Out of the Waters (13 page)

He's with Hedia.

He's having sex with Hedia in the garden!

Alphena blushed, then staggered as the
stupidity
of her thought struck her. Oh, Hedia's reputation was deserved: she'd as much as told Alphena so when they were fighting for their lives and very souls. As for Corylus, he was a man, which meant he was a pig; and there was no doubt that he found Hedia attractive. The way his eyes followed her whenever she was in sight proved it!

But Hedia didn't rub her husband's nose in things he would be expected to object to. She was a lady, and Alphena had good reason to know that she loved Saxa—in her way.

Just as Corylus was a gentleman, if not an aristocrat. He would turn up his nose at actions which the perfumed wastrels of Hedia's social set would have performed without thinking twice.

Alphena swallowed, then forced her lips into a smile. “Well, I won't disturb him, then,” she said. “I will have some of that wine, though. But mix mine with two parts water, if you will.”

“At once, your ladyship!” Lenatus said. He and Pulto spun toward the wine jar so swiftly that they almost collided. Without a signal Alphena could see, Pulto took the other cup as well as his own and Lenatus snatched an empty one from a cupboard intended for bath paraphernalia.

Alphena expected the trainer to lift wine from the jar with a narrow, deep-bellied dipper, a wine thief. Instead he hooked his thumb in the handle, then lifted the jar on his elbow and forearm to pour. Returning the wine to its corner, he lifted the water jar in the same fashion and brought the level up to a proper distance below the rim of the cup.

“Your ladyship,” he said, offering it to her.

Alphena was trembling from all the emotions that she
hadn't
given in to over the past short while. “Sit down, both of you,” she said. With that for an excuse, she quickly seated herself on the end of a bench intended for swordsmen tightening the straps of their sandals before they began their exercises.

When she had entered the gymnasium, the men had been beside one another on the raised stone slab into which posts were set when the grounds were used for fencing practice. They sat down as directed, but Alphena noticed that they had moved as far from her bench as they could get.

Pulto gave a little cough and swigged wine. Avoiding eye contact by looking into his cup, he said, “Master Corylus has spoken well of your judgment, your ladyship.”

Alphena froze.
What does he mean by that?

She smiled. At first she was forcing the corners of her lips upward, but the humor of the situation struck her.

“Thank you, Master Pulto,” she said. “Though if you mean that I can recognize circumstances in which a proper young lady knows better than to walk in on a male acquaintance, I can only say that Mother hasn't yet made
that
proper a young lady of me.”

Lenatus choked, blowing a spray of wine out his nose. Pulto simply froze.

“Fortunately…,” Alphena continued. She enjoyed the feeling of being in control of a situation without screaming at people. “Master Corylus
is
a proper gentleman. Despite my own failings, the worst would not have happened.”

Mother really has taught me things. As soon as I was willing to learn them.

“But let's change the subject,” Alphena continued calmly, looking at the old soldiers over the rim of her wine cup. “What do you—both of you—think about what happened in the theater this afternoon?”

If she had asked that question bluntly when she walked into the gymnasium, they would have mumbled and lied. They were off balance now, because she'd delicately hinted at a bawdy joke that they understood very well. They would
much
rather talk frankly with a senator's daughter about magic and sorcerers than to join her in a discussion of sexual shenanigans.

“Your ladyship…,” Lenatus said. He wasn't mumbling, but his voice was low. “I wasn't … I mean, I was here in the house when all that happened.”

“Yes,” said Alphena crisply; no one could mistake her tone for agreement. “But you were talking to your friend about it, were you not?”

Pulto croaked a laugh. He emptied his cup and said, “This is dry work, your ladyship. Do ye mind if I have some more of this good wine while we talk?”

“Not at all,” said Alphena. Her nose was too snubby for her to look down at it with aristocratic hauteur, but just trying made her grin; which was perhaps an equally good way to get information out of these veterans. “Here, you can top off mine—”

She held the cup out.

“—too. Don't worry about more water.”

