Air and Darkness (34 page)

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A
LPHENA AND
P
ANDAREUS SAT
with the driver on the bench of the second of the six wagons; Lenatus was in the lead vehicle. They were approaching the gardens behind Sentius' country estate without difficulty, though weren't using lanterns and the waning moon had just risen.

“There's plenty of light for them to see us by too,” Alphena said to the teacher beside her. “I'm surprised that we haven't met anyone since we turned off the Salt Road.”

“Um,” said Pandareus. “I'm not out in the country at night often enough to know what may be normal.”

Neither am I,
Alphena realized. Aloud she said, “It doesn't matter anyway. I have to do this. If it's a trap, I hope we can fight our way out of it.”

She was wearing a sword and dagger, though she had decided against armor. Most of the escorts wore at least a helmet, and some of the former gladiators had shields and heavy back-and-breast armor also.

Perhaps thinking along similar lines, Pandareus said, “The men appear to be excited and pleased about this expedition. Do they not expect resistance?”

“I suspect most of them hope there
will
be a fight,” Alphena said. “They're bored.
I
hope we'll get in without trouble and I'll find a statue in the garden which tells me where Corylus is, and that we'll free him just as easily.”

Pursing her lips, she added, “I think that's likely.”

That isn't really true,
she thought.

Pandareus looked into the back of the wagon where six heavily armed escorts hunched. Facing forward again, he said, “I think men like these are usually bored. Their activities are of a sort that brings only ephemeral pleasures.”

Before Alphena could decide how to reply, the teacher added, “Lest I seem to be criticizing, I would not want a band of rhetoric teachers accompanying me on an outing like this. Though I'm sure we would have a lively discussion on the way.”

Their driver murmured to the pair of mules, and the wagon swayed to a halt. Men were already jumping out of the lead vehicle. The garden was enclosed by a six-foot fence of palings, built to keep out goats rather than for show. No lights were visible through gaps in the fence, either in the garden or at the back of the house beyond.

Alphena dismounted, then helped Pandareus down from the seat. The six wagons were in a close line on the cartway behind the fence, and Lenatus was at her elbow.

“Are you ready to go in?” he said brusquely. He was the veteran soldier speaking to the young officer in command for the first time, not the obsequious servant to Her Ladyship.

“Yes, with my own escort only,” Alphena said. “I'd like to do this with as little disturbance as possible, but ten men is enough to hold for a moment if there's trouble.”

Lenatus' face went harshly blank in the moonlight. Because he didn't respond instantly, Alphena said, “My father will support whatever I decide, but for his sake I would like this to look as little like armed rebellion as possible afterwards.”

“Ah!” said Lenatus. “Right.”

“Worst case, we can kill all the witnesses,” said Pulto, who had joined them. Both veterans were in full legionary armor, though they weren't wearing their helmet crests.

“What?” said Alphena. “There'll be farm laborers in the wings, probably hundreds of them.”

“Yeah, but they won't have much in the way of weapons,” explained Lenatus. “And we'll have surprise.”

“Besides,” said Pulto, “a lot of them'll be women and kids.”

“That shouldn't be necessary,” Alphena said. She was suddenly aware at a visceral level of what it meant to guard the frontiers of the Republic. “Let's go.”

“Pulto, you're in charge back here,” Lenatus said as he strode to the gate in the fence. Then, to Drago, “First Squad with me, Second and Third in reserve.”

“Let's get these bloody wagons turned around,” Pulto ordered behind them. He wasn't shouting, but the sounds of weapons and harness would already have been enough to alert any watchman in the garden.

The gate was sturdier than the fence itself and was closed on the inside. Lenatus drew his dagger and said, “I'll slide this past the gatepost and lift the bar.”

Minimus gripped the top of the gate with one hand and twisted, wrenching it off its hinges. He shook the panel to toss the crossbar out of its supports.

Lenatus looked at the big Galatian with no expression.

“It didn't make noise like kicking the gate in'd do,” Minimus said.

