Out of the Waters (63 page)

Corylus hit the deck again on all fours, then bounded to his feet.
I couldn't have done that once in a thousand tries if I'd been training,
he thought.

The whole world seemed to be shouting. Some of the Atlanteans may have been alive, but they were no danger to Carce now.

The two ships coming through the portal and the scores behind them, though—they would be enough.

Corylus looked up. As he did so, the ape wrenched the metal ball from its socket on top of the obelisk. The portal wavered, and an Atlantean screamed in terror.

The ape gripped the obelisk with both legs and smashed the ball down on the wedge-shaped granite point with the strength of his arms and upper body. The metal deformed with a hollow boom.

The portal shrank. The storm rushed from all sides as the bubble of clear heaven reduced. Lightning and thunder overwhelmed the sound of the crowd.

The ape swung again, ripping the ball open. The portal vanished like mist in the sun. The bows of the ships on the way into this world tumbled downward, their hulls sheared more neatly than a saw could have done.

The ape stood on the peak of the obelisk, shrieking a challenge to the sky. The thunderbolt that struck him was blinding in its intensity.

The ape froze where it was for a moment, its fur blazing. Then it tumbled, and rain from the breaking storm hissed on the flames.

 

EPILOGUE

Hedia watched Lann fall as stiffly as a burning statue. The lightning must have frozen his muscles. She had seen antelope shot through the head in the arena stiffen that way.
There is no chance he can be alive.

Then,
He saved me.

She felt nothing for a moment. She was floating in a prickly white fog.

Her vision cleared. “You, Lenatus!” she said; her voice clear, her enunciation perfect. “You and your men clear my way to the sundial!”

She'd thought the trainer might hesitate. Instead he instantly bellowed, “Come on, squad! Batons only until I tell you different!”

Leading the newly freed servants, Lenatus pushed through the line of lictors who had taken the place of honor in front of the consul. From the way they moved, each man wore a sword under his tunic despite the fact that it would be certain crucifixion to be caught with military arms within the sacred boundaries of Carce.

Hedia followed, holding the borrowed toga over her shoulders with both hands. It was a stupid garment, clumsy and ugly and
stupid.
She'd like to burn
alive
the man who decreed it for formal wear!

She knew she was being irrational. She didn't care. She had
never
cared what other people thought of her behavior.

Lenatus and his bullies formed a wedge that shoved through the crowd. Lann might have been a trifle quicker about it, but he hadn't been clearing a path for a noble lady. Instead of just knocking down spectators who hadn't gotten out of the way, the men in front of Hedia were hurling them to one side or another so that she wouldn't trip over their groaning bodies.

Rain had begun to hammer down by the time they reached the obelisk. One of the men—a bulky Galatian well over six feet tall, named Minimus by a former owner with a sense of humor—shouted at something on the pavement. He jumped back, drawing his sword.

He's alive!

“Put that away or you'll be crow bait!” Lenatus bellowed. “It's dead, don't you see?”

“Let me through,” said Hedia. Her voice was clear, her enunciation perfect. She floated in a white stinging cloud.

“Your ladyship?” Lenatus said in concern. His hand was under his tunic also.

“He's dead, you say, so there's no problem, is there?” Hedia said. She brushed past and squatted beside Lann. Beside Lann's body.

Despite the rain, the ape-man's fur was still smoldering. The smell was terrible. She brushed his cheek with her fingertips and felt crisp tendrils break off beneath them.

He was as stiff as bronze, though the body was still warm. Brains were leaking from his crushed skull, but he must have died from the thunderbolt. The fall had flattened his head in line with his heavy brow ridges. The poor dear had never had the high forehead of a philosopher, of course.

He couldn't have felt a thing. No pain, nothing. Triumph and then oblivion. Quite a good way to go, and certainly he was now in a better afterlife than that which awaited the noble Hedia.…

“Dear heart?” a voice said.

Hedia looked over her shoulder. Lenatus had formed his squad in a circle around her and the body of the ape-man. They had allowed Saxa through, but the lictors were on the other side.

