Out of the Waters-ARC

by David Drake

  He swallowed and said, "The Sages will release Uktena here in Carce."

  ***

  Hedia turned. She was draped in three nets which were being dragged in slightly different directions, but she drew herself up as straight as she could. The hunters chattered excitedly to one another in--bad--Greek, so it was in that language which she said, "I am Lady Hedia, wife of Lord Gaius Alphenus Saxa, Consul of Carce. Take these cords off me at once and bring me proper clothing!"

  It was a challenge to be regally disdainful while naked, limping, and covered with cuts and scratches, but Hedia had generations of noble ancestors to fall back on. She didn't expect her captors to pay attention, but at least she wasn't disgracing her family.

  Somewhat to her surprise, the hunters--servants, obviously--fell silent and slacked the net ropes enough that Hedia could straighten fully. Along with tunics that left the right shoulder bare, they wore ankle-length boots of some supple material. Some of them glanced back to the taller man in fiery armor who was walking toward them.

  "Are you in charge of this rabble?" Hedia said. "What do you mean by behaving in this fashion?"

  The man smirked at her in a comfortable, arrogant fashion. That wasn't an unfamiliar expression on the faces of men who were seeing Hedia nude; though usually her appearance was less bedraggled.

  "I am the Minos Serdain," he said. "Kalpos and I--"

  He nodded toward the similarly armored man who remained in the more distant of the two ships.

  "--were sent by the Council of the Minoi to bring you back when the Servitors botched the job."

  Serdain made a sour face. "Using the Servitors was a bad choice but a necessary one," he said. "Even the most powerful of us couldn't have gone to the Underworld and returned... but you did, Minos Hedia. Which is why we need you."

  He wasn't speaking bad Greek, she realized, but rather a very foreign Greek. Among Saxa's recent visitors had been a delegation from the ancient Greek colony of Vipasca in Lusitania. Their speech had some of the same rhythms as this Serdain's did; perhaps it was the Phoenician influence.

  "Release me, then," Hedia said, sounding as haughty as she could while naked and looking--literally--like a sparrow which cats had been playing with. "When you've done that, we can discuss my terms for helping you."

  She was no more a magician than she was Emperor, but if these Minoi wanted to think otherwise, then perhaps that would give her some bargaining power.

  Serdain chuckled. "No, I don't think I'll do that, my dear," he said, "since I'm not a mindless automaton like the Servitors. We might not be lucky enough to get you back the next time. And you--"

  His grin became suddenly cruel.

  "--might not be so lucky either. The jungle can be dangerous, particularly where you were, in the ruins of Lann's keep after Procron destroyed it. Procron played with Lann's dependants, you see. Some of the results may still be alive, in which case they're worse than the creatures that nature herself created."

  The ape with a human head, Hedia realized. But that--

  Aloud she said, "Your forehead."

  She tried to point, but she couldn't raise her arm high enough to make the gesture more than a hint of her intention. "The tattoo there. What does it mean?"

  "Mean?" said Serdain. He raised his free hand--the other held the flaring helmet that covered even his face behind a mesh of the same metal as the remainder of his armor. His gauntleted finger stopped just short of touching the pentagram. "It means that I'm a Minos, of course. It's a sign of the favor of Zeus. But I see--"

  His eyes narrowed.

  "--that you do not have the mark. Has the Council made a mistake, I wonder?"

  "You'll learn what a mistake you've made if you continue to treat me with disrespect!" Hedia said.

  Serdain chuckled. "No doubt, no doubt," he said in a mocking voice.

  A pair of glass men--Servitors--had come from the nearer ship. They reached under the tangled nets and locked hobbles around her ankles.

  The restraints appeared to be made of the same translucent substance as the Servitors themselves. To Hedia's amazement they weighed as little as silk leggings, but when she tried to kick, they were as constraining as steel. They would allow her to take only shuffling, eighteen-inch steps.

  When the hobbles were in place, the servants began to remove their nets. Their task was more difficult because they seemed afraid to touch Hedia. Some of the cords were looped on her elbows and even chin.