“Right,” Lenatus said in a quiet voice. “But don't get smart again, or you'll get this”—he waggled the dagger, then thrust it back into its scabbard—“up through your belly.”

Alphena tried to step through the gate. Lenatus blocked her with his left arm without looking at her and went through himself. She had seen him sheathe the dagger. She hadn't seen him draw the infantry-issue sword now in his right hand.

“All right,” Lenatus said, walking forward. Rago and Drago followed him, jostling Alphena without quite shoving her behind them.

The Illyrians were stripped to the waist and barefoot. Their torsos showed more scars than Alphena had imagined. Their tattoos must conceal much of the scarring on their arms. They fanned out to either side of Lenatus, and at last she could enter.

The moonlit garden looked ordinary enough. It was a working garden, providing vegetables for Sentius' town house and the villa's own staff.

The pool running most of the length of the central axis was probably for irrigation rather than being a “water feature” in the sense an architect would have meant it, but it was fed by a fountain in the shape of a faun playing double pipes at the head end, near the rear stoop of the house itself. Alphena trotted toward the statue, holding the iron locket in her left hand.

Her sword was in its scabbard, but she could draw it if it was needed. Not as quickly as Lenatus, but quickly enough.

The stone faun lowered the pipes as Alphena approached him; water continued to spurt from the instrument into the long pool. The statue's features were those of a boy, but the now-living eyes she looked into were ancient.

“Greetings, Faun,” she said. “I am the Lady Alphena. I'm looking for a friend, a tall man with red hair named Corylus. Have you seen him?”

Pandareus stood beside her with an expression of bright interest. The men of her escort were grouped around them. Mostly they faced outward, but Lenatus and the two Illyrians glared at the statue as though they wanted to lop its head off.

I suppose they could, or at least could crack it to pieces. Tuff isn't very strong.

“I heard Rupa call somebody ‘Corylus' this afternoon,” the faun said in a nasal voice. “They were on the porch, though. I couldn't turn around and see them, but I recognized Rupa's voice. She's a wizard, you know?”

“Yes,” said Alphena. “Are they still in the house?”

“Beats me,” said the faun. “I can't turn around, remember? Well, I couldn't till now, I guess.”

He turned his head toward the building. As he did so, a woman in a long white garment stepped out onto the porch. Publius Corylus walked stiffly beside her. With them were—pigmies? Monkeys?—wearing headdresses made of long feathers.

The animals—they wore clothing and walked on two legs, but their faces weren't human—began to chant in chirping voices. Nets of green light sprang from their folded hands and fell over Alphena and her companions.

She felt only a tingle, but the men with her froze. Lenatus had opened his mouth, probably to call Pulto for support, but he stood stiff and silent. The faun was a statue again also, facing the pool into which his pipes trickled water.

“Good evening, Lady Alphena,” said the woman. “My name is Rupa, and I believe the amulet you're holding will be better in my care.”

Smiling like a cruel goddess, she walked toward Alphena. Corylus wore no expression as he followed the wizard.

*   *   *

I
N
C
ARCE
H
EDIA RAN
with a fast crowd, all of whom would have said that she drank as hard as any of them. In fact, though she made a point of being among the first to ask for unmixed wine as the party began warming up, she didn't often refill her cup and she almost never became drunk.

Hedia had found that her male companions were more at ease if they thought she was tipsy. She wanted men to be at ease, and she had no difficulty in being uninhibited without needing alcohol to stimulate her.

She was drunk now, or at any rate she was in a state of exhilaration greater than wine or sex or anything else had brought her before. She had been drunk or exhilarated ever since Bacchus took her hand to lift her into his embrace.

“How long have we been here in this basket?” Hedia asked lazily as her fingertips toyed with the fine golden hair of Bacchus' chest.

She had seen the enclosure woven from grapevines before it was hung between the pair of strange-tusked elephants, so she
knew
it was a basket. The interior was that of the finest bedchamber imaginable for the sort of sports proper to a bedchamber, however. The walls and floor were firm when that was desired, resilient to aid a counterthrust, and sometimes soft when Hedia lay back in exhaustion.

