Air and Darkness (23 page)

He stopped a little distance from Gilise, smiled at Hedia, and took a hammer from the bed of the cart. It looked tiny in Boest's hand, but Hedia knew the iron head must weigh more than a pound.

Hedia stepped in front of Boest. “Master Boest,” she said. “I gave my word. I will not—”

She caught herself. She couldn't stop Boest from doing anything he pleased. Her little knife was still knotted into the end of the sash, and she didn't think it would be much use anyway against the big man with a hammer.

“Master Boest,” Hedia said. “Please, if you feel any obligation to me, do not besmirch my honor in this matter.”

“I owe you my soul, Lady Hedia,” Boest said with a sad smile. “Gilise and I will carry the souls he stole back to their owners. I need him to guide me, if you doubt
my
honor.”

“I don't doubt your honor,” Hedia said, stepping out of his way.
I never
should
have doubted him, but I did.

“But Lady Hedia?” Boest said without moving from where he stood. “He must stay with me until we have finished.”

“I will, Boest,” Gilise trilled. “I'll make up for my mistakes. I swear I will!”

Hedia smiled at Boest. “I promised him his life and his freedom,” she said. “No more than that.”

“Then be ready to loose the cord,” Boest said. “I will catch him so that he doesn't fall to the ground.”

Hedia walked to the springhead and pulled slightly on the sash to give herself slack. She lifted the loop off the stone stele; she could unknot it at leisure.

Boest held Gilise's free ankle with his left hand, then flipped the hammer in the air and caught it by the head. Gilise was babbling something. Boest broke his shin with a quick tap of the hammer handle, an eighteen-inch hardwood baton.

Gilise screamed. Boest gripped his other ankle and broke that shin also. He cradled Gilise's body to the ground as Hedia released the sash. Gilise had fainted.

“I don't know how long it will take to find all the victims,” Boest said. “I may have to break his legs several more times as they heal. I hope by the time we have finished Gilise will understand the pain he has brought to others and he'll change his ways after I let him go.”

“You used to love him,” Hedia said. The smell of Gilise's fear hung over them, like that of a rotting corpse.

“I still love him,” Boest said quietly. He looked at the toad and said, “I'm sorry, little one, but I do.”

Paddock made a grunting sound. “I've never asked you to lie to me, dear heart,” he said. “I never will ask that.”

“Lady Hedia, I'll take you to the Spring of True Answers now,” Boest said. “It isn't far away.”

He looked down at the toad. “And you, little one?” he said.

“I'll wait here with Gilise,” Paddock said. “Just watching. You don't need to hurry back on my account.”

I promised Gilise his life,
Hedia thought. Then she thought,
A quick death would have been too good for him.

 

CHAPTER
VII

Alphena and Pandareus had the back garden of Saxa's town house to themselves. It wasn't a place in which she had spent much time in the past.

Behind the high wall was an alley, and in the wall was the gate through which deliveries generally arrived. The plantings had been almost an afterthought, though there was a loggia against either corner of the inner wall to suit the family's possible whim.

Originally there had been two fruit trees: a pear and a peach. Now the pear was gone, shattered by a killing frost in midsummer while Saxa was under the control of the wizard Nemastes and they worked magic here. Publius Corylus had recently sent a pomegranate to replace the pear, but no other work had been done in the garden since the spell had been conjured here.

In practice the loggias had been used to store gardening tools until magic had tainted the garden with a
feeling
that the servants found as unsettling as the fumes of burning sulphur. The doorman at the back gate stood in the alley instead of in the garden, looking out through a grate, and gardeners had moved their tools somewhere else. That way they didn't have to enter the garden except to water the trees. They probably wouldn't have done even that except that Alphena checked and kept them to the task.

I might not have bothered about the peach,
she thought.
But we couldn't let the gift of Publius Corylus wither and die.

