Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (55 page)

“I wonder if you could tell me anything about the passage we’ll be following here,” Pandareus said, gesturing with his left hand. “Master Corylus and I arrived in a very different fashion, by stepping into a vision which a dwarf who had been Vergil created in a basin.”

“I don’t even know if there is a passage,” Hedia said. “My daughter’s idol, First, tells me that there is and said that it was opened by the demon which Master Melino controlled. Well, First hinted that.”

She smiled at a memory. “Melino insisted that his demon had neither personality nor emotions,” she said. “He was wrong about both; and in the end, he appears to have been wrong in believing that she was
his
demon.”

Because she was with a man, Hedia reflexively glanced down at herself. “I look a fright,” she said ruefully. “My maid will be horrified.”

“I trust you’ll be able to clean up before your husband sees you, Your Ladyship,” Pandareus said mildly.

Hedia laughed cheerfully. “Saxa won’t worry,” she said. “Saxa seems to think that nothing can really hurt me.”

“Your husband is a very wise man,” Pandareus said.

Hedia stared at him in surprise. She didn’t reply, but only a lifetime of control kept her from blurting, “Are you joking?”

“I realize that Lord Saxa has foibles,” Pandareus said. He was obviously serious. “Underneath them, though, he has remarkable understanding of character, understanding of the heart, if you’ll allow me to use a term which I believe is more accurate than a more scientific one would be.”

“I think you are correct, Master Pandareus,” Hedia said after she had taken the necessary time to consider the statement. “And I thank you for an observation which had escaped me.”

The two youths and Alphena had reached the temple. The arch of light was a solid ruby wall, no longer transparent or even translucent. It seemed to burn with internal light.

The girl turned in horrified realization. “The Daughters!” she said. “Where are they? I promised I’d defend them!”

“The Daughters are with the Egg,” chirped First. “Where would you expect them to be, worshiper?”

“The Egg hatched,” said Varus in what for him was a hard voice. He was frowning at the discourtesy to his sister. “Where are the Daughters now?”

“The Egg hatched and the Phoenix fed and lived its
saeclum,
” First said in a singsong. “And now the Daughters again guard the Egg of the Phoenix,
Lord.
”

The last word was obviously a sneer.

Varus had no expression for a moment. Then he chuckled and said, “Thank you for enlightening me, little godling.”

I’m not sure he learned that sort of response from me,
Hedia thought. She felt a surge of pride.
But he might have.

“Well, aren’t you going through?” First said. “There’s no point in building me a temple here. Though I suppose having lizards sacrificed to me is better than nothing.”

“I’m going through,” said Corylus, lifting his arm clear of his friend’s shoulders. He strode into the pane of light and vanished. Alphena and then Varus stepped after him.

Hedia’s eyes fell on the body of the Etruscan priest. There were bubbles of blood at his nostrils. As she focused in surprise, she saw his remaining eyelid quiver.

The sun will finish him off before long.

She thought of Melino, and thought of the little insect man that Melino had left half-legless in the Otherworld.

“Go on through,” Hedia said to Pandareus. “I’ll follow in a moment.”

The scholar lifted his chin in acknowledgment and vanished into the light. Another man might have protested the brusque order, but Pandareus seemed to have quite a good grasp of character himself.

Hedia walked back a few paces to the spear that an Ethiope had thrown down. It was like dragging a tree, but she didn’t have far to go.

Hedia set the point against the Etruscan’s chest and tilted the shaft into an upward angle. “Since you believe in gods,” she said, “go to whatever place they choose for you.”

She leaned forward, but the weapon’s own weight did most of the work. The needle-sharp flint crunched through bone and gristle; the eyelid ceased to flutter.

Hedia, wife of Gaius Alphenus Saxa, stepped into ruby light and through, to her companions and to the Waking World.

Read on for a preview of

Air and Darkness

David Drake

Available in November 2015 by Tom Doherty Associates

    
A “Tor Hardcover”    ISBN 978-0-7653-2081-0

Copyright © 2015 by David Drake

CHAPTER
I

“Help us, Mother Matuta,”
chanted Hedia as she danced sunwise in a circle with eleven women of the district. The priest Doclianus stood beside the altar in the center. It was of black local stones, crudely squared and laid without mortar—what you’d expect, forty miles from Carce and in the middle of nowhere.

“Help us, bringer of brightness! Help us, bringer of warmth!”

Hedia sniffed. Though the pre-dawn sky was light, it certainly hadn’t brought warmth.

The dance required that she turn around as she circled. Her long tunic was cinched up to free her legs, and she was barefoot.

She felt like a complete and utter fool. The way the woman immediately following in the circle—the wife of an estate manager—kept stepping on her with feet as horny as horse hooves tipped Hedia’s embarrassment very close to fury.

“Let no harm or danger, Mother, menace our people!”

The things I do to be a good mother,
Hedia thought. Not that she’d had any children herself—she had much better uses for her body than to ruin it with childbirth!—but her current husband, Gaius Alphenus Saxa, had a seventeen-year-old son, Gaius Alphenus Varus, and a daughter, Alphena, a year younger.

A daughter that age would have been a trial for any mother, let alone a stepmother of twenty-three like Hedia. Alphena was a tomboy who had been allowed to dictate to the rest of the household until Saxa married his young third wife.

Nobody
dictated to Hedia, and certainly not a slip of a girl who liked to dress up in gladiator’s armor and whack at a post with a weighted sword. There had been some heated exchanges between mother and daughter before Alphena learned that she wasn’t going to win by screaming threats anymore. Hedia was just as willing as her daughter to have a scene, and she’d been threatened too often by furious male lovers to worry about a girl with a taste for drama.

