Night & Demons (25 page)

The bandits surged to meet them. A youngster with matted hair and a wool tunic too dirty to show its original color swung a club at Vettius. It boomed dully on his shield, and the bandit snarled in fury. Vettius struck back with practiced grace, felling the club wielder with an overarm chop, then stabbing another opponent over his own back as he recovered his blade. Dropping the reins, he smashed his shield down into the face of a third who was hacking at his thigh below his studded leather apron. Her rough cloak fell away from her torso as she pitched backwards.

Dama had ridden down one of the bandits. He was trading furious strokes with a second, a purple-garbed patriarch with a sword, when a third man crawled under his horse’s belly and stabbed upward with a fire-hardened spear. The beast screamed in agony and threw the Cappadocian into the gully. He struggled upright barely in time to block the blow of a human thighbone used as a bludgeon, then thrust his assailant through the neck.

“Get Harpago’s horse!” Vettius shouted as he cut through the melee to relieve his friend.

Dama caught at the beast’s reins. A bandit, his mouth smeared with gore, clubbed him across the shoulders and he dropped them again. Stunned, he staggered into the horse. Before his opponent could raise his weapon for another blow, Vettius had slashed through his spine. Drops of blood sailed off the tip of the soldier’s sword as each blow arced home.

Dama threw himself onto the saddle. As he struggled to swing a leg astride, the purple-clad swordsman who had engaged him earlier slipped behind Vettius’s horse and cut at the blond merchant’s face. Vettius wheeled expertly and lopped off the bandit’s right arm.

The handful of surviving bandits fell back in mewling horror. Then a baby bawled from the darkness as his mother tore him from her breast and dropped him to the ground. The woodline crackled with frantic movement. Savage forms rushed from the black pines—children scarcely able to walk and feral women. In the hush their bare feet scratched on the stone. Their men, braced by their numbers, moved forward purposefully.

All looked bestially alike.

Vettius took the reeling bandit chief by the hair and thrust his blade against his bony throat. The ghoulish horde moaned in baffled rage, but hesitated.

Then one of the women snarled deep in her throat and rushed at the riders alone. Dama, reeling in his saddle, slashed at her. She ducked under his sword and raked the merchant’s leg with teeth and horny nails. Dama hacked awkwardly at her back. The woman cried shrilly each time the heavy blade struck her, but only at the fourth blow did she sag to the pavement.

“Let’s get out of here!” Dama cried, gesturing at the clot of savage forms. He could face their crude weapons, but the bloodlust in their eyes was terrifying.

Vettius was chopping at the bandit’s neck with short strokes. At last the spine parted and the soldier howled again, flaunting his trophy as he kicked his horse into a gallop.

As they rounded the next bend, Dama glanced over his shoulder. Harpago’s body was again covered by writhing men. Or things shaped like men.

A mile down the road they halted for a moment, looking to their wounds and gulping air. The merchant hung his head low to clear it. His face was still pale when he straightened.

Vettius had dropped his trophy into a saddlebag, so that he could grip the reins again with his left hand. He continued to rest the spatha on his saddlebow instead of sheathing it.

“We’d better be going,” he said curtly.

The eastern sky was perceptibly brighter when their foam-spattered horses staggered into another stretch of dismantled roadway. The riders’ skin crawled as they forced their way between the files of trees, but the passage was without incident. Beyond lay Aurelia, a huddle of mean houses surrounded by the tents of the merchants come for the fair.

Light bobbed as a watchman raised his lantern toward them.
“
You!” he called, “Where did you come from?”

“South of here,” Vettius replied bleakly.

“Gods,” the watchman began, “nobody’s come that way in—” The riders had come within the circle of lantern light and his startled eyes took in their torn clothes and bloody weapons. “Gods!” he blurted again, “Then the story
is
true.”

“What story?” Dama croaked, his gaze fixed on the watchman. Absently, he wiped his sword on his ruined tunic.

“There was a family of bandits—cannibals, really—living on that stretch—”

“You knew of that and did nothing?” Vettius roared, his face reddening with fury. “By the blood of the Bull, I’ll have another head for this!”