“It's going to be hard times if his lordship needs me escorting him when he goes out to a show,” Lenatus said wryly. He offered his cup when Pulto had filled Alphena's. “Mind you, I'd prefer that to what's going on now. Whatever it is.”

“Right,” said Pulto, sitting down again. “You always know where you're at in a fight.”

“Of course,” Lenatus offered, “where you're at may be so deep in the soup that you'll never see the surface again.”

They were … not so much treating Alphena as one of them as talking as if she wasn't present. Which was good enough.

“I hate for my wife to be mixed up in it,” Pulto said, taking half the cupful without lowering it from his lips. He looked at Alphena. “You know about that, right, your ladyship? That Lady Hedia is going to see my Anna tomorrow?”

“Yes,” said Alphena. “I'll be accompanying my mother.”

After a pause for thought, she went on, “I think in these times that we all should help to the degree we can. Help the Republic, I mean.”

Lenatus looked at her without expression, then took a silent swallow of wine. Alphena had the uncomfortable suspicion that if she hadn't been his employer's noble daughter, he would have spat onto the dirt.

“I guess Lenatus and me know a bit about serving the Republic, your ladyship,” Pulto said. He sipped wine and swizzled it around his mouth before letting it go down. “And Anna too. She was there on the frontier as sure as me and the Old Man and the boy. Who isn't such a boy now, is he?”

“I'm sorry, Pulto,” Alphena said, feeling her cheeks burn. Ordinarily she would have reacted by shrieking angrily at the cause of her embarrassment, but she
wasn't
going to do that again. Or anyway, she wasn't going to do that this time. “I'm uncomfortable about it too, that's all.”

She cleared her throat. “But what
was
it you saw?” she said. “What did you think it was?”

Looking at Lenatus, she said, “What did you just tell your friend Lenatus it was?”

The trainer barked out a laugh. “I can answer that, your ladyship,” he said. “Pulto here told me he had no bloody idea of what he'd just seen except it scared the living crap out of him, and could I maybe find a jar of wine.”

He lifted the cup in his left hand; he'd emptied it again. “Which I did, begging your pardon, but I'll pay it back to your father out of my salary.”

Alphena waved the thought away brusquely. This was as proper a use for her father's wine as any in the Republic.

“Mistress?” said Pulto. He grimaced and corrected himself, saying “Your ladyship, I mean. You were there. What did
you
see? If a fellow can ask, I mean.”

Alphena looked at them. At last she said, “I saw a man wearing a breechclout, with his hair in two braids. He was as old as you are, but he looked very fit.”

When she heard the words come out of her mouth, she paused in renewed embarrassment. “I didn't mean—” she blurted. She stopped because she didn't know what to say that wouldn't make the insult worse.

“Go on, your ladyship,” said Pulto calmly. He clapped his belly with his cupped left hand. “I live in this flesh, so you don't need to tell me I'm not the hard young cockerel I was when first I enlisted.”

“Well, anyway,” said Alphena, “that's what I saw: a man. And he was destroying what looked like a city, only it was so tiny.”

She closed her eyes and forced herself to add, “Just for an instant I thought I saw tentacles and snakes like Syra said. Like a lot of other people thought, I suppose. But
I
saw a man.”

“I saw the tentacles and all,” Pulto said, speaking to his empty cup. “Only then I didn't think it was real, so it didn't bother me.”

He looked up with a lopsided grin. “It wasn't till I saw how your brother and the Greek professor were taking it that I started to get worried,” he said. “And then Lady Hedia coming to see my Anna for charms—because that's what it is, I know from how she asked it—well, that pissed in the wine for sure.”

“But do you know what it means?” Alphena asked. She suddenly felt very young. She wanted these two hard men to protect her, but she didn't know from what. “You've been in, well, battles! What's going to happen now?”

The men looked at one another. Lenatus unexpectedly chuckled. “You remember Stellio?” he said to his friend. Both of them laughed.

