Air and Darkness (38 page)

“Lenatus!” Alphena said. She began to back away. “Get them out of here
now
! Back to the city. I'll come last; I have the amulet, so I've got to.”

“Yes, lady,” Lenatus said, himself again. He shouted crisp orders that Alphena scarcely heard because she was so focused on Rupa and the creatures with her. They had retreated to the back porch, but they were all watching Alphena.

Pandareus touched Alphena's right elbow, guiding her backward so that she did not have to look around. Gentle pressure eased her around the end of the pool and down the path to the back gate by which they had entered.

Lenatus was waiting there. He laid the gate askew across the posts from which Minimus had wrenched it.

Alphena stood backward in the rear of the final wagon, holding the amulet in both hands until they had reached the main road again. Nothing followed them, but dread of what she had seen and been part of rode with Alphena all the way to her father's town house.

 

CHAPTER
XII

Corylus clung to the trunk of the palm tree with his heels and left arm as he trimmed dead fronds from the bottom of the crest. Phoenix, the tree nymph standing on the ground with Aura, giggled and said, “Ooh! That tickles!”

The sharp orichalc blade made the job easier than it would have been with the working edge of his issue dagger. Corylus could certainly have cut through the stems with the steel, but since he had only one hand, he would have had to chop against the trunk. He would've been careful not to do any real damage, but he would rather have slept on bare dirt than do it.

Of course, Phoenix might have liked it. Women are as different in their tastes as men are.

Grinning at the thought, Corylus sheathed his dagger and called, “I'm going to drop down, so stay clear!”

His feet were twenty feet above the ground, but he'd made longer jumps in the past. The palm's jagged bark provided a better grip for his bare feet than a smoother trunk would have done, but both his soles and the insides of his knees were bleeding from the climb.

The vines that twisted to the crown to dangle their flowers were too slender for him to climb instead of using the trunk itself. The flowers were still closed, though they would probably open when the sun was fully down.

“We're clear,” Aura said.

“I could catch you,” Phoenix said with another giggle. “I'm stronger than I look, you know.”

Corylus pushed himself away and dropped. He would rather have been facing outward in the direction he was likely to roll if he didn't land perfectly, but turning in the air wasn't worth the risk. Though he was as fit as he'd ever been, he was out of practice, and he weighed more than he had on the frontier when he jumped like this regularly.

He hit perfectly and his knees flexed to take the shock. He thought he was going to topple backward, but Aura was suddenly behind him and bracing his shoulders. She was quite strong.

Corylus straightened. His feet, calves, and thighs all ached for different reasons, but he hadn't broken any bones and his scrapes would heal as so many others had done over the years. He turned to the two sprites.

“Now what?” Phoenix said, standing hipshot.

Aura kept her hand on Corylus' right shoulder. She was giving the tree nymph a blank stare.

Corylus sliced another wedge of meat from the fallen coconut that he had opened before he climbed the tree. “Now,” he said firmly, “I sleep. I was wrung out from that business with Ampelos, but we couldn't hang around there. Another six hours hiking couldn't be helped, but I'm as tired now I've ever been. Good night, ladies.”

“
We
don't sleep,” Phoenix said. Corylus knew that if he had been looking at her instead of arranging the fronds into a mattress of sorts he would have seen her pout. That didn't matter.

“Good night,” he repeated. He was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

*   *   *

H
E WASN'T SURE
when the dreams came, perhaps nearly at once.

Someone gripped him by the shoulder and shook him awake. “No, Corylus,” a rasping voice said. “You're still asleep. I have things to show you.”

Corylus opened his eyes. A crude iron figure was bending over him: not a man in armor, but a man hammered out of iron.

I don't feel threatened,
Corylus realized.
I ought to, but I don't.

He sat up and saw that the world—well, the Otherworld—had vanished. The palm tree, the two sprites, and the open forest toward which Aura had been leading him were gone, replaced by a gray plain under a sky of paler gray.