  She glared at Serdain, refusing to help or even recognize the servants. He continued to smirk. That appeared to be his normal expression.

  The nets came free, one after the other in quick succession. The servants retreated in pairs and began to roll the nets without letting them touch the coarse grass. Serdain said, "Come to the ship and we'll be off, Minos Hedia. If you really are a Minos."

  "Carry me," Hedia said, her arms crossed. It was a petty response, but she had noticed that the servants were afraid of her. "Since you've made it impossible for me to walk."

  She could walk, of course, but she couldn't walk in a dignified manner. There was almost nothing she could do with dignity in her present condition, but she didn't intend to stagger along like a hunched beldame in addition to the other degradations.

  Instead of responding, Serdain turned his back and stalked back toward the nearer vessel. The servants followed, murmuring among themselves again.

  Are they going to leave me? Hedia thought. The two Servitors gripped her by the upper arms and lifted off the ground. The walked toward the ship in perfect unison; they could have been one another's mirror images.

  Hedia drew her legs up under her to kick but restrained the reflex in time to save herself a broken toe--or worse. It'd be like kicking marble statues. She held herself silent and upright as the creatures paced on.

  The ship lay on its port side, canted at about a thirty degree angle. That put the railing low enough for the servants to clamber aboard easily; despite his armor, Serdain mounted without apparent difficulty. He walked to the stern and used both hands to settle the helmet back onto his head.

  With the helmet in place, Serdain took an object--it looked to Hedia like a simple pebble--out of a pouch of silvery cloth hanging from a stud on his breastplate. She had noticed it but had assumed it was simply a bangle.

  The Servitors stepped aboard with Hedia between them and stood her against the single mast. One held her in place while the other bent at her feet. She heard a click and found her hobble was firmly attached to the mast step.

  The ship trembled, then rocked upright on its keel. The crew didn't have anything to do with it, so far as Hedia could see. The humans, the hunters who had caught her, squatted along the rails. Other than shifting slightly, presumably for balance, and talking among themselves in low voices, they didn't seem concerned or even interested.

  The Servitors--two on this ship with Hedia, but four on the deck of the other vessel--stepped into the bow and didn't move after that. She might have taken them for glass decorations if she hadn't seen them previously.

  Serdain was motionless also, but the stone in his hands spat light which occasionally seemed to coat the stern. It faded from Hedia's sight as it wicked forward along the deck. She felt the hair on the backs of her arms rise for just an instant.

  She grimaced. Alphena would understand--or at least experience--whatever was going on to make the ship move. The girl had a natural talent for magic, according to Anna.

  To Hedia it was all a blank, like the literature Varus got excited about or the mathematics that the engineer planning an irrigation tunnel at her first husband's estate in Calabria tried to interest her in. She smiled, remembering the engineer; she hadn't thought of him in years.

  Hedia had talents of her own. She wouldn't trade them for magic or literature or mathematics or anything in the world... nor, she was sure, would any of the men she'd gotten to know want her to trade.

  The sails were carried on a pair of booms butted to opposite sides of
the mast. Hedia hadn't paid much attention to ships, but that was unusual enough to have caught her eye when she first saw the ships flying above the city of the vision. There was a double thump above her and a gust of wind. She twisted--her body was free--and looked upward. The sails were beating like a bird's wings, just as she had seen them in the vision.

  The ship hopped once and a second time on the ground, then lifted from the glade. The "wings" weren't big enough relative to the hull to do that, at least not as slowly as they were flapping.

  But the ship is flying, she realized, looking over the side. There's no question about that.

  Hedia itched. She was extremely hungry, and she would have liked something to drink. Thirst during the night had caused her to slurp water from the up-turned leaves of a plant rooted in the trunk of a great tree, but there hadn't been much even of that.

  She wasn't going to beg, though; not yet. And if Serdain's apparent concentration was real--as it may well have been, if he was responsible for the ship flying--he might not have been able to respond to any request she made anyway.