At the moment, the floor was as soft as a cloud. She was both as tired as she had ever been in her life and as soaringly excited as butterflies circling to mate above a field of sunlit flowers.

“Shall we go somewhere else?” said Bacchus, offering her a grape that he had plucked from a bunch growing from the sidewall. It was sweet and fiery and the most delicious thing Hedia had ever in her life eaten—save for the grapes she had eaten from the god's fingers previously.

“I'm happy here,” Hedia said. “It doesn't matter; I just wondered.”

She was transportingly happy. She was happier than she had thought was humanly possible. Perhaps she wasn't human anymore; perhaps intimacy with the god had made her a god as well.…

Bacchus combed his fingers through her hair. The tight ringlets of current Carce fashion had relaxed into soft curls that fell to her shoulders; they sparkled with gold and silver and diamonds when the god touched them.

“We'll visit the Waking World,” Bacchus said, rising to his feet. He drew Hedia up with no more than the touch of his fingertip on hers. “King Govinda has sent two of his vassals against a rajah who worships me alone. We will rout the attackers.”

The wall opened, and they stepped out onto the ground. In the procession's track, trees and vines spread with luxuriant abandon.

“Greetings, Lord Bacchus!” cried nearby members of the throng. The gold and ivory chariot Bacchus had ridden in when Hedia first met him was following the pair of elephants, though no one rode in the car. The giant leopards ramped in their harness, pawing the air, but their roars were joyous rather than threatening.

Bacchus handed Hedia into the car and followed her. “We go to demonstrate our godhood to unbelieving princes!” he called.

The leopards leaped over the elephants, drawing the car after them as though it were made of gossamer. The whole procession surged forward, across the plain and then into the Waking World without a transition which Hedia noticed.

Ampelos followed them in his similar chariot. Hedia avoided looking directly at him—it would provoke him, and Hedia saw no reason to do that—but a side-glance showed that the youth was as stony faced as his poor emotional control allowed him to be.

Ampelos obviously had only the power of the god's regard. To enter the Waking World, Ampelos had needed the help of magicians preparing the way: Bacchus had simply willed himself and his entourage from one world to the other.

“Why are you attacking underlings if Govinda is your enemy?” Hedia said. She clung to the god's side for the thrill of the contact, but her feet were as solid in the bounding chariot as they could have been on the bedrock of the Capitolium.

The leopards slowed to a playful lope. Dikes fell and hedges parted for the cats. In the chariot's wake, thorn bushes became olives and fruit trees draped with blooming grapevines. Laborers stared after Bacchus or capered in the train following the god.

“When I conquered India, I planted a grapevine in the palace of Govinda's ancestor,” Bacchus said, waving his thyrsus like a standard. “So long as that vine grows, the kings of India accept me as their suzerain. Govinda is testing the length of his chain, but not so directly that I have to hang him with it. And the grape still grows in his palace.”

“Was it a cutting from that vine that Govinda's delegation planted at Polymartium?” Hedia said. It was hard to remember her normal life in the Waking World, even the last scene she had witnessed there.

“Where is Polymartium?” asked the god. That was an answer of sorts.

An army was drawn up on the plain before them. In the center were a score of elephants on whose backs rested platforms bearing three or four armed men apiece. Some were archers with bamboo bows and long arrows, but others carried pikes as long as the lances of Sarmatian horsemen. The pikemen were in better clothing and sometimes wore steel caps or body armor.

Large bodies of cavalry flanked the elephants. The riders dressed in colorful garments, probably silk, and carried lances and curved swords like those of the noblemen Hedia had seen in Polymartium. Unlike the delegates, these men generally wore armor, often including steel helmets.

There were thousands of cavalry, but on both wings were many thousands more infantrymen. These men were peasants, not obviously different from the gardners who planted the vine at Polymartium. Many carried tools with stone heads or spears made of bamboo cut to a sharp point, but there were so
many
of them.

Hedia had seen the entire Praetorian Guard paraded in Carce, more than five thousand men under arms. This Indian army was far larger than that, many times larger than that.