Out of the Waters-ARC

by David Drake

  There was something ahead: at first just a texture on the sidewalls. Then, as Varus proceeded with the lantern, he saw that the walls had been cut back at knee height to make shelves. On them were terracotta urns, similar to ordinary wine jars. Instead of ordinary stoppers, these jars were closed with the stylized heads of birds with long curved beaks.

  One of the jars had fallen and shattered some distance down the long corridor. Varus paused and knelt to bring the lantern closer: there would be nothing at the other end of this passage that wouldn't wait for him to arrive. Given that it might be his goal might be death, he wasn't going to have the regret that he'd hastened past his last opportunity for learning.

  He smiled, but he meant it. Pandareus would understand; and perhaps Corylus would as well.

  The jar had enclosed the corpse of a bird. It had been mummified--the smell of natron and cedar resin was noticeable even after what might have been ages--but the skull was bare beneath rotted linen wrappings.

  It had been an ibis. There were thousands or tens of thousands of ibises in this necropolis.

  Varus rose to his feet and walked on. He had to restrain himself from counting paces under his breath. He wasn't sure that he was really moving physically anyway. It would be unworthy of a philosopher to carry out a meaningless ritual to trick his mind into the belief that he was imposing control over his immediate surroundings.

  I think I see light. But Varus knew that he could see flashes even when his eyes were closed; and he had to admit that his present state of mind wasn't wholly that of a dispassionate philosopher.

  He wondered if Socrates had really been that calm when he prepared to drink the poison. Plato had not been a disinterested witness, now that Varus thought about it; given that Plato's stature as a teacher was directly dependent on the stature of the master whom he portrayed as showing godlike wisdom and fortitude.

  Varus chuckled. He would have described himself as an Epicurean; but perhaps the teachings of Diogenes the Cynic better suited his present mental state.

  "Greetings, Lord Varus," called the man standing at the end of the corridor. The pool of light surrounding him did not come from any source Varus could see. "I am Menre."

  Varus stepped to within arm's length of the stranger who wore a woolen tunic, a semicircular cloak that hung to his waist, and a low-crowned, flat-brimmed leather hat. He would have passed for an ordinary traveller anywhere in Greece or the southern portions of Italy.

  "Sir, you're Menre the Egyptian?" Varus said in puzzlement. The stranger--Menre--held a bulky papyrus scroll in his left hand.

  Menre laughed. "Sarapis is more Greek than Egyptian," he said, "and perhaps the same is true of me. Regardless, the chapel was a useful connection between you and the place I am."

  Varus found his lips dry; he licked them. He said, "Sir, I would have expected you to visit my teacher Pandareus, as you have in the past. Rather than me."

  Menre looked him up and down as though he were a slave--or a couch--he was considering buying. Smiling faintly, he said, "Pandareus is a great scholar, worthy of a place in any learned academy. But he is not a magician, so this--"

  He offered the scroll in his left hand.

  "--would be of no use to him or to the world."

  Varus took the scroll. He started to fumble with it, then set the lantern on the floor so that he had both hands free. There was as much light as there would be outside at midday in Carce, even if he couldn't tell where it was coming from.

  He unrolled a few pages of the book; Menre watched him, continuing to smile. The text was in pictographs; chapters were headed--he unrolled more of the scroll to be sure--by paintings in the Egyptian style, full frontal or full profile; gods of terrible aspect confronted humans.

  Still holding the book open, Varus met the other man's eyes. "Sir," he said, "this is written in Egyptian holy symbols. I can't read it."

  "Can you not, Magician?" Menre said. To Varus, his words were an eerie echo of those the Sybil sometimes directed at him. "Try."

  Scowling, Varus looked down at the page, as meaningless to him as bird tracks in the dust. He said, "All hail to Ra, the Sun, as he rises in the eastern quadrant of heaven!" He stopped, amazed.

  "You will need the book," Menre said, smiling more broadly. "Give my regards to your teacher, whose scholarship I respect."

