The Worm in Every Heart (19 page)

“Well met, truly, after so long an absence.” He said, bowing. “Will my Lady sit?”

Carola did not reply.

“It seems my Lady prefers to stand,” her husband told the walls. “And to stare.” A pause. “Am I so different, then?”

“Not at all.”

His brows raised. “She speaks! An honor surely worth a few years of anticipation.”

Carola swayed, abruptly, and sat. The curtains stirred at her movement, dust spilling, to wake a handful of moths nesting near their base.

“A—few—?”

The moths hovered, caught, about the Hand. Its corona picked golden scales from their wings.

“Fifty, to judge aright,” he replied. “Your pardon.”

At his gesture, the moths veered too far in, crisped and fell together, twitching.

“There was no need for that,” Carola said.

Her husband merely smiled.

“Hunger without need,” he said. “And power without conscience; yes. But a man must hold true to his own nature, must he not?” Softer: “Or a woman.”

As he spoke, Carola found her teeth had begun to ache once more. She rubbed at the corner of her mouth, sensing a stain.

“You cheated me,” she said, at length.

“I? Never.”

Then, mildly:

“My Lady, you do me wrong. And let me be your mirror in this—a fair bargain, since I promise you'll have no other.” He rose, gracefully. “You see your fields fallow and your people craven, and blame me for it. But look you—'tis
your
castle shunned,
your
name taken in vain and prayed against in hope of God's protection.”

He gestured again, making the dead moths skitter in the Hand's shadow.

“I
am entirely innocent in this matter. My only crime is to have kept your marriage bed warm while waiting, these many long years, on your late return.”

Carola examined her hands, closely, in the wavering light. Saw—as if for the first time—the broken nails, black with grave-dirt and old flesh. Saw how the skin drowned in its own whiteness, eaten from within by immortality. She ran her tongue reflectively across her teeth, drawing blood.

And raised her head at last, voice level—

“You are noble.”

“As you yourself.”

“Had you—land of your own?”

A flicker, at the corner of one eye. Just a flicker.

“Once,” he said. “But that was long ago.”

“And did no one ever teach you our duty? To serve those who serve us, or be unworthy of their love and our estate?” She stood now, flayed toes digging the stone like claws. “All that I have, I owe to them. This I promised.”

Nose to nose with him, her voice rose to a thin shriek: “And you—
you have made me break my word.”

He held fast and met her, stare for stare.

“You were
born
to this, Lady,” he said. “Dead or alive—hunter, to their prey. What matter whether they love or fear, so long as you rule?”

“To rule, yes. And to protect. From beasts such as you.”

A red light came into her husband's smile.

“Listen now, and be silent,” he said. “You are the merest shadow of what you were. You are dead. You are alone. Together, we might take this land and everything beyond—if we are quick, and discreet. We may even love each other, in the end. But leave me, knowing nothing, and fear will dog you forever. Your prey will turn on you, and hunt you back into the grave.”

And he brought her face to his, coming even closer.

“You are nothing,” he whispered. “You
have
nothing. Nothing but me.”

Carola felt behind her, eyes on his, along the curtain and the wall beneath it. Felt until she found her hold—

“Well, then,” she said. “Let us to our union—husband.”

—and twisted aside, ripping the curtain open, flat to the wall as the sun came washing over him in a hot, gold wave. She held rigid, self-blinded, until his screams turned to gurgles.

By sunset, there was nothing left but ash.

* * *

Dark crept in near supper-time, leeching the sky of every color but black. A cold wind blew in from the marshes. Flakes of snow lit and tumbled on its wake, like spindrift. Under the trees, assignations of long standing were kept and made again. Here a fire burned, and naked men and women danced back to back, as a goat in human clothes marked time. Here the Unkind Court rode in their finery, lances garnished with skulls, to hunt a mourning thing forever across the landscape of a thousand dreams. Here the wolves slunk anew from their lair, bound for yet another farm.

And here the captain's grieving woman, finding her husband dead by Carola's uprooted grave, cut her throat with the rusted blade of his pike.

Carola sat in state at the tower's top, ashes blowing about her feet. Behind her, the Hand of Glory still burned. She had turned her chair to face the open window.

And all this is mine, she thought. Everything.

(And nothing.)

The sky dimmed further. A lidless moon rose and stared, without pity, down upon Carola's victory. Carola stared back . . .

