Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories

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

  Herosilla’s nose wrinkled. “Ganea needn’t worry,” she whispered.

  “Aye, I know that,” Acca said. “But the girl’s young and hasn’t learned that some women are interested in more that what a man’s got hanging between his legs. Though that too.”

  Herosilla blinked, then nodded. “Yes, that too,” she said. She’d always claimed to appreciate plain speaking, but it was nonetheless disconcerting to hear it from a near stranger.

  Roscio finally finished. Ran out of words, at any rate. He looked around in puzzlement. The man seated next to him tugged his tunic; Roscio sat down hard.

  Faustulus planted his staff in front of him and levered himself upright with the strength of both arms. Acca braced her husband midway in the process, then stepped back.

  “We all know there was trouble with Numitor’s herdsmen before my boys got their growth,” Faustulus said without preamble. “And we know that since then there’s been trouble the other way, with Numitor’s folk showing splints and bandages any time their flocks get too near our grazing.”

  He paused. There was a chorus of, “Aye, that’s so,” and, “Just what I said.” Given the length of time the council had been sitting, Herosilla would have been amazed if there was anything that hadn’t been said at least once.

  “That’s well and good,” Faustulus continued, “but there’s us and there’s all the men in the three other villages besides. Are you going to tell me that Numitor’s going to run us all off if both the boys are gone for a day or two? Is that all you are, sheep yourselves?”

  “It’s not like we’re afraid,” said the man to the other side of Herosilla. “It’s just, you know, we need somebody to lead. And you don’t get around so good any more.”

  The stocky brother jumped up. “If there’s no more manhood here than that,” he said, “then Mars strike me if I’m going to stay any longer! I’m going to town with the lady messenger tomorrow. The only question you all can decide is whether I bother to come back. The only question!”

  He crossed his arms and stood with lowering fury. The man beside him, the rural equivalent of a rich man’s toady, cheered.

  The taller brother had risen also. “It’s my right, so I’ll go,” he said and crossed his arms in turn.

  “Well, one day,” muttered the man beside Herosilla.

  “Maybe one day,” Roscio said. “Could be two, easy could be two.”

  “Are we all agreed, then?” Faustulus said in a voice that was nearly a growl. “Will anyone stand to say he’s afraid to spend a day in the pastures without one of my boys to hold his hand?”

  “Oh, let them go,” a man said. “But it don’t make sense, I say.”

  “It’s decided,” Faustulus said. He turned to his taller son and continued, “Remus, you’ll guide our lady guest to Alba in the morning to see the king. Romulus, since you’re so set on going you may; but the next trip to town is your brother’s again.”

  Herosilla tried to stand. She stepped on the hem of her borrowed tunic. She toppled backward and would have fallen if Acca hadn’t caught her.

  “Romulus and Remus?” she said. “Is this the Palatine Hill?”

  “Well, our village is Palatium, lady,” the taller brother—Remus!—said. He looked puzzled by her sudden question. “I guess you could call the hill the Palatine, sure.”

  “By the stars!” Herosilla said.

  The lightning had indeed thrown her a long way. The distance, however, was through time rather than space.

  “By the very gods.”

  “All praise to the gods who rule men’s lives,” Faustulus said, in what he thought was agreement with his guest.

  Herosilla sat on the roots of a pine, looking down over the moonlit plain where some day the Circus Maximus would seat a quarter million Romans watching horse races. There wasn’t a single horse in present-day Palatium. Presumably there were a few in the royal town of Alba.

  A thousand years. A thousand years.

  The villagers must all be asleep by now. The occasional gust no longer brought snatches of speech as folk chewed over the marvelous events of the day. The arrival of a Greek woman from Cumae was as amazing to them as the truth was to Herosilla herself.

  A thousand years.

  Footsteps crunched behind Herosilla. She stood and turned, stepping around the tree. Romulus was walking down to where Herosilla had gone to think after awareness of the situation struck her like a second thunderbolt.

  She could easily have gotten home from some rural valley outside Rome. There was no way back from the past, except as bones.

