Out of the Waters (10 page)

Don't bother me, and don't try to badger me into rushing back to the house so that my escort of servants can eat and dice and generally relax in the luxury of a rich man's town house.

Hedia grinned at Varus in delight. She may have been the only person present—besides the servants—who understood what he had done. Alphena didn't have to maneuver that way, because the staff was too frightened of her temper to volunteer
anything
, least of all a suggestion, to her.

Pandareus cocked his head to the side as he spoke, looking oddly birdlike. When lecturing or delivering speeches to his class, he had a forceful, direct delivery which made him seem both authoritative and harsh.

“Why is your man Pulto displeased at Hedia visiting his wife?” he asked Corylus.

“Pulto doesn't like magic,” Corylus said. “He believes Anna is a witch and—begging your pardon, Varus?”

Varus shrugged. He said, “You won't offend my family honor by speaking the truth, Publius.”

“Well,” Corylus said, “he believes Lady Hedia and her daughter are visiting Anna to get a charm or spell or something. And by implication, I just told him I approve of what Anna will be asked to do.”

“I don't believe in witchcraft,” Varus mused aloud. He smiled ruefully at his companions. “Given the things that I've seen and therefore accept—and the things that I've done, for that matter—that is clearly irrational behavior on my part.”

Pandareus shrugged. “Believing in elephants, Lord Varus,” he said, “doesn't require that one also believe in dragons.”

Varus laughed. “Unfortunately, master,” he said, “I've seen a dragon also. And you were with me when it happened, the first time at least. And I very much fear—”

Still smiling—Pandareus' indirect joke had broken the uncomfortable mood—he looked toward the stage where mere minutes ago he had seen a monster ripping apart an island.

“—that if I spent much time around Pulto's wife, I would find myself believing in witchcraft as well. Which would distress me, as I consider such beliefs to be infallible proof that the holder is a superstitious yokel.”

Pandareus spoke. Varus heard the sound but not the words. At the moment laughter relaxed him, his grip on present reality loosened.

Varus was drifting into the mist in which he met the Sibyl. His companions continued talking, apparently unaware of what was happening to him.

He was climbing a trail through jagged mountains. The encircling cloud was too thick for him to see much beyond the length of his arm, but the sun scattered rainbows around the edges of outcrops.

Varus trudged on. He was never sure of time when he was in this place—or in this state, for a better word. Something large moved in the bright blur; coming toward him … and it was past, crossing the path ahead of him. It walked on two legs, but even bent over—as it was—it stood twice his height and taller than any man. Its long hair rustled, and it had the sharp, dry odor of fresh sawdust.

Can I die here?
Varus thought. Then, smiling like the philosopher he wished to be,
Does it matter if I do?

He came out into sunlight so bright that in the waking world, the contrast should have made him blink and sneeze. The Sibyl waited at the edge of a precipice which plunged off in the opposite direction. Every wrinkle of her face, every fold of her soft gray garment, was sharply visible. She had thrown back her hood so that she stood in a halo of her thick silver hair.

“Greetings, Sibyl!” Varus said. He bowed, then straightened. “Why did you call me here again?”

“Greetings, Lord Varus,” the old woman said. “Who am I to summon you? You are real, Lord Magician, and I am only the thing your powers have created.”

Varus looked out toward a great city far below. It was a moment before he recognized Carce, lying along the Tiber River and spreading in all directions from the villages which were its genesis.

Instead of the familiar Alban Hills to the southeast, the horizon lived and crawled forward on myriad legs. Tentacles flayed the ground to rock as bare as this on which the Sibyl stood. Typhon, growing with each innumerable step, advanced on Carce.

“Sibyl…?” Varus said, sick at what he was seeing.
How long before that vision is the reality which my neighbors see loom above Carce's ancient walls?
“What am I to do? Where do we look for the answer, my friends and I?”

“I am a tool that your mind uses, Lord Varus,” the old woman said. Her tone was that of a kindly mother to a child who demands to know the secrets of life. “I exist only through your powers. You know the answer to your questions.”

