Air and Darkness (33 page)

Corylus grinned wryly, still looking at the gleaming orichalc blade. “I'm not sure that
I
could've pulled it out,” he said, “unless I got a scare like the one I had when I stuck it in. That was as close as I ever need it to be.”

The orichalc blade was slightly leaf shaped and too broad to fit in the scabbard of his legion-issue weapon. Corylus unwrapped the ties that, with a flat hook, attached the silver scabbard to its belt.

He looked up at Aura, standing submissively before him. “Why did you try to get me killed?” he asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

“I didn't,” she said, “though I supposed you would be. All those before you had been.”

She gestured past him. “There's a glade just down the trail,” she said. “Beyond this knuckle of rock where Scylla laired. If we go there, we can sit in a degree of comfort. But whatever you wish.”

“All right,” Corylus said. He thought of telling Aura to walk in front of him, but that would be pointless except as an insult.

He turned and walked down the trail. He didn't understand her behavior, but he wasn't worried about her stabbing him in the back.

There was a notch twenty feet deep in the sandstone wall, rising from the trail to the cliff top. The ground was covered with ferns and flowering plants, some of them with small white or magenta blooms. The cliff had been carved back into a bench on one side.

“Is this artificial?” Corylus said. He gestured upward. “All of it?”

Aura shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. She sat on the bench and looked up at him. “I suppose so.”

Corylus thought for a moment, then seated himself also. He had the silver scabbard loose; now he removed the issue one from his own belt.

“You said ‘Scylla,'” he said. “She had six heads, didn't she?”

“No,” said Aura. “She had only one, but that was enough until you came.”

Aura crossed her hands in her lap and looked out toward the other side of the ravine. “Zetes and I came by this path,” she said. “We hadn't left Anti-Thule very long before and we were exploring. We were following this trail—”

She gestured back the way they had come.

“—and talking about how happy we were to be here.”

She looked at Corylus. “We were always happy,” Aura said. “We had each other. And then Scylla struck and took Zetes and threw his corpse into the ravine. Not to eat, just to kill.”

Her tone was emotionless, as dead as the stone on which they sat. Corylus swallowed. “But why didn't you warn me? I didn't hurt Zetes; I wouldn't have hurt you.
I'm
not your enemy.”

“After Zetes died, I have had no purpose but to kill Scylla,” Aura said. “I've led creatures up this trail, wolves and bears and big cats—”

She flushed as she held his eyes and added, “—and men, sometimes men. Knowing that one day one of them would kill Scylla and living for that day. And you have killed her.”

Aura's face softened and she lost the tone of challenge. “I have no reason to live now,” she said, “except to do your will. When you're done with me, I will die and join my lover in oblivion.”

Corylus understood the ruthlessness—the frontiers were a hard school, and he had accompanied the Batavian Scouts. The method still puzzled him. He said, “But why didn't you tell me what was going to happen? I was quick enough, but I might not have been.”

“Would you have come with me if you'd known the danger?” Aura said in a harsh voice.

“Of course I…,” Corylus said, but he paused. He looked down, then met her eyes again. “If you'd made it a condition of leading me to the Cave of Zagreus, I think I would.”

Aura shrugged. “Perhaps you would have,” she said. “It doesn't matter now anyway.”

Corylus didn't let his first—angry—reaction reach his lips. During the pause, he thought. Grinning, he said, “You know, I don't think I could've reacted better when that head came down at me if I'd been practicing all year. Maybe you were right about how to handle it.”

He stood and buckled on his equipment belt. The new scabbard rode easily over his right hip bone, and the horns of the dagger's pommel didn't prevent him from drawing it quickly.

He looked at Aura. “Do you really know how to get to the Cave of Zagreus?” he said. “Or was that just a trick to get me to come this way?”

“It wasn't a trick,” the girl said. “There are other ways we could go, but this path is the shortest.”

“Then…,” Corylus said, “let's be on our way, shall we?”