  “No one believed me when I told them my destiny,” Romulus said. “They didn’t laugh to my face, but I knew what they were thinking. Now they have to believe.”

  “I’m not—” she said. But Romulus was right: he was destined for greatness. It just had nothing to with what had happened to Flavia Herosilla, gentlewoman and scholar.

  “I’m the son of Numitor’s daughter,” Romulus said. “The king is my granduncle. Some day I’ll be king myself, but a great king—not a worm like Amulius!”

  “The king’s brother Numitor is the rightful king?” Herosilla asked. She’d always assumed the stories of the founding were legend; that they had no more reality than similar tales of Olympus or Thule, written by folk to whom the truth would only have been a hurdle to leap in the course of their fictions. “Amulius ousted him?”

  “What?” said Romulus. He was a tall man; only in the company of his brother would he have looked stocky. “Really? I wouldn’t have thought Amulius had the backbone. The gods told you this?”

  Herosilla opened her mouth, then closed it again. She’d never understood how a king who’d let his brother depose him had gained the manhood decades later to take his throne back. But then, she hadn’t believed any part of the legend.

  “But you and Remus are Rhea’s twin sons, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Oh, not him,” Romulus said scornfully. “He’s just a shepherd like the rest of them here, Faustulus’ son by Acca. But I’m the son of Mars, just as Rhea claimed. The king said Rhea’s son had died with her in childbirth, but really he had me set out on a hillside because he was afraid. Faustulus found me and brought me here to be suckled with his own son.”

  Facts were all Flavia Herosilla had ever cared about. The thunderbolt had destroyed her previous certainties along with all other aspects of her former life. Parts of the legend passed to her down a thousand years were perhaps true; other parts were certainly wrong. Romulus couldn’t rationally be sure about things that had happened before he was born…but perhaps a god really had whispered them in his ear! She couldn’t prove otherwise.

  The only thing Herosilla could be sure of now was that she stood on a hilltop and the winter wind was cold.

  “So you see I’m descended from a god also,” Romulus concluded. “Therefore it’s proper that you and I should mate.” He put his hand on her arm.

  “What?” said Herosilla. She backed away. “Don’t be an idiot!”

  Romulus laughed with the confidence of a strong man fully conscious of his power. He caught Herosilla by the arm again, above the elbow. “Goddess you may be, but I’ll bet you’re a woman as well. Don’t try to run or you’ll get hurt and spoil your part of the fun.”

  Herosilla knew better than to run. She stooped, caught Romulus’ unloaded ankle, and twisted as he tried to shift his weight. He went over her back and hit the rocky slope with a crash and a bellow.

  Herosilla started toward the huts at a brisk pace, stooping once to grab a handful of dirt to throw in Romulus’ eyes when he caught her. It was mud rather than dust or fine sand, but it would have to serve. From the sounds behind her the big man had rolled some way while stunned from landing on his head.

  Acca, Remus, and several others trotted from the village. The moon behind Herosilla’s back lit them brightly. “Lady?” Acca called.

  “I’m here!” Herosilla said.

  “We heard you…” Remus said doubt
fully. Romulus, panting like a blown horse, caught up to them.

  “Your brother slipped,” Herosilla said. “I was coming for help.”

  She turned. Romulus looked at her with slitted eyes. There was a dark blotch on his forehead. “That’s right,” he muttered. “But I didn’t need help.”

  Herosilla threw down as much of the dirt as she could and tried to wipe off the sticky remainder between her palms. She wondered what served the village for a water supply. Puddles, she feared.

  “I’d like to sleep now,” she said. “Is there a bed I could use?”

  “Ours, lady,” Acca said. “My husband and I will give you our house and sleep with our sons.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, Mistress Acca,” Herosilla said, her eyes on the lowering Romulus, “I’d prefer that you remain with me tonight.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Romulus said. ‘We’ll get an early start for town.”

  “Why of course, lady,” Acca said.

  Romulus stalked up the path, pushing aside villagers who didn’t get out of his way in time.

