by Tanith Lee
He strode from the room, down through the fort, and out by the Lamb Gate into the darkling town below.
How dark the streets were. Few stars, but for the Lion, no moon, he thought, till later, and she would be thin as a bone.
As a rule, the square below the fort, and the sloping road to and from its walls, were lit by burning brands. Tonight some had gone out, or been missed. While either side of the main path, few lights showed; most of the living premises were to the back, only the occasional tiny window, or signalling lamp in the doorway of a drinking shop. But the general sense he had of the town was of something muffled in a dense black veil.
Not many were ever abroad by night. The odd thief, probably, slinking through the back alleys, a stray dog or hunting cat or two on its own business. The general whores kept sensibly to their own group-houses, with guards on hand.
There was little sound either. It seemed to Corbo the night was pressing close and closer. Yet he moved freely in it, knowing, and able to decipher the way.
When he reached the corner where Yeila had her apartment above a baker’s, and he had walked up the brief familiar outer stair, he found her window rather better lighted.
Then he paused, and stood in darkness, looking in, as if into another mirror, this one of pale amber. And there she was, beautiful as some exotic creature not quite mortal: the cloud of her loose black hair with its hint of red-copper, her long-lidded, slightly slanted eyes of a silken fawn shade, in colour most like the shell of some fabulous tortoise … She was dressed in her finery, with combs and necklaces, bracelets and anklets; and about her in the small, oblong, almost luxurious room, things had been made ready to entertain a valued guest. As he had supposed, she was expecting him. The news would have been brought to her at sunset of his return to Arida.
The lowest, softest lamplight, perfumed no doubt with myrrh and olibanum, eddied in the chamber, like the gentle currents of a calm lake. Her skin, a little tawnier than his, so caressable, so smooth, bathed and depilated, creamed, scented for his hands, his limbs, the two organs of his hunger, mouth and loins. Even stood outside in the night, he felt his body swim and centre against hers, could taste her hair, the ripe berry she would leave for him to eat from her navel.
After watching her a while he noted, neither aggravated or amused, the slight impatience growing in her gestures. She had begun to stray about the room, picking up, tossing back the cushions of dyed Eastern silk into new and less studied patterns.
He was late. Almost moonrise. She must realise, maybe, the business of the fort had delayed him: the Madmen at Aquae.
But Corbo did not shift. He did not go to the side door. Did not even tap on the lattice that fragilely guarded the lower half of the window. He stood outside, in night, and night covered and hid him. If she looked outward – she had, and see, now and then did so again – plainly she did not perceive him there. His eyes had been filled with darkness. He was the dark. Invisible. In a minute more, or possibly rather longer – she had lain down by then on a couch, drinking the iced and honeyed wine, having kicked off her sandals with the serpent heads – Corbo had grasped that he would not, after all, be going in to visit her. He would not be giving her the magic mirror, even though he had taken, cleaned and brought it with him for that purpose.
As he turned away, it seemed to him he had grown twice his own not insignificant height. Tall as a house-roof, perhaps, his feet upon the dark, his eyes shining with the dark, darkness upon and within him.
He could see himself for a second, definite as he had seen Yeila in her room. And he was as the mirror had shown him, unknown, a stranger, a shadow.
When the man jumped him next, in the alley, Corbo was not startled.
What might have startled him, although he only thought this after, was his total preparedness and consequent reaction.
Corbo was, evidently, a trained soldier. He had been attacked countlessly and in myriad ways. It was not that. It was as if – as if he himself, somehow, enticed the attack. So that in the first flicker of impact, he was already springing about.
Without recourse to a weapon, let alone a verbal challenge, he flung the hefty man back and downward, smashing his head against the nearest flinty wall. Then Corbo, a legionary and officer, knelt on his groaning, palpitating body, and with his own sharp Roman teeth, took out the bastard’s throat.
