Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories

by L. Sprague de Camp;Frederik Pohl;David Drake;S. M. Stirling;Alexei

  Gentle, scholarly Drusilla had been much more the American’s style.

  “Pity your parents couldn’t get back from Gadez,” he said, feeling slightly guilty.

  The truth was he’d never much liked his daughter Maria. That was unjust. It wasn’t her fault that Drusilla had died in childbirth. He’d tried to be a good father anyway, but between that and the press of business, she’d mostly been raised by relatives and servants. Jorith was the delight of his old age.

  And doesn’t she know it, he thought indulgently.

  They walked out together through the Quaestor’s Offices, her arm linked around his left elbow. He was slightly—resentfully—conscious of the fact that she was walking slowly and ready to catch him if he stumbled, despite the cane he used with his right hand. He was in his mid-eighties now. Moving hurt. He’d spent nearly six decades back here, and he wasn’t that spry, brash young archaeologist anymore.

  Not even the same person, really. A few weeks ago he’d tried to make himself think in English, and found it horrifyingly difficult.

  I should be grateful, he thought, as they walked down corridors past offices and clerical pools, amid a ripple of bows and murmurs. I’m not senile or bedridden. Or dead, for that matter. And he’d done a lot more good here than he could have in his native century; nobody who’d seen a real famine close up, or what was left of a town after a sack by Hun raiders, could doubt that.

  He ignored the quartet of guards who followed, hard-eyed young men with their hands on the hilts of their swords and revolvers at their waists. They were part of the furniture. Justinian and assorted other enemies would still be glad to see him go. He chuckled a little as they came out into the broad marble-and-mosaic foyer of the building.

  “What’s so funny, Grandfather?” Jorith said.

  “That there are still men prepared to go to such efforts to kill me,” Padway said.

  “That’s funny?” she said, in a scandalized tone.

  “In a way. If they’d killed me right after I arrived here, they might have accomplished something—from their point of view; stopped me from changing things. It was touch and go there, those first couple of years. It’s far too late, now…”

  “But not too late for the theatre,” Jorith said. “It’s a revival of one of your plays, too—A Midsummer Night’s Dream…what are you laughing at this time, Grandfather?”

  “There’s nothing here,” the archbishop fretted.

  “Well, the Cathedral wasn’t built until the 700s,” the historian pointed out with poisonously sweet reasonableness.

  The field wasn’t empty, strictly speaking. There was a big two-story brick building, so new that the tiles were still going on the roof. The rest of it was trampled mud, wheelbarrows, piles of mortar and brick and timber and boards, and a clumsy-looking steam traction engine.

  “But why should…marvelous are the works of the Lord,” the archbishop said. “If His Son could be born in a stable, a saint can rise to heaven from a building yard.”

  “We’re redirecting traffic, my lord,” the policeman said, walking up to the door of the carriage.

  “What for?” Padway said. Mustn’t get testy in my old age, he thought. And it was a pretty good performance. Thank God for a good memory; he’d managed to put down something close to Shakespeare’s text.

  “There are rumors of riots,” the policeman said, sweating slightly. Nobody liked having the Big Boss suddenly turn up on their beat when something was going wrong. “Riots among the football spectators, my lord.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you, Officer,” Padway said. As the carriage lurched into motion, he went on: “I keep outsmarting myself.”

  Jorith giggled. “Grandfather, why is it that all the other politicians and courtiers are dull as dust, but you can always make me laugh?”

  It does sound funnier in Latin, he thought. Plus he’d gotten a considerable reputation as a wit over the past fifty years by reusing the clichés of the next fifteen hundred years. He chuckled himself.

  And Drusilla swooned over things like parting is such sweet sorrow, too. That brought a stab of pain, and he leaned out the window of the carriage.

  “What I mean,” he went on, “is that I introduced football to quiet people down. Didn’t think anyone could get as upset about that as they did over chariot races.”

  “I’ve never seen the point, myself,” Jorith said. “Polo is much more exciting.”

