friend.”
Half a mile away on the top of the next rolling hill an armored horseman reined up in a spatter of snow. He turned his head and gave a series of short yelps that carried over the plain like bugle calls. Moments later a full score of lancers topped the brow of the hill and pounded down toward the interlopers.
“I think we’ll wait here,” the soldier remarked.
“Sure, give them a sitting target,” Dama agreed with a tense smile.
Seconds short of slaughter, the leading Sarmatian raised his lance. The rest of the troop followed his signal. The whole group swept around Vettius and Dama to halt in neighing, skidding chaos. One horse lost its footing and spilled its rider on the snow with a clatter of weapons. Cursing, the disgruntled Sarmatian lurched toward the Romans with his short, crooked sword out. From behind Dama, the leader barked a denial and laid his lance in front of the man. The merchant breathed deeply but did not relax his grip on the queerly shaped crossbow resting on his saddle until the glowering Sarmatian had remounted.
The leader rode alongside Vettius and looked up at the soldier on his taller horse. “You come with us to Torgu,” he ordered in passable Greek.
“That’s right,” Vettius agreed in Sarmatian. “We’re going to Torgu to see Hydaspes.”
There was a murmur from the Sarmatians. One of them leaned forward to shake an amulet bag in the soldier’s face, gabbling something too swiftly to be understood.
The leader had frowned when Vettius spoke. He snapped another order and kicked his horse forward. Romans and Sarmatians together jogged up the hill, toward the offal and frozen muck of Torgu.
On the bank of a nameless, icebound stream stood the village’s central hall and only real building. Dama glanced at it as they rode past. Its roughly squared logs were gray and streaked with odd splits along the twisted grain. Any caulking there might have been in the seams had fallen out over the years. The sides rose to a flaring roof of scummed thatch, open under the eaves to emit smoke and the stink of packed bodies. The hall would have seemed crude in the most stagnant backwaters of the Empire; the merchant could scarcely believe that a people to whom it was the height of civilization could be a threat.
Around the timber structure sprawled the nomad wagons in filthy confusion. Their sloping canopies were shingled with cow droppings set out to dry in the wan sunlight before being burned for fuel. The light soot that had settled out of thousands of cooking fires permeated the camp with an unclean, sweetish odor. Nothing in the village but the un-tethered horses watching the patrol return looked cared for.
Long lances had
been butted into the ground beside each wagon. As he stared back at the flat gazes directed at him by idle Sarmatians, Dama realized what was wrong with the scene. Normally, only a handful of each family group would have been armored lancers. The rest would be horse archers, able to afford only a bow and padded linen protection. Most of their escort hung cased bows from their saddles, but all bore the lance and most wore scale mail.
“Lucius,” the merchant whispered in Latin, “are all of these nobles?”
“You noticed that,” Vettius replied approvingly. “No, you can see from their looks that almost all of them were just herdsmen recently. Somebody made them his retainers, paid for their equipment and their keep.”
“Hydaspes?” the merchant queried.
“I guess. He must have more personal retainers than the king, then.”
“You will be silent!” ordered the Sarmatian leader.
They had ridden almost completely through the camp and were approaching a tent of gaily pennoned furs on the edge of the plains. At each corner squatted an octagonal stump of basalt a few feet high. The stones were unmarked and of uncertain significance, altars or boundary markers or both. No wains had been parked within fifty paces of the tent. A pair of guards stood before its entrance. Dama glanced at the streamers and said, “You know, there really is a market for silk in this forsaken country. A shame that—”
“Silence!” the Sarmatian repeated as he drew up in front of the tent. He threw a rapid greeting to the guards, one of whom bowed and ducked inside. He returned quickly, followed by a tall man in a robe of fine black Spanish wool. The newcomer’s face was thin for a Sarmatian and bore a smile that mixed triumph and something else. On his shoulder, covered by the dark hood, clung a tiny monkey with great brown eyes. From time to time it put its mouth to its master’s ear and murmured secretly.
“Hydaspes,” Vettius whispered. “He always wears black.”
“Have they been disarmed?” the wizard questioned. The escort’s leader flushed in embarrassment at his oversight and angrily demanded the Romans’ weapons. Vettius said nothing as he handed over his bow and the long cavalry sword he carried even now that he commanded an infantry unit. The merchant added his crossbow and a handful of bolts to the collection.
“What is that?” Hydaspes asked, motioning his man to hand him the crossbow.
“It comes from the east where I get my silk,” Dama explained, speaking directly to the wizard. “You just drop a bolt into the tall slot on top. That holds it while you pull back on the handle, cocking and firing it all in one motion.”
“From the east? I get weapons from the east,” the Sarmatian said with a nasty quirk of his lip. “But this, this is only a toy surely? The arrow is so light and scarcely a handspan long. What could a man do with such a thing?”
Dama shrugged. “I’m not a warrior. For my own part, I wouldn’t care to be shot with this or anything else.”
The wizard gestured an end to the conversation, setting the weapon inside his tent for later perusal. “Dismount, gentlemen, dismount,” he continued in excellent Greek. “Perhaps you have heard of me?”
“Hydaspes the wizard. Yes,” Vettius lied, “even within the Empire we think of you when we think of a powerful sorcerer. That’s why we’ve come for help.”
“In whose name?” the Sarmatian demanded shrewdly. “Constantius the emperor?”
“Celsus, Count of Dacia,” Vettius snapped back. “The Empire has suffered the bloody absurdities of Constantius and his brothers long enough. Eunuchs run the army, priests rule the state, and the people pray to the tax gatherers. We’ll have support when we get started, but first we need some standard to rally to, something to convince everyone that we have more than mere hopes behind us. We want your giants, and we’ll pay you a part of the Empire to get them.”