Pandareus sat beside her in the northern loggia, looking at the painted frieze beneath the roof. Alphena had brought him here because it was private in a fashion that no place else in a house with over two hundred resident servants could be, but as a foreigner of no status he was properly holding his silence until his noble hostess began the conversation.

Alphena took the Ear of the Satyr out from under her tunic. The iron case felt warm between her palms. Instead of talking about the things that mattered, she said, “Is there something important about those paintings, Master Pandareus?”

The things that mattered were first: that they weren't any closer to finding Hedia and Varus than before they went to Polymartium
and
they'd lost Corylus besides. And second: that Alphena had tried to rape Corylus after the charioteer's light had shone on her.

The second thing was what filled Alphena's mind as fully as passion had the previous evening at Polymartium. She had humiliated herself—and Corylus had then rejected her, which increased her misery.

It was possible that Pandareus hadn't seen what was going on. It was even possible that Pulto had misunderstood; certainly he hadn't said anything to suggest that he
had
understood what Lady Alphena was trying to do.

Of course Pulto hasn't said anything to me. He'll talk to Lenatus and who knows what other army buddies, though! And they'll talk to their girlfriends and everybody in Carce will know that Saxa's daughter is a hot-crotch little tramp!

Everybody including Hedia, when she returned. The embarrassment of having failed her stepmother was the worst thing of all.

“Important, Your Ladyship—no,” Pandareus said. “But they're quite interesting. You see here”—he stood and indicated the frieze over the ends of the loggia by pointing in both directions—“you have cupids imitating a battle of Greeks and Amazons. On the front and back”—he rotated ninety degrees—“you have the battle of the centaurs and Lapiths, again being fought by cupids.”

“I've seen cupids on friezes before,” Alphena said, glad to turn her mind from her own thoughts. “Doing farm labor, working in shops—all the things people do.”

“Indeed,” Pandareus said. “But these cupids are copying the frieze of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, which is the most perfect work by Ictinus.”

“I've never heard of it,” Alphena said. “I've never heard of Ictinus, either.”

She was mildly irritated. Pandareus should know her well enough to realize that she didn't care about anything in Greece, which Carce had conquered centuries ago. Now it was a source of teachers, like Pandareus himself, and old statues, which impressed Saxa. If Greece had bred gladiators, she might know something about it.

“Ictinus designed the Parthenon,” Pandareus said. “Thirty years later, he designed the temple at Bassae, which refined his earlier design—but in the middle of nowhere. Even for those of us who find more importance in Greece than most citizens of Carce can understand.”

He smiled gently.

He does know me,
Alphena realized. Aloud she said, “I've heard of the Parthenon. Even I have.”

“Everything is connected, Your Ladyship,” Pandareus said. “If we could understand the connections, we could understand everything. I try to explain that to my students, but I'm afraid most of them would settle for knowing which Stable will win the next day's chariot race. Your brother and Master Corylus being exceptions, of course.”

“
I
'd settle for getting them back,” Alphena said. “And Mother.”

The silly digression had calmed Alphena more than she would have believed. She could think again instead of just wallowing in pointless misery like a landed fish flopping on the sand.

She looked at Pandareus sharply as her mind went into a different pathway. She said, “Did you…?”

Pandareus grinned and sat beside her again. “A teacher of rhetoric learns quickly that some young men, no matter how sturdy and athletic they may be…,” he said, “are terrified of speaking in public. A good teacher also learns to calm them when that happens, because his fees depend on their parents as well as those of his more stolid students.”

Alphena hefted the amulet. “Should we approach Lucius Sentius and offer to trade this to him if he returns our, our friends?” she said. “It's interesting to be able to talk to statues, I suppose, but it's useless for getting Corylus, everybody, back.”

“Well, how do you expect
us
to help you?” piped a voice from the left. One of the Amazons was glaring at Alphena over her odd crescent-shaped shield. “None of us were at Polymartium, were we? And this Sentius didn't make his plans in
this
loggia, I can tell you that!”