  The light began to fade; Menre faded with it, as though he had been only a mirage. Just before he vanished completely, his faint voice added, "You will need more than the book, Lord Varus. Perhaps more than your world holds. Good luck to you, but I am not hopeful."

  Varus swallowed. For a moment, his surroundings seemed as dark as the tomb; then his eyes adjusted to the oil flame wavering in the lantern which sat on the ground beside him. He picked it up again. The large scroll had vanished, as though it never was.

  He and Pandareus were in the service area of the chapel. Food couldn't be prepared here, but prepared dishes would be brought in ahead of time and then served in sequence to the diners.

  "Lord Varus?" Pandareus said. "Are you all right?"

  "I--" Varus said. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his free hand. "Did I disappear, Master?"

  "No," said Pandareus, "but you stopped where you were and put the lantern down. You didn't appear to hear me when I spoke to you."

  "Ah," said Varus. "Was I, that is, was this for long?"

  "Not long," said Pandareus. "Not much longer than it took you to pick up the lantern again. Did something happen to you?"

  "We may as well go back," Varus said, turning. He felt queasy, as though he had grasped for a handhold while falling and felt his fingers slip off it. All that remained now was to hit the ground. "I thought I met Menre and that he gave me a book that he said I would need. That we would need. But I don't have it now."

  "Can you remember any of it?" Pandareus said, leading through the central room of the chapel. The light from above was enough for him to avoid the benches now that they had been underground for long enough.

  "I didn't read it," Varus said, feeling an edge of irritation. "I just glanced at the opening columns. And even if I had--"

  Suddenly, unbidden, the phrase, "Let not the Destroyer be allowed to prevail over him!" leaped into his mind. He shouted the words aloud.

  Pandareus glanced back at him and nodded in satisfaction. "It appears to me, Lord Varus," he said, "that you have what we need. What all the world needs."

  They walked up the stairs together, as they had gone down.

  ***

  "This is the place?" Corylus said. Pulto had stopped at a sunken place on the hillside, but he hadn't said anything for the long moments while his master waited politely for him to speak.

  "It's where Anna showed me this morning," Pulto agreed in a dull voice. He turned to face Corylus. They carried a lighted lantern, but there was moon enough to show their features clearly.

  "Master," Pulto said, "we shouldn't be doing this. I'm not a god-botherer, you know that, but it'd be better to lose than to win by the kind of magic that you find in graveyards. Though it was my own Anna as sent us here."

  Corylus thought about the vision of Typhon, wrecking the world it crawled across. "No, old friend," he said. "Losing would be worse, for the Earth, at any rate. For me personally--"

  He shrugged. "I don't know what it means for me personally. It doesn't matter. But Pulto? You can wait for me back where we crossed the old wall. I won't think the less of you if you're unwilling to be involved in this sort of thing."

  That wasn't really true, but Corylus knew that it should be true. He'd known a man, a centurion with scars marking every hand's-breadth of his body--he couldn't remember the tale of half of them--who had frozen in mumbling fear when a wolf spider ran up the inside of a leather tent and stopped directly over him. If magic disturbed Pulto in the same way, well, there was more reason for it.

  Pulto snorted. "I'm afraid," he said, "but I'm a soldier, so what's being afraid got to do with anything? And I've done plenty of
things this stupid before, begging your pardon, master. Only--"

  His smile was forced, but the fact he could force a smile spoke well of his courage and his spirits both.

  "--this time I'm sober. Which is maybe the trouble, but it's one I plan to solve right quick when we're done with this nonsense."

  Corylus grinned. "I'll split at least the first jar with you," he said. "Now let's get to work."

  The tombs of Carce's wealthy ranged along all the roads out of the city. The great families had huge columbaria, dovecotes; so called because the interiors were covered with lattices to hold urns of cremated ashes.

  Lesser, more recently wealthy, households had correspondingly smaller monuments. Often there was just a slab with reliefs of the man or couple and a small altar in front to receive the offerings brought by descendents.