  She rubbed the deck with her big toe. It appeared to be ordinary wood, though with an oily slickness. Its broad grain showed sharp contrast between the white softer wood and the almost black divisions.

  Does the kind of wood help the ship fly?

  Hedia quirked a bitter smile. That question didn't matter in the least; except that it saved her from thinking about the questions that did matter.

  How can I escape? How can I get back to Carce even if I do escape? Am I going to spend eternity being tortured in the Underworld alongside Calpurnius Latus...?

  She had no answers to those questions either, of course. Still, her worst enemies--and there was a long list of them, for one reason or another--had never claimed Hedia was a coward. She would focus on escaping, and after that on return to Carce.

  What happened after she died could take care of itself. As no doubt it would.

  When she had been stumbling among the lightless tree trunks, Hedia had thought of the forest as degrees of blackness and greens so dark as to be black themselves. Looking down on the same expanse, she was delighted by the amount of color.

  Several of the giants emerging from the canopy were sending up spikes covered with bright yellow flowers. Butterflies with blue, transparent wings flitted among them like chips of brilliant glass.

  The second ship was paralleling theirs about fifty feet to the side. A tiny monkey looked up at them and flung itself to cover deeper in the foliage. The ships were so quiet that Hedia could clearly hear its cheep! of alarm.

  They were flying at about the speed of a trotting horse--faster than Hedia had ever been carried on a ship, though within the capacity--for a brief dash--of the triremes she had seen exercising in the sea off Misenum. Under other circumstances, this could be a pleasant, mildly exciting interlude.

  She giggled, causing the nearer servants to look at her with concern. It would be interesting to see what Serdain looked like stripped to the buff. He can't be more than forty, and he moves well despite that clumsy armor.

  They passed within a long bowshot of crystal buildings surrounded by ordinary huts which spilled down the hill from them. People, dressed and looking like Serdain's human servants, were at their occupations in the terraced yards between the ordinary dwellings. Most of them didn't bother to look up at the ships.

  One of the crystal structures was a squat dome. The other, attached to it, was a tall cylinder whose thin walls fully displayed the contents. A sloping ramp wound from the bottom to the top of the interior. In layered beds grew grains, vegetables and fruit, often of types which Hedia had never seen before.

  She sniffed. Of course, to her food was something that appeared on serving tables, frequently in forms so modified that a farm manager wouldn't be able to determine the original.

  Hedia turned to look off the right side of the ship; to starboard, seamen called it, though she had never understood why. She saw glints on top of a hill in the distance. Those must be the ruins where I escaped.

  "What are those?" she said to Serdain in a crisp voice, pointing as much to emphasize her question as to indicate the shattered crystal.

  The Minos seemed oblivious of all except the pebble in his hands. That continued to spit sparks like amber rubbed with silk.

  As I expected, Hedia thought. She gestured to the servants along the railing. The ship was so narrow that if she had bent over and stretched out a hand, she could have touched several of them on the shoulder.

  "You!" she said. "Why are those buildings broken that way? What happened there?"

  The servants didn't move away--perhaps they couldn't without making the ship wobble in a dangerous fashion--but they lowered their eyes. One began singing a counting song as if to block out Hedia's voice.

  "Do you want me to turn you all into toads?" Hedia said on a rising note. She was afraid, and she let that come out as anger in her voice. "Is that what you want? Is it?"

  She straightened and pointed her right arm toward a hunter slightly astern of where she was fastened; her index and middle fingers were extended. He turned his head, but he couldn't help seeing the threat in the corner of his eyes.

  I'm going to look like a complete fool if he calls my bluff.

  "It's Procron's keep!" the servant blurted. Fear made his wretched dialect almost unintelligible, but at least he was trying. "Don't turn me into a toad. Don't turn me into a toad."

  The rest of what he was trying to say was lost when he began to blubber. Hedia thought she could guess the words easily enough, though. She lowered her arm.