“I take the lady's point,” Pandareus said with an approving nod to the frieze. “And I very much doubt that Lucius Sentius holds Corylus. He could hold your mother and brother, though I doubt that. I watched what happened to Corylus while Pulto was helping you to safety, Your Ladyship. He vanished with a female whom I took to be a tree nymph, based on my past experience with Master Corylus.”

He coughed and added, “I'm sure that Corylus was in good health at the point when the nymph snatched him out of danger.”

“I see,” Alphena said. What she really saw in her mind was Corylus and the nymph he owed his safety to. Alphena's flash of anger was as hot as her lust the night before had been.

Alphena looked at the backs of her hands until the emotion cooled. Without raising her eyes, she said, “I went mad, near enough, last night. I saw a lot of soldiers who were acting that way too. It didn't seem to bother Corylus, though. Or you, Master Pandareus?”

“Ah!” said the teacher. “I felt emotional pressure, certainly. But you must remember, Your Ladyship, that my life's study has been toward self-control. I do not doubt that you are capable of similar control, but—”

He paused, pursing him lips.

“You can speak freely!” Alphena said. “Pandareus, please—call me Alphena and I'll call you Pandareus and we'll get Corylus and everyone back if we can!”

“Yes,” said Pandareus, speaking calmly. “You have the capacity for control, but nothing in your life to the present has encouraged you to practice that control. I wondered at so many soldiers being affected, but I realized that military discipline is externally applied. There is no necessity for a soldier to control himself, as he's in a structure which controls him in all the fashions that the system believes are important.”

Alphena thought about what the teacher had said, then nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “I feel better.”

She stood up and eyed the frieze. She didn't remember which of the painted figures had spoken, but it probably didn't matter. She said, “And thank you, Mistress Amazon, for showing me what to do.”

A horsewoman—horse-cupid?—bobbed her lance toward Alphena.

“What is it that you will do, if I may ask, Alphena?” Pandareus said. He had risen when she did.

“I need to go to Sentius' town house and speak to the statues there,” she said. “I'll be able to do that posing as a slave, I believe.”

The teacher pursed his lips again. “I don't see how that will be possible,” he said.

“It's possible with my father's help,” Alphena said. “I think.”

She drew a deep breath. This had to be done, but she was sick with fear at the conversation she was about to have.

“So I'll go see my father right now,” Alphena said. She opened the door toward the front of the house.

*   *   *

T
HE SCALLOPED ARCHWAY
at the top of the stairs didn't have a door, but a dozen strands of tiny silver bells tinkled pleasingly when Hanwant, calling something in Indian, pushed through the curtain ahead of Varus and Bhiku. Hanwant was probably announcing his arrival with the great magicians.

Their guide had paused midway up the stairs to sheathe his sword. Varus didn't know how Ramsa Lal would react to a soldier approaching him with a bare weapon, but if something similar happened in Carce—or, more likely, on Capri—the Emperor's German Bodyguard would be more likely to react than to discuss the matter.

Bhiku gestured Varus ahead. He swept the strings of bells aside with his forearms and almost collided with Hanwant, who had been stopped by a precious-looking little man—short, round, and bald, in bright silk pantaloons and vest. He was barring the way with an arm-thick silver rod that was a foot longer than he was tall.

Varus skipped to the side to let Bhiku enter. They took in the room.

It was a large hall, lit not only by the high windows on both sides but also by skylights in the ceiling. There were gauze curtains on both sides, but dark velvet drapes hung in swags above the southern windows; they must just have been lifted as the sun sank beneath the wing of the palace across the courtyard.

The only furniture was the high-backed chair against the east wall. Varus' eyes took a moment to adapt to the interior's relative dimness. Only then did he realize that a figure, doubtless Lal himself, was seated on the throne. A dozen servants, some of them guards, stood nearby.

Two teams of men wearing loincloths pushed and pulled levers. Ropes connected the apparatus to lengths of carpet hanging edge on to the ceiling, causing them to swing back and forth. The breeze wasn't cool, but it least the movement kept the hall from being stuffy.