“Be satisfied with us, Mother of Brightness!”
Hedia chanted, and the stupid
cow
stepped on her foot again.

A sudden memory flashed before Hedia and dissolved her anger so thoroughly that she would have burst out laughing if she hadn’t caught herself. Laughter would have disrupted the ceremony as badly as if she had turned and slapped her clumsy neighbor.

I’ve been in similar circumstances while wearing a lot less,
Hedia thought.
But I’d been drinking and the men were drunk, so until the next morning none of us really noticed how many bruises we were accumulating.

Hedia wasn’t sure that she’d do it all again; the three years since that party hadn’t turned her into a Vestal Virgin, but she’d learned discrimination. Still, she was very glad for the memory on this chill June morning.

“Help us, Mother Matuta! Help us! Help us!”

After the third “Help us,” Hedia faced the altar and jumped in the air as the priest had told her to do. The other dancers carried out some variation of that. Some jumped sooner, some leaped forward instead of remaining in place as they were supposed to, and the estate manager’s wife outdid herself by tripping and pitching headfirst toward the altar.

It would serve her right if she knocked her few brains out!
Hedia thought; but that wasn’t true. Being clumsy and stupid wasn’t really worthy of execution. Not
quite.

The flutist who had been blowing time for the dance on a double pipe halted. He bowed to the crowd as though he were performing in the theater, as he generally did. Normally the timekeeper would have been a rustic clapping sticks together or perhaps blowing a panpipe. Hedia had hired Daphnis, the current toast of Carce, for the task.

Daphnis had agreed to perform because Hedia was the wife of a senator and the current Governor of Lusitania—where his duties were being carried out by a competent administrator who needed the money and didn’t mind traveling to the Atlantic edge of Iberia. Saxa, though one of the richest men in the Republic, was completely disinterested in the power his wealth might have given him. His wife, however, had a reputation for expecting people to do as she asked and for punishing those who chose to do otherwise.

The priest Doclianus, a former slave, dropped a pinch of frankincense into the fire on the altar. “Accept this gift from Lady Hedia and your other worshipers, Mother Matuta,” he said, speaking clearly but with a Celtic accent. “Bless us and our crops for the coming year.”

“Bless us, Mother!” the crowd mumbled, closing the ceremony.

Hedia let out her breath. Syra, her chief maid, ran to her ahead of a pair of male servants holding their mistress’ shoes. “Lean on me, Your Ladyship!” Syra said, stepping close. Hedia put an arm around her shoulders and lifted one foot at a time.

The men wiped Hedia’s feet with silken cloths before slipping the shoes on expertly. They were body servants brought to Polymartium for this purpose, not the sturdier men who escorted Lady Hedia through the streets of Carce as well as outside the city, lest any common person touch her.

The whole purpose of Hedia’s present visit to the country was to demonstrate that she was part of the ancient rustic religion of Carce.
The things I do as a mother’s duty!
she repeated silently.

Varus joined her, slipping his bronze stylus away into its loop on the notebook of waxed boards on which he had been jotting notes. He seemed an ordinary young man, handsome enough—Hedia always noticed a man’s looks—not an athlete, but not soft, either. A glance didn’t suggest how extremely learned Varus was despite his youth, nor that he was extremely intelligent.

“The reference to me,” Hedia said, “wasn’t part of the ceremony as Doclianus had explained it. I suppose he added it on the spur of the moment.”

“I’ve already made a note of the usage,” Varus said, tapping his notebook in acknowledgment. “From my reading, it appears that a blood sacrifice—a pigeon or a kid—would have been made in former times, but of course imported incense would have been impossibly expensive for rural districts like this. I don’t think the form of the offering matters in a rite of this sort, do you? As it might if the ceremony was for Mars as god of war.”

“I’ll bow to your expertise,” Hedia said drily. There were scholars who were qualified to discuss questions of that sort with Varus—his teacher, Pandareus of Athens, and his friend, Publius Corylus, among them; but as best Hedia could see, even they seemed to defer to her son when he spoke on a subject he had studied.

When she married Saxa Hedia had expected trouble with the daughter. It was a surprise that both the children’s mother and Saxa’s second wife, the mother’s sister, had ignored their responsibilities so completely—letting a noblewoman play at being a gladiator!—but it was nothing Hedia couldn’t handle.

Varus, however, had been completely outside Hedia’s experience. The boy wasn’t a drunk, a rake, or a mincing aesthete as so many of his age and station were. Hedia’s first husband, Gaius Calpurnius Latus, had been all three of those things and a nasty piece of work besides.

Whereas Varus was a philosopher, a pleasant enough fellow who preferred books to people. That was almost as unseemly for the son of a wealthy senator as Alphena’s sword fighting was. Philosophy tended to make people question the legitimacy of the government. The Emperor, who
was
that government, had every intention of dying in bed, because all those who had questioned his right to rule had been executed in prison.

Even worse, Varus had set his heart on becoming a great poet. Hedia was no judge of poetry—Homer and Vergil were simply names to her—but Varus himself was a very good judge, and he had embarrassed himself horribly with the disaster of his own public reading. Indeed, Hedia would have been worried that embarrassment might have led to suicide—Varus was a
very
serious youth—had not a magic disrupted the reading and the world itself.

In the aftermath, Varus had given up composing poetry and was instead compiling information on the ancient religion of Carce, an equally pointless exercise, in Hedia’s mind, but one he appeared to have a talent for. This shrine was on the land from which the Hedia family had sprung, and they had been the ceremony’s patron for centuries. Her only personal acquaintance with the rite had come when an aunt had brought her here as an eight-year-old.