  Padway grinned to himself. The Gothic aristocracy had taken to that like Russians to drink. In fact, they’d virtually reinvented the game themselves, with a little encouragement and some descriptions from him.

  They remind me of horsy country-gentleman-type Englishmen, he thought, not for the first time. Particularly now that they’ve taken to baths and literacy.

  They were out of the theatre crush now, the carriages moving a little faster as they moved downhill. The clatter of shod hooves on pavement was loud, but at least most of them had rubber wheels these days, which cut down on the shattering racket iron-clad ones made on city streets. He stopped himself from making a mental note to look into how automobile research was coming.

  Leave it to the young men, he thought.

  There were enough of them coming out of the universities now, trained in the scientific worldview. In the long run, it would be better not to intervene anymore, even with “suggestions.” There were enough superstitions about “Mysterious Martinus”; he wanted the younger generation to learn how to think rationally, and for themselves.

  He smiled, thinking of the thrill he’d had the first time a young professor had dared to argue with him about chemistry—and the whippersnapper had turned out to be right, and Padway’s vague high-school recollections wrong, too. And after that…

  Jorith was smiling at him indulgently. He blinked, realizing he’d dozed off, lost in half-dreams of decades past.

  “Sorry,” he said, straightening on the coach’s well-padded seat, wincing a little at the stiffness in his neck.

  “You deserve to be able to nap when you feel like it, Grandfather,” Jorith said. “It’s a sin, the way you work yourself to a nub, after all you’ve done for the kingdom. Why, I remember only last month, how everyone cheered in the Senate when you made that speech—the one where you said we had nothing to fear but fear itself—”

  A short crashing baaammm rang out ahead. Padway’s head came up with a start, the last threads of dream slipping away. He knew that sound of old—was responsible for it being heard a millennium or so early.

  Rifles, firing in volley…

  “Fire!” Tharasamund said reluctantly.

  The sound of fifteen rifles going off within half a second of each other battered at his ears. The front rank reloaded, spent cartridges tinkling on the pavement, and the sergeant bellowed:

  “Second rank, volley fire present—fire!”

  Dirty-white powder smoke drifted back towards him, smelling of rotten eggs and death. Ten yards away the crowd milled and screamed, half a dozen lying limply dead, twice as many more whimpering or fleeing clutching wounds or lying and screaming out their hurt to the world. The rest hesitated, bunching up—which meant a lot of them were angry enough to face high-velocity lead slugs.

  “Cease fire!” he said to his men, with enough of a rasp in it to make them obey. To the mob, he went on in Latin.

  “Disperse! Return to your homes!” he called, working to keep his voice deep and authoritative, and all the desperation he felt out of it. “In the Emperor Urias’ name!”

  “Down with the Goths!” someone screeched. “Down with the heretics! Dig up their bones!”

  “Oh-oh,” Tharasamund said.

  That was call to riot, an import from Constantine’s city....The religious prejudice was home-grown, though. Most Goths were still Arian Christians—heretics, to Orthodox Catholics—and the Western Empire enforced a strict policy of toleration, even for pagans and Jews and Nestorians, and for Zoroastrian refugees from Justinian’s persecutions.

&nb
sp; I hate to do this. They’re fools, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to he sausage meat. Drunk, half of them, and a lot of them out of work.

  “Clear firing lanes!” he rasped aloud.

  The soldiers did, shuffling aside but keeping their rifles to the shoulder to leave a line of bright points and intimidating muzzles facing the crowd. The artillerymen stepped aside from their weapons—they’d recoil ten feet each when fired, on smooth pavement—with the gun captains holding the long lanyards ready. Those four-inch bores were even more intimidating than rifles, if you knew what they could do.

  “Ready, sir,” the artillery noncom said. “Doubled-shotted with grape.”

  Tharasamund nodded. “Disperse!” he repeated, his voice cutting over the low brabbling murmur of the crowd. “This is your last warning!”

  He heard a whisper of Why give them any fucking warnings? but ignored it; there were some times an officer was wise to be half-deaf.

