From the Heart of Darkness (22 page)

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The doorkeeper had difficulty slamming the door against the gust of wind that followed Vettius into the anteroom. Moist air from the baths within condensed to bead the decorated tiles and rime the soldier's cape of black bearskin. He wore the bear's head as a cowl. The beast's glass eyes usually glared out above Vettius' own; now they too were frosted and the doorkeeper, turning, shuddered at the look of blank agony they gave him.

Vettius shrugged off the cape and stamped his muddy boots on the floor. The doorkeeper sighed inwardly and picked up his twig broom. The damned man had been stomping through the muck like a common soldier instead of riding decently in a litter as befit his rank. The slave said nothing aloud as he swept, though; the legate had a reputation for violence and he already wore a dark glower this afternoon.

Walking through the door of the changing room, Vettius tossed his cape to one of the obsequious attendants and began to unlace his boots. While he sat on a bench and stripped off his thick woolen leggings, the other attendant looked delicately at the miry leather and asked with faint disdain, “Will you have these cleaned while you bathe, sir?”

“Dis, why should I?” the soldier snarled. “I've got to wear them out of here, don't I?”

The attendant started at his tone. Vettius chuckled at the man's fear and threw the filthy leggings in his face. Laying both his tunics on the bench, he surveyed the now apprehensive slaves and asked, “Either of you know where Dama is?”

“The Legate Vettius?” called a voice from the inner hallway. A third attendant poked his head into the changing room. “Sir? If you will follow me.…”

The attendant's sandles slapped nervously down the hallway past steam rooms on the right and the wall of the great pool on the left. Tiles of glaucous gray covered the floors and most of the walls, set off by horizontal bands of mosaic. A craftsman of Naisso who had never been to the coast had inset octopuses and dolphins cavorting on a bright green sea. The civilization I protect, Vettius thought disgustedly. The reason I bow to fat fools.

At the corner of the hall the attendant stopped and opened one of the right-hand doors. Steam puffed out. Vettius peered in with his hand on the jamb to keep from slipping on the slick tile. Through the hot fog he could make out the figure of the small man who lay on one of the benches.

“Dama?” the soldier called uncertainly.

“Come on in, Lucius,” invited the other. He rose to his elbow and the light on his head of tight blond curls identified him. “How did it go?”

“The interrogation was fine,” Vettius answered; but his tone was savage, that of a man used to taking out his frustrations in slaughter and very close to the point of doing so again. “We didn't need much persuasion to get the prisoner to tell us everything he knew about the giant. It came from a tent village called Torgu, and he says the shaman running the place has ten more just like it.”

“If one, why not eleven?” Dama mused. “But I didn't think the Sarmatians ever made a shaman chief.”

“I didn't either,” Vettius agreed darkly, “and that wasn't the last strange thing he told us about this wizard, this Hydaspes. He was at Torgu when the family we ambushed got there late in the fall, nervous as the Emperor's taster and fussing around the village to look over each new arrival. He wasn't claiming much authority, either. Then about two months ago a horseman rode in from the east. Our prisoner didn't talk with the fellow but he saw him give a package the size of his fist to Hydaspes. That was what the wizard had been waiting for. He laughed and capered all the way to his tent and didn't come out again for a week. When he did, he started giving orders like a king. Since now he had a nine-foot giant behind him, everyone obeyed. In back of Hydaspes' tent there was a long trench in the frozen ground and a lot of dirt was missing. Nobody the prisoner knew hung about behind there to see if the wizard really was digging up giants there night after night—they were all scared to death by then.”

“So a one-time hedge wizard gets a giant bodyguard,” the merchant said softly, “and he unites a tribe under him. If he can do that, he may just as easily become king of the whole nation. What would happen, Lucius, if the Sarmatians got a real king, a real leader who stopped their squabbling and sent them across the Danube together?”

The white fear that had been shimmering around the edges of Vettius' mind broke through again and tensed all his muscles. “A century ago the Persians unified Mesopotamia against us,” he said. “Constant fighting. Some victories, more losses. But we could accept that on one frontier—it's a big empire. On two at the same time.… I can't say what would happen.”