  But the poor died also, and even a slave might have friends and family. The slope of the Aventine outside the sacred boundary of the city received their remains. Small markers, generally wooden but occasionally scratched stones, dotted the rocky soil. Badly spelled prayers or simple names which were themselves prayers for survival, lasted briefly and were replaced by later burials and later markers, just as other wretched souls had moved into the tenements that the dead had vacated earlier.

  By day this end of the Aventine was a waste of brush which feral dogs prowled and where crows and vultures croaked and grunted. Fuel for pyres was an expense which the poor skimped on, as they skimped on food and clothing during life. At night occasional humans joined the beasts, witches who searched for herbs which had gained power through the presence of death; and who sometimes gathered bones as well, to be ground and used in darker medicine.

  No one would disturb Corylus and his servant, but Pulto had brought swords for both of them among the other tools: the mattock and pry bar, ropes and basket. By concentrating on the thought of human enemies, Pulto could push the other dangers from his mind.

  "It's a well, I think," Pulto said, loosening up now that Corylus had broken the glum silence. "Under a lot of crap and full of crap, of course, but that's what I thought by daylight."

  "Right," said Corylus, thrusting the blade of his mattock between two stones gripped by vines and levering upward. "People throw things down the well when they're in a hurry to leave. We should be able to find what we're looking for and get out before the wine shops close!"

  Among the things people threw into wells were bodies, depending on who the people were. Well, they'd deal with that if they had to.

  Corylus put on his thick cowhide mittens. He didn't need them for the tools--he spent enough time wielding a sword in Saxa's exercise ground that his calluses protected him--but the loosened rocks were often jagged or wrapped in brambles. He didn't mind a few cuts and scratches, but it was easy to wear protection when throwing rubble down slope.

  He and Pulto worked together briefly, but when they had excavated the fill a few feet down, Corylus got into the shaft and filled baskets for his servant to lift and empty from the top. It was a well shaft as Pulto had guessed. The coping of volcanic tuff had mostly collapsed inward, but the remainder was cut through the hillside's soft limestone. There was no way to tell how old it was, but it was certainly old.

  Corylus lost track of everything except the task. This was monotonous but not mindless work, much like ditching or cutting turf to wall a marching camp. He had to decide each next stroke, sometimes scooping loose dirt with the blade of the mattock, sometimes using the pry bar to separate rocks that were wedged together.

  Once he found a human jaw. There wasn't room in the shaft to leave it, but he made sure it was on the bottom of the next basketful he sent up to Pulto.

  Corylus wasn't sure how long he had been working--it didn't help to think about that, since he would work until the task was finished--but his feet were by now some ten feet below the level of the coping. He bent to work more of the light fill--gravel and silt--loose with the mattock while Pulto hauled up the basket with the latest load.

  He stopped and put the mattock down. The light at this depth wouldn't have been good even without Pulto leaning over the top, so Corylus tried the seam between stones with his fingers and found what he thought his eyes had told him: a slot wide enough for passage had been cut in the living rock, then closed with a fitted stone with a stone wedge above it.

  "Pulto?" Corylus called. "Send the lantern down to me on a cord."

  Pulto only grunted in reply, but he jerked the basket up more abruptly than usual--a long task was better handled at a steady pace than by fits and starts. Moments later the lantern wobbled down, tied to the end of Pulto's sash. They could have passed it directly from hand to hand, but not without searing somebody's fingertips on the hot bronze casing.

  Corylus set the lantern at an angle on the ground so that the light through its mica windows fell on the stones inset in the smooth shaft. He set the point of his pry bar, then used it to work the wedge sideways. When it bound, he blocked the widened crack with a pebble, then shifted the pry bar to the other side and levered the wedge the other way.

  An inch of the wedge was clear of the wall. Corylus thumped it with the heel of his bare palm so that the pebble fell out, then gripped the stone with the fingertips of both hands and wriggled it back and forth while he drew it out. He hopped when it fell, but it landed between where his feet were anyway.