  "It's not Procron's keep," said the hunter just ahead of Hedia's target. "It's Lann's, that Procron destroyed before the Council drove Procron out. Procron was a mile farther west."

  He cleared his throat and risked looking directly at Hedia; from the scars on his chest and right shoulder, he must have tangled with a lizard like the one that she saw just before she was recaptured. The hunter added, "I was in the Council fleet."

  I wonder what happened to the ape that saved me? Hedia thought. Aloud she said to the hunter, "Thank you, my good man."

  That tiny bit of information raised her spirits enormously. The Minoi fought one another... and she already knew that at least some of the Minoi were male. She smiled kittenishly at Serdain, though he was too lost in his magic to notice her; for the moment.

  There would be other times and other male Minoi. Hedia was no longer without resources.

  They slanted out over water--one of the bands of water which separated the ring islands she had seen as she approached with the Servitors who had snatched her from her bed. That certainly provided Saxa with an unexpected thrill, she thought. She snorted a laugh which she throttled with her hand. I do hope Saxa is all right.

  Mats of vegetation floated in the broad lagoon. At first she took them for islands, but they drifted in the sluggish current. Flowers rose on long stalks, following the sun; there were animals, too, popping up and vanishing to leave only green undulations behind.

  And there were fish as well. Anyway, something was swimming so deeply under the water that Hedia saw only a huge shadow.

  Ahead was the city of the vision in the theater, a jewel glittering against the dark green hills surrounding it. A dozen ships circled lazily over the crystal towers, their sails beating slowly; many similar ships bobbed in the lagoon, tied up at the seawall below the city.

  The ships weren't in the wide plaza facing the temple, because that was full of spectators: many thousands of people, including as many as a hundred of the armored Minoi. Most of them had their helmets off. With each Minos was a band of retainers in distinct livery. The dyes were vivid enough to bring a fortune in Carce to anyone who was able to duplicate them.

  Serdain's ship sank toward the sea front; the ship that had been escorting it joined those circling above the city. The hunters murmured in animation to one another, though Hedia couldn't catch words.

  She drew he
rself up with as much dignity as circumstances allowed. More than when they caught me in the forest, she thought. I will get out of this and return home. I will!

  Hedia had half-expected cheers from the crowd as the ship they waited for approached. Instead, she heard frightened whispers magnified many thousands of times.

  She felt a touch of disquiet. They didn't bring me here for a human sacrifice, did they? The Gauls and Scythians did that, and Varus had told her that as recently as the war with Hannibal, the Senate of Carce had made human sacrifices.

  I'll deal with the situation as it develops. And if some priest comes toward me with a golden sickle, I'll hope that my hands are still free.

  The ship dropped below the seawall to settle into the lagoon. Hedia looked up. All she could see of the city was the top of the high temple. The ball gleaming there was the one she had last seen while shopping in Carce, on top of the obelisk of Psammeticus.

  ***

  Rather than using a brazier on a tripod, Anna had built a small fire on the ancient well curb at the side of the back garden. She fed it with splinters of maple wood and regularly dropped pinches of different powders onto the flames. Occasionally it spat sparks, and once Alphena had seen a bright glow in the shape of a cat form around the fire.

  Alphena wore heavy sandals, a short tunic, and a belt from which hung the sword she had battled demons with. She was nervous and tired and occasionally dizzy, though she thought the dizziness was just from standing upright and not moving from the spot for so long.

  Anna chanted in Oscan. The rhythms were more or less the same as those of Latin, but Alphena could only catch the occasional word. She smiled slightly: she was guessing about even those words. Maybe it wasn't Oscan, maybe it was all gibberish and Anna was playing a joke on her.

  Alphena pressed her lower lip between her teeth. Part of her hoped that nothing was going to happen, except that afterward she would feel like a fool.

  Heavy wagons rumbled along the Argiletum all night, their iron-shod wheels smothering other sounds. Even Anna's cracked voice only flecked that dull background, like bubbles on the sea after a storm. Somewhere a man shouted curses, repeating himself and slipping into a singsong pattern before finally falling silent again.