For whatever else befalls, I am still Raum.

. . . as a tear of blood, unheeded, made its slow way down her cheek.

. . . that this, too, was one of the dark places of the earth.

—Jack Conrad.

DIVIUS ARCTURUS MARTIALIS'
bladder woke him, without dignity, well before dawn. Inside the tent an exported slice of Rome lay dozing, all shifting armor-clink and sour-stale sweat: Torc-burnt necks hidden beneath tarnished Medusa-head breastplates, Legionnaires' badges muffled in sweat-stiff furs, hides, woolen cloaks. The ragged remains of a “cohort” cobbled together from Northumbrian numeri, Romano-Briton infantry recruits trained to fight their own in the service of an Empire too cheap to reinforce their own crude weaponry with more than a used gladius each—an Empire which once took their loyalty for granted, but now barely acknowledged their existence.
Arcturus
‘ cohort, for all that was worth; not much, nowadays, plainest of plain truth be told. Less, and less . . .

. . . and less.

Outside, meanwhile, Northumbria itself still waited: Slate-grey on black punctuated by intermittent salt-white flare of scraped-bare quartz turf-bed, chalk cliffs grey with fresh snow, darkness still pooled in their open cracks like oil on weather-waxed hide. Wet mist eddying in on every side, erasing the lightening sky.

This godsless, gods-full place. This land where even shadows cast shadows.

Arcturus barely had words enough to tell how he had come to hate it.

Pausing by the foot of his standard, he shifted his kilt to empty himself, and watched a contemptuous curl of steam rise from the resultant puddle. His stomach reminded him just how far the village they had last taken booty from now lay behind them, even as he tried to shock it silent with a quick, reflexive curse, a half-attempted prayer—

Mars Ultor, war's Avenger, succor me. Look favorably on your faithful servitor. Ancestors, hold me up. Make me able to do what I must, for my men. For my own name's sake.

Call and response, automatic as breath:
Roma Invicta, fraterni!

(
Roma Aeterna,
magistere!
)

But this was no Roma, nor they Romans, for all their rapt devotion to their conquerors' ideals. This was elsewhere, beyond Empire's reach, beyond even the shadow of the Wall itself. Roadless ruin and darkness. Trackless waste.

Arcturus felt the wet cold—ever-present, never-escapable—begin to seep up through his bones towards his heart, and shrugged his wolf-skins closer. He turned back for the fire-pit, veering to where the seer-girl lay tethered at its outermost edge: Pale and still, her fine-boned wrists and ankles strung with gut, under a smoky blanket of ash-blackened spindrift.

She had refused to tell her tribe's true name—or her own, for that matter. They had dragged her by her pale hair from a stone beehive in that last village, a skull-clogged dirt-trap full of blood-mess and hanging herbs that gave a heavy, fragrant smoke when Lucian—Arcturus' numericus second, native-born himself, though better-tamed than most—fired them with his torch, almost as an afterthought.

‘Tis sacred, that's what,
he had said, his patois-inflected Latin even harder than usual to understand, as he rooted through the debris with the butt of his spear.
A holy place for gods to speak through—through here, through . . .

Pointing:
. . . her.

Our gods?
Arcturus had asked. Only to see Lucian give an all-purpose shrug, his blue-tattooed cheeks glistening in the herbs' light. And reply, without much (apparent) interest—

. . . gods.

The girl bore similar marks, as they all did—even Arcturus, for all that he kept his Legionnaire's SPQR hidden beneath one shoulderplate: Light wounds rubbed with ash or woad, a charcoaled thread sewn beneath the skin and left to heal, uncleaned; permanent grey-blue lines bracketing the line of the girl's nose, circling out over her nostrils to spiral beneath her eyes.

Those pale, pale eyes.

Arcturus reached down and shook her roughly, by one nude shoulder—cold white skin, dappled with dew. “Do you live yet, barbarian?” he asked, slitting her hands apart. “Come back to me now, before I take mind to do your body some injury.”

A long shiver took her, from heels to head. She bent back, bow-taut: Damp skin flushing like a caught eel's, as her absent spirit poured back into her. Her “fetch,” Lucian had termed it.

We've the corpse, but she goes out anyroad, coming to call. She's sent for by those she serves, and ‘tis her fetch what answers.

Her daimon, you mean? Her soul?
A stolid, minimal shrug.
Why call it ‘fetch', if that's all?