  In her own day Herosilla had visited the villas of wealthy friends around Lake Albana, twelve miles from Rome. That hadn’t prepared her for the experience of hiking to the region over a track surfaced in mud and sheep dung. The only vehicles in Palatium were wheelbarrows. There wasn’t a mule or donkey to ride, much less a horse. The risk of being carried in a litter by herdsmen who’d never done anything of the sort before was greater than the discomfort of walking.

  But the discomfort was worse than anything Herosilla’d experienced since she spent her first and only sea voyage leaning over the ship’s railing and wondering whether it wouldn’t be preferable to drown.

  “That’s it?” she said as they reached the top of the hill. She’d thought the huts glimpsed from the bottom of the long final climb from the lakeside were Alba’s outskirts: the shanties beyond the walls occupied by poor people.

  There were no walls. There was no more street plan than there had been in Palatium. Muddy tracks meandered between hovels much like those of the village. A few had a stone foundation course; a few had a small courtyard separated from its neighbors by a fence of twigs woven on a frame of vertical posts. Some houses were oval and perhaps contained two rooms instead of one, but they were the exceptions.

  “Makes you feel cramped, doesn’t it?” Remus said, mistaking Herosilla’s shudder. “They’ve got tens of tens of tens of people here. It’s too much.”

  “A real king would have a real city,” Romulus said. “Like Troy, with stone walls. And think of how great Agamemnon was in Mycenae, to have conquered Troy!”

  “Men aren’t meant to live like that,” his brother retorted. “Wars are because folk go mad when they’re pressed too tight. They act like rats in a basket.”

  The first spikes of winter-sown grain showed in the fields below Alba. The town’s immediate vicinity was cultivated; the pastures were around outlying communities like Palatium because live animals could be driven a greater distance than vegetable crops could be hauled over what passed for roads.

  Children and dogs played in the streets. A few women sat on their lintels, talking and spinning yarn between their palms. They watched the visitors. One of them called a knowing greeting to Romulus, but for the most part their eyes were on Herosilla’s saffron shawl. It was the only item of her own clothing that she’d dared bring on the muddy track.

  A horn blatted from deeper into town. “We’re here on market day,” Remus explained. “That’s the signal that the king is ready to hear petitions in the forum.”

  “Better if we’d gotten here sooner,” Romulus said. “It can’t be helped now.”

  “It couldn’t be helped at all unless you were willing to carry me on your back,” Herosilla snapped.

  Both brothers had been surprised at the slow pace she set them, though Remus had been more polite in his comments. The ability to stride swiftly through muck had never been a virtue Herosilla thought to cultivate. Now she felt unreasonably angry at herself for that failure.

  “There’s no great hurry,” Remus said. “Amulius would want to see her even if it weren’t his petition day.”

  For all that, Remus moved faster through the twisting streets. Herosilla quickened her step despite fiery pains in both shins. The brothers led her by half a stride, clearing obstacles with their spearshafts or shoulders regardless of complaints from townsfolk.

  Despite herself, Herosilla was expecting Alba’s forum to have some kinship with the forum of a town of her own day. No commemorative arches or statues of leading citizens, but a covered porch for market days in bad weather and at least a few stone buildings.

  This forum was a wide junction of the streets feeding it. That would have been greater praise if the streets had been more than dirt alleys. There were several hundred people present, some of them crying the remainder of their produce at reduced prices. Most of the citizens were indistinguishable from the shepherds of Palatium, though a few of the wealthier sort wore dyed cloth and metal or amber jewelry.

  On one side of the forum was a compound surrounded by a log stockade. Two spearmen with bronze breastplates, plumed helmets, and large round shields guarded the gate. Across the forum was a similar stockade, marginally smaller.

  “That’s the king’s palace,” Remus said, nodding to the first compound. “The other’s Numitor’s. He’s an envious little toad.”

  If Romulus disagreed with the description of the man he claimed as grandfather, he didn’t do so aloud. “Come on,” he muttered. “Let’s get to the front.”