“We'd better deal with Hydaspes soon,” Dama summarized flatly, “or Hydaspes will deal with us. Have you told Celsus?”

“Oh, I told the Count,” Vettius snapped, “but he didn't believe me—and besides, he was too busy reaming me out for leading the ambush myself. It was undignified for a legate he said.”

Dama crowed, trying to imagine Vettius too dignified for a fight.

“That's the sort he is,” the soldier agreed with a rueful smile. “He expects me to keep my cut-throats in line without dirtying my boots. A popular attitude this side of the river, it seems.”

Knuckles slammed on the steam-room door. Both men looked up sharply.

“Sirs, quickly!” the attendant hissed from outside.

Dama threw the door open for the frightened attendant. “Sirs,” the slave explained, “the Count has come for the legate Vettius. I misdirected him, thinking you might want to prepare, but he'll be here any moment.”

“I'll put on a tunic and meet him in the changing room,” the soldier decided. “I've no desire to be arrested in the nude.”

The frightened changing room attendants had disappeared into the far reaches of the building, leaving the friends to pull on their linen tunics undisturbed. Celsus burst in on them without ceremony, followed by two of his runners. He's not here to charge me after all, Vettius thought, not without at least a squad of troops. Though Mithra knew, his wishes would have supported a treason indictment.

“Where have you been?” the official stormed. His round face was almost the color of his toga's broad maroon hem.

“Right here in the bath, your excellency,” Vettius replied without deference.

“Word just came by heliograph,” the count sputtered. “There were ten attacks last night,
ten!
Impregnable monsters leading them—Punicum, Novae, Frasuli, Anarti—posts wiped out!”

“I told you there were other attacks planned,” the soldier replied calmly. “None of them were in my sector. I told you why that was too.”

“But you lied when you said you killed a monster, didn't you?” accused Celsus, stamping his foot. “At Novae they hit one with a catapult and the bolt only bounced off!”

“Then they didn't hit him squarely,” Vettius retorted. “The armor isn't that heavy. And I told you, I shot mine through the viewslit in his helmet.”

The count motioned his runners away. Noticing Dama for the first time he screamed, “Get out! Get out!”

The merchant bowed and exited behind the runners. He stood near the door.

“Listen,” Celsus whispered, plucking at the soldier's sleeve to bring his ear lower, “you've got to do something about the giants. It'll look bad if these raids continue.”

“Fine,” Vettius said in surprise. “Give me my regiment and the Fifth Macedonian, and some cavalry—say the Old Germans. I'll level Torgu and everyone in it.”

“Oh no,” his pudgy superior gasped, “not so much. The Emperor will hear about it and the gods know what he'll think. Oh, no—fifty men, that was enough before.”

“Are you—” Vettius began, then rephrased his thought. “This isn't an ambush for one family, your excellency. This is disposing of a powerful chief and maybe a thousand of his followers, a hundred miles into Sarmatia. I might as well go alone as with fifty men.”

“Fifty men,” Celsus repeated. Then, beaming as if he were making a promise, he added, “You'll manage, I'm sure.”

*   *   *

The two riders were within a few miles of Torgu before they were noticed.

“I shouldn't have let you come,” Vettius grumbled to his companion. “Either I should have gone myself or else marched my regiment in and told Celsus to bugger himself.”

Dama smiled. “You don't have any curiosity, Lucius. You only see the job to be done. Myself, I want to know where a nine-foot giant comes from.”

They eyed the sprawling herd of black cattle which were finding some unimaginable pasturage beneath the snow crust. Perhaps they were stripping bark from the brush that scarred the landscape with its black rigidity. A cow scented the unfamiliar horses approaching it. The animal blatted and scrambled to its feet, splashing dung behind it. When it had bustled twenty feet away, the cow regained enough composure to turn and stare at the riders, focusing the ripple of disturbance that moved sluggishly through other bovine minds. Face after drooling, vacant face rotated toward them; after long moments, even the distant herdsman looked up from where he huddled over his fire in the lee of a hill.

