by Tanith Lee
Provisional decisions lay in tottering stacks, and the meeting disbanded.
Julusarus noted that one man had remained in the shadow by the wall with the sword.
‘Well, Marcus Corbo. Here we are. We shall have to meet and argue again. Worse than the Senate. What did you want from me?’
‘Hear me out, sir.’
‘If I must.’
Corbo spoke. Had the water-clock in the mess been working, it would have recorded an equivalent of seven minutes only.
The Commander began in a bored and weary pose, altered to disbelief, and close to mockery. Then to a moment of rage. Then to an utter silence.
‘You’ve lost your bloody mind, soldier.’
‘Perhaps. But the risk to our forces here will be negligible. You’ll lose only, at most, 16, 17 men.’
‘Mad. I said. What’s got into you? Your pretty whore bitten you and given you the foaming sickness?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Sleep on it, Marcus. Don’t think I don’t value your courage and your nerve. Your resolution. This is the stuff on which the spines of our legions were built. But – by Martis, by the Jupitrexium –’
‘Sir, I’ve checked. These men I’ve selected from my Battalion are unattached to any great obligation. None has living parents, or is married, none has children even, or none he will recognise. Laurus does have a dog, but we can find the dog a kind secondary home. And who knows, maybe Laurus will come back.’
‘You’re mad. I said. And all this because of this scout or whatever he is from Aquae – what’s he called? Slinger? And he knows some hidden way into the oasis town? Well. He may be a rogue. A liar, a villain in Madmen pay.’
‘No, sir. He and I, we have a bond – blood brothers, sir. It goes – way back. I’d trust him, and he me. I only need now the authority of your agreement, and your seal.’
‘Madness.’
‘Then, Commander, may such madness as mine rule, until the other alien lunacy is crushed and rinsed from the earth.’
Corbo called the men to him after the sun had set. He did it in an established way, from which each individual would guess, as with certain previous other assemblies, matters must be kept secret. They arrived expectantly, gathering in the gathering dark, motes and men forming a single entity. He spoke to each alone.
‘It’s a mission that may well mean death, as you understand; that will, I promise, include a sort of death. Can you trust me in this?’
All but one assured him of agreement. The one who hesitated had just taken up with a woman of Arida, and might be going to have with her, so Corbo learned, a child. That seemed fair enough. Corbo dismissed him civilly, blameless, if with a mild iron warning not to speak of the unknown venture to any other.
It would be 16 men then, and Slinger, and Corbo himself. In total 18.
If any of this living dream was real, that would be plenty.
He let them into his cell also one by one, now in the shade of a moonless night that had, by then, absorbed everything it could, only the small yellow star of the oil lamp fluttering.
‘You will pledge to this task for the honour of the Empire, and the last fair Glory of Rome?’
‘I will.’
‘Look down,’ he said, ‘into the light.’
One by one, they looked.
And yes, the moon, no longer in heaven, lay on the table.
Each man started, stared, gazed – transfixed, pinned. Some swore. Some only audibly breathed.
‘What – is it?’
‘A mirror.’
‘I saw a mirror before, once – at Hiersol’a – it was silver with gold. I could see myself – unnerved me a minute. But not like this – it’s glass. They burn the desert sand, don’t, they, to make glass. He’s – is he me? I? So clear – but now – where am I? What – what – has happened to me?’
‘You are yet yourself,’ he said. Truth and lie, like all things. ‘You are more yourself now than ever before.’
And reaching across the table, he placed his wrist before the man, each man, one by one. There was a tiny wound, just ready-made, in the vein. A thread of scarlet. ‘This has to be a pact of blood.’
Most instantly bent their heads, like thirsty beasts to water. The instinct was very strong, as he recollected. A few delayed for a moment. Laurus was one of these; but then, when he bent his head also to suck up the vital ichor, his teeth ground in Corbo’s flesh, more savage than Corbo had expected.