The iron figure stepped back. He was bearded, or at least waves that were probably meant for a flowing beard had been forged on to his chin and upper chest. His arms and legs were all a piece with his torso when he was still, only separating when he moved.

“Who are you, sir?” said Corylus as he got up. The figure was no taller than he was, but it projected an enormous solidity.

“I am the other face of Janus,” the figure said. “I say ‘the other face' because I'm guiding Lady Alphena at present. But come.”

He turned and began stumping across the featureless plain. Corylus took two long strides to catch up. There didn't seem any reason to go in one direction or another in this place, but Corylus preferred company to being alone here.

“Where is Lady Alphena, ah, Janus?” he said.

“Not here,” said the iron man peevishly. “And that's not what I want to talk about.
This
is what I want to talk about.”

He pointed with his whole arm; the fingers were undifferentiated. A circle of the blank sky gleamed like a mirrored ball. It rotated into an image of a city of paper houses on the banks of a river. Figures were going about their business in the streets and plazas.

“Where is this?” Corylus said. “That is, if you please.”

“That is central Italy, as you would call it,” said Janus. “The Tyla have their own name, of course. In your world the river is the Tiber where it flows through Carce.”

When Corylus looked at the figures instead of simply accepting them as the human residents of an unfamiliar landscape, he saw that they were two-legged animals with fox-like faces and tan fur ranging sometimes toward golden. He didn't bother to try to keep his voice calm as he said, “Janus! Is that happening now?”

“There is no ‘now' where you and I are, Corylus,” said the iron man. “Look around you. If you mean, ‘Is this the reality of the Waking World from which you come?' then that depends. Now, come along.”

They walked farther across the gray limbo. Corylus glanced over his shoulder, but there was no longer a sign of the shining ball or the world of the Tyla he had seen through the ball.

Janus pointed again. The air darkened, then gleamed and rotated as it had the first time. Corylus felt his gut tighten before he looked, but this scene was one of tranquil pleasure. Men and women sprawled on lush grass or ambled over hills that he recognized as those of Carce. Crops grew though no one seemed to be tending them, and everywhere dangled bunches of ripe grapes.

“It's the Age of Saturn,” Corylus said, quirking a smile as he looked at his guide. “The Silver Age of the poets. I prefer this one to the one you showed me first, Janus.”

“It is the Age of Bacchus,” the iron man said. “It will be the Age of Bacchus for all time, in the place where this is happening. But come, Corylus, for there are other worlds still.”

“How many are you going to show me?” Corylus asked, following his guide. It didn't really matter, since Corylus had nothing else to do in this gray waste, but the iron man's peremptory commands were becoming irritating now that the novelty of the situation had worn off.

“One more will be enough, I think,” said Janus. He pointed, and as before the air responded with a vision.

Corylus squinted. He thought that something had gone wrong, that the image hadn't cleared yet. He saw only smeared black in the sphere.

“Janus, what is this?” he said. He didn't have his staff or dagger in this dream; he would have felt much better at this moment with the weight of either in his hands.

“This is the Waking World as it will be after the Blight has conquered,” said Janus. “This would be the bend of the Tiber, but there are no rivers and no seas and all the world is the same.”

“There are no…?” Corylus began. Then he said, “There is no life.”

“The Blight is alive,” Janus said.

The blackness moved, the way a pool of tar moves on a hot day.
It isn't alive. It can't be alive.

“It is not life as you know it,” Janus said. “It may become all the life there is in the Waking World.”

“
May
become!” Corylus said. “Will it or won't it? Is
that
—”

He pointed to the Blight.

“—real, Janus?”

The iron man lowered his arm; the vision became gray, then vanished. Janus made a harsh grating noise that made the hair rise on the back of Corylus' neck.

He's laughing!
And that was even worse.

“All the futures you have seen are real,” Janus said, pivoting his whole body to face Corylus. “Somewhere, sometime, on some chain of events. As for which one is real in your world, that depends.”