She got to her feet, swaying with exhaustion—mental and physical both. She didn't know how long she had been kneeling on the marble pavement, but the borrowed toga was soaked.

“My husband, I'm glad you've joined me,” Hedia said calmly. “I'll ask you to put a guard over Lann here. Master Lenatus and his men will do.”

She flexed her knees to pat the big body for a last time, then thought the better of it and simply gestured.

She said, “Please have him cremated as soon as the rain permits. A formal funeral will not be necessary, but I request that you have his ashes interred in the family tomb.”

“Him?” Saxa said in obvious puzzlement. “The monkey, you mean?”

Hedia's mind went buzzing white again. After a moment she said, “If you choose to name your savior a monkey, yes.”

Then, like a whiplash, “See to it!”

“Yes, my dear,” Saxa said quietly. “At once. Ah—I'll go back to the Altar and, ah, leave you and your pet…”

He turned.

Hedia caught him by the shoulder and embraced him clumsily. “No, my dear master,” she said. “We will go to the Portico of Agrippa, you and I, where you will take charge of the crisis until someone else arrives—the urban prefect or one of the Praetorian commanders, I suppose. And I see our daughter coming toward us. She appears to need help also.”

She pointed to Lenatus, then toward the ape-man's body. The old soldier nodded in understanding. Soldiers got a lot of experience with hasty cremations; he would take care of it.

Good-bye, my friend Lann.

*   *   *

V
ARUS SAT ON THE STEPS
of the public facility north of the sundial, letting the rain beat on him and trying not to think. The Emperor Augustus had built a larger pyre with marble appointments a little farther out on the Flaminian Way, close to where he erected his huge family mausoleum, so this one got little business in recent years.

Today the whole district stank of charred human flesh. Varus didn't know whether there were interrupted funerals on the platforms of volcanic tuff behind him, the fires quenched by the downpour, or if corpses scattered when Atlantean ships burned and crashed were responsible for the odor.

Eventually he would rise and join his father, who had set up a headquarters in the Portico of Agrippa across the road. Since the urban prefect hadn't arrived, Saxa had taken charge of rescue and the firefighting—which, thanks to the rain, wasn't the danger which a shower of burning timbers could have posed.

Eventually he would get up; but not now.

“Good afternoon, Lord Varus,” Pandareus said from close beside him. “A very good one, in as much as we are both alive and Carce is not a flaming ruin.”

Varus jumped to his feet. “Master!” he said.

Then, more calmly and with a smile for himself, “I'm sorry, I was completely lost in myself. ‘In thought', I would say, but I think what I was really doing was trying not to think.”

Before Pandareus could reply, Varus really
looked
at him. “Alive, yes,” he said, “but what happened to you, master? Are you really all right?”

The left side of his teacher's face was badly swollen. The greasy look was probably unguent smeared on the cut over the cheekbone, but it looked
terrible
. Both his wrists were splinted, though his fingers seemed to move normally.

“Quite well, really,” Pandareus said. The swelling distorted his smile, but it was clearly meant to be cheerful. “Though our ship fell to the ground, I managed to hold on to the railing. Unfortunately—”

He lifted his forearms to call attention to the splints.

“—I appear to have injured myself that way as well, though not as badly as would have happened if I had been thrown out. Pulto assures me that in a month I will be able to swing a sword just as ably as I ever could.”

Varus went blank, then giggled in what he realized was release. Only then did Pandareus let his battered face warm in a smile.

“Corylus is all right, then?” Varus asked, raising his head. A pair of mounted couriers raced up the road from the barracks of the City Watch and headed south down the Flaminian Way. Only Hercules knew what they were doing.

Varus grinned wryly, glad to realize that he was regaining an interest in life. The rain seemed to be slacking, though his toga was so sodden already that walking in it would be like wearing a waterfall. Wool could absorb enormous quantities of water.