After this, Slinger every time stepped out of the shadows. He told the men, the 16 of the new Blood Crow Battalion, the rules and gambits of survival – sunlight, other sustenance – the partaking of, and leaving of friends, healthy, alive and unaware of quite what had been done. Conversely, the tidy utter slaying of enemies – drained to empty wine-sacks, decapitated, burned to black cinders that made – not glass, as the dusts of the desert could – but lifeless ashes.
That last lesson they would require most of all.
The remainder of the night was filled by hidden and sudden things.
Next day they were out, flinching a little at the first sunlight, but adjusting quite swiftly, as Corbo had – all strong, youngish men, in their prime, able to support their transformation, ready for action as ever. Laurus’s dog, guard and companion, had taken up residence, it seemed, with a local butcher. The dog and the butcher were old friends, the dog had patrolled the premises before. The dog would get fat, Laurus concluded sadly.
They readied their horses and their weapons. Provisions were brought to them; water, wine, and – at Corbo’s particular order – raw bloody hanks of fresh meat, redder than sunrise or even the red of the legionary cloaks and helmet crests.
Scarlet in the dawn, riding away southward. Bloody Rome on the march.
Fourteen days:
During their initial advance, retracing their earlier returning fortwards steps on the patrol, passing again now even the wrecked well where the mirror had hidden under the sand. Not much unusual presented itself this time. The occasional desert village lay undisturbed, if anxious, as before. Only in one place had the people abruptly fled their settlement, too scared to stay, fearing the Madmen would arrive. The nearly eyeless brown dwellings stood blindly, the lintels of doorways already fallen. The people had poured sand into their own well – again, a form of sacrilege. But then, if they expected the nightmare Vecordia to want the water, why not destroy its source?
Beyond the fifteenth day, more abandoned villages appeared. In one, the leavers had even burned the grove of fruit trees they had cultivated, to deny them to the foe.
Following that, they passed no more inhabited or once-inhabited places. There were sand-blows too, in one of which Corbo’s Battalion was caught. After it, they hunted for fresh game. The animal blood was equally welcome with the meat. But their stamina, to a man, was so improved on its already healthy status, they seemed able to withstand most things; ordinary hunger, thirst, the gentle insistent longing for blood, like a vague craving for something sweet …
By the time they reached the oasis of Erum – untouched and opulent – confidence was high. They were an elite. And unlike the Vecordia, a verifiable one. Erum was their justified pre-battle reward.
In the dusk, Corbo oversaw the concealment of a cook-fire and the roasting there of a wild goat.
Then he and Slinger drew aside, as earlier now and then they had, under the tall palms.
Here the water-course burst from the rock, with a soft pattering. From here too, some thirty miles off along the sand plains, it was just possible to make out, side lit by the settling sun, the walls of Aquaelis. You could tell nothing from that.
Or everything. The town still stood. The devils still had it. They were smug and safe, gathering their crazed, merciless, unhuman minds and bodies for a further journeying, slaughter and hell.
Corbo turned his father’s seal-ring on his finger absently as he always had. He had sent Yeila a note of regret, with a pretty brooch from the market, of two silver doves, the bi
rds of Venus, upon a blue enamel flower.
Slinger spoke quietly. ‘Soon, we’ll take the town. Once the full night comes.’
‘You know a hidden way in, you’ve said.’
‘Yes, I do. Sheer luck, I heard of it the single day I stayed there, almost a year ago. These things happen. The gods mean them to happen. So I think. Or none of it makes sense.’
‘So you still believe in gods, Slinger, even after what’s gone on.’
‘Yes. What’s happened with us is clever and heartless. That’d be the gods. Who else? But I think too – for some reason maybe I owed you my death, Marcus. But you in turn owed me my life.’
‘Why?’
‘The gods know. They’ll tell us one day. Or not.’
Corbo looked about at his chosen men, the 16 he had murdered and given immortality. He felt no remorse. He was a soldier, had always been chasing after the legions since the age of five or six. You used the weapons to hand. And, it was as if he had done it before, somehow, this riotous act, in some previous era. The men were eating the roasted goat, and the sugary dates that grew in the oasis; drinking wine.