  The noise of the crowd died down, a slow sullen quiet spreading like olive oil on a linen tablecloth A few in the front rank tossed down their rocks and chunks of brick, turning and trying to force their way back through the crowd; the slow forward movement turned into eddies and milling about. He took a long breath of relief, and felt the little hairs along his spine stop trying to bristle upright.

  “I should have stayed home in Campania and raised horses,” he muttered to himself. “But no, I had to be dutiful…”

  He half-turned his head as he sheathed his sword; that let him catch the motion on the rooftop out of the corner of his eye. Time froze; he could see the man—short, swarthy, nondescript, in a shabby tunic. The expression of concentration on the man’s face as he tossed the black-iron sphere with its long fuse trailing sputterings and blue smoke…

  “Down!” Tharasamund screamed, and suited action to words—there was no time to do anything else.

  Someone tripped and fell over him; that saved his life, although he never remembered exactly what happened when the bomb fell into the open ammunition limber of the twelve-pounder.

  “What was that?” Jorith exclaimed, shock on her face.

  Neither of them really needed telling. That was an explosion, and a fairly big one. The driver of the carriage leaned on the brake and reined in, but the road was fairly steep here—flanked on both sides by shops and homes above them. Padway leaned out again, putting on his spectacles and blinking, thankful that at least the lens grinders were turning out good flint glass at last. Then another blast came, and another, smaller and muffled by distance.

  “Goddamn that bastard Justinian to hell,” he growled—surprising himself by swearing, and doing it in English. Normally he was a mild-mannered man, but…

  “Grandfather?” Jorith said nervously; she wasn’t used to him lapsing into the mysterious foreign tongue either.

  “Sorry, kitten,” he said, then coughed. “I was cursing the Emperor of the East.”

  Her blue eyes went wide. “You think—”

  “Well, we can produce our own riots, but not bombs, I think,” Padway said. “Dammit, he can try and kill me—he’s been doing that for fifty years—but this is beyond enough.”

  Shod hooves clattered on the pavement outside. One of the bodyguards leaned over to speak through the coach’s window.

  “Excellent boss,” he said. “There are rioters behind us. We think it would be best to try and go forward and link up with the soldiers we heard ahead, and then take the Equinoctal Way out to the suburbs. There will be more troops moving into the city.”

  “As you think best, Hermann,” Padway said; he’d commanded armies in his time, but that was forty years ago and more, and he’d never pretended to be a fighting man. He tried to leave that to the professionals.

  Tharasamund shook his head. That was a bad mistake; pain thrust needles through his head, and there was a loud metallic ringing noise that made him struggle to clap hands to his ears. The soft heavy resistance to the movement made him realize that he was lying under several mangled bodies, and what the sticky substance clotting his eyelashes and running into his mouth was. He retched a little, gained control with gritted teeth and a massive effort of will, and pushed the body off. Half-blinded, he groped frantically for a water bottle and splashed the contents across his face while he rubbed at his eyelids. The blood wasn’t quite dried, and the flies weren’t all that bad yet; that meant he hadn’t been out long. A public fountain had broken in the blast, and water was puddling up against the dam of dead horses and men and wrecked equipment across the road.

  As he’d expected, what he saw when he could see properly was very bad. Nobody looked alive—most of the bodies weren’t even intact, and if one of the field guns hadn’t taken some of the blast when both limbers went off, he wouldn’t be either. Nobody but the dead were here—a tangle of the mob around where the last of his soldiers had fallen. All the intact weapons were gone, of course, except for his sword and revolver; he’d probably looked too thoroughly like a mangled corpse to be worth searching by men in a hurry. The fronts of the shops on either side were smashed in by the explosion and by looters completing the work; a civilian lay half in and half out of one window, very thoroughly dead.

  “Probably the shopkeeper,” Tharasamund muttered grimly, his own voice sounding muffled and strange. The pain and the ringing in his ears were a little better, but probably he’d never have quite the keenness of hearing again.