He offered Aura his hand. She touched fingertip to fingertip, but she rose with no more effort than a breeze ruffling the ferns.

*   *   *

V
ARUS HAD BEEN HEARING THE SOUNDS
for several minutes, but he wasn't sure they were angry voices and not a flock of birds. He looked at Bhiku and said, “Some of the prettiest of your birds seem to have the most unpleasant calls.”

“Indeed,” said the sage. “If I were a different sort of philosopher, I would form a long exposition about this, showing that the gods always balance good features with ill.”

He smiled, turning his face from a prune into a happy prune. “It wouldn't be true, but by choosing my examples I could convince those of my audience who don't think for themselves,” he said. “At any rate, that is what I have observed in watching my colleagues. My wealthier colleagues.”

“Carce has similar teachers,” Varus said. “Ours dress better and appear to eat better than my friend and teacher, Pandareus of Athens.”

Of whom you remind me a good deal,
his mind added silently.

“In the particular case,” Bhiku said, “what we hear is a village squabble of some sort. The plumage of our villagers is much like my own rather than, say, that of a golden pheasant.”

The path wound through brush. The knotted stems reached thirty feet high, though they were never as thick as Varus' wrist. At the tops were sprays of small leaves, bobbling even in air that seemed dead still.

The voices hadn't gotten louder from the time Varus first heard them, but the next bend of the path brought him and Bhiku within ten feet of forty or fifty peasants focused on something in their midst. Some of them carried staffs or sickles made by setting sharp flints in a backing of split cane.

Bhiku shouted in Indian. His voice carried like a flung javelin when he chose to be heard.

The men nearest to him turned, saw two strangers, and scurried back. The fear spread, driving a wedge into the middle of the crowd as spectators moved sideways.

Everyone whom Varus saw was male, with the exception of the naked girl in the middle. She was tied to the stake planted at a fork in the path he and Bhiku had come down. Dry palm fronds and lengths of bamboo were piled knee high around her.

“Stop this at once!” Varus shouted, striding forward. His anger surprised him more than it probably did the peasants.
She's only ten!

A old man stepped forward wearing a turban of red cotton and a pale yellow vest embroidered in black. Twisted into a rope between his hands was a garment of mottled silk.

“Go, stranger!” he said in shrill Greek as he stumped toward Varus. He poked out both index fingers without letting go of the silk. “Serpent woman! Evil! We caught her and we burn her!”

The girl wasn't as young as Varus had thought at first glance, but she was no more than his own eighteen years. The Indians he had seen since his arrival were lightly built and so looked younger than he expected. Unlike the peasants surrounding her, though, the girl's ribs didn't show from hunger. She looked as supple as a rattan vine.

Bhiku appeared at Varus' side. He addressed the old peasant sharply in Indian. Each time the answer began to singsong into a rant, Bhiku brought the peasant back in a tone of command.

When the peasant stopped talking, seemingly calmer, Bhiku nodded and turned to Varus. “The headman says that a woodcutter saw the girl bathing and recognized her as a serpent demon. He took her garment so that she couldn't change into her snake form and ran back to the village to bring help. The headman determined to burn her so that they can be sure her ghost doesn't return to curse them.”

“I see,” said Varus, but as a placeholder to show that he was considering the matter. He thought of asking Bhiku's opinion. This was India, and the customs of the country were the business of Indians alone, after all.

Italian peasants are probably just as benighted as this lot,
he thought.
I certainly wouldn't be interested in
their
judgment as to what was proper behavior.

Bhiku was another matter, but Varus wasn't going to ask his friend to tell him whether something was right or wrong. He faced the headman and tried to compose his face like that of a magistrate delivering judgment in a murder trial.

“It may be executing this girl is proper,” Varus said, speaking loudly and slowly to help this peasant understand Greek. “I don't know anything about serpent demons. However—”

He gestured to the pile of kindling and fuel about the girl's feet.

“—cruelty of this sort is not proper. Since you're worried about her haunting you if you execute her, it's best that you avoid the problem by leaving her to go her own way. Release her now!”