If Corylus had been speaking to a man, even a much bigger man, he would have hit him. The thought of hitting this crude mass of iron was absurd.

Corylus laughed and bowed to his guide.

You get a sense of humor on the frontier, especially with a unit like the Batavian Scouts. It isn't everybody's sense of humor.

“What does it depend on, Lord Janus?” Corylus said. “What does the fate of my world depend on?”

“You and your colleagues will determine the branch of reality which your world follows,” Janus said. “That is what I came to tell you.”

The iron lips twisted into a smile as distorted as every other aspect of the figure. “Now you may awaken.”

*   *   *

C
ORYLUS FELT SOMEONE SHAKING HIM,
but when his eyes opened the two sprites were chatting ten feet away. No one else was present.

It was daylight. A pair of tiny monkeys with diaphanous wings flitted through the palm fronds. The flowers hanging from tendrils of vine had closed again.

“He's awake,” said Phoenix. The sprites moved to him, Aura slightly in advance of the tree nymph.

“I slept well,” Corylus said. He thought that would be a lie—he didn't want to discuss what he had seen—but he found that his limbs felt supple and the aches and scrapes of the previous day's events had been smoothed away. “I want to start immediately for the cave.”

“Did you dream?” asked Phoenix.

“Why?” snapped Corylus. Then, realizing how defensive he sounded, he said, “I may have done, yes. But why do you ask?”

The palm sprite shrugged. “I was just curious,” she said. “Humans who sleep under the Black Lotus usually do, I've found.”

“Ah,” said Corylus as he laced his sandals. The soles of his feet were smooth and callused again. “Let's go on then, Aura.”

As they set off toward broken woodlands, he glanced over his shoulder. Phoenix waved hopefully, but Corylus was looking at the closed black flowers dangling from the palm crown.

*   *   *

A
LPHENA STOOD AT THE BASE
of the statue of Marsyas in the Forum, a location Pandareus had suggested. Her escort, which this morning included Lenatus wearing a cape, encircled her and the teacher, facing outward. There was nothing so unusual about the scene as to draw attention. Though the Forum was as crowded as usual, nobody was paying particular attention to the noble lady and her servants.

“Later in the day, prostitutes gather here,” Pandareus said, looking up at the bronze satyr with its right hand raised. “The girls lay their wreaths on the statue's head if they've had a successful night, but the attendants of the Basilica Aemilia—”

He nodded to the two-story building behind them.

“—usually take them away before court sessions open in the morning. I see that they missed one today, though.”

A garland of roses lay behind the statue. Alphena suspected that the flowers had been blown before last night; Corylus would probably be able to tell, since his father used huge numbers of flowers in his perfume business.

That's still another reason to wish Corylus were here,
she thought. That was the kind of joke he would make, but she found she couldn't smile at it now.

Taking a deep breath, Alphena got to the business that she wanted to discuss with the teacher in private. “Corylus, the straw doll last night I mean, said that the real Corylus was going to the Cave of Zagreus. What does that mean, please?”

Pandareus smiled wryly. “I will try to remember that I'm not lecturing to students,” he said, “but rather advising a colleague about how to find our missing associates. Briefly, I don't have any idea where the Cave of Zagreus might be. Zagreus in myth—or what I thought was myth—was the son of Zeus and Persephone and was born in the dragon-guarded cave where his mother was hidden to preserve her chastity. The dragons were unsuccessful in protecting that, obviously.”

Pandareus glanced at the statue again. “Followers of the Orphic Cult believe that Zagreus was a prefiguration of Bacchus,” he said. “I suppose that's why I thought of coming here for privacy, since Marsyas was the steward of Bacchus.”

Pandareus smiled wryly. “I can't help but be a pedant, I fear.”

“It was a good location, for whatever reason,” Alphena said. Listening to the teacher reminded her of her brother's similar twists of mind through all sorts of literary thickets.

She frowned when she saw what Pandareus was holding. He'd had it the whole morning, but she had been too lost in her own thoughts—her fears—to notice it.