Alphena felt her anger rise despite trying very hard to choke it down. Pulto read her reaction correctly. “Your ladyship,” he said, “what we mean is that nobody can tell you what's going to happen in a battle. Even if that's what this is, though I don't much see it.”

“Stellio was a lazy scut, even for a Sicilian,” Lenatus said. He sounded apologetic for being insultingly unclear when he first mentioned the fellow. “
And
I've seen rabbits with more stomach for a fight than he ever showed.”

“We were going to assault a couple German hill forts the next day,” Pulto said. “Only Stellio gets his foot under a cartwheel, by accident—he says—and he won't be able to hold his rank when we charge. So he got assigned to the artillery. He can turn the crank of one of the dart throwers, bad foot or no bad foot. But staying well back from German spear range, you see.”

“So we're lined up and waiting the word,” Lenatus said, speaking as he refilled all three cups. “The Germans are up on their mound, shouting and booming their spear shafts against their hide shields, and I got to say, I've been places I was happier being. Up rattles a mule cart and hauls around, and it's Stellio in the back with the dart thrower.”

“He's grinning like anything,” Pulto said, picking up when his friend took a swallow of wine, “and he starts cranking the arms back. And I hear
whack!
”

“I was looking right at him when it happened,” Lenatus said, almost bursting with suppressed laughter. “The lever snapped right at the spring and come flying around on the cord. It caught Stellio on the back of the neck and broke it neat as a chicken for dinner!”

The men laughed together, more freely than before. Alphena wondered for a moment how much wine they had drunk, but she'd drunk more than her usual as well. She joined the laughter.

“And the beauty of it,” Pulto said, his voice rising as if to be heard during a drinking party in barracks, “is that we didn't lose another bloody man that day. Not a one! The first salvo, one dart pinned the top of the chief's shield to his forehead and helmet. He tumbled down the hill, stiff as a board, and the rest all bloody ran off the other way.”

“May my dick turn black and fall off if it didn't happen
just
that way!” Lenatus burbled.

The laughter died away.
They're probably hoping I didn't hear that,
Alphena thought.
Or at least that I'll pretend I didn't hear it, which I certainly will.

“I understand that the future isn't really predictable,” Alphena said carefully. “And I guess we can hope for a lucky dart shot, whatever that may mean now. I just wish I had something better to hope for.”

“Your ladyship?” Pulto said. “We're not laughing at you. And we feel the same way. We wish we knew what was coming. Because we think something is, too.”

“All I can tell you about a battle…,” Lenatus said, lowering his cup and looking at her with an expression something between calm and defiance. “Is that what happens is generally going to be worse than you figured it to be.”

“But you deal with it,” said Pulto earnestly. “You always deal with it, however piss-poor a deal it is you get handed.”

That's what soldiers do,
Alphena realized in a flash of understanding. She had thought being a soldier on the frontier meant fighting … but that was only part of it. They
dealt
; even though all they knew about the future was it would probably range from unpleasant to awful.

That was much the same as being a woman in a world which men thought they ruled. Hedia had shown her that. Hedia dealt, and thus far she had dealt successfully.

There was a bustle of voices in the passage from the house proper. Alphena set the cup down and rose.

“Thank you both,” she said. “You've helped me to understand the situation. And now—”

She turned to the door.

“—I believe I'll join my brother for a moment before I dine.”

And just possibly I'll chat with Corylus as well as Varus; but no matter what, I'll deal. Mother will be proud of me.

*   *   *

H
EDIA ROSE FROM HER BED.
A light burned in the alcove where her maid slept. Hedia didn't need the light because she was still asleep. She walked through the door of her suite, then drifted down the staircase.

Servants sprawled in the portico around the central courtyard. Five or six were dicing by lamplight, laughing and muttering curses. The familiar noise didn't disturb the nearby sleepers.

In a back corner was the miniature terra-cotta hill on which snails crawled till a cook's helper plucked them out for dinner. They continued to meander slowly along the molded curves.