He turned the ring again. Stiff and close, grown long since into his flesh, the knuckle, with the years. Yet somehow it had slid from him, leading him back to the wrecked well to search until he found the succubus of mirror in the sand. Yes. Fate – the gods? – had done all this.
The sky lowered itself, turning bronze and lilac. Faint as a sigh, a hint of light haloed the distant walls of Aquaelis. Torches, he decided it must be, to show so far.
The Battalion made polite offerings to Father Jupiter and Brother Mars. And to Chance. The horses would be tethered here, enough water and grazing, shade, safe for this while. The men would lope to the town. They would make good speed, now.
Black silk covered the world in a praetorium tent.
The rhythmic water of the fountain sounded – Stay – No, you must hurry on – Come back – bright and loud as music.
Stars in the sky looked near as beads on a ceiling.
Am I yet a human man? Or is that all truly gone from me, with my soul, into the mirror? Some other day or night an hour will come, I know, and I shall die. There will be nothing then left of me to go down into the grey Underland. I shall be a smoke that blows about the sky, one more reason for darkness, one more hollowness against which the stars can flaunt themselves. But not yet. Not yet. First there is the now.
It was like a snake, the twisting crawl-space of a passage rising up into and through the town wall. It began about a quarter mile from the town, humped under the sand among some stony monument or other, long since smashed down to boulders by the Madmen, who would never tolerate, it seemed, any evidence or honour of gods other than their own. Slinger said he had overheard the story of the secret entrance from a thief who had once utilised it. In the beginning, very likely, it had been an integral part of the town’s barricades and defences, perhaps then openly marked as an outpost, with gate and guards. Now it was like climbing and slithering through an intestine – through the snake-bowel. Then: an exit. It was only able to be recognised by a slender crack, going up and up and up. A fissure in the wall. From the other, inner town side, no doubt it seemed like nothing more than one extra, insignificant fault in the stone.
Slinger had said he knew what must be done.
He did.
Crouching over the glimmering crack, he felt after something, then shoved it very hard.
The wall gave. No, it was a door, of sorts.
The men filed out, able to straighten as they did so, one by one, 16, 18 of them, stepping onto the platform beyond – a wall-walk, unmistakably Roman in construction, solid and lasting. Small hollow towers went up along and all around; watchtowers not, now, seeming in proper use. The torches, or whatever had puffed off that faint previous powder of illumination, were out. They had a curfew here, it seemed, on light.
Against the nearest tower, about 13 feet from him, Corbo began to discern a shape. It had appeared to be part of the masonry. It was not. Like some mechanical apparatus of war, its head was turning toward them. He was reminded of a theatre, an actor masked and seeming soulless. Soulless. As were they – he and his men?
Wound in black cloth, body and head covered, and face, yet the eyes still gleamed, two wet, white-black slits. The eyes had fixed on him. Out of its unseen, perhaps non-existent mouth, burst a thin and eerie howl. Up flew its robe-sleeved arm – a blade flashed darkest white. The being surged toward them, singing its warbling battle-song, and Corbo ran to meet it. Too late. Slinger was already there. The curved foreign knife sliced downward, passed directly through Slinger’s shoulder. Slinger gave off a loud raw noise. It was not the note of agony or death but a sort of utter filthy joy. Next second, unharmed, Slinger had seized the throat of his foe. Blood spurted blacker than the moonless sky, thicket than lust. The body of the Madman, flailing – arms, legs, coverings, as if it had as many appendages as a spider — cascaded over. It was gurgling now, like a half-blocked water-vent. Then all its roiling and uproar ended. Slinger, a leopard, lay over it, drinking deep.