  That was another score to settle, along with the cold rage at the killing of his men. He staggered over to the fountain and washed as best he could; that brought him nearer to consciousness. The first thing to do—

  He hardly heard the coach clatter up, but the sight brought him out into the roadway, waving his sword. That brought half a dozen pistols in the hands of the mounted guards on him, and a shotgun from the man beside the driver. The men were in civil dress, country gentleman’s Gothic style, but they were a mixed lot. Soldiers or ex-soldiers, he’d swear; from the look of the coach, some great lord’s personal retainers. None of them looked very upset at the carnage that was painting the coach’s wheels and the hooves of their horses red…best be a little careful.

  “Tharasamund, Captain in the Kunglike-hird, the Royal Guard,” he snapped, sheathing the blade. “I need transport, and I call on you to assist me in the Emperor’s name.”

  “Straight-leg, we don’t stop for anyone,” the chief guard said—he had a long tow-colored mane, a thick bull-neck, and an equally thick growling accent in his Latin: Saxon, at a guess. “The only thing I want to hear from you is how to get our lord to someplace safe.”

  Tharasamund looked around. He could hear distant shouting and screams and the crackle of gunfire. That meant they were loud. And he could see columns of smoke, too. It might be an hour—or four or five—before enough troops marched in from the barracks outside town, between the built-up area and the royal palace, to restore order. Someone had screwed up royally; he’d be surprised if there wasn’t a new urban prefect soon.

  Not that that will be much consolation to the dead, he added to himself.

  He was opening his mouth to argue again—he had to get back to regimental HQ, to report this monumental ratfuck, and get some orders—when a young woman leaned out of the half-open carriage door.

  Not just any young woman. Her gown and jewels were rich in an exquisitely restrained court fashion, but that face would have stopped him cold if she were naked—especially if she were naked. His gesture turned into a sweeping bow.

  Wait a minute. They said their lord, not their lady.

  The girl’s eyes widened at the sight ahead, and she gulped. Then she fought down nausea—he felt a rush of approval even in the press of emergency—and looked at him. There was a faint feeling like an electric-telegraph spark as their eyes met, gray gazing into blue, and then she was looking over her shoulder.

  “Grandfather,” she said, in pure upper-class Latin. “There’s been a disaster here.”

  “There’s been an attack on Im
perial troops here,” Tharasamund said firmly, pitching his voice to carry into the interior of the vehicle. “I must insist, my lord—”

  It seemed to be a day for shocks. The man who leaned out in turn, bracing himself with a grimace, certainly looked like a grandfather. Possibly God’s grandfather, from the wrinkles; he’d never seen anyone older and still alive. The pouched eyes behind the lenses and big beak nose were disconcertingly shrewd. It was a face Tharasamund had seen before, when his unit was on court duty; anyone who saw magazines and engravings and photographs would have recognized it as well, these past two generations and more.

  Martinus of Padua. Quaestor to three Emperors of the West; kingmaker, sorcerer or saint, devil or angel—some pagans thought him a god—and next to Urias II, the most powerful man in the world. Possibly more powerful. Emperors came and went, but the man from Padua had been making things happen since Tharasamund’s grandfather was a stripling riding to his first war, when the Greeks invaded Italy in Thiudahad’s day.

  Tharasamund saluted and made a deep bow. “My apologies, my lord. I am at your disposal.” He managed a smile, a gentleman’s refusal to be disconcerted by events. “And at yours, my lady.”

  “Jorith Hermansdaughter, noble captain,” she said, a little faintly but with courtly politeness. A princess, then, and the old man’s granddaughter.

  This definitely took precedence over his own troubles....

  Ouch, Padway thought, pushing his glasses back up his nose and giving thanks, for once, for the increasing shortsightedness of old age. He’d seen worse, but not very often.

  “Captain, pleased to see you,” he said. “What happened here?”

  “My lord,” the young man said crisply. He looked suitably heroic in a battered way, but it was a pleasure to hear the firm intelligence in his voice. “A detachment of my company was ordered by General Winnithar of the Capital City garrison command to suppress rioters in aid to the civil power. We were doing so when a bomb thrower dropped a grenade into the ammunition limber. I suspect the man was a foreign agent—the whole thing was too smooth for accident.”