“No!” the watchman squealed, cringing from the upraised sword.
“
I tell you it’s been fifty years! For a long time they killed everybody they attacked, so it went on for years and years without anyone knowing what was happening. But when somebody got away, the governor brought in a squadron of cavalry. He crucified them all up and down the road and left them hanging there to rot.”

Vettius shook his head in frustration. “But they’re still there!” he insisted.

The watchman gulped.
“
That’s what my grandfather said. That’s why they had to close that road fifty years ago. Because they were still there—even though all of them were dead.”

“Lucius,” the merchant said softly. He had opened his friend’s saddlebag. A moment later the severed head thumped to the ground.

Rosy light reflected from eyes that were suddenly vacant sockets. Skin blackened, sloughed, and disappeared. The skull remained, grinning at some secret jest the dead might understand.

LORD OF THE DEPTHS

“Lord of the Depths” is a more or less conscious copy of “Queen of the Black Coast,” one of the best of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. The details of my story grew out of classical models, however.

I have a Latin edition of Pliny’s Natural History, and during my honeymoon I read chunks of it. One interesting bit was that Alexander the Great sent a squadron under Nearchos from the Indus to Babylon by sea while Alexander himself marched back overland with his army. Pliny noted that en route the sailors found very large, aggressive squid. I assumed that Nearchos had been on an exploring voyage with a few ships.

The other classical influence was Juvenal’s 14th satire. In it he rails against the mad lust for wealth that causes ships’ captains to load their vessels to the gunwales, risking death for a fraction more profit.

Juvenal is a brilliant and evocative writer. Critics always talk about his bitterness and invective, but I find far more interesting his remarkable ability to draw character with a line or two. I hope I’ve been able to learn something from his craftsmanship in general, but the scene just mentioned certainly shaped the present story.

I didn’t specifically reference Alexander in “Lord of the Depths,” and I deliberately didn’t learn any more about Nearchos’s voyage than what I’d found in Pliny’s passing mention in a discussion of squids. I didn’t want to sully my fiction with reality. (If this seems very silly to you, it seems even sillier to me now. I can’t imagine why I felt that way, but I know that I did.)

In fact Nearchos was in command of a fleet of thousands of ships which were intended to supply Alexander and the army on the march. They failed to do so because the Greeks didn’t learn about the South Asian monsoon until some two centuries later. I could have turned the real event into a story; but it would’ve been very different.

I wrote “Lord of the Depths” during my first year in law school and sent it to Mr. Derleth. He requested that I cut a scene which he said didn’t fit: the viewpoint characters are chased by a giant lizard which is killed by an arrow from the catapult on the deck of one of the vessels. (Mr. Derleth wasn’t exactly wrong—the scene was unnecessary. I don’t think it hurt the story, though. He liked to fiddle with things.) When I made that change, he bought the story for $50, the most he ever paid me.

This was my second sale. Those of you who’ve already read “Denkirch” will note that I made an entirely different set of mistakes in this one. I like to think of that as the story of my life: an unending quest to find new fashions in which to screw up.

* * *

T
here were five of the ships. I, deck watch on the leader, the kerkouros
Flyer,
turned from the invariance of sea and moonlit jungle to glance back along our wake. Behind us stretched our sisters
Foresight
and
Crane,
dragged like us over a thousand leagues of plain and desert to reach their element at last in the Great River and thence to the sea. For all their mishandling, the light craft were far more seaworthy than the trieres
Service
or the
Dominator,
a great fiver wallowing far astern. Built on the River, the larger ships had suffered for lack of knowledgeable craftsmen and seasoned wood. Both had leaked from the start and the
Dominator
had warped to the point that a dozen crewmen choked in the bilges to keep the level down.

We were running by night, for the heat of the days was too great to live, much less row, on the glancing oven of the water. At dawn we would beach our craft, cook what had been caught during the night or foraged on the shore, and pray to find fresh water—all but a handful of our casks had been of green wood also. Then we would seek shade and rest, cursing all the while the madness of our leader to order the voyage, and our own to obey him.