“I know nothing!” Varus said. “I know—”

Immeasurable and inexorable, Typhon crashed across villas and the tombs on the roads leading out of the city. Varus' view shifted from the danger to a house on the slopes of the Palatine Hill, facing the Citadel and great temples on the Capitoline across the Forum. It was still luxurious, though it had been built to the standards of an older, less grandiose, time.

That's the house of the Sempronii Tardi,
Varus thought. He had visited it a year past to read the manuscripts of three plays of Ennius which, as best he could determine, existed nowhere else in the city.

“You know all that I know, Lord Varus,” said the Sibyl, smiling. Then she lifted her face and cackled to the heavens. “
There is a dear land, a nurturer to men, which lies in the plain. The Nile forms all its boundaries, flowing
—”

Varus was in the Tribunal with his startled friends. Corylus held his shoulders; Pandareus had taken his right hand in both of his own.

In a strained voice, Varus heard himself shout, “—by Libya and Ethiopia!”

“It's all right, Gaius,” Corylus was saying. “Here, lean against the railing and we'll get a chair back up here for you.”

Varus shook his head, partly to scatter the drifting tendrils of cloud.

“No,” he said. He hacked to clear his throat, then resumed in a firm voice and standing straight, “I'm quite all right.”

The humor of what he had just said struck him, so he asked, “Well, I'm all right now. But thank you for holding me, Publius, because mentally I was in a different place for a time.”

“You were speaking of Egypt,” Pandareus said. He considered for a moment with his head cocked sideways, then said, “A voice spoke which didn't sound at all like yours but came from your throat. Was speaking of Egypt. What bearing does Egypt have on our situation?”

“I don't know,” Varus said. He shook his head ruefully, remembering the way he had said the same thing to the Sibyl in his … his dream? His waking reverie?

He considered the whole dream, frowned, and said, “I saw—I focused on, I mean; I saw all Carce. But I focused on the town house of Commissioner Tardus. I suppose I might have been thinking about him because of the strangers who accompanied him in the theater.”

“It's equally probable,” said Corylus, “that the thing that disturbed you in the theater is the same thing that you saw, saw or sensed or whatever, in the vision you just experienced. That's what you did, isn't it? Have a vision?”

Varus bobbed his chin up in agreement. “Yes,” he said. “I saw Typhon starting to destroy Carce. It was much bigger than what we all saw here in the theater, but it was clearly the same creature. Then I was looking at Tardus' house.”

“If we assume that the connection with Egypt is important…,” Pandareus said. He was in professorial mode again; he turned his right palm outward to forestall the objections to his logic.

“Then the crypt to the god Sarapis beneath the house of the Sempronii Tardi might explain the cause.”

“But, master?” said Corylus. “Private temples to Serapis—”

Varus noted that his friend pronounced the god's name in Latin fashion while Pandareus had used Greek.

“—were closed by order of the Senate more than eighty years ago. Were they not?”

Pandareus chuckled. “Very good, my legalistic friend,” he said. “But my understanding—purely as a scholar, of course—is that the Senator Sempronius Tardus of the day chose discretion rather than to strictly obey to the order closing private chapels. His successors have continued to exercise discretion, since closing the chapel now would call attention to the past.”

He shrugged. “I'm told this, you understand—” probably by Atilius Priscus, but Pandareus would never betray his source “—but it's entirely a private matter. The aristocracy of Carce do not open their temples—or their family secrets—to curious Greeklings, however interested in philosophy and religion.”

Varus sucked in his lips to wet them. “I think,” he said, “that Commissioner Tardus would open his house to the authority of a consul.”

Pandareus and Corylus both looked at him sharply. “Will your father help us in this?” the teacher said.

“I think he might do so at my request,” said Varus.

He smiled. Looked at in the correct way, everything is political. He said, “And I'm quite sure he will obey his wife in the matter. Judging from Hedia's actions, she is just as concerned about this business as the three of us are.”