Next instant the entire upper walk erupted into veiled and knife-armed live automata. Corbo’s Battalion of Blood made little answering sound as they leaped and thrust among them. Not a single Roman weapon was employed. What requirement for sword or dagger? Their teeth were diamond, were steel and fire. Their throats and guts were wide and clear and empty and hungry. As Corbo slaked his initial thirst, he felt two or three of the curved blades hacked into him, back and ribs. He paid them no heed. He had no need to. And one feast partaken of, insatiable, he rose up, the power in him like a black and singing sunrise. Pleasure and glory – had ever anything matched this ecstasy? He had known battle-fever before – but even that was not like this. In that, you were lost. But in this you were All, and It – You.
The alien blades fell from him.
Everywhere about, as he sprang and grasped, lifted and met and felled and fed, he saw the others of his band. Eighteen men. They seemed a million.
Curious. A clot of Madmen had now clutched him. Blind and stupid, they could learn nothing, it seemed. He shook them away, easy as large unwieldy pieces of dirt. Then, turning to each assailant as he spun, Corbo sank his teeth into the creature’s throat, through veil and sinew and bone. Where he did not immediately drain them – less urgent now, the want of blood – he left them choking and bleeding to death. But he would take no chances. Every one of these monsters should be rendered bloodless soon, and the heads lopped from their bodies. There was after all one of the ugly knives still lodged in his arm. He pulled it out and thrust it, almost playfully – Is this toy yours? – straight through the enveloped face of a Madman. Corbo laughed softly with a nearly childish amusement as he wrung the gouts of life from the cleft face, lapping it like milk.
How simple this was. The true order of the Earth.
An orgy, the divine battle-feast, went on and on.
His men were laughing too, sheer happiness. A festival.
Down from the wall, they expanded their remit into the town. Through the streets, across the two squares of Aquaelis, whose fine forum and statues of Jupiter and Juno had been hammered into rubble, around the lanes, the alleys, through doors into shops, apartments in five-storey blocks, or houses lying behind the street. Not a human being was to be found. Only the mechanised Vecordia, these now only creeping out, when discovered some even kneeling and wailing to their selective gods, or only in abstract panic. Whatever their credo, the result the same.
So many black sacks with dead-fish eyes. The town carpeted now with veiled corpses.
No others were left there, it seemed. No Roman or Romanised local. The Madmen had destroyed all those. In certain areas there were evidential remains, pegged out or hung up, or slung in heaps. You saw how they had been made to die. The Roman men and women, the native friends of Rome. Their children. Their animals.
At the very end, whenever that was, the end of that long, intensive
night, a few last Madmen were discovered hiding in a drain beneath the stones of a street. They gazed dumbly now at what came in to find them.
The night was blood. Of course, at last, the tell-tale crimson streak must also appear in the east. The sun too had taken her bath in the cornucopia.
How still the town. Yet even so, the few last chores to tend to. They were soldiers. You did not stint, or, as they said in the markets of the Mother of Cities, ‘spoil the stew for a pinch of salt.’
Salt was the sword at last. Clean, it struck off the thousands of heads. Out of their coverings the faces sometimes rolled. Mindless and soulless faces. These, the succubae. These, the walking dead.
As the day rose up on her brief incarnadine wings, the soldiers made their bonfire in the central space of the ruined forum. And as the torsos and limbs and separated heads were burned, stinking as only human flesh truly can when cooked, the Blood Battalion of the Crow and the Mirror toasted their own gods in the last of the wine, and the first bright draughts of Eternity.
One recounting has it, some eight thousand men of the Vecordia were slain at Aquaelis that night. Slain by 18 Roman legionaries, a rogue squadron from Arida.
But such a victory could not be possible.
Even to Romans.
Three days later, a watcher, were there one, could see the smoke yet rising from the immolation in the forum. And this from some miles farther to the south.
Corbo and his men had not turned back toward Arida. They had spared no one of their number as messenger. The news would reach the fort eventually; somehow news always did, the worst, the best.
They had not discussed future plans, he and the Blood Battalion. They had slept a lot, mostly by day, among the dunes, and at the next rough oasis, some ten miles on from the town.
That night, they sat and drank water, ate a little dried meat and fruit. Watched the stars that, in turn, seemed always to be watching them.
‘Are they eyes?’ Laurus had murmured, just the previous evening.