The blood shone black as liquid night, as the River of the Underland. It tasted meat-thick, and salt, and sweet, familiar as wine or milk or oil. He gulped it down and down. And as he drank, every physical apparatus of his body shone within as if with cores of fire. His lungs expanded like the opened wings of an eagle, his ears opened to every littlest sound and whisper, his heart slowed to a strong and marvellous beat. Even his sexual blade unsheathed and rose up to its fullest stamina – yet not as if in actual desire, more as if it flexed itself in a rare, luxurious, undemanding pleasure of power and pride.
When he had finished drinking, and it did not take so long, Corbo was well aware he had emptied his assailant. There was not a drop of blood left in him, and his wilted corpse, dead as anything left sliced upon a battlefield, statically flopped on the stones and earth, with its huge, popping eyes still blindly glaring.
The slim moon was going over now, and cruelly sparkled them, but Corbo, unconcerned, walked quiet and steady on, up the incline to the Lamb Gate of the fort.
Old Sato let him in.
‘A peaceful night, sir,’ said Sato. ‘I reckon we must make the most of such, before the filthy Madmen come.’
And Corbo nodded, and gave him a coin, and went up, in the usual manner, to his pallet and sleep.
In the morning, Sato was apparently also waiting for Corbo below.
Corbo was puzzled by this. What did the old man want?
But the morning itself seemed puzzling, in the oddest fashion. The brightness of the sun, which appeared to flatten out the sky to an opaque pane; the annoying movement of sunbeams; it was as if he had never seen them before, or not properly. At first, mere light stung his eyes. Obviously he had drunk too much last night – except, when had that happened? He had meant to visit Yeila, he recalled, but for some reason had turned back. And there had been, had there not, some sort of altercation with a rough in an alley – which was itself curious enough. Not many men tried to insult or assault soldiers of the Legion, who were so dangerously able to defend themselves, and to hit back. And even in the casual wear of the fort, who did not know how a Roman legionary looked?
Dressed and tidied, Corbo went down to the lower hall where Sato, off duty now, was idling.
‘What is it?’
‘Leader Corbo, there’s a man at the Courtyard Gate. Says he must see you. He gave me quite a nice bribe, so I tell you this.’
Ever-honest Sato! Corbo smiled, and decided to go at once and learn what went on. Certainly he had no appetite for breakfast, felt even rather feverish as he crossed the lower court and the full sun swiped his body. Yet then the discomfort seemed to ebb away as confusingly as it had slammed into him.
By the time he reached the gate-yard all was well with Corbo. Though he was racking his brains as to what he had done – said – got involved in – the previous evening.
The instant he saw the man, who was leaning back in the deep shade of a wall, a fold of his ragged cloak pulled over his head as if to shield him, Corbo remembered.
He stopped dead. The world splintered in pieces and fell. As it had … last night. Through a hailstorm of flying visual shards and sparks he gaped at the attacker who, at moonrise in the alley, he had bested, battered, and drunk dead to the dregs.
Forty days later, inside the oasis of Erum, he and Slinger, rather than stand transfixed in terrified fury and disbelief, would sit eating dates and drinking a little harsh sour wine. The military strategy by then was established and, unusually, everybody of one consenting and eager mind. They were less men on the evening-dawn of battle than hounds, acute and able, and lacking all sentiment. Just starving enou
gh to be looking forward: to nightfall. Just human enough still to revel in their gods-given luck.
All that, however, was to come.
Those first few moments in the courtyard at Arida, Slinger and Corbo were neither comrades nor co-conspirators. Each man stared at the other and his world – quite literally visually in Corbo’s case – fell apart. Metamorphosis, as any god, or god’s victim, might tell you, was not always the happiest phase of a man’s life.
‘I – killed you,’ Corbo stated, finally. ‘Or I was mistaken.’
‘No,’ grumbled the man, who soon enough would say his name was Slinger. ‘You surely did. But you don’t, do you, puffed shit of a Roman officer, know how. Or –’ he broke off as Corbo, able to see once more, strode over to him and slapped him hard across the face.
Unusually, at such a blow, the man-who-was-Slinger did not drop on the ground. He swayed, righted himself, and said, ‘If I don’t geta drop of what you took off me last night, I shall puke. And I’ll make sure it’ll be all across your damned soldier-sandals.’