 

CHAPTER
IV

Pulto was part of the rear guard, chatting in German with a footman who had been born in the quadrilateral between the Upper Rhine and Upper Danube, but Corylus walked beside Varus in the middle of the procession. His expression must have caught his friend's eye in the torches which the linkmen carried.

Varus looked concerned and asked, “Is something wrong, Publius?”

“Nothing at all,” Corylus said. He gestured to the twenty-odd servants ahead of them—as many followed—and explained, “In the cantonments, a procession like this at night would be the Camp Police, is all. So I guess part of me is expecting some drunk to fling a wine bottle at us—or a chamber pot, to tell the truth.”

“We're far more civilized here in Carce,” Varus said, relaxing into a smile. “A poor man might be set on and robbed, but we of the better classes travel in perfect ease and security. Unless we slip on the paving stones and fall on our backs, as I've been known to do.”

Two linkmen and two servants with cudgels led the entourage, singing about a girlfriend who had run off with a trapeze artist and now performed with him. This version was rather tamer than what Corylus had heard sung on the Danube, where the lyrics dwelt on the endowments of the acrobat which had lured the errant girlfriend away.

The song was to warn away footpads, drunks, and any poor citizen who happened to be sharing Orbian Street with them tonight and didn't want a crack on the head. Corylus had learned quickly that in Carce, rich men's escorts had a rough-and-ready way with potential dangers to those they were protecting.

“Manetho?” Varus called to the steward walking a pace ahead of his master. “We'll go in through the back garden. I expect my father's clients will be clogging the front entrance for hours yet after the—”

He paused. Corylus knew why, but the servants probably thought nothing of it.

“—the success, that is, of his mime.”

“As your lordship wishes,” Manetho said. He trotted forward, though the men in front had probably heard the command without it needing to be relayed.

Pandareus had insisted on going home on his own to his tiny apartment off the Sacred Way. He'd insisted he would be in no danger because he had many years of dodging trouble at night in Carce.

No doubt that was true, but Corylus still wished that Varus had succeeded in getting their teacher to accept a couple husky servants to convey him. Marmots had a great deal of experience foraging on grassy alpine meadows, but eagles still caught their dinners.

One of the linkmen waited at the mouth of the alley as a marker, while his partner and the cudgel-bearers turned down it. From the near distance ahead a deep voice boomed, “Who's there?”

“Keep your tunic on, Maximus!” the linkman said.

“Both of you pipe down!” said Manetho. “Let's not embarrass the consul in his own home, shall we? He'll be meeting in his office with the leading men of the Republic right now.”

“That isn't how I would have described my father's clients,” Varus said, leaning close to Corylus. Even so his voice was barely audible. “But I suppose it sounds better than ‘feckless parasites'.”

“Well, I'm sure they're the leading feckless parasites,” Corylus whispered back. That he dared make such a joke to a noble showed—showed Corylus himself—how much he trusted Varus and considered him to be a friend.
He's a man I'd take across the Rhine,
Corylus thought, putting it in army terms.

The alley was narrow; the procession slowed to a crawl while Maximus, the nighttime doorkeeper, pulled open the back gate. He had been waiting in the alley with his lantern instead of watching the portal from inside.

Pulto slipped—more likely, pushed—through the intervening servants to join his master. If Varus hadn't been present he would probably have asked Corylus what he intended to do now, but under the circumstances he merely grunted, “Sir,” politely.

The line was moving again. The footmen who'd been in front were blocking the other end of the alley against rampaging housebreakers or other equally unlikely threats.

Most of what a rich man's servants did was either make-work or simply sit on their hands. There were too many of them for it to be any other way. Saxa had well over two hundred servants here in his town house: he could have rebuilt the whole structure with a smaller crew.

“Unless you want me with you, Varus…?” Corylus said, raising an eyebrow.

“No, I think it's best if I see Father alone,” Varus said. “I can take him away from his clients, but to bring my friend with me would be insulting. I'm perfectly willing to insult them if I need to, but I don't see the necessity in this case. Would you care to wait in the gymnasium until I have an answer?”