Lucian laughed, shortly.
Ask it tha'self,
magistere
.
When it comes to FETCH thee.

In Roma, as Arcturus remembered, the gods only spoke when spoken
to
. Oracular justification of policy. Reward for public service. Deities were twenty a sesterce, the Pantheon stuffed to bursting with them: Borrowed, stolen, made up fresh from scratch to suit every purpose under heaven.

This one, though—she might look young in the body, this one, but she was sworn to old gods indeed. He had seen them look from her eyes, and laugh at him; felt their hands on him directly, now and always, more intimate than rape. Their invisible touch steering him here and there . . . softer, and more full of febrile activity, than a dead dog's belly by any given paved, spear-straight, Roman-laid road's side.

It was no great mystery, to loose your soul and bid it do secret business. There were witches in Roma, too.

Opening her eyes, now, as she rubbed—weakly—at her bruise-banded wrists: Faint rim of bloodshot cilia, fire-caught iris pale as dirty snow. Whispering—

“She hears tha, Roman.”

“Arcturus.”

“A, Roman. Tha.”

“Speak
true
Latin, slut,” he ordered her, yet again, freeing her feet likewise. Then: “Did you see our path?”

“A, Roman. She sees.”

“You'll show us where it leads, then—and truly, understand? Or I'll cut your cords.”

“She shows tha, a. As She shows she.”

“As . . . your goddess . . . shows
you
?”

“A, Roman. ‘Tis lore-ful, this. She takes she out-body, into dream. Sends she down.”

“Down where?”

The girl gave him a grin—bloody lip-twist, complete with rim of broken teeth. All at once, Arcturus wanted to shove his tongue between them and let her bite down, abrade him with every (currently) hidden part of her filthy body. Watched as she reached up under her sodden twill skirt and rummaged, then drew her hand out and sketched a spiral in her opposite palm: Wet red, dark against her dirty grey-white skin. Juice of her split fruit, her open wound.

He knew it should have repulsed him; knew it didn't. And tried, with all his strength—

(faintest of all faint hopes)

—never to allow himself to wonder, explicitly . . . why.

“Sent down,” she repeated. “Where was, is, will be. She sends she.
Shows
she.”

“And then
you
show
me
.”

“A-true, Roman.”

“Arcturus. My name, girl: Say it.” She looked at him. “
Say
it.”

“A . . . rrr . . . ”

(a
ha
, you savage bitch)

“ . . . rrrRoman.”

He took her again that very night, as they'd both known he would, for all he'd sworn not to. Lucian kept guard, stirring the fire; the others watched hungrily, from a discreet distance. Arcturus and his nameless seer lay together in the shadow of a chalk-cliff, meanwhile—under the empty skeletal gaze of some flat, long-jawed, long-dead beast-fish: A shark from ancient times, doomed to forever swim the dead sea of this rock's rain-slimed face. Sharp grin agape, ribs scattered and splayed, spine unstrung like a harlot's snapped necklace . . .

She tried to slip away from him in the midst of it, to send herself down that wet red spiral, but he kept her anchored with his prick—dug deep enough to force her back, and clutched her to him as they arrived together. When they finally severed, he glanced down to see himself painted similarly red from glans to thatch, dripping; blood sleeked the insides of her thighs like open wings, a bird crushed in mid-flight. Lips, widespread, on a second, deeper mouth.

And oh, but this was an awful place he'd come to at the end of all his ambitions, full of cold and dread. A place where the gods were bloody as Tarsan Diana, secret as Mithras, strange as Isis and unknowable—in the end—as the Jew heretics' one-god. A place where the land melted and fell away to mist, where people melted and fell away with it. Where a blue-cheeked girl had only to cast him one glance under her too-pale lashes for him to feel himself surge like the sea against his leather kilt, like rot in an unclean wound.

Dragging him down into herself, part by part: The soles of her bare feet, rinded with callus. Her cracked, black-rimmed nails. Her sly, colorless eyes, washed empty with strange gods' thoughts. Her bloody, red-lipped core.

Witchery. Necromancy. The road to Hades, or whatever name this girl—and Lucian—had for their particular version of Hell eternal.

This much Arcturus still knew: In Greece, in Roma—here, even—the dead drank blood, always. No matter
where
you called them from.