“You cannot give us orders, stranger!” the headman said. His mouth threw spittle in his anger. He turned his head and shouted to the villagers in their own language. Several of them bent surreptitiously to pick up stones.

Bhiku rattled off a long spate of Indian, loudly enough to be heard on the fringes of the crowd. It brought a series of gasps and cries. Those who had picked up stones dropped them again. Several men at the back edged away, then turned and ran. Within a few moments all the villagers had joined the rush, some of them leaving tools or articles of clothing behind.

The headman turned and shouted at them in anger, then realized he was alone. He looked over his shoulder, snarled what Varus was sure was a curse, and flung the twisted silk down as he fled after them.

Varus took a deep breath. Until the crisis was over, he hadn't appreciated how dangerous the situation had been. Peasants who were willing to burn a girl alive might not have hesitated to stone to death a pair of unarmed strangers who tried to interfere.

“What did you say to them, Bhiku?” he said. “Did you translate my words?”

Bhiku laughed. He said, “I found your rhetoric persuasive, Lord Varus, but I'm afraid it would have been less effective on our local visitors. Instead I told them that you were a great wizard and would blast them all to atoms if they didn't run back to their village at once.”

“I—” Varus said in horror. He caught the words in his throat. He considered the situation instead of simply responding as he wished the situation to have been.

Smiling, he said, “I had no conscious intention of blasting those fellows or doing them any other harm. But then, I didn't consciously intend to bind Lady Teji's demon, either. Thank you for using your initiative, Bhiku.”

“It appeared to me that the alternative was that we would be stoned to death,” the sage said. “I would have been willing to shade the truth to avoid that, but it appeared to me that what I said was true in essence, even if I might have been wrong about the details. You might have brought fire from Heaven onto them instead, for example.”

“Yes,” said Varus. He managed a smile, but he felt as though he were talking about some third party, a powerful magician, and probably a figure of his imagination, because in his heart he didn't believe in magic.…

“We're forgetting the cause of the excitement,” Bhiku said. He walked to the girl, holding a sharpened flint between his thumb and index finger; it had probably fallen out of a sickle or other tool in the recent commotion.

Varus retrieved the girl's garment from the bush to which it had stuck when the headman threw it away. He shook it out into a simple shift and carried it to her. The fabric didn't appear damaged by its hard handling. He still wasn't sure what color it was, though, as it appeared to change depending on the light.

Bhiku had sawed through the twine of bamboo fibers binding the girl to the stake. He spoke to her in Indian.

She shrugged into her garment and turned a brilliant smile on her rescuers. “Thank you,” she said in perfect Greek. “There was nothing I could do to preserve myself. You have saved my life, Lord Varus. I will repay you when I can.”

Varus nodded, blank faced. He was taken aback that she knew his name.

Bhiku had grinned minusculely. The girl turned her brilliant smile on him and said, “Even so great a wizard as Lord Varus is better for having friends, Master Bhiku. And no friend is too weak to help in
some
fashion.”

Bhiku bowed. “You are right to correct me,” he said. “I apologize.”

The girl smiled again. She pressed her hands together before her, fingers pointed up, and bowed. She vanished.

“My goodness,” said the sage. He looked at Varus.

“I have no idea of what just happened, either,” Varus said. “I'm as glad to have her as a friend, though.”

He cleared his throat. “Are we near Lord Raguram's domains yet?”

“Not as near as I would prefer to be without getting a drink of water,” Bhiku said, “but perhaps we'll find a spring on the way. Under other circumstances I would suggest we stop by the well of the village which must be nearby—”

He gestured in the direction in which the villagers had fled.

“—but not, I think, at this time. Let's take the other fork.”

“I could always blast them to atoms,” said Varus as he and Bhiku proceeded. “But on balance, I think waiting to drink until we reach another source of water will be proper training in Stoic resignation.”

They walked on. Both men were chuckling.