“And you, little man?” Hydaspes asked the merchant unexpectedly.
Dama had been imagining the count’s face if he learned his name was being linked with raw treason, but he recovered swiftly and fumbled at his sash while replying, “We merchants have little cause to love Constantius. The roads are ruinous, the coinage base; and the rapacity of local officials leaves little profit for even the most daring adventurer.”
“So you came to add your promise of future gain?”
“Future? Who knows the future?” Dama grunted. Gold gleamed in his hand. A shower of coins arced unerringly from his right palm to his left and back again. “If you can supply what we need, you’ll not lament your present payment.”
“Ho! Such confidence,” the wizard said, laughing cheerfully. The monkey chittered, stroking its master’s hair with bulbous fingertips. “You really believe that I can raise giants from the past?
“I can!”
Hydaspes’ face became a mask of unreason. Dama shifted nervously from one foot to the other, realizing that the wizard was far from the clever illusionist they had assumed back at Naisso he must be. This man wasn’t sane enough to successfully impose on so many people, even ignorant barbarians. Or was the madness a recent thing?
“Subradas, gather the village behind my tent,” Hydaspes ordered abruptly, “but leave space in the middle as wide and long as the tent itself.”
The leader of the escort dipped his lance in acknowledgement. “The women, Lord?”
“All—women, slaves, everyone. I’m going to show you how I raise the giants.”
“Ho!” gasped the listening Sarmatians. The leader saluted again and rode off shouting. Hydaspes turned to reenter his tent, then paused. “Take the Romans, too,” he directed the guards. “Put them by the flap and watch them well.
“Yes,” he continued, glancing back at Vettius, “it is a very easy thing to raise giants, if you have the equipment and the knowledge. Like drawing a bow for a man like you.”
The Hell-lit afterimage of the wizard’s eyes continued to blaze in the soldier’s mind when the furs had closed behind the black figure.
As the rest of the Sarmatians dismounted and began to jostle them around the long tent, Dama whispered, “This isn’t working. If it gets too tight, break for the tent. You know about my bow?”
Vettius nodded, but his mind was chilled by a foretaste of death.
As the prisoner had said, eleven long trenches bristled outward from the wall of Hydaspes’ tent. Each was shallow but too extensive for the wizard to have dug it in the frozen ground in one night. Dama disliked the way the surface slumped over the ditches, as if enormous corpses had clawed their way out of their graves…
Which was what the wizard seemed to claim had happened.
The guards positioned the two Romans at the center of the back wall of the tent where laces indicated another entrance. Later comers crowded about anxiously, held back in a rough circle by officers with drawn swords. Twenty feet to either side of the Romans stretched the straight walls of the tent paralleled by a single row of warriors. From the basalt posts at either corner curved the rest of the tribe in milling excitement, warriors in front and women and children squirming as close as they could get before being elbowed back.
The Sarmatians were still pushing for position when Hydaspes entered the cleared space, grinning ironically at Vettius and Dama as he stepped between them. A guard laced the tent back up. In the wizard’s left hand was a stoppered copper flask; his right gripped a small packet of supple cowhide.
“The life!” Hydaspes shouted to the goggle-eyed throng, waving the flask above his head from the center of the circle. He set the vessel down on the dirt and carefully unrolled the leather wrappings from the other objects.
“And the seed!” the wizard cried at last. In his palm lay a pair of teeth. They were a dull, stony gray without any of the sheen of ivory. One was a molar, human but inhumanly large. The other tooth, even less credible, seemed to be a canine fully four inches long. With one tooth in either hand, Hydaspes goatfooted about the flask in an impromptu dance of triumph.
His monkey rider clacked its teeth in glee.
The
wizard stopped abruptly and faced the Romans. “Oh, yes. The seed. I got them, all thirteen teeth, from the Chinese—the people who sell you your silk, merchant. Dragons’ teeth they call them—hee hee! And I plant them just like Cadmus did when he built Thebes. But I’m the greater prince, oh yes, for I’ll build an empire where he built a city.”
Dama licked his lips. “We’ll help you build your empire,” he began, but the wizard ignored him and spoke only to Vettius.
“You want my giants, Roman, my darlings? Watch!”
Hydaspes plucked a small dagger from his sash and poked a hole in the ground. Like a farmer planting a nut, the wizard popped the molar into the hole and patted the earth back down. When he straightened he shouted a few words at the sky. The villagers gasped, but Dama doubted whether they understood any more of the invocation than he did. Perhaps less—the merchant thought he recognized the language, at least, one he had heard chanted on the shores of the Persian Gulf on a dead, starless night. He shuddered.
Now the wizard was unstoppering his flask and crooning under his breath. His cowl had fallen back to display the monkey clinging fiercely to his long oily hair. When the wizard turned, Dama could see the beast’s lips miming its master obscenely.
Droplets spattered from the flask, bloody red and glowing. The merchant guessed wine or blood, changed his mind when the fluid popped and sizzled on the ground. The frozen dirt trembled like a stricken gong.
The monkey leaped from Hydaspes’ shoulder, strangely unaffected by the cold. It faced the wizard across the patch of fluid-scarred ground. It was chanting terrible squeaky words that thundered back from Hydaspes.
The ground split.
The monkey collapsed. Hydaspes leaped over the earth’s sudden gape and scooped up the little creature, wrapping it in his cloak.
Through the crack in the soil thrust an enormous hand. Earth heaved upward again. The giant’s whole torso appeared, dribbling dirt back into the trench. Vettius recognized the same thrusting jaw, the same high flat eyesockets, as those of the giant he had killed.
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