  "What are you doing down there, boy?" Pulto asked with a rasp in his voice. He was worried, and that made him harsh.

  "I think I've found what we're looking for," Corylus said. He didn't say that he'd found an Etruscan tomb, because he knew that the information wouldn't please Pulto.

  As Corylus hoped, the larger slab tipped forward when the wedge was removed. He walked it awkwardly to the side, trying not to crush the lantern or trip over the wedge. Holding the lantern before him, he knelt to peer into the opening.

  The chamber beyond was cut from the rock like the well shaft. It was about ten feet long but not quite that wide. Benches were built into the sidewalls. At the back, facing the entrance, was a chair that seemed to have been carved from the limestone also.

  On the chair sat a bearded man with a fierce expression. He wore a white tunic with fringes of either black or dark blue and a heavier garment of deep red over his left shoulder, leaving the right side of his chest covered only by the tunic. On a gold neck-chain was an elongated jewel clasped by gold filigree at top and bottom.

  "Master, what are you doing?" Pulto said. His voice echoed dully in the well. "Hold on! I'm coming down!"

  "Stay where you are!" Corylus said, twisting his head backward as much as the tomb door allowed him. "I'm coming right back!"

  He stepped forward, hunching; the floor was cut down so that the ceiling might have been high enough for him to stand, but he didn't want to chance a bad knock in his hurry. He set the lantern on the floor, then took the jewel in his hands and started to lift the chain over the head of the bearded man.

  The figure and his clothing vanished into a swirl of dust. A bracelet of braided gold wire clinked to the stone chair, then to the floor.

  Corylus sneezed, then squeezed his lips together. He backed quickly out of the tomb, then dropped the chain over his own head as the easiest way to carry it. I'm not going back for the lantern, he thought.

  "Pulto!" he said. "Drop me an end of the rope and snub it off. I'm coming up and we're getting out of here!"

  The rope sailed down; the basket was still attached to the handle.

  "That's the first thing you've said tonight that I agree with!" Pulto said. "By Hercules! it is."

  CHAPTER 7

  Daylight through cracks in the shutters awakened Corylus. He sat up quickly, angry with himself. Ordinarily he awakened before dawn and--

  Pain split his head straight back from the center of his forehead. He wobbled, sick and briefly unable to see colors. He whispered, "Hercules!"

  "Swear by Charon, better," said Anna as she hobbled over to him, carrying a bronze
mug that she had been heating in a bath of water. "I've never seen anyone closer to dead but still walking than the two of you when you came in last night."

  She offered the mug. "Here," she said. "Swallow it down."

  Corylus lifted the warm bronze cautiously. The odor made his nostrils quiver; he started to lower the mug.

  "Drink it, I tell you!" Anna said. "D'ye think you're the first drunk I've had to bring back to life in the morning? It's been your father often enough; but I don't think he'd be pleased to learn that my man, who he trusted, let you get into this state--and himself no better!"

  "Yes, ma'am," Corylus said obediently. He held his breath and drank the whole mugful at a measured pace, then set it on the side table empty. Anna gave him a napkin. He looked at it puzzled, then sneezed violently into it.

  "There," said Anna with a satisfied smirk. "You'll feel better now, or so I believe."

  Corylus lowered the napkin with which he had covered his mouth and nose. He did feel better, for a wonder. He would have thought that the sneeze would have shattered his head into more bits than the shell of a dropped egg.

  "I meant to stop at the first jar," he said contritely. "I must have had more than that to drink."

  "Aye, you must have," Anna said, her tone still grim but her face showing a trace of humor--if you knew what you were looking for. "Well, it's done and you're back safely, no thanks to that fool husband of mine. Are you going to your class today, then?"

  "If I...," Corylus said. He got slowly to his feet as he spoke. Somewhat to his surprise, he found that he was all right except for a slight wobbliness when he straightened. "Yes, I will. I want to talk with Varus afterwards anyway, and Master Pandareus too."

  A thought struck him. "Oh!" he said. "And we did find what you sent us for, or I think it was."