  The gate of the royal compound swung inward, opening. The stockade enclosed four or five buildings much like those in the rest of town. Amulius lived with guards and servants, maybe even courtiers if the term could be applied; but he lived in conditions very like those of Alba’s other three thousand or so residents.

  The horn sounded twice from within the compound. Four more guards and several attendants walked through the gate accompanying a man in his sixties who wore an embroidered purple robe.

  One of the attendants carried a cow horn with a wooden mouthpiece; another held a wooden staff with knob of carved ivory; and the third had a folding stool which looked similar to the senatorial chairs of Herosilla’s day except for being wood rather than ivory. The gate guards fell in at the end of the procession, leaving the stockade open behind them.

  The brothers led Herosilla to the front of the crowd with the same strong-arm technique that had cleared the route through town. Citizens bleated at being shoved aside, but when they saw who was responsible they merely muttered about ‘wild men from the hills.’

  Herosilla smiled wryly. The folk of this day saw gradations in a culture which was from her viewpoint as uniform as a mud puddle. To the townsfolk, the shepherds were uncouth thugs who couldn’t be expected to understand civilized norms.

  The attendant spread the legs of the stool. As he did so, the gates of the other compound opened. Two spearmen with helmets but no shields or breastplates led out a man in a blue cloak. A group of blue-clad servants already at the front of the crowd opened space for the newcomers.

  “Numitor,” Remus whispered.

  “So I gathered,” Herosilla said.

  Amulius sat on the stool, careful not to overbalance. He was somewhat overweight, while his brother was as thin as an aging weasel. The staffbearer raised his arms and said, “Citizens of Alba, your king is now—”

  “King Amulius!” Romulus boomed as he stepped forward. “I bring you the messenger sent me by the gods in a lightning bolt. She—”

  “Seize that man, Amulius!” Numitor cried. “And his brother too! They’re the leaders of the bandits who’ve been attacking my herdsmen!”

  “Seize me yourself, Numitor!” Remus said. He faced the king’s brother, holding his spear held upright with the point down. Though not directly threatening, Remus could rotate and throw his weapon in a fraction of a second.

  The crowd was already b
acking away. Amulius’ guards moved in front of the king and raised their shields. From their shelter he cried, “Stop this! Stop this right now!”

  The staffbearer leaned down and spoke in the king’s ear. Numitor’s guards raised their spears. Numitor touched their arms, restraining them.

  “Citizens of Alba!” the staffbearer said. “There is inviolability for all during the king’s petition time. Put down your weapons.”

  “Another time,” Numitor said. He hadn’t flinched during the confrontation, though he must have known as Herosilla did that Remus was strong enough to strike his target even if that meant the spear went through a guard first. “Let’s hear the messenger of the gods, shall we?”

  “King—” Romulus resumed, turning his own spear butt-down again.

  “I can speak for myself,” Herosilla said, stepping in front of Romulus. That brought her almost in contact with the king’s guards. She prodded the shepherd with her elbow to back him up. “King Amulius, I am Flavia Herosilla, a gentlewoman of…of another place.”

  ‘Rome’ would mean nothing. Saying she came from Cumae wouldn’t dispose the king to help her.

  Amulius leaned forward and tapped his guards to move them aside. He peered at Herosilla without expression.

  “Lightning struck an oak tree in the storm yesterday and she appeared,” Remus said. “We saw her, my brother and me, while we were herding your sheep.”

  “She’s proof of my high destiny,” Romulus put in. Nobody seemed to pay any attention. Even in Alba they’d probably heard the claims often enough.

  Amulius and his attendants bent their heads together for a moment whispering, their eyes on Herosilla. The king sat up again and said, “Are you claiming to be an oak dryad, then?”

  “Nothing of the sort!” Herosilla said. “I’m a gentlewoman, a noble of my own country. I—”

  Spectators laughed. Herosilla realized she was dressed for the most part as a peasant and was filthy from the journey besides.

  Amulius’ eyes narrowed in puzzlement. The staff-bearer whispered to him again. “Well, what is it you want from me, woman?” the king said.