Corbo stared. ‘You want money? You jumped me to rob me. I took care of you. The jail is the place for you –’
‘Oh no it’s not. And you know it’s not. Wake up. I know what’s gone on. Are you, you educated lad, such a slosh-head?’
Corbo could not get his bearings. He stretched out his hand – to render another blow, or only to grab the fellow. But instead Slinger seized his wrist. Lowering his head, he bit deep into Corbo’s muscular wrist, before Corbo could even guess – or violently respond.
And another startlement then. Corbo did not resist. He stood there patiently with the stranger, in the shade of the wall. And when one of the sentries called down the wall-walk to him, the man being unable to discern details, and less in unease than mere nosiness, Corbo called back, off-handedly, ‘No matter, Gaius. Just fort business.’
A minute after, he pushed Slinger off him, and Slinger withdrew meekly enough, wiping his red mouth on one gruesome sleeve. Corbo looked at the wound of teeth. It was already shut. He suspected the marks he himself had scored in Slinger’s throat would leave more enduring evidence.
Had that hurt him? This bite had not hurt Corbo.
‘That’s better,’ mumbled Slinger. ‘But you owed me.’
‘Very well.’ Corbo surrendered. ‘What in the Name of Everlasting Jupiter is going on?’
It was insane, all of this. Madder than the antics of the Madmen. How bizarre that, as it transpired, in this at least there were answers.
Slinger’s head resembled an egg. The high brown bald smooth dome, and rounded face beneath, blending into the short tough neck, and so to the stocky, muscular body. All of him was tanned, hardened. A scar like a thin faint river-course traced the back of his skull. No leftover from the blow in the alley. But on his throat, as Corbo had predicted, and later beheld, that attack showed as a cicatrice upraised, blue-white and absolute as a piece of tribal scarring.
His race was mixed, and with some Roman, Slinger said. Why disbelieve that? It was true of half the civilised world, what was left of it. And his black eyes, narrow and humorous, had, he declared, eyesight to rival that of Apollo. Hence his former trade: a slinger with the ramshackle armies, also partly indigenous, partly Roman, that straggled now around the periphery of everywhere. There had been also one famous slinger, Slinger told Corbo later, on some other evening: David, who slew a giant with a single stone and so became a king. But Slinger himself was thrown on hard times. He had trekked to Arida, hoping to enlist with the battalions, as a messenger, even as a pot-boy, a scout. No-one had wanted him. And so, belly empty and heart soured, he had turned to crime. And who had he picked to rob? A new-made demon.
‘But your luck was in, my sir. You had no idea what went on. But I, I did and do. You found a mirror, you say, of real glass, sheer and unclouded, and it reflected you! By the God of the Wilderness – that mirror you have is a succubus. In you looked, and saw yourself reflected there. And the mirror in turn saw you – and it ate your soul! Yes, my friend, so sorry, but your soul is gone. It sucked it from you, with your likeness in the glass. Which is why you’ll never reflect in any surface ever again. As nor will I, since you despoiled me too of that soul that was mine.’
Corbo had sat by then with his head in his hands. Useless to deny, however crazed and stupid all this sounded, seemed. He knew, he knew that it was the truth. As if he had never realised before that he was a mortal man, and some sage had told him. Save now he was man no more. He was – this. This.
They were in a wine shop off the Street of Birds.
Nobody disturbed them.
Corbo, or his rank, was generally recognised, and Slinger – it must be – was therefore assumed to be some useful runner or spy, in deep converse with him.
‘One thing,’ Slinger added then, sprightly as a vindictive maiden Corbo had insulted. ‘Next time you need to fill up with fresh blood – and you will, if only to endure the sunlight – don’t drain your prey. Leave them alive, they’ll recover, or so the old texts say. Or, if you do kill, you must lop off the head, and maybe burn it, and the body, for good measure. No, don’t wince, my son. This lesson is for your own good. How many more of my type do you want, after all, elegant Leader, trotting after you for a drop of aqua vitae?’