Dama's chest grew tight. There was still another moment's silence while the Sarmatian made up his mind that there really were Romans riding toward Torgu through his herd. When at last he grasped that fact, he leaped to his feet yipping his amazement. For an instant he crouched bowlegged, waiting for a hostile move. When the intruders ignored him, the Sarmatian scampered to his horse and lashed it into a startled gallop for home.

The merchant chewed at his cheeks, trying to work saliva into a mouth that had gone dry when he realized they would be noticed. He'd known they were going to meet Sarmatians: that was the whole purpose of what they were doing. But now it was too late to back out. “About time we got an escort,” he said with false bravado. “I'm surprised the Sarmatians don't patrol more carefully.”

“Why should they?” Vettius snorted. “They know they're safe over here so long as a brainless scut like Celsus is in charge of the border.”

They jogged beyond the last of the cattle. Without the Sarmatian's presence the beasts were slowly drifting away from the trampled area where they had been herded. If they wandered far they would be loose at night when the wolves hunted.

“Cows,” Vettius muttered. “It's getting hard to find men, my friend.”

Half a mile away on the top of the next rolling hill an armored horseman reined up in a spatter of snow. He turned his head and gave a series of short yelps that carried over the plain like bugle calls. Moments later a full score of lancers topped the brow of the hill and pounded down toward the interlopers.

“I think we'll wait here,” the soldier remarked.

“Sure, give them a sitting target,” Dama agreed with a tense smile.

Seconds short of slaughter, the leading Sarmatian raised his lance. The rest of the troop followed his signal. The whole group swept around Vettius and Dama to halt in neighing, skidding chaos. One horse lost its footing and spilled its rider on the snow with a clatter of weapons. Cursing, the disgruntled Sarmatian lurched toward the Romans with his short, crooked sword out. From behind Dama, the leader barked a denial and laid his lance in front of the man. The merchant breathed deeply but did not relax his grip on the queerly shaped crossbow resting on his saddle until the glowering Sarmatian had remounted.

The leader rode alongside Vettius and looked up at the soldier on his taller horse. “You come with us to Torgu,” he ordered in passable Greek.

“That's right,” Vettius agreed in Sarmatian. “We're going to Torgu to see Hydaspes.”

There was a murmur from the Sarmatians. One of them leaned forward to shake an amulet bag in the soldier's face, gabbling something too swiftly to be understood.

The leader had frowned when Vettius spoke. He snapped another order and kicked his horse forward. Romans and Sarmatians together jogged up the hill, toward the offal and frozen muck of Torgu.

On the bank of a nameless, icebound stream stood the village's central hall and only real building. Dama glanced at it as they rode past. Its roughly squared logs were gray and streaked with odd splits along the twisted grain. Any caulking there might have been in the seams had fallen out over the years. The sides rose to a flaring roof of scummed thatch, open under the eaves to emit smoke and the stink of packed bodies. The hall would have seemed crude in the most stagnant backwaters of the Empire; the merchant could scarcely believe that a people to whom it was the height of civilization could be a threat.

Around the timber structure sprawled the nomad wagons in filthy confusion. Their sloping canopies were shingled with cow droppings set out to dry in the wan sunlight before being burned for fuel. The light soot that had settled out of thousands of cooking fires permeated the camp with an unclean, sweetish odor. Nothing in the village but the untethered horses watching the patrol return looked cared for.

Long lances had been butted into the ground beside each wagon. As he stared back at the flat gazes directed at him by idle Sarmatians, Dama realized what was wrong with the scene. Normally, only a handful of each family group would have been armored lancers. The rest would be horse archers, able to afford only a bow and padded linen protection. Most of their escort hung cased bows from their saddles, but all bore the lance and most wore scale mail.

“Lucius,” the merchant whispered in Latin, “are all of these nobles?”

“You noticed that,” Vettius replied approvingly. “No, you can see from their looks that almost all of them were just herdsmen recently. Somebody made them his retainers, paid for their equipment and their keep.”

“Hydaspes?” the merchant queried.

“I guess. He must have more personal retainers than the king, then.”