The breeze was gentle and we scudded before it, easily distancing the heavier vessels though their sides crawled with oars. Their captains had formed the crews into shifts to work some of the oars at all times in a vain effort to keep abreast of their nimbler kinsmen, but only in rough seas where weight told and we needs must reduce sail did they succeed. The larger ships had been a mistake. Whereas we had crews of only eighteen and the beaks stripped off for ease on the long portage, the decked ships had been sent off in full fighting trim. The
Dominator
bore three hundred men, artillery fore and aft, and a bronze ram of ten talents, cast from our leader’s spoils and fit only to warp the seams worse on such a voyage as ours.

Far back from the silvery darkness came the triple soughing of the
Dominator
’s command horn: Close up! It meant, as always, reef sails and await the sluggards. I sighed in vexation, for we were many months from home as was and with the penteres leaking like the pails of the Belides the situation could only get worse. A flash from starboard and shore recalled my attention as I leaned over to roust Hipporion, our bosun; the moon was glinting from something smooth in the jungle, metal or polished marble.

“Lay your dream-wench aside, Hylas,” I said, for with such a nickname we mocked the grizzled old bosun. “There’s something to be seen.”

He only grunted as he awoke, but his eye followed my gesture right enough.

“I suppose we’re to bugger ourselves while the
Fornicator
closes up again?” he growled, and at my nod roared, “Off and on, ladies, it’s time to pretend we’re sailors again. Begging your pardon, sir.”

This last to Antiopas, a brave man and our captain, but a better horseman than sailor. He snapped awake, pawing for the long cavalry sword now stowed below as too awkward even for dignity. “What’s the matter, Hylas?” he complained. “What couldn’t a detail handle that we all must be up for?”

“Xenias has found something of interest, sir,” the bosun answered and pointed toward the shore. More was visible now, stonework and what seemed the remains of a pier jutting from the jungle.

“Would it be a difficult landfall?” Antiopas questioned.

“With a pier for hope and a leadsman for certainty, I don’t see any problem,” the bosun decided, and I took the lead while he shouted orders to the rest of the crew. The
Foresight,
following or perhaps anticipating our action, trailed us in while the
Crane
’s less adventurous captain held position offshore.

I swore as I retrieved the third cast and we stood but a bow-shot from the shore.

“What bottom?” Hylas queried.

“None at all,” I answered, well aware of the fool I sounded. The bosun, surprised, took the line without comment and cast it himself. The twenty fathoms shot through his hands butter smooth. “Horns of Tanit, there
is
no bottom!” he snarled. “Take it gentle,” he warned the four men on sweeps. “We’ve a strange coast here and I’ve no desire to learn of further oddities the hard way.”

I continued to sound as we crawled toward the shore. Finally, within a ship’s length of the pier, I found bottom at sixty feet. There was no rise to speak of after that, even when the crumbling stone was alongside.

The climate had long since devoured the bollards, but an ornamental stone bench at the end of the pier and parallel to the shore was still sturdy enough to hold us by a couple turns of hawser. The pier was almost the only bare stone visible. The buildings, not bathed in salt, were completely overgrown save where a massive pediment had been pried loose by questing tendrils recently enough to leave the substructure bare. Without that there would have been little to catch my eye, for the pier was low among the waves.

“I’m going to take out a party,” the captain remarked to Hylas. “You’d better be ready to get us out of here fast if we must.”

Antiopas took five others with him, carrying javelins and staying within sight of the ship for the most part. The
Foresight
docked across from us but her captain kept all on board to wait for Antiopas to report. The arms chests had been opened and that, more than the ruins themselves, made us uneasy. Just as the
Dominator
signaled again one of the men on shore picked something from the ground and called to his mates. The six of them gathered but distance and the uncertain light hid the object they were discussing. Then they began to jog back in evident excitement. “Sir,” called Hylas as the captain approached, “the flagship is signaling.”

“Call ’em in!”Antiopas shouted back. “We’re not leaving here till we’ve done a mite more searching.”

He raised his hands and the heavy torque he carried shone softly in the moonlight. Colors were washed out, but the perfect lack of corrosion left no doubt of what the ornament was made. If a single piece of jewelry contained several pounds of gold, a further search was indeed worthwhile.