Corbo thought, I have gone mad.
He knew he had not.
‘How do you know this?’ he said to the slinger.
‘Stories told to me in childhood. Long ago. As if, prophetically, to prepare me.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I don’t lie unless I have to. Now I don’t have to. I’ve always had an ability to see in images – I have an imagination. You, honoured Leader, less so. But now it will come. Don’t try to hide from it. Embrace it. Look, there’s the sun, all shiny as a shield! Have another drink. You’ve taken enough blood you can do what you want. Even screw a woman. If you like.’
‘You know so much,’ said Corbo bleakly. ‘How shall I die?’
‘That … Probably not for centuries. Unless one does to you as you should have to me – burn, decapitate – you’re more or less invulnerable. I am. Remember where I bit you for the blood — there’s not even a mark, is there? Look.’ Slyly Slinger took a thin vile knife from the lining of his belt – no doubt a tool of his robbery trade. Bending forward slightly, to conceal what he did from the general area, Slinger stuck it straight in the side of his neck. It was a stab that might well have killed him. But did not. Unblinking, he slid the knife out; no hint of blood – not even a bruise remained. Some tricky blade then? Corbo did not believe so. A dull yet fiery ache, not physical, thrummed in his gut, his heart and mind. He knew that Slinger was a part of his destiny, as he had been of Slinger’s. Slinger had spoken only facts. Nothing was ever without a reason. The gods knew their business. It was not only the evil who were chosen.
As he was about to report again to Julusarus the Commander, one of the runners of the fort brought Corbo a scrap of scented letter. It was actual parchment, if of a rather tattered kind. The writing was ornate and the syntax of not very accurate Latin. But then, by now, at such outposts as Arida, most of the use of the pure tongue of Rome had grown slovenly, slangy, inventive and eccentric, as well as being tangled with native phrases.
‘His Handmaid Yeila to her lord-master the Battalion Leader Marcus Scorpius Corbo:
‘Why are you not come? Are you of sick? Are you full tired of me? Me beg you will reassure I otherwise. Or if I hear not, then expect no more shred of I, ever.
‘In sorrows, Yeila’
He had saved her life by not going in to her. Or robbed her of eternity.
He sighed, a man beset by troubles, and climbed the stone stair to the Commander’s room.
The pilum was of course on the wall, the saddle, the dented sword. The frustrated anger was still there also. It hung like a cloud of fizzing flies, ready to sting.
Six Battalion Captains stood in the room with Julusarus, as he outlined in vast
and weighty detail the activities of the Vecordia, their seemingly irrevocable possession of Aquaelis. They had hung Roman men, merchants, soldiers, to scorch and die on the outer walls. They had paved the square with dead children. None who was not of their race and faith, chosen of their gods, might live. Even the mules and the dogs they had had away with. Even the birds of the air.
‘And in number, mark this now, for here is the final estimate, they exceed seven thousand men. In the past when we stood high and fine, a far smaller number of legionaries could have dealt with them. As few even as three thousand.
This we know from the history of Rome herself. But now we lack such numbers, and even our machines, our catapults and engines of siege. Even our shields are bent from shape. Like that sword there, of my father, old Austus Vario, may he feast in the Undercountry. And what full number of soldiers can we anyway muster, and not leave this arid town of ours unguarded? Why, at top pitch, twelve-hundred men.’ Julusarus slammed his wine cup down on the table. The wine spilled, an inadvertent offering to some uncaring deity – Bacchus, Mars, Mercury, Callidus –
The other men in the room murmured, softly growled.
‘Nevertheless, sir, we must go. It must be seen to.’
‘And that’s precisely it, Fero. Such as we are now can’t see to it. Can we? The Madmen will destroy our force, easy as spit, and then come prowling here to wipe this place too off the map. For them there must be a world that contains only them, and their non-human, honourless, bowel-dipped kind.’
Arguments rang like gongs then. Men swore, oaths impossible. Hopefully the gods, who ignored the inadvertent wine, ignored also these.
The room was very hot. As if a storm brewed there in it. It did. But to no effect.