“Master Corylus is well,” Pandareus said, “which is quite remarkable—even granting that I knew from our first meeting that he was an athlete as well as a scholar. He took his companions into the enclosure around the Altar of Peace, and his man Pulto is standing in the entrance to see to it that they're not disturbed. Pulto seemed pleased to see me and bandage my wrists, though.”

“I'm glad of that,” Varus said. He wondered who his friend's “companions” were and why they needed privacy. He could ask Corylus about that later, if he felt he had to know and if the information hadn't been volunteered. He shrugged in preparation to getting up, but the sloshing weight of his toga made him hesitate a little longer.

“Lady Hedia is in quite her usual form also,” Pandareus said, “although she seems to have had received some rough handling in the recent past. She has taken your sister in hand and they're repairing their wardrobe and toilette in the shops of the portico.”

“I'm sure Mother is in better shape than whoever tried to get in her way,” Varus said, smiling faintly. Until Father got involved with magic, he hadn't appreciated how terrifying an enemy Hedia would be.

“I thought…,” Pandareus said with a hint of reserve. “That I saw you and your sister arrive here on the back of a gryphon?”

“Yes,” said Varus. “That's what it seemed to me also. It may have been a metaphor, though.”

He lurched to his feet. The toga clung to his legs, threatening to bind him. Well, if that was the worst problem he had—and it was—then he was a very fortunate man, and Carce was fortunate also.

“Master?” he said. “Typhon isn't a danger anymore, because of my sister. Alphena saved us all.”

Pandareus lifted his chin in acknowledgement. “I gathered from what Lady Alphena said to your mother that the danger was past. I'm glad to have that confirmed, though. Your sister, ah, seemed distraught.”

I really don't know what has been happening to my sister since she disappeared from our garden,
Varus thought.
And I think it will be better if I never try to learn.

Aloud he said, “Come, my honored teacher. I will greet my father, the consul; and then we too should look into a change of garments.”

*   *   *

A
LPHENA LAY ON THE TABLE
under the hands of the masseur. He was a tall eunuch, a friend and perhaps relative of Abinnaeus, whose shop Hedia had taken over with her usual brusque authority. The clothier would be paid, of course, and probably greatly overpaid, but Alphena doubted he'd been thinking of money when he leaped to obey the cascade of orders.

Alphena had stopped crying. The rough toweling had warmed and dried her, and she'd found herself drifting into a blurred reverie punctuated by flashes of vivid memory.

She and Hedia lay with their heads in opposite directions on parallel tables—display tables, originally, but sturdy enough for this use—and each had turned her face to the right. When Alphena opened her eyes, her mother was looking at her.

“Are you feeling better, dear?” Hedia asked, her voice pulsing with the quick rhythm of the assistant masseur who chopped at her back with the edges of his hands. He was a Libyan with dark skin and tightly wound hair as coarse as wire.

Hedia had insisted that the master work on her daughter, so of course that was what happened. Alphena could watch the assistant, though, and she had been impressed by the economy, strength, and precision with which he moved.
He'd make a good swordsman.…

“I don't feel anything,” Alphena said as the masseur worked the muscles of her right buttock with fingers as hard as wood. “I don't think I'll ever feel anything ever again!”

Her voice sounded petulant, even to herself, and she knew as she spoke that the words were a lie. She wouldn't have been able to judge the Libyan's skill if she hadn't resumed taking an interest in the world around her.

“That isn't true,” she said flatly before her mother could say anything. “I don't want to feel anything, but I do.”

To her furious amazement, she started crying again. “I feel awful!
Awful!
What they did was wrong!”

Hedia sat up abruptly. “You may all leave,” she said, gesturing toward the outer door.

“At once, your ladyship,” said Abinnaeus, who with his two assistants had been standing before the hanging which covered the storage room and stairs to the upper level. “Since your own attendants haven't arrived yet, would you like me to leave one of my boys? He speaks only Aramaic, though I suspect he's picked up some Common Greek. Not Latin, though, as he's only been in Carce for the past week.”

“I think my daughter and I can pour our own wine in a crisis, Abinnaeus,” Hedia said calmly. “Though if my maid Syra arrives, you may pass her through.”