* * *

A week earlier, then, back at the Wall: Arcturus and his Tribune, immersed to their waists in the mineral-green, stone-warmed main tank of their home-fort's cramped lavarium. A reward for good service, supposedly—though far less so in practice than in theory, what with extended field duty amongst barbarians seemingly having left Arcturus rendered permanently uncomfortable even in the midst of most “civilized” comforts. Still, the bath's waters did hide most of his worst scars, aside from those which swam pale and knotted as mating sea-snakes just beneath the surface.

“If the Tribune might care to bring such a tedious matter back to mind, momentarily,” Arcturus had begun, eking his words out between grit teeth, “the fact does remain, however annoying and irrelevant—”

“—that ‘your' numeri still haven't been paid.” The Tribune barely bothered to meet Arcturus' eyes, gesturing instead at the nearest slave, who came running with scraper at the ready. “Yes, Centurion, I do recall it. But really: What would they do with good Roman coin, those savages? They barter with each other for everything they need. A pig here, a woman there . . . ”

“Then buy them something to barter
with
, if you don't want them thinking they're Citizens anymore. Or would you prefer to prove the Empire only honors its promises when it stands to gain something by doing so?”

Brave words, albeit foolish. To which the Tribune merely gave a dry smile, replying:

“But it's that very lesson they must learn sometime, Arcturus. Is it not?”

Especially now.

“Your feeling for them does you credit. Still, facts must be faced—where Caesar speaks, we answer. And Caesar wants us gone from here, at least for the moment.”

“Do they know that?”

“Not unless you tell them. Which I . . . of course . . . order you not to.”

(
Typical
.)

Arcturus strove to keep his disgust well-hid, though probably not as much so as might have been best to his advantage; the Tribune's shrewd glance seemed to grow ever-colder as the bath progressed through its ritual phases: Soaking, slathering, scraping—steamed and salted like vegetables for the cooking, in this hubristic cocoon of pseudo-Mediterranean heat. By the time Arcturus stepped back out into the usual Northumbrian light drizzle of oncreeping dusk, an artificially hot fog rose from his pores to greet the night; the joints of his carapace, smoking like an ill-banked fire wherever his wolf-skins didn't quite reach.

Lucian fell into lock-step beside him as he broached the hill, glancing down at the freshly-polished Medusa-head on his commanding officer's breastplate. Venturing, at last: “Some rare thing, she, wi' such teeth and snakes. Thy guardian, is't?”

“Guardian?”

“Ay, magistere—a spirit set to help an' hold thee, wherever men-place and gods-place cross over. Same as I was sent t'find, up hill wi' no food ‘till I come back calling on animal-brother as my own guardian, when first I grew a man.”

“And did you?”

A gap-toothed grin. “As all did, sure. Had to, we wanted ever shuck of our milk-names.”

“Romans don't believe in spirits.”

“What, then?”

“Ancestors. Familial duty, fides. Household lares and penates.” Arcturus touched the Medusa's fierce grimace with two equally hilt-callused fingers, lightly. “She's a monster, no Goddess—her eyes turn men to stone. A nightmare, to strike fear in our enemies' hearts.”

“Ah. Lore-ful too, that.”

Lucian sounded approving; the corners of his pale eyes seemed to have lifted slightly, though Arcturus most-times found it almost impossible to tell what his mouth might or might not actually be doing, under that drooping moustache. It reminded him, all at once, of a passage from Diodorus Siculus concerning the Gauls: Their savage impenetrability, slaughtering both themselves and everyone else they came across in the pious service of gods so anathemic-sacred their names were considered better forgotten than prayed to.

“When their enemies fall,” Siculus had written, “they cut off their heads and fasten them about the necks of their horses; and turning over to their attendants the arms of their opponents, all covered with blood, they carry the heads off as booty, singing a paean over them and striking up a song of victory, and these first-fruits of victory they fasten by nails upon their houses, just as men do, in certain kinds of hunting, with the heads of wild beasts they have mastered.

“The heads of the most distinguished enemies they embalm in cedar-oil and carefully preserve in a chest, and these they exhibit to strangers, gravely maintaining that in exchange for this head some one of their ancestors, or their father, or the man himself, refused the offer of a great sum of money. And some men among them, we are told, boast that they have not accepted an equal weight of gold for the head they show, displaying a barbarous sort of greatness of soul; for not to sell that which constitutes a witness and proof